Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  “The answer’s simple.”

  “What is it?”

  “You said it yourself. We’re the ones doing the naming.”

  “The pure arrogance of it.”

  “Why, what would you call us?”

  “How about something like Homo duplicitous?” She thought for a second. “Actually, the one that sums up most men I know has already been used: Homo erectus. What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I don’t think single entendres are very funny.”

  “Neither do I.”

  She suddenly sounded serious and he glanced at her. She was not smiling. Her skin looked dark inside a white cotton dress cut deep at the neckline. He knew she was not wearing a bra. He looked at her hand resting on the table and felt an impulse to reach for it. But she moved it.

  “It’s getting late—time to go back,” Susan said. They walked in silence to the hotel.

  The gate was locked and they had to ring for a long time. The boy came out in a flowing white nightshirt and opened it. Their two room keys, heavy brass ones attached to wooden batons, were hanging side by side. Wordlessly they trudged up the stairs. In the hallway they put their keys in the locks simultaneously and then looked at each other, which made them both smile.

  Susan’s room was small and desolate. A lamp with holes in the shade cast shadows upon the wall.

  She walked over to the closet and opened the door. A full-length mirror was on the inside. She looked at her reflection in surprise; there was sadness on her face, but she still looked good. She lifted the cotton dress over her head. Her figure was taut, her breasts still firm. She slipped her panties down to her ankles and stepped out of them. She straightened and looked into the mirror at her naked body.

  She kicked her shoes off, lay down upon the bed, and stared at the ceiling. She felt the room turning and closed her eyes. She opened her legs slightly, slowly, and began caressing her stomach with her fingertips. She could hear Matt’s voice dictating the day’s events into his tape recorder. What would he say about her?

  She felt everything rushing in all at once. Little things came into focus—a crack in the ceiling, a doorknob, a shoe lying on its side—but they didn’t keep the anxiety at bay. They didn’t anchor her. She opened her eyes and raised her head until she felt the room settle, then fell back and relaxed again. She moved her hand lower, still circling slowly, and her eyes closed.

  Suddenly she heard a sound, a brushing against the door and a slight thump. She leaned over and looked. A white envelope lay under the door.

  Jumping up, she put on her dress, rushed over to the door, and opened it. The corridor was empty. She ripped open the envelope. She felt a stab of recognition at the familiar handwriting, bold strokes and slashes, not easy to read.

  It was a letter from Kellicut.

  6

  Van found a good spot, a “secure zone” as Eagleton would have called it. The tarpaper on the hotel roof was already warm from the morning sun. He was behind the chimney, out of sight. He leaned around a corner to check the small closed door across the roof. Above there were only some cirrocumulus off to the east. That wouldn’t interfere with the transmission.

  He opened his knapsack, took out a black box, pulled the catches on the sides toward him, and flipped the lid up. The keyboard was dirty from the fingers of all those who had used it be­fore him. Leave it to these people to stick him with a secondhand NOMAD, not even the up-to-date model that weighed a good four pounds less. This one was a tank.

  He turned it on, tilted the microwave screen upside down at a 45-degree angle, typed in CTERM for the software, and selected IOR for Indian Ocean Region, one of the four satellites encircling the globe. The signal strength bar crossed the screen—14.8, the highest he had seen—so he slipped in the disk and punched in his nine-digit ID code. More letters. There was a slight hum and then a long silence as it searched the sky and he awaited that magic handshake above the stratosphere. Curious how he always felt an undercurrent of ten­sion during this wait. It wasn’t like that with a radio or a telephone. It must have something to do with all the space the electronic pulses were traversing, a distance farther than he had traveled in his whole life. He felt the old desire for a cigarette again.

  At breakfast Van had detected suspicion in Matt and Susan. It was not in anything they said or did; in fact it was their attempts to be natural, even friendly. He was accomplished at spotting meaning in minor gestures and reading body language. At one point he caught them exchanging a significant look. He wondered idly if the two of them had finally fallen into the sack. They deserved each other: Each was so goddamned perfect.

  Suddenly he heard the tiny beeps, the little singsong that indicated a connection, and a second later the screen emptied and the com­mand TRANSMIT appeared. Van typed out the code. It was a routine progress report. There was not much to pass along other than the lo­cation. He had already sent a message with the information from the boy. Eagleton loved detailed reports—he was sure to be curious about Matt and Susan—and Van derived a perverse pleasure in withholding as much as he could get away with. He knew that Ea­gleton would sell him out in a minute, and the only times he felt a modicum of power were when he was out in the field. Then the see­saw tilted. Might as well enjoy it as long as it lasted.

  He got a routine acknowledgment: CONF-OK. He shut the NOMAD down and turned the power switch to OFF. He had been warned by a communications officer, an old drinking buddy, that the machines had been retrofitted so that the OFF position activated the automatic SAT-SEARCH system so that he could be tracked down anywhere in the world. Typical of Eagleton to try to pull a fast one. Van made a point of keeping it in the OFF position for the moment—if he didn’t, it would alert them to the fact that he knew about it. Then he put the computer back in his knapsack and sneaked downstairs.

  * * *

  Matt was worried by Kellicut’s note: the contents, the fact that Kellicut felt it necessary to send it, and that he had chosen a circuitous route to get it into their hands—into Susan’s hands, actu­ally, for it was addressed to her. They surmised that he must have sent it down the mountain with Sharafidin and that it was the boy who had delivered it last night. Which probably accounted for his strange question about Kellicut and Susan knowing each other—no doubt some misunderstanding of a directive from Kellicut to ensure that she alone received it.

  When Matt had heard the soft knock on his door last night, he knew at once it was Susan. He dropped the tape recorder and opened the door with his heart in his throat, but as soon as he saw the confusion in her face he knew she had not come for the reason he had hoped. Without a word, she had handed him the letter. He had it still, and now unfolded the soiled paper and read it again.

  Susan,

  You must come urgently. Only you and Matt will appreciate the enormity of what I have found. Do not delay. And here’s an afterthought: Do not speak of this to others. Keep it secret. Only we scientists should make the contact. There are many who are not fit representatives of our species. Hurry, for God’s sake! What we are going to experience together surpasses anything in human history.

  By all the gods, tomorrow will be a day of reckoning.

  Kellicut didn’t sign it. Typical, thought Matt, looking down at the scrawled hand, egotistical and enigmatic to the end. No date, no place. But the way the paper was creased and wrinkled, it was clearly written in the rough. Its purpose was the warning not to speak about the expedition. But why? Did he want to be the one to break it to the world? That would not be atypical of him. That line about “many who are not fit representatives of our species”—a curious way to put it.

  Great. He tells us we’re about to make the biggest discovery in history and says we can’t talk about it. He delivers a warning when there is nothing we can do about it. Why didn’t he bother to look up our addresses if he was setting out on something so momen­tous? Kellicut the Pied Piper, still leading us into the unknown after all these years. Only now it’s not quantum th
eory and Jung, it’s ... who the hell knows what it is?

  Something else was troubling: This note suggested that there had in fact been an earlier letter inside the package. He didn’t say it in so many words, but the tone seemed that of a postscript, an “afterthought,” as he put it. Which stood to reason. Kellicut loved drama and was not above attention-grabbing antics, but at heart he was a scientist. He would not simply drop a twenty-five-year-old Neanderthal skull into a box with no explanation. Too much was at stake, too much could go wrong. The implications of a missing letter were chilling: Eagleton or Van or both were holding back. Why? What was it Matt and Susan were not to know?

  There was no question but that the letter came from Kellicut. It was his style, his blarney. Matt could even visualize him writing that passionate promise of a discovery that “surpasses anything in human history.” And the flourish at the end, the Greek quote: “By all the gods, tomorrow will be a day of reckoning.” Susan was the one who placed it: Achilles speaking after Patroclus was slain out­side the walls of Troy.

  Even in a situation like this, where he thinks he’s standing on the threshold of a great discovery, where he’s leading two of his clos­est colleagues directly into peril, he still has to be pedantic, Matt thought. The bitterness that he felt surprised him.

  In the courtyard Van spread out the equipment, carrying a clipboard and shouting orders to Rudy, who cheerfully packed each item as it was checked off. Matt was exasperated by all the sup­plies: tents, sleeping bags, boots, polypropylene jackets, a medical kit, lanterns, cooking equipment, axes, knives, canteens, cameras. And all kinds of food: canned goods and strips of meat but mostly unappetizing dehydrated vegetables in vacuum packets.

  “My God,” Matt said, surveying the small mountain. “Are we looking for the Alma or are we going to open a Wal-Matt?”

  Susan came out cradling a cup of steaming coffee, her hair tousled.

  Matt pointed to a small canvas bag. “What’s in there?” he asked Van.

  “Flares.”

  “What do we need flares for?”

  “In case we have to be evacuated.”

  “And who’s going to evacuate us?”

  “You never know. Better safe than sorry.”

  Susan caught Matt’s eye, frowned, shook her head, and turned away.

  They drove along the Pamir highway, a black ribbon of asphalt that slipped through the mountains all the way to Khorog on the Afghan border and beyond to the ancient town of Osh, once a caravan terminus. Rudy was at the wheel, and he provided a medley of songs from his New York year. Van, sitting next to him, was in­explicably tolerant.

  They passed one or two ghost villages, clusters of mud huts on steep hillsides shaded by trees, all shuttered tight with no sign of life. On the outskirts were what had once been cornfields, and even an abandoned collective farm, the huge stone barracks toppled and the roof caved in. Wagons and plows were left in place.

  “What happened?” asked Matt. “Disease? Famine?”

  “Neither,” said Rudy. “This was a government settlement on the River Vaksh. It was forcibly cleared in 1981 after three earthquakes. About twelve thousand people died. This was the epicen­ter. The whole region is still unstable.”

  Later, they drove higher into the foothills, where the riverbeds were filled with a torrent from melting snowcaps and the brown grass turned green.

  At noon they stopped for lunch. Rudy parked the car near a stream and, after eating, Matt followed it around a bend where it turned into a small pond. On impulse, he threw off his clothes and waded in. He found a sandy bottom, slowly fell backward, and broke his fall with his arms until only his head remained above water.

  He felt adrift, like a leaf. All morning he had been having sexual fantasies about Susan, swimming in them. On the path down to the stream he had turned to wait for her, watching only her body. He let her go ahead and stared at the beads of sweat rolling down the backs of her thighs. He imagined pushing those thighs open and burying his head there as he used to do.

  His reverie was broken by their shouts that it was time to go. As he emerged from the water and dried off, he felt the air warm against his body and realized that he was aroused.

  That afternoon Matt drove. Ordinarily he enjoyed doing so but this was difficult. They had left the highway and were bouncing along on a dirt washboard road, so that if he went too fast a bone-shattering shudder seized the car. With the sun sinking dead ahead, the track was hard to make out amid the glare and glittering stones. He squinted so much he felt his eyebrows aching.

  In the evening Susan took over while Van and Rudy slept in the back. The air cooled rapidly. The wind rushed in like a cold underwater stream, but they left the windows open because it felt good. With the headlights bouncing, it was hard to spot obstacles in the road, so Matt served as lookout, shouting whenever he spot­ted something. He was enjoying himself. So was she.

  Every so often they saw a scorpion scuttle through the beam of the headlights with its stinger high in the air, agile and obscene-looking.

  “All we need is music, driving music,” Matt said.

  “Wait a minute.” She stopped the car, rummaged in the back, and returned with a leather case, propped it over the dashboard, switched it on, and pulled away. The sounds of Bruce Springsteen filled the night. As she gunned the gas, they were both grinning.

  Three hours later they stopped for the night at a grassy knoll surrounded by cliffs and boulders. They built a large fire and dug a trench around the campsite, splashing gasoline in it to keep out the scorpions.

  By the fire, Van pored over a map. “We made good time, consid­ering the road. Must have gone two hundred and fifty miles.” Matt peered over his shoulder while he traced the route. “I figure we’ll be at the base of the mountain around noon.” Van was almost sociable.

  After dinner they laid out their sleeping bags. Susan unrolled hers next to Matt. Sharafidin put his blanket off to one side and prayed on his knees, touching his forehead to the ground, facing Mecca. With his head down, his cotton blouse billowed over his skinny back. Abruptly, he straightened up and from his bundle ex­tracted something that looked like a tiny box. He held it up to the night sky, brought it slowly to his lips, and kissed it four or five times. Rudy looked at him, then at Matt and Susan, smiled, pointed a forefinger at his temple, and spun crazy circles.

  Matt tried to sleep but the road was uncoiling before him and his blood was racing. He listened to Susan’s breathing, steady and deep, and fell off to sleep abruptly, like dropping off a cliff.

  In the morning they got an early start. Van drove silently and me­chanically. They were climbing rapidly and could feel the altitude clog their ears. The topography changed. The scrub brush died away and the road was flanked by scrawny pines. Then the trees thinned out and the road began winding in treacherous and steep hairpin turns. Van slipped into second gear, then into first. Finally the road petered out altogether into a rocky path.

  Van came to a dead stop under a tree on the edge of a meadow. “End of the line,” he said, killing the engine.

  “Can’t say I like that expression,” said Susan. They unloaded the gear and packed it into their knapsacks, Van directing the opera­tion. He kept his pack, which was larger, separate from the others. Finally he opened the Cruiser’s hood and disconnected the battery. “Don’t know how long we’re going to be up there,” he said, as he put the car keys over the visor. “They’re up here, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “We get separated.”

  As they crossed the meadow toward the forest, the jagged peaks loomed high and seemingly close, encrusted in glacial ice. Against a sky of moving clouds, veils of mist swirled around them and gave an illusion of movement so that they appeared to totter and lunge.

  They hiked for hours up the incline of rocks and thornbushes, following a route set by Sharafidin. He walked steadily, his dark eyes constantly moving to pick up landmarks. There was no path. Once or twice he erred,
and they had to backtrack and rest while he went ahead, then called to them when he had found the way. It was hot in the sunlight, and he was stripped to the waist, his lithe body showing his ribs.

  The front of Van’s shirt was soaked in a triangle of sweat. His backpack was heavier than the others and it slowed him down. Matt and Susan walked easily and deliberately, conserving energy. Rudy was the noisiest. He brushed the scraggly branches of bushes aside as if he were opening doors of a saloon. Under a broad-brimmed straw hat, he looked goofy and talked constantly to any­one within earshot.

  They came to a delta, passing the ruins of a kishlak, several houses and channels cut for irrigation and fields that had once been tilled. Everything was abandoned. The stone walls had toppled down. The soil appeared dark and fertile, and the land had the look of a place that had been occupied for centuries.

  After several hours, they came to an alpine meadow bisected by a raging river. They dropped their packs—Van needed help getting out of his—and drank the cold water deeply. Rudy scooped out hatfuls and poured them over his head, looking so comical that the others had to laugh.

  Susan walked off alone into the meadow. On one side she could see great gangling juniper bushes and cypresses, and here and there clusters of briar, honeysuckle, and currants. The lazy hot air gave off the scent of mountain roses.

  “Beautiful, no?” said Rudy’s voice behind her. He stood gazing at the sight contemplatively before speaking again. “This is one of the reasons I came back to this crazy country.” As he looked up at the formidable peaks, his childlike features relaxed. He’s downright handsome, Susan thought suddenly.

  “You’ve never been to Tajikistan before?” asked Rudy.

  “No, never. Why?”