Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  It was quiet outside, yet the noise and excitement of the cave con­tinued to reverberate in their heads and their lovemaking was fren­zied. Afterward they rolled away from each other and rested apart, too transported to touch each other. It took minutes to return.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Matt finally.

  They were quiet for a while until Matt spoke again.

  “I’m glad you picked me. I didn’t think you were going to.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even think.”

  “Susan?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me—did you want to pick him?”

  “I didn’t, did I?”

  “How about one of them? Did you consider making love to one of them?”

  She leaned over and hugged him. “Matt, you sweet dope. Don’t you realize? We just did.”

  Matt became friendly with a young hominid they called Lancelot. He was drawn to him because Lancelot, who had longer legs and a more slender build than most, appeared to be both unusually in­telligent and open to new ways. When Matt looked into his brown eyes he was convinced he was looking into a deep reservoir of an­imation.

  Lancelot was curious and enjoyed looking through their belong­ings. He would take an object like a knife and hold it up in the air, examining it from all angles. When they went on long hikes and Matt got thoroughly lost, Lancelot was always able to find the way back. If they had to ascend a rock face, he stared at it before­hand, tracing a route of ledges and footholds with his darting eyes.

  Once when they were on a path, Lancelot dragged Matt over to a tree, practically pushed him up it, and then ascended after him. No sooner were they off the ground than a large warthog ran past, tossing his tusks in the air. Matt did not know if Lancelot had heard him coming or had somehow sensed his presence with his special faculty. On another afternoon, Matt fell asleep and was awakened to find Lancelot caressing his smooth brow with his fin­gers and looking puzzled.

  During treks, Lancelot sometimes would wander off for long pe­riods, generally going in the same direction. When this happened Matt would make his own way, but from time to time he would feel a slight fluttering behind the eyes and a heaviness in his frontal lobe, and he would know that Lancelot was reading him.

  It was frustrating that the communication was so largely one-way. After weeks of intense experiencing and learning, Matt realized that he was at an impasse. In a strange way he had fallen into a routine. What Dostoevsky had written was true: Man, the beast, accustoms himself to anything. Here he was in a paleontologist’s dream, a real-life prehistoric laboratory, and yet he could not hon­estly say that he had penetrated to the core of the mystery of what these beings were truly like. But despite this he had adjusted to a world he could not have even conjured up two months ago, so much so that his day-to-day life seemed almost ordinary.

  Out of desperation he decided to try to teach Lancelot how to talk. He made a conscious effort to recall everything he had ever read about experiments with chimps and language. Of course this would be different because he would not merely be attempting to convey the concept of an object—say, the concept of “treeness” in­herent in a tree—which was basically associative learning carried to an abstract level. He would also be trying to teach Lancelot to pronounce and use the word correctly and then string it together with other words to create new meaning. That was the quantum leap of language.

  For the first lesson he sat Lancelot across from him, picked up a good-sized rock, walked over to him, turned the hominid’s hand open, and put the rock on it, repeating over and over the word “rock.” Receiving a blank look, he dropped the r to simplify the sound, repeating “ock” over and over as he removed it and replaced it on the hand of a baffled Lancelot. For days Matt tried to hammer home the idea, but without success. Sometimes Lancelot would repeat the sound, but he never seemed to connect it to the rock. Matt tried other words—“leaf,” “sky,” “water.” He tried sign language, mimicking such actions as eating and sleeping. He tried “Matt,” or “I” and “you,” by pointing, a gesture that did not seem to convey any meaning. Clearly pronouns had no context in a world that did not differentiate between oneself and others. At one point, he brought out his tape recorder and recorded the sounds to play them over and over as he presented the objects, but Lancelot was too fascinated by the recorder itself to concentrate.

  “I’m getting nowhere,” Matt confided to Susan one afternoon.

  “That’s not surprising. Language has got to be the single most complicated human activity.”

  “But they’re so similar in so many other ways. You’d think that capacity is there somewhere, even if only in a vestigial form that could be reactivated.”

  “If it’s not used it won’t develop. It’s like those babies born with cataracts; if they aren’t treated for six months they become irrevo­cably blind. Besides, the hominid brain is already specialized; it has to process all that information from the visual channels of others.”

  “Yet sometimes they make sounds.”

  Susan suggested that he try it the other way around, learning as much as he could of their spoken vocabulary. Perhaps he could use this as a lever to achieve a breakthrough. So he began by observ­ing them in groups. He concentrated on the young ones, especially when they were playing, because that was when they seemed to voice the most sounds. He recorded them on tape, and over time he was able to link certain sounds to specific responses. He de­tected one sound for surprise, a sort of open-throated grunt. Then he had the good fortune to record alarm when a group of young­sters playing on a riverbank scattered as a predator, a smallish cat that looked like a mountain lion, walked toward them. When Matt retrieved the tape afterward he heard a series of high-pitched whines that sounded like keening.

  He practiced making the sound himself alone in the woods, and that evening told Susan half jokingly to prepare for a historic moment. Standing on the outskirts of the village, he drew a deep breath and let the sound rip so that it echoed through the trees. Be­fore Susan knew what was happening, Matt was lying at her feet, writhing on the ground, his hands pressed against his temples.

  “Matt, for God’s sake, what’s wrong?”

  He sat up, looking a bit sheepish. “I raised the alarm, all right. I guess everyone wanted to know what was wrong, and they all read me at the same time.”

  If Lancelot didn’t learn to talk, he did learn something else. One evening as Matt and Susan presided over a wrestling bout, he was in the pit with a young hominid when he was thrown to the ground. Instantly, he was up on his feet and advanced on the youth, who spun so that his elbow caught him on the chin. Lancelot teetered back, stunned, then charged straight at his opponent, rammed him in the chest, and threw him roughly to the ground. As he turned in triumph, Matt caught a full view of his face—flushed red in anger. Matt jumped in to end the match.

  He and Susan were stunned and a little unnerved. Later they talked it over. “You know what I thought when I saw that,” said Susan. “There was real anger there, aggression. That’s not in the emotional vocabulary of the others here.”

  “Whether we like it or not, anger and aggression are human characteristics,” Matt replied. “Maybe some of them have already begun to take the path of the renegades and that path leads right to us.”

  All this time, Kellicut had been undergoing his own instruction and was spending more and more time with the shaman. The shaman lived in a separate hut, the only one that had a door, which was always closed. It was surrounded by a moat of tiny totems like tufts of hair and teeth, and a foul odor emanated from it.

  Matt and Susan called him Dark-Eye, a name that captured him in aspect as well as function, which was to guide the tribe through the netherworld of spirits. He took the weight of the souls of departed ancestors onto his frail frame. His upper body was emaci­ated, with shoulder bones poking under the skin like bat wings, and his face was pinched and sinister, with unruly hair that fell down like a curtain. When i
t parted, it showed one clouded eye stuck in place, gazing permanently off into the distance as if he were seeing visions that eluded others, spirits that resided in hid­den nests and hollowed trees.

  Dark-Eye would go off alone to a rocky pinnacle for days at a time, communing with the spirits there and fasting, to return as gaunt as a hatchet blade. The tribe seemed excited when he reappeared and gave him food and other offerings, but they also feared him, moving away when he approached. He held ceremonies to commune with ancestors, complete with shouts and chants, the beating of logs, and fits of possession. Susan noticed that during these times he seemed to fall into a trance and, when he did, he kept his single good eye closed. This, she imagined, cut him off from the outside world altogether and made it impossible for the other tribal members to read him even if they dared to try.

  18

  Early one morning, with a sky so blue it covered the valley like a luminous globe, a commotion rent the village. Matt, who was bathing in a cool stream, heard shouts of excitement and what sounded like screams. Susan, who was collecting raspberries for breakfast from a thicket, stood erect so quickly that she scratched herself. She picked her way out carefully and then ran toward the village, arriving just as Matt did.

  A knot of hominids were pushing and shoving and kicking up dust. Children circled around with solemn faces. A fight of some sort, Matt thought, then realized with a start how completely he had adjusted to the somnolent tranquility of the village: The thought of a melee for any reason shocked him. Then he saw Longface’s head above the throng and, as the hominid turned to face him, realized that his features were twisted in anguish.

  “What’s going on?” asked Susan. She too was staggered by the scene.

  “I have no idea, but we’d better find out.”

  As Susan stepped forward, the crowd parted to make a path for her and Matt, and she could make out a litter made of branches and leaves. Upon it was a hominid she had not seen before, a dark-haired youth. As the group set the litter down in the dirt, the body rocked and came to a rest, inert.

  The youth was badly wounded. He had a gash across one side of his forehead. The flesh was peeled back from the protruding bone, which was starkly white like some swollen packed growth that had burst through the skin. Dark blood ran down the side of his face toward the back of his neck, matting his hair. He seemed to be slipping into unconsciousness. His right knee was smashed and bleeding; his left arm hung limply over the side, the exposed inner flesh upward. His body was adorned in a way they had never seen, as if with warpaint. His cheeks were marked with lines of red ocher and black charcoal, drawn in a downward V from the nose, and his powerful chest was streaked with similar lines emanating from the breastbone. His breathing showed his ribs.

  Longface could not stop touching him. He hugged the youth’s other arm in a posture of distress, like a Pietà, and emitted strange chilling sounds, tossing his head back and stretching his vocal cords in cries of grief. Something in his stance, and the way he cra­dled the body to comfort it and held the world at bay to protect it, struck Susan.

  “Matt,” she said. “It’s his son.”

  “It is,” came Kellicut’s voice from behind them. “And from the look of him he’ll be dead soon if we don’t do something.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Probably not much, but it will be more than they can. Medicine is not a highly developed art here.”

  When Longface heard Kellicut, he dropped the boy’s arm, ran over, cupped an outsized hand around the back of Kellicut’s neck, and pulled him toward the litter as the crowd fell back to make room. He guided Kellicut down so that he had to genuflect next to the body.

  Ashen-faced, Kellicut touched the boy on one temple. The youth opened his eyes briefly, looked at his father and groaned, then turned his head to one side. Kellicut held the back of his fingers to his cheek, touched his ribs, and felt his pulse. Abruptly Longface let out a groan, matching his son’s in intensity.

  “My God!” said Matt. “He’s reading his son. He’s taking on his pain. He’s literally feeling it.”

  “That’s right,” Kellicut said over his shoulder. “And it must be excruciating. We can’t have even the vaguest notion of what it’s like. The problem is, I don’t think it lessens the pain for his son or mitigates it in any way. It’s simply a way of experiencing it simul­taneously, an empathy that is purely altruistic.”

  Kellicut was metamorphosing into a medic. “First, we’ve got to wash some of this blood off. Can’t see a damn thing. No idea what we’re faced with here.” He swung around abruptly. “Matt,” he commanded, “get your medical kit on the double. We’ll take him over to the big hut by the river. Susan, get whatever clothes you have and meet us there. We’ve got to cover him. He’s in shock.” He was the old Kellicut now, barking peremptory orders, rushing in to take charge before others had even sized up the situation. “Let’s get going.”

  He began to lift the litter and five men rushed to help him. As it moved it jostled the youth, who let out a fearsome moan of pain; so did Longface. The strange procession made its way through the village but with a sense of purpose now, a huge animal kicking up dust with ten feet and Kellicut out front leading it like a guide.

  At the river he motioned for the litter to be set down under a cluster of poplar trees. Nearby was a hut formed by the interlacing branches from two trees. It was open on both sides and a soft breeze blew through it, and here Kellicut set up shop. He sent Matt to the river three times with his canteen, pouring water over the wounds and gently swabbing them with one of Susan’s blouses until he could see where the flesh was torn. Dirt was ingrained around the edges of the gash along the forehead.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Susan asked.

  “It’s hard to say, but this one up here was caused by a blow of some kind,” Kellicut replied, still mopping the brow. “Look at the swelling on the side; and here the bone’s chipped, see?” He lifted a tiny flap of skin next to the browbone. “That’s the frontal torus. Just think, we’re looking at a bone that has never been seen in any medical school in the world.” He wrapped the youth in the odds and ends of clothing that Susan had left, a pathetically small pile that included a pair of trousers. “They’ll never fit him, you know,” said Kellicut. “We’ll have to use them as a blanket.” He turned back to his patient.

  “I’m hardly a doctor, but I’d bet he didn’t get this blow from a fall. And it’s not likely that he would smash his leg like that in some kind of accident. No,” he said, tucking the clothes under the body of the youth, who was beginning to shiver, “he got it from a club. I’d say he was in a fight.”

  “With whom?”

  “With the same gang you ran into.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Who else would do it?” Kellicut paused as if wondering how much to say. “Besides, he ran off to join them.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. Some weeks ago. His father was heartbroken. He couldn’t accept it.” Kellicut looked over at Longface, who was seated on a stump, staring into the face of his son and rocking slowly back and forth. “It’s a bit of a stigma, actually, to have a son or daughter join the renegades, but your guy over there is so respected it didn’t seem to damage his prestige. Except that he suf­fered so.”

  “That’s incredible,” said Matt.

  “Why incredible? They have depths of feelings you can’t even dream about.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean running off and joining the other group like that, the ... the renegades, as you call them.”

  “In a way this wounded kid is responsible for your being found.”

  “In what way?”

  “Those three that came across you were a search party looking for him.”

  Susan looked at Kellicut. “I think there’s a lot of explaining to be done. There’s a lot you can tell us.”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I suppose so. But all in good time. First things first. Before anything els
e, we’ve got to save this young man.”

  Longface looked across his son’s body directly at Kellicut. Matt was not an expert at reading emotions on the faces of these beings who were still so alien to him, but he had no doubt about this one: Longface was pleading. Stooped with age, he walked over to Kelli­cut’s side, lifted Kellicut’s hand and spread two fingers, and gently placed them on his son’s eyelids. Then he touched his own fingers to Kellicut’s eyes and held them there for a moment, a look of suppli­cation on his face. He’s telling us that his son is dying and is begging Kellicut to save him, Matt thought.

  Eagleton punched the intercom, and bellowed out “Schwartzbaum!” Then he hit the button to release the disinfectant from above. If there’s anyone who’ll contaminate this office, he thought maliciously, it’s that windbag Schwartzbaum. It was unfortunate that he was even tangentially connected to the operation.

  Schwartzbaum had gone through the Harvard paleoanthropology factory and studied with the best of them. He had begun as a classic “bones and stones” man and then, like his subject matter, had evolved. He was now on the cutting edge in evolutionary ge­netics. Every two years he turned out papers on skeletal physiog­nomy and mitochondrial DNA that were so obscure and unreadable that his reputation had become unassailable. Eagleton had needed his expertise so badly for this project that he had ap­pointed him deputy director of the Institute with all the perks: a salary of $150,000, a parking space, and a season pass to the Red­skins games.