Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  Eagleton appeared agitated. His right hand made an arc through the air and came to rest on his forehead, fingers pointing down. He raked it backward through his hair and rocked slightly. Matt began to wonder if this ditzy professorial air wasn’t all just an act.

  “I mean, he is where we sent him—or rather, where he wanted to go—with our blessing. The thing is, we had not heard from him for a long time—until recently, that is. Until he sent for you.”

  “For us!”

  “Yes.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Yes. Here is how it came.” Eagleton opened his desk drawer and pulled out a flattened piece of brown wrapping paper which had Kellicut’s familiar scrawl:

  Dr. S. Arnot / Dr. M. Mattison

  care of: Institute for Prehistoric Research

  1290 Brandywine Lane

  Bethesda, MD 09763

  USA

  “Where’s the message?” asked Susan. “Where’s the note?”

  “It’s not a note,” said Eagleton, “but I guess you could say it is a message. It’s what was inside the package.” He nodded toward Van, who went to a closet and came back with a square, battered, wooden box about a foot high. He set it in the center of Eagleton’s desk, lifted off the top, reached in, and pulled out an object cov­ered with a dirty white cloth.

  “This is just the way it came,” said Eagleton. He reached over and snapped the cloth away.

  Underneath, gleaming and surprisingly white, was a skull. It seemed to grin at them from the center of Eagleton’s desk. Van held it up, Hamlet-like. A rush of recognition: that long sloping forehead, the clipped chin, and of course the thick impenetrable band of beetle-shaped bone above the eyes.

  “It’s perfect!” exclaimed Susan, reaching for it excitedly. She held it in both hands, like a Christmas present. “A perfect specimen. I’ve never seen one so complete, so well-preserved. It’s the find of the century!”

  Eagleton grunted. “That it is,” he said.

  “It’s almost too perfect,” put in Matt. “It looks unreal. Did you date it?”

  “Of course,” replied Eagleton. He lit another cigarette.

  “And?”

  “That’s the strange part.”

  “What? How old is it?”

  Eagleton puffed. “Twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five?” said Matt, incredulous.

  “That’s impossible,” said Susan. Matt shot her a look. “Neanderthal was not alive twenty-five thousand years ago.”

  “Not twenty-five thousand years,” said Eagleton. He was caught up in a sudden fit of coughing so that he could barely wheeze out the words. “Twenty-five years.”

  He waved at the air, and the smoke cloud over his head undulated.

  4

  Susan was sleeping lightly next to him. Her head was cocked back slightly, her throat exposed. Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing. He looked at her eyelashes, which trembled from time to time. Maybe she was dreaming.

  The other passengers were quiet. Matt could hear the faint whine of the music through her headphones, an insect sound. Blues of some sort, maybe Otis Redding or Coltrane. She used to live by them. An image from the past appeared of a stereo blaring in their funky apartment in Cambridge.

  He turned and looked out the window, as the plane’s wing tipped, and saw for the first time the snow-covered tops of the Pamirs. The peaks, sharp and jagged sheets of rock, showed through the white­ness like metal piercing through flesh. His heart leaped. Unforgiving terrain, he thought—godless, uninhabitable, and irresistible.

  Matt still had not recovered from the shock of seeing the skull. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it was twenty-five years old; that was simply too incredible. The idea that a Neanderthal could survive into the twentieth century was something that crackpots had been peddling for years and scientists such as himself had scoffed at them without a second thought. Still, there it was. The thing looked authentic; he had handled enough Neanderthal skulls in his time to know that in an instant. Could it have been doctored, washed clean by an acid bath? Even so, it was too well pre­served. It must have been made from scratch with a new type of bone-simulating plaster. But if it was counterfeit, it was perfect. Who would have the knowledge to create it—and why?

  Susan was more open to accepting it on face value. On the way to the airport they had disagreed. He had cited famous historical frauds from the Loch Ness monster to the Piltdown Man. “They were convincing in their day, too,” he said. But Susan seemed to want to believe it; her eyes were already burning with the possibil­ities. “What if it’s true?” she had said. “Imagine—there may be a whole group of them somewhere, and if we find them we could study them as living beings. We’ll no longer be reduced to our pa­thetic little guesses based upon a chipped stone or a bone frag­ment. A whole other species and we could make contact with it. Imagine what that would mean.”

  He had to admit he had felt a thrill when she’d said that. It seemed a fantasy and for a moment he indulged in it. It was far­fetched but if he didn’t seize this opportunity he might always wonder: Could it have been true? Just to disprove it was reason enough to make the trip. And he had a more immediate purpose— to find Kellicut. For there seemed little doubt that he was missing. And if somebody had gone to all the trouble of perpetrating a hoax, he might well be in danger.

  He looked again at Susan. They had not been able to talk about their past. An hour out of Kennedy they ordered stiff drinks: scotch for him, vodka for her. As they touched the rims of their glasses in a wordless toast, leaning closer like conspirators, there had been a moment of something close to intimacy. But the moment passed. Once he tried to steer the conversation back to them, but she resisted firmly, so they had talked of their careers and the more recent past.

  “And after Harvard, what?” Matt asked.

  “I bounced around, the peripatetic young PhD. I was at Berkeley for three years.”

  “I heard.”

  “It was pleasant enough, but I don’t know—all that sun, the health food, those people on the right side of all the issues. … I began to miss cloudy skies.”

  Matt smiled.

  “I didn’t publish much. But Kellicut was a dream. He was really attached to us, you know, and he was upset about us afterward, so he pulled strings for me. I heard about a dig in Iraq and I went. God, it was wonderful: the work, the dust, the hassles, all the little unlooked-for adventures, even the flies.

  “At night when the desert got cool, I’d swing myself to sleep in my hammock. I’d look up at this huge dark sky and all the stars and think, This is it. I want nothing more than this. But of course I guess I did. Still, the dig was a success. We got the bones. I found my first skull. It was a fragment this big.” She held up her thumb and forefinger, four inches apart.

  “And then?”

  “I went to Madison. I got tenure. More digs, more bones, more papers. Dust to dust. The story of my life.” She was leaving out the important parts—on purpose. Amazing how bare-boned a life can sound, she thought.

  “And all that time, you never thought of getting married?”

  She stiffened. “No, not really.”

  “Ever come close?”

  “Look, Matt”—it was, he realized, the first time she had used his name, and it felt both strange and familiar—“we really don’t have to get into all that. There are a lot of other things I’d rather talk about.” Her voice lowered. “I haven’t asked you about Anne.”

  “Anne. I haven’t seen her for—” he paused to calculate; it was important to be accurate now that they were venturing onto thin ice “—must be thirteen years.”

  They were silent again. She ordered another drink. Had she con­quered her fears about becoming an alcoholic? He asked for another scotch. The stewardess flirted with him, ignoring Susan and looking playfully into his eyes.

  And so there it was—no soul-baring confessions, no emotional catharsis. Maybe it was just as well, thought Matt; on one level he wanted it
, but on another he feared it. How could he explain what had happened and how he had felt back then? It was so long ago. He was never good with words when it counted. He was, he had to admit, relieved.

  Susan preferred it that way, too. She had been thrown by the shock of seeing Matt and by not being able to prepare herself. It was so different from the hundreds of chance encounters she had played out in her daydreams. He was still handsome, she thought sadly. But how strange to see flecks of gray on those familiar tem­ples. At least he had not gotten fat; some of her vindictive fantasies had turned him obese, and the thought had made her feel tri­umphant. But reality was different; she was glad his midriff was still cowboy lean. But mostly she felt distressed to find that he was still such a presence, that her mind’s eye was always watching him when he was around.

  It had taken years to get over his betrayal. The feelings had not so much disappeared as become covered by the accumulated flotsam of daily life. Her friends had tired of listening, so she eventu­ally stopped talking about him. She pushed the feelings inside until finally she began to confine them to one corner. She went on to other places and had other lovers, but every so often the feelings would rise up, and in those moments she would feel the pain all over again, though not as strongly as before. Now she knew that for the sake of some core part of her, she had to keep a distance.

  Susan had put on her headphones and settled into her seat. Her skirt rose up on her thighs as she slumped down. Matt sat, sipping his drink and looking out the window.

  Van was plowing through a stack of papers. Manila folders piled on the seat next to him slid from side to side as the plane rocked. He always worked this way, compulsively. Maybe that’s why he was such a good scientist and so good on missions. He always overdid it, reading, studying, figuring all the angles. He was proud of his record—it was one of the few things he could be proud of. His work was his life, and there was little room for anything else.

  Van had felt superior for as long as he could remember, even as a boy. There were always kids who were bigger, better-looking, faster. They grew into men who were the same, guys like Matt, who made everything look easy, who just sopped it all up without even trying. With Van it was different. He had to struggle for every little crumb. Nothing came to him easily. But he had one advan­tage: He was sMatt—sMatter than all of them—and he could fig­ure the angles.

  His mother had died under strange circumstances when he was four, something about a gas-stove explosion. It was never fully ex­plained to him, certainly not by his father, a distant and bitter man who was an army officer. Van never remembered sitting on his lap or touching him, not once. Mostly he remembered his pock­marked face, the haircut with the band of skin above the ears, the hot smell of his breath. Van and his younger brother were military brats. They moved around a lot. Their father would go ahead and after a month or two send for them. They would take the train. Once on the train from Fort Dix to Fort Bragg they were so ner­vous about missing the stop they took turns staying awake at night to read the station signs. When they arrived, their father barely spoke to them.

  Then Van discovered science. He began with mathematics, where he found the order cleansing to his spirit, and moved on to chem­istry and physics. In college he discovered the social sciences—less certain than the natural sciences but more attractive because they presupposed the manipulation of human behavior. He fell under the spell of experimental psychology and, at Chicago, the behav­iorists. He ran rats through mazes and operated on them and ran them again. He climbed up the evolutionary scale, reaching mon­keys and then people, working with brain-damaged patients at VA hospitals. The techniques were all the same, he joked, “a bit of cheese at one end, electric shock at the other.” A taste for the cut­ting edge led him to the emerging field of psycholingualism.

  Van didn’t go in for the domestic life. He wasn’t cut out for it. He didn’t have many relationships. He was always on the go and he liked his work, which kept him hopping and appealed to his loner streak. He enjoyed being on the inside, knowing things other people didn’t. And he was good at it, even if he didn’t get enough credit from Eagleton, a difficult man to work for.

  This was a strange one, this Neanderthal expedition. He didn’t know enough, didn’t feel comfortable with it, but it could be the one he was waiting for, the one that was—what? His destiny, he thought, if that’s not too corny a word.

  “Mind?” said Matt, pointing to the seat next to Van.

  Van grunted, but he closed the file before him, and looked out the window at the mountains. Below were sheer rock faces and pristine snow bridges.

  “Probably the most unexplored land in the entire world,” said Matt. “Look at it. You wonder how anything could survive there.”

  “It couldn’t—not if it’s human.”

  Matt looked past Van at the peaks and recalled information on the Pamirs he had lifted from a gazetteer last week: seven or eight separate ranges in the uncharted terrain of Kashmir, Afghanistan, and the remote Central Asian republics of what once was the Soviet Union. Known through the ages as the “roof of the world”—not so much for the height of its mountains, which were indeed high, but for the hidden uplands of its valleys, plains, and lakes. The first to use the word Pamir was the Chinese Buddhist monk Hsüan Tsang, who crossed from Badakhshan to Tashkurghan in the seventh cen­tury. But it was Marco Polo who best described it as a forbidding labyrinth of mountains and glaciers, moraines heaped with scree, and hidden valleys filled with deposits of lapis lazuli.

  “On the other hand,” said Matt, “if something did survive there, it would be hidden from the outside world for years.”

  “Decades. Centuries.” Van turned back abruptly from the window. “You know, there was a hidden village somewhere lower down there. Leztinecia. It was totally cut off. It existed for who knows how long—seventy, a hundred years. No contact with the outside world. It was discovered in 1926 by a Russian expedition. The villagers had reverted to barbarism. They had almost lost the use of fire. The scientists who found them were treated like gods and were given everything the villagers had. They went to sleep one night, and do you know what happened?”

  “What?” Matt asked.

  “In the morning, when they opened the doors of their hut, they found two dead children on their doorstep. They had been slaughtered.”

  “Why?”

  “The whole village had done it. It wasn’t clear whose children they were. You could hardly try them for breaking laws they had never heard of.” He chuckled. “Sacrifice to the gods is one of the oldest instincts in human history.”

  “And the village?”

  “The usual story. Wiped out by disease. Some of them wandered off or intermarried with outsiders. The rest perished. They were probably doomed anyway. Face it, any culture that puts its chil­dren to death isn’t taking the long view.”

  They fell silent. Then Van said awkwardly, “You know, I’ve read your work.”

  “You have?”

  “Uh-huh. The New England Journal of Archaeology, The Fossil Review, the lot. I even read Neanderthals: Killers or Kissing Cousins?”

  Matt didn’t often encounter people who read the esoteric journals and obscure publications that carried his articles, and he had always been slightly embarrassed at his title for that book, a con­cession to a sales-struck and ultimately disappointed editor. He noticed that Van had not complimented him on any of it.

  Van asked him what he was currently working on, and Matt said he was examining the morphology of the Neanderthal vocal tract, specifically the pharynx.

  “Why?” asked Van.

  “It might turn out to be primitive. From this we could deduce that his speech was limited. He probably couldn’t say certain consonants—a g, for instance, or a k. His vocalic range was stunted.”

  “And where does all this lead?”

  “Too early to tell, but here’s the theory in a nutshell: Language is the essence of thinking. It’s both the cradle and the gate of i
ntel­ligence. The Neanderthal didn’t have full linguistic ability, so his capacity for abstract thought never developed. As social interac­tion became more and more important for survival, he lost out. In activities like a group hunt, where communication and anticipa­tory thinking are crucial, he was unable to cope. He fell by the wayside.”

  “Doomed to extinction for want of a proper epiglottis?” sneered Van.

  “Something like that,” replied Matt defensively.

  “You’ve got problems, professor.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re overreaching,” said Van. “For one thing, communication can occur with very limited vocalization. We know of tribes in New Guinea and the Amazon that survive very nicely with lan­guages based on no more than twelve distinct sounds.”

  “For another?”

  “For another, why should abstract thinking correlate with a multiplicity of sounds? Or why should the complexity of language, for that matter? We intuit this to be true, but we might be mis­taken. And then of course there’s a third possibility, and that’s the most interesting of all.”

  “What?”

  “Communication beyond sound.”

  “You mean ESP?”

  “Or something like it. I don’t like the term. It presupposes that perception not conducted through our senses is extraordinary.”

  “Well, isn’t it?” asked Matt.

  “Obviously I don’t think so, or I wouldn’t have devoted my life to it.”

  “So that’s your field?”

  “Yes. I may not be a hotshot professor at the University of Chicago like you, but I do have a doctorate. I don’t need to be lec­tured to like an undergraduate.” f

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Matt was intrigued by what Van had said and tried to draw him out, but Van refused to discuss his latest research. “It’s not publishable,” was all he said.