Once, far out on the savannah, I turned and looked back at New Helensburgh. Despite the distance I saw a number of two-legged beings swarming over the hillside and along the battlement in front of our abandoned huts. I pointed out these figures to Helen. She cocked her head to one side and for a good half-minute studied their activity. No one else seemed interested, and we moved on. At regular intervals, though, I would glance back at the hillside. Eventually the tiny apparitions scurrying about there came down into the grasslands and completely disappeared from view. I had the distinct, unsettling feeling that the creatures were following us.
We reached the baobab in which we had installed Genly. Ham sang a long, plaintive note in remembrance, frightening several of the children, but we discovered no sign of either our dead comrade or the leopard that had devoured his remains. I worried that in response to Ham’s call the leopard would return, thinking that we had brought it another offering. The other Minids apparently shared this fear, for we did not shelter under the baobab but continued our southeasterly trek toward the mountain.
* * *
That evening, then, I found myself reciting in my head—with alterations dictated by circumstance—a poem I had first composed in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, after an especially vivid spirit-traveling episode. At the time I had been working during the day for Tom Hubbard’s Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., doing research on the Pleistocene at the public library in the evenings, and dreaming my singular dreams every fourth or fifth night. I was nineteen when I wrote the poem, and I never showed it to anyone, not even Big Gene Curtiss, my trailer mate.
Now, though, I decided to speak it aloud to the Minids, who sat or lay among the fig trees and acacias bordering the little gully where we had stopped. “This is called ‘For the Habilines Who Have Won My Heart,’ ” I told them, and I walked back and forth along the bank, declaiming my 2,000,007-year-old poem almost as if I were Alistair Patrick Blair putting on his Richard Burton act at an American Geographic fundraiser. In my own defense, though, I projected my very soul into the words, and the Minids listened to me with rapt self-extinction:
“Your mothers drop you in the dust of
unnamed basins.
Your sires rove like jackals on the
periphery of extinction.
How I came to be among you is
anybody’s guess.
Your sun is a gazelle’s heart held
throbbingly aloft.
You are learning how to pick apart
its ventricles.
Scavengers, you speak to me only of
your appetites.
Heedless, I ask you of Pangea and its
postmitotic progeny.
Laurasia and Gondwanaland are orphans
to your understanding.
The incontinence of Africa sculpts you
to its needs.
Language begins to sprout in the left
brains of the females.
The males poach dexterous insights
from the dead savannahs.
Birth remains a labor insusceptible
to practical division.
The tools you make resemble plectra
for uninvented lutes.
My pocketknife is a triumph no less
complex than television.
What percussive music rings above the
barren of our rivercourse.
My awe goes ghosting at our austere
communal feasts.
Together we break crayfish and suck the
slip of birds’ eggs.
Our most lovely artifact is a fragile
group compassion.
What you make of me is what the
millennia have made.
My sophistication is a fossil from the
future’s coldest stratum.
Am I the last anachronism of what you
move toward?”
Yes, a rapt and scary self-extinction. There was no applause when I finished, but no one had heckled or walked out on me, either, and when I sat down beside Helen to pass the coming night, she put her arm around my shoulders and huddled near.
* * *
Dawn elicited no reverent hymns from the lips of the habilines. Groggy, we puttered about trying to forage up breakfast and get our blood moving. We found grubs, a scorpion or two, some desiccated fruit, and a few tiny rock lobsters in the eroded banks of the rivercourse. Although I missed the singing, I knew that this morning we did not want to give away our position or proclaim this poor place our temporary capital. We were in transit, and our rootlessness had affected us all with a subtle sadness.
A holdover complication from yesterday still worried me. Behind us to the northeast, a mysterious band of two-legged creatures continued to dog our heels. Squinting into the sunrise, I could barely discern them moving through the thorn scrub, so like ghosts floating cool and transparent in the haze of mirage were they. Helen saw them too. As we marched she continually peered over her shoulder to catch a glimpse of the phantoms, but they had melted into the landscape and there was little hope of that. I soon ceased to fear the apparitions, but I never did get over the whispering nag of their presence. They were definitely there, and they were definitely following us.
A little before noon Roosevelt halted and made a strange pawing gesture with his arm. All the other Minids halted too, and a series of significant glances, mostly opaque to me, flew about among the hunters. Ahead of us was a cluster of trees—like an immense green umbrella on a desert of dry grass—and Roosevelt led us toward this copse until the two strange animals laboring in its shade lifted their strange heads, took notice of us, and whickered their strange whickers. They did not run, but they watched us warily, and I began to feel that we had walked into an illustration for an apocryphal bestiary.
I tried not to breathe.
The animals were chalicotheres. They vindicated my dreams. Dry dirt powdered their equine muzzles, and their legs looked inordinately thick and ponderous. Their lively ears and stunning pelts, however, invited admiration. The chalicotheres had been digging with their claws at the base of a tree, digging furiously, and our arrival had interrupted their search for tubers. Despite having seen such creatures in some of my earliest spirit-traveling, today I was an adventurer just stumbled into an enchanted kingdom of dragons and unicorns. Was this meeting really happening? Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.
The Minids, unfortunately, had an entirely different perspective on the matter. Alfie approached me, put his hand to my holster, and signaled that I should draw and fire. We had had very little meat since our hut-roast pork, and the Minids saw these chalicotheres as fair game. I did not. Their scarcity suggested that they were already well on the road to Fairy Land, and I wanted no part of hastening their journey, even in the simulacrum past to which White Sphinx had posted me. For all I knew these two chalicotheres could be the last two in the world. My world, and theirs.
“No,” I told Alfie. “Hell, no.”
Hearing this, the beasts whickered again, bumped into each other, and cantered off to the east, moving like graceless ballerinas on the tips of their incongruous talons. Once, not so very long ago, I had told Blair before a good-sized audience in Pensacola that I had seen chalicotheres eating flesh. I had lied not principally to embarrass the Great Man but to shake his faith in his own preconceptions and to insure that he remembered me. Also, by first deflating orthodoxy in the matter of chalicothere vegetarianism I had hoped to establish my impartiality in attacking Blair’s mistaken view of human evolution. If I was a firebrand and an iconoclast, I wanted him to understand that at least I was open-minded about whose altars I burned and whose idols I smashed.
Now, watching the chalicotheres retreat, I was ashamed of having lied about them. Like unicorns and dragons, they were lies embodying a lopsided verity. It would have been a dream come true to lasso, bridle, and ride one of those lovely falsehoods. In fact, seeing them pause and
glance back at us, as if reluctant to abandon their little bower, I was stricken with a powerful sense of loss. If only I were a wizard or a virgin, it seemed to me, I could have tamed and communicated with those chalicotheres.
* * *
Helen entered the cluster of trees deserted by the chalicotheres. Strolling about almost casually, she surveyed the ground. Then, not far from the holes that the animals had been digging, she knelt and picked speculatively at what looked to me like a clump of loose soil. Every few seconds or so, however, she withdrew her fingers as if a thorn had pricked them. Our curiosity aroused, the rest of us pressed into the bower to see what was going on.
My dream beasts, I discovered, had bellies and bowels. Because they had inhabited this copse long enough to litter its floor with excrement, the droppings had attracted a species of coprid beetle dedicated to dismantling each and every pad. The beetles separated the grass-shot dung, shaped it into brood balls, and rolled the balls away for burial. Considering the scarcity of my fossil beasts, this variety of coprid was probably not exclusively adapted to chalicothere dung. No. These beetles were opportunists. They had moved into the bower with such speed and determination because pickings were slim elsewhere, and they had happened to be close by.
The reason for Helen’s herky-jerky finger movements had finally revealed themselves. She was trying to snatch a beetle out of a pad already broken down into fragments, but, rearing back on its four hind legs, the little demolitionist refused to cooperate in its own capture. It looked like a miniature triceratops with an additional pair of legs, and it used its horns, mandibles, and forelimbs to fight off Helen’s fingers. Between engagements it returned its full attention to the dung pad, as if my bride’s persistence annoyed rather than frightened it. At last, though, Helen got the beetle by its chitinous thorax and lifted it high into the air.
As I watched, the other Minids spread out through the bower to find dung beetles of their own. The young habilines—Jocelyn, Groucho, Bonzo, and Pebbles—sought to daze the insects by rapping them with their knuckles, the way I had once stunned and captured a scorpion, but everyone else tried to grab the beetles by the horny plates behind their heads. The competition for the biggest specimen was fierce, and the point of it all seemed to be to acquire the prestige of ownership rather than to satisfy a between-meals hunger. No one hurried to devour the coprids they found. Instead, the Minids pushed their captives along the ground, held them aloft, or flipped them over onto their carapaces to watch their struggles to get right again.
Eventually I overcame my scruples about digging in a dung pad—I had overcome nearly every other, after all—and sat down to fish for a beetle. I caught one a little smaller than Helen’s, one with blue-black armor and rakishly plumed legs. It swaggered in my palm, prising my fingers apart every time I tried to make a fist. If we ever got going again, the beetle would not be easy to carry, and I wondered if the habilines would give up their pets when we had to decamp.
Pets. Interesting word, and one that seemed entirely appropriate in context. In fact, I think a case could be made that our ancestors’ first nonprimate companions were not bung-sniffing dogs but dung-sifting beetles.
Subsequent activity in the bower told me that few of the Minids were going to relinquish their captives. Many of the adults and almost all of the children had beetles stashed in weaverbird baskets, clutched uncertainly in hand, or dangling from pieces of thread unraveled from the tops of my socks.
For Helen I took even greater pains. I cut a piece of tangled fish line from my survival kit and tied it about the thorax of her beetle. Scarabs, you see, were a habiline’s best friend, pets that could also be animate, iridescent jewelry. Helen wore her coprid from her left ear. Pendant from not quite two inches of doubled fish line, it twirled and grappled. Each time it caught her hair she shook the beetle loose again, glancing sidelong to watch its perturbations. I hooked my pet over the snap of my holster, but the other Minids were far more envious of Helen than of me. As we resumed our march, the intensity of their admiration apparently made up for the inconvenience occasioned by the beetle’s wiggling. Helen was the belle of our lackadaisical anabasis.
Although vanity of this sort has led to scarification, foot binding, bustles, and tuxedos, that afternoon I could not begrudge Helen her small triumph. Three or four hours later, however, when she yanked the beetle off its thread and popped it into her mouth like a bonbon, I was flabbergasted.
The habilines—Helen not least among them—never lost their disconcerting knack of turning my preconceptions upside-down.
Later that day I cut my beetle loose and tossed it out into the savannah. If it were industrious, it would survive. Those who derive their sustenance from others’ shit rarely perish. Ecologically speaking, they are the universe’s chosen creatures—there is generally available so much of what they need to perpetuate their lifestyles.
Chapter Nineteen
New York City, The Bronx
April 1979
HE AWOKE TO THE FAINT, UNCERTAIN CADENCES of a child’s voice—his own voice, as he had sounded at ten or eleven.
“ . . . a set of eyes,” he heard his younger self saying.
“All I am is a set of eyes, and the people I’m watching—they’re almost like people, but different, too—they can’t see me. They’re very hairy, but naked just under their hair. The women-ones have . . .”
In the three years since Hugo’s death Johnny had not wholly accustomed himself to waking up in his mother’s eighth-floor apartment in a building overlooking the Hudson River. This building reminded him of a huge tombstone riddled with termite cells. One morning he had cracked the Venetian blinds and caught sight of a bloated human corpse bobbing along in the river. It was worse waking in the apartment at night.
Especially if he had been dreaming of giraffes and gazelles, habilines and prototypical hartebeest. Then it hurt to realize that the beaches of Florida did not lie just beyond the wall—not beaches nor Kansas wheatfields nor the desolate prairies of Wyoming. Nothing familiar to give reality ballast. Of course, he had never been able to hang on to Pleistocene East Africa, but lately his return from each spirit-traveling episode had begun to seem like abandonment on the doorstep of an infernal orphanage. The apartment’s heating vents hissed a herpetologist’s white noise, and the sounds of sirens in the streets soared above every other noise like coloratura advertisements for the current opera season. In Johnny’s imagination, respectable Riverdale was a landscape more saurian than urban.
“ . . . eating meat out of their hands. I don’t know what kind of meat because they were already eating it when I began to watch. Baby-ones, and ones older than babies, children I guess, try to make the men-ones pay attention to them. They want . . .”
What was going on? Clad only in his Fruit of the Loom briefs, Johnny threw back the covers, put his bare feet on the floor, and cocked his head. He was listening to a portion of his recorded dream diary, the chronicle of his spirit-traveling. This was a segment he had recorded not long after forsaking the complex symbology of his notebooks for the convenience of oral transcription. Since his tenth birthday, when he received the portable recorder, he had logged every one of his spirit-traveling episodes on tape. The cassettes, nearly a dozen, he kept filed in a shoebox, the way some kids stored their baseball cards.
It was 2:27 in the morning. His watch, another gift from Hugo, gave him this reading digitally.
He turned on the tensor lamp hooked over his headboard and padded silently to the closet. He found the shoebox, one hiking boot and a pair of tennis shoes nearly concealing it, and in the box, as neatly aligned as if by the Dewey Decimal System, eleven cassettes. The symbols with which he had cryptically decorated each little talking book told him that these were the originals, not clever substitutions meant to throw him off the track.
“ . . . with their arms around them. Some of them pass meat to the children when the men-ones gave it to them to do that. There are, well, families, sort of. They eat toge
ther, but usually . . .”
His own childish voice was inexpertly recapitulating one of his spirit-travels, a particularly vivid one, but the cassette on which he had chronicled this dream reposed under his hand in its usual place, undisturbed. He set the box back on the closet floor and reeled out of his room toward the sound of his own prepubescent voice. At the entrance to Jeannette’s bedroom-study he halted and stared at his mother. Because she was sitting at her tilted desktop, a kind of drafting board, making notations in ink on a long sheet of type-covered paper, she did not see her son come up behind her.
Galley proofs you called the kinds of pages on which she was working. You got them when a manuscript you had submitted to a publisher was just about to become an honest-to-God book. This, then, was a project that Jeannette had almost brought to completion. For the last three or four months, however, she had been complaining about how badly her work was going.
On a shelf above the drafting board hummed a portable tape player much like the one Hugo had given John-John. Jeannette suddenly punched a key, rewound the machine, and punched a second key to activate her son’s youthful voice again.
“ . . . give it to them to do that. There are, well, families, sort of. They eat together, but usually the babies, the children, move around to get what they can from whoever’s handing it out. Later . . .”
“What are you doing?” Johnny interrupted John-John’s voice, his sixteen-year-old tenor overriding his ten-year-old boy soprano.
Jeannette started, gasped, dropped her ballpoint pen. She was wearing a white dressing gown embroidered about the collar and hem with an Egyptian motif (King Tut’s treasure had come through town during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration, inflicting jackal hieroglyphs and golden cobra rings on the devotees of haute couture), and her hair was clasped at her nape in a way that made her look like a girl. Recovering slightly, she gave a mighty sigh and stabbed the cassette recorder to a standstill.
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