Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  BLAIR: Weren’t there any women on Montaraz to keep things going? Isn’t it possible that some far-scattered fellow habilines may still be alive?

  ADAM: No sightings, no reports. Such a hope seems foolish.

  BLAIR (sighing audibly): Ah, well. Yet another proof of contemporary humanity’s unparalleled ability to muck up or destroy what clearly ought to be preserved. It makes me ashamed.

  ADAM: Don’t reproach yourself too harshly, sir. Should I die before H. sapiens sapiens obliterates itself along with this oh-so-lovely planet, why, your kind will have outlasted mine. Only by a little, and only after a reign much briefer than the furtive persistence of us habilines—but you must take your victories, Dr. Blair, where you find them, even if they are upsettingly Pyrrhic. Not so?

  CAROLINE: You seem to be identifying yourself as a habiline now, Adam. Do you mean to?

  ADAM: I am identifying with my people, whom others have called habilines. Also, of course, I’m a good H. sapiens sapiens myself. Perhaps my people were too, even lacking speech. In my mind, Miss Caroline, they will always seem human—nobly human.

  BLAIR: I take scant comfort from surviving by a mere breath an ancestral human species that preexisted us by at least two million years.

  ADAM: Then you are noble, too, sir.

  BLAIR: Thank you. I appreciate your vote of confidence.

  CAROLINE: Adam, Dr. Blair’s other questions concerned your childhood and youth, your memories of habiline society and culture here on Montaraz. Those strike me as topics of crucial value to any study of your vanished people. Would you tell us what you can about those topics?

  ADAM: You and Dr. Blair must never forget that that portion of my life corresponds to the portion of ongoing human experience you call “prehistory.” I have a prehistoric life and an ego-documented life. I’m speaking now out of the latter context. Recovering the prehistoric elements of my life from the vantage of my crystallized ego is very hard. Distortions arise. Who I am now contaminates what then I was. Contaminates and discolors.

  BLAIR: You’re wholly unable to reconstruct your early life?

  ADAM: Of course not. It goes around in my head like a dream. It’s a hard dream to tell, though, because then I had no language with which to chain and tame it. I had heard language spoken, but I had none of my own, and if you had seen me in those days, you would have thought me a feral thing surviving by instinct rather than wit. I had an invisible umbilical cord to my family, and another to the island’s soil and vegetation, and another to the snakes and capybaras, and yet another to the sea and air. Everything around us was magical, and I was a kind of joyfully suffering magician. Falling down might hurt. Getting kicked might hurt. Going hungry might hurt. But the living of life, the living of even these many cruelties and hurts, was ever and always magical, Dr. Blair.

  BLAIR: But was the population of habilines from which you sprang a patrilineal or a matrilineal society? Was sexual dimorphism a factor in assigning domestic tasks and leadership roles? Did you have any noteworthy rites of passage to mark your movement from one stage of life to another? Did you hunt, scavenge, or forage for your food? That’s what my colleagues will ask me, Adam. Can’t you remember, can’t you tell me anything about such basic matters?

  ADAM: In the absence of the people themselves, Dr. Blair, such knowledge seems—forgive me—irrelevant, keenly and profoundly irrelevant.

  BLAIR: Hardly, Adam. Knowledge of the world is knowledge of ourselves. What you can tell us of habiline mores, customs, and survival strategies will enable us better to comprehend who and what we are.

  ADAM: To know the habiline life in any sense truly meaningful, sir, you would have to live it. You would have to stop scrutinizing it from afar and plunge into it with uncritical abandon. That’s possible no longer. Gone, gone.

  BLAIR: If nothing else, can you tell me where you lived?

  ADAM: Dominican slaves were freed by Boyer in the 1820s, but it was not until 1874, when Peter Martin Rutherford ceded Montaraz to Haiti, that we habilines obtained our liberty from his cacao and coffee plantations. We left en masse and made a secret republic for ourselves on one of the island’s little-populated fingers. That is all I can say. For a long time, no one bothered us. Then the twentieth century happened, and everything changed. Gradually, oh so piecemeal, for the worse. I’m speaking now, you see, from the vantage of my crystallized ego.

  BLAIR: Can you take me to the site or sites of that “republic”?

  ADAM: No. It is impossible. They’re gone, and I’ve forgotten.

  BLAIR: But, Adam, the island isn’t that large. Suppose the Haitian government were to authorize travel and archeological research in various areas. Don’t you think you’d assist? Wouldn’t you cooperate with me and others in uncovering your people’s past?

  ADAM: No, Dr. Blair. Let the dead rest in the memories of their loving kin.

  BLAIR: But isn’t it true that you had your son’s ashes disinterred and brought here to Montaraz by your friends the Loyds?

  ADAM: It is.

  BLAIR: Then I don’t understand the distinction between that and excavating the living sites of your extinct habiline relations.

  ADAM (coldly): Apparently not.

  BLAIR: Sorry. I meant no offense.

  (The participants took another break.)

  CAROLINE: All right. I’ve flipped the tape. Dr. Blair, please begin again.

  BLAIR: This has been a somewhat frustrating exchange for both of us, Adam. Let me apologize for that again. You see, I never expected to sit down with a surviving representative of any of the hominid species whose bones I’ve been digging up and cataloguing these last fifty years. It’s not a conversation I ever imagined taking place.

  ADAM: Of course not.

  BLAIR: You don’t knap flint, do you? You don’t chase hyenas off the remains of a lion’s kill. You don’t recall walking upright through the ash storm of an erupting East African volcano. You can’t say anything about the other hominid species—Australopithecus robustus, Australopithecus africanus—with whom your people shared the savannahs. You can’t illuminate your people’s millennia-long trials and tribulations in the hills of present-day Zarakal.

  ADAM: Regretfully, I can’t. I am a product of Montaraz. So were my parents. So were their parents. On this island, we go back nearly seven generations.

  BLAIR: Doesn’t the allure of Africa niggle at you, Adam? I’ve seen some of your paintings. Baobabs, volcanoes, grass fires, hunting parties. It’s hard for me to believe that the continent of your origin doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Wouldn’t you like to visit? Wouldn’t you perhaps like to emigrate?

  ADAM: I would like to see a giraffe.

  BLAIR: A giraffe?

  ADAM: Yes. It would be fine to see a giraffe performing its dreamy, slow-motion gallop across the great African steppe. Otherwise, sir, I have no ambitions to fulfill on that score. I am home again. Montaraz is home, and it puts me in touch with earlier homes.

  BLAIR (after a lengthy pause): A little while ago, Adam, you mentioned that you have—let me see—“many troubling spiritual longings” and “a freshly emergent concept of God.” Would you care to expound a little on those matters?

  ADAM: Only a little.

  RUTHCLAIRE (her one and only interjection): Thank God.

  ADAM: Before my ego crystallized, here on this island, I was an unconscious animist and also a lip-servicing Catholic. The magic all around me overwhelmed the dogmas of the Roman church. Then, in the late seventies, my ego began to take shape—in response, I am sure, to economic and political realities. At last, soon after the murders off the Cuban coast, my ego was precipitated from the terrible pressures of exile and refugee-ism. I became neurotically self-aware.

  BLAIR: Neurotically?

  ADAM: Even as you and everyone else alive in your world. To survive today, as “reality” is presently constituted, one must have a competitive neuroticism. So I surrendered to ego development in order to survive. I became an “I.”

&n
bsp; BLAIR: And your spiritual longings?

  ADAM: Much that my new “I” heard in your world was disparaging of my personhood. I was an animal. I had no soul. On the boat from Mariel Bay to Key West, the passengers were not physically cruel to me; the opposite, rather. They patted my back, laughed at my funnies, and treated me like a friendly performing dog. The “I” that my once-innocent self had become—well, it realized that in their private estimation, I was . . . soulless. I was excommunicated from real human fellowship because of my unhappy lack of this attribute.

  BLAIR: Quite a tortuous chain of reasoning for a brand-new ego, Adam.

  ADAM: Yes, but in my brand-newness I was very stupid. I made the mistake of appropriating these misinformed people’s concept of the soul. I began to think of it as an item separable from the body. Like, perhaps, a pocket watch. I wanted such a pocket watch. A pocket watch, after all, may very well survive the death of its owner. It can exist without that person. It can continue to keep its time in a drawer. But it isn’t coequal with its dead owner, and ultimately it, too, will perish. Nevertheless, I wanted this kind of soul, the sort that nearly everybody else mistakenly believes they possess—if, of course, they are “religious.” Having that kind of soul, I thought, would bring my crystallized ego into fellowship with those of the human beings around me.

  BLAIR: But you learned better?

  ADAM: I learned better than they, sir. If you wish to touch your soul, place your hands on your own body. I had known this as a creature without ego here on Montaraz, but in becoming an aggressive “I” to make my way in civilization, I forgot. The soul is not a pocket watch. It is inseparable from the live body. It does not reside in a pocket. It lives throughout the body’s systems. A dead body does not possess one. It’s dead, in fact, because its soul has been disrupted.

  BLAIR: No immortality, then?

  ADAM: The fatal disruption of the personality would seem to preclude it, Dr. Blair. But only rigidly crystallized egos despair on this account. A self that understands its subtle ties to the systems around it—family, plants, animals, water, air—knows that healthy living matters more than the egotistical lingering of personality after death. God’s grace is on those who know this.

  CAROLINE: Not everyone would find that comforting, Adam.

  ADAM: Well, it is the neuroticism of the developed ego that prevents them. It is the unfortunate psychic investment they’ve made in something called “salvation.” They’ve paid in too much for too long to withdraw from this investment. Or maybe they deeply love others who have paid in too much for too long. It’s a hard thing. I have much sympathy for all such travelers on the path to spirituality.

  BLAIR: Does your spiritual journey recapitulate that of humanity as a whole?

  ADAM: Only in the long view. I have no great hope that the human species will adopt a holistic faith without imposing a lethal rigidity upon it. And maybe, Dr. Blair, the interplay among current faiths, the tensions and slacknesses even yet linking them, is itself a holistic system with certain virtues. I don’t know. A nonneurotic human species would be a species nearly unimaginable. You would have to think up a new taxonomic designation, Dr. Blair.

  BLAIR: Perhaps not. Maybe the one we have now would finally begin to imply something other than self-congratulation. What about your “freshly emergent concept of God”? You deny the immortality of the soul apart from the problematically immortal body, and yet still believe in a transcendent deity?

  ADAM: Yes, I do. Perhaps, though, it is unimportant. I weary of talking. Do you hear how my voice rasps?

  BLAIR: Quickly, then, just a hint of your formulation.

  ADAM: It sounds like a paradox. Perhaps it is. I hold that God possesses both a fundamental timelessness—that he exists outside the operations of time—and also a complete and necessary temporality, permitting him to direct and change within the stream of time. There’s a hint, then, of my theology.

  BLAIR: But isn’t that like saying that a man both has a head and doesn’t have a head? Or that a certain person happens to be both a Haitian citizen and not a Haitian citizen? It’s self-contradictory.

  ADAM: Only because our temporality makes the issue seem baldly either-or. (Adam’s voice had gotten thicker and thicker. He cleared his throat.)

  No more for now, please. I think I would like to take a swim.

  CAROLINE: We’ll wrap it up with that, then. Thank you, Dr. Blair. Thank you, Adam. It’s been a strange but stimulating journey.

  *

  This interview was never resumed. Blair wanted to question Adam further. Indeed, he wanted to mount an impromptu expedition to the island’s various peninsulas, to traipse about among the pines and wild avocados in search of Adam’s “secret republic.” But late that afternoon, an advisor arrived from Rutherford’s Port to tell him that the American Geographic Foundation had added to his tour three new lectures and tomorrow he must fly to Miami from Cap-Haïtien. Storming about the bungalow, Blair cursed his advisor and impugned the good name of the director of American Geographic. Finally, though, he subsided, confessing that without this tour much important work at Lake Kiboko would go undone. After collecting his suitcases for the trip to town, he came back into the living room to bid us all goodbye, as downcast and jet-lagged a figure as I could imagine. He was truly disheartened to have to go.

  Abruptly, his mood changed. Grinning, he knelt beside one of his leather bags and undid the straps on a bulging side pocket. From this pouch he extracted a magazine. “Adam, would you and RuthClaire autograph this for me? I’m not ordinarily a souvenir collector—fossils are the only souvenirs a man in my line requires—but I’d like to frame this for my office in the National Museum in Marakoi.”

  It was the Newsweek with the infamous Maria-Katherine Kander photograph of Adam and RuthClaire. Only Blair, of all the people in the room, failed to detect the palpable air of embarrassment that had congealed about us. Even his advisor, a young black man in an expensive western suit, flinched. Adam, although not embarrassed or offended, understood that Blair had discomfited his wife and his guests. He took the magazine and initialed it with a ballpoint pen. Blair beamed. He nodded at RuthClaire to encourage Adam to pass the magazine to her. With some reluctance, Adam did so. She accepted with her head down and a crimson flush on her brow and cheeks.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” said Blair, buoyant again. “You’ve got quite a respectable little body there.”

  “Thank you,” RuthClaire said. (Blair was a father figure, and you never upbraided Daddy for bad manners or an absence of tact. That would be unmannerly, that would be tactless.) But when she signed her portrait, she wrote her name in an angry vertical loop that partly effaced her two-dimensional nakedness. Then she shoved the magazine back into Blair’s chest. It trembled there at the end of her outstretched arm.

  A cloudlet of confusion passed over Blair’s face. He took the magazine, regarded it as if it had been vandalized (maybe it had), and, kneeling again, slid it regretfully into the side pouch of his carry-on bag. No one spoke. When he stood again, his expression was abashed and apologetic.

  “Body shame’s one of the saddest consequences of western civilization,” he said. “Of course, the commercial exploitation of nudity is a reprehensible thing, too. It’s a prurient outgrowth of that same unhealthy body shame.”

  I was sure that this was an astute analysis of something, but a something sadly peripheral to our joint embarrassment.

  “Sir,” said the young Zarakali to Blair, “it’s time to go.”

  The Great Man agreed. He shook hands with Adam and me, embraced Caroline, and, when she failed to respond to his attempt to hug her, too, kissed RuthClaire on the forehead. Then all of us but RuthClaire trailed Blair and his aide outside and waved them goodbye. Their enclosed four-wheel-drive vehicle spun through the sand, at last obtaining purchase on the road to Rutherford’s Port. Inside again, we found RuthClaire standing in the middle of the living room with her hands limp at her sides and tears flowing down he
r face. Adam took her in his arms and held her.

  Over Adam’s head, RuthClaire said, “Paulie’s dead because of that damn photo, and I thanked that stupid old coot for telling me I’ve got ‘quite a respectable little body.’ I thanked the son of a bitch!”

  That evening, near twilight, Adam and I took a walk along the secluded beach below the cottage. Caroline and I had argued because although I had wanted to walk with her, she had insisted on starting the transcription and editing of the tapes. Her holiday would only begin, she declared, when she had accomplished this work. She could not relax with it hanging over her head, and I was selfish to pressure her to go for a skinnydip while the task remained undone. Damn Calvinist, I had thought—for, Blair’s little lecture about western “body shame” notwithstanding, I wanted nothing quite so much as to hold my unclad flesh against Caroline’s in the gently lapping waters of Caicos Bay.

  Instead, my companion was Adam Montaraz, now naked. I shuffled along beside him in sandals, loose ebony swim trunks, and a short-sleeved terrycloth jacket. Shells crunched beneath our feet, and stars began to glimmer overhead.

  “You told Blair you’re the last of your kind, but RuthClaire’s letter said there were habiline artists here. That’s why I came—to look at their work, maybe even to represent it in Atlanta. What the hell’s going on, Adam?”

  “I lied to Dr. Blair.”

  “Why?”

  “To protect the remnant that survives: five persons, Mister Paul—only five.”

  “But if I go back to Atlanta touting their work as the glory of an innate habiline aesthetic impulse, this place’ll be overrun again. You’ll have blown their cover for good. The art will prove they’re here, and bingo! another influx of bounty hunters.”

  Adam halted. “Not if you represent their paintings as the work of dead Haitian artists, each item you put up for bid as a discovery from their estates. You needn’t even identify the artists as habilines. Haitian art has many aficionados in los Estados Unidos. Sell it as Haitian art—nothing more, nothing less.”