Installment One
“Welcome, welcome, pleasure to see you, please pick a seat and stick to it.”
Twenty-nine, lanky, bespectacled, and a victim of his own first name, Every Daniels could not be blamed for pinning authoritativeness to the end of his long list of allergies. It was only in the early moments of his first lecture that he realized there might be a cure.
“Settle down, pilgrims.”
If there was a cure for awkward humor, Every hadn’t begun to look.
“Welcome to General Anthro studies, week two. I have no doubt that you’ve all had your fill of syllabus jargon, but there’s a final announcement relating to the class that I have to make before we can finally get our hands dirty.”
Every took a breath deep enough to know the shape of his ribcage behind the second of five flannel shirts he cycled through in accordance with a weekly ritual.
“Today marks our third meeting. For me, it will be the last.”
Every could not blame his students for their lack of response. A pair of hour-and-a-half long lectures, neither having strayed far from test scheduling and the evils of plagiarism, had been poor facilitators of the bond he’d grown so fond of across his tenure. Some, no doubt those especially meticulous few who researched every professor before committing themselves to a class, chattered amongst themselves.
“I’ve left a box of tissues for each of you under your desks. Feel free to use them. There is no judgement here.”
One student, gullible or curious or genuinely distressed - none could be sure - took too conspicuous a glance between her feet. There was no box of tissues, only laughter.
“Quiet down, everyone, please. Ma’am, I do appreciate the sentiment.”
The freshman transfer from Japan hid behind her hair and slouched in her seat. Every continued despite the twinge of guilt.
“I have not been fired, in case you were wondering. Still too crafty for that. No, I am leaving of my own accord, and the accord of our Federal government, who art in Heaven, and for a very special reason.”
Every’s hands were drawn together in false prayer, and his eyes remained closed when he parted them.
“I think I told you that I was invited to spend the long weekend in Russia - Siberia, specifically. To be true, I had been given no explanation, and it would be fair to say I had no reason to expect a warmer welcome than Napoleon himself.”
A smile then rooted itself across the professor’s face, unique before an auditorium that brimmed with phone-lit chins and supported a thimble’s worth of polite attention. Every still could not blame them for their disinterest, and certainly he did not expect it to last.
“It’s not every day you get a ticket in the mail with your name on it, out of the blue, no return address to speak of. But after four weeks trying to talk myself out of it ended in a hung jury, I layered my cat’s bowl with two days dry and two days wet and hopped in a cab. Even Napoleon got a private island out of his visit. What’s the worst that could happen to me?”
Someone coughed in a manufactured way. Two more came in answer, and Every identified the matching fraternity hats on their heads, and still he harbored no resentment toward them. Due time.
“I was met at the airport - pardon - at the tarmac - by fifteen blacked-out, bulletproofed S-classes. A motorcade packed with ten Russian generals for each they thought the French army was worth and fifty times the horsepower.”
Every adjusted his glasses as the coughing reached a crescendo.
“I know it sounds like I’m bragging, I know, but I’ll ask that you reserve your judgements. I haven’t had much cause to train myself in the art of humility before now.”
“Were they wearing beaver hats?”
The voice was male and slurred. Beginning at 11:30 sharp, his first of two Tuesday-Thursday lectures, Every passively wondered whether it were the slur of a long night or an early start.
“Many of them were, now that I think about it.”
“In Soviet Russia, radio listen to you.”
Early start. Years of therapy and stringent routine had made Every’s confidence robust enough to allow for public speaking, a prerequisite for his current position to be sure. Neither were enough in their own right, however, to silence a deep seated social anxiety that survived to nag him in echoes from early childhood.
“Quite right, young man. And you can be sure that the practice outlived the Union.”
Every glanced at the entrance. Hung above the double doors, an analog clock scolded him for being too liberal with his time.
“Allow me to get to the point. I’ll ask that you put your phones away now. Treat the next hour like a test. If I see a screen, it means cheating. Cheating means expulsion.”
More coughing.
“A man in, well, a beaver hat, took my suitcase. Another man in another hat took me by the arm. After a short walk and a conversation more one-sided than racquetball, they sat me all alone in the back of a limousine. A long drive and two paper bags full of vomit later, my new friends and I squeezed into a single prop plane to begin an unguided tour of the motherland from ten thousand feet.
“Flying makes me nervous, if you can believe it, so the only sightseeing I did was of a rosary the pilot was kind enough to lend me when the turbulence hit. I regret that now.”
Having rehearsed it since he stepped onto the international flight home, this was the point in the account that Every expected would begin to draw attention. Even the girl he’d played no small part in humiliating parted her bangs.
“We landed on an asphalt strip that looked like it hadn’t had the chance to dry. It could’ve been on fire, didn’t make a difference to me so long as it was close to sea level. But the second I was out of that cabin, the moment my feet were underneath me, I nearly knocked myself out trying to get back inside.”
“What was it?” asked the Japanese student.
“Was it a pretty girl?” proposed the binge drinker.
“Worse” admitted Every. He preceded his next sentence, and nearly every sentence thereafter, with a sip from the bottle his students could be forgiven for assuming was filled with water.
“I suppose it’s probably just the second semester here for most of you, but has anyone had the opportunity to take Professor Bonman’s Earth History course?”
A half-dozen hands cast their fluorescent shadows across rows of cushioned seats.
“Count yourselves lucky, Bonman is one of our best,” Every shook his head, “and something tells me this will be his last semester, too. You,” a well groomed fingernail implicated the student with their hand held highest, “did he cover the Permian-Triassic extinction event? You may remember it as the ‘Great Dying’. Bonman prefers the colloquial.”
“He did. Scared the shit outta me.”
Older perhaps than Every himself, the southern hemisphere of a Marine Corps tattoo peeking out beneath his sleeve, the student had intelligent eyes that gave no indication of regret for his choice in words. Every smiled. He liked these sorts of students. Especially today.
“As it should have. Would you be so kind as to share what you can remember regarding the nature of the events that led to the Great Dying?”
The man cracked his knuckles, calloused, and his neck, also tattooed.
“Volcanism, mainly. But there were a lot of reasons. A ‘confluence’, I think Professor B. put it.”
“Sounds like him. Did Professor B. mention where the volcanism occurred?”
“Siberia. Or whatever the good people of Pangea would have called Siberia back then.”
Every’s heart raced, pumping in direct proportion to the pinpricks and sweat that spread as conquerors from end to end of him. He kn
ew, as a matter of context, that this student had made a joke. All that Every knew as a matter of absolute fact was that it was, in any case, no longer of any consequence.
“Professor Bonman - did he have time to discuss the world before and directly after this event? In other words, what can you tell us, if anything, about the variety of life preceding and following the purported spike in volcanism?”
“Not much, he always focused more on the geology. The man loves his rocks.”
“That he does. Can anyone here pick up where Bonman left off, then?”
It was extremely apparent that the Japanese student had anticipated this question, and that she’d spent some minutes in silent deliberation over whether volunteering her answer justified the attention. Her professor watched the mental conflict unfold, a conflict he knew intimately, and was in no small way impressed when her hand rose in sheepish tribute.
“You, young lady near the front.”
Her accent was slight, her English impeccable.
“The Permian period, the last of the Paleozoic, culminated in the Great Dying. Megafauna had finally proliferated on land, as it had for hundreds of millions of years at sea. The most prolific were, colloquially, ‘mammal like reptiles’, also called stem or proto mammals.”
Every smiled and shook his head, listening with great satisfaction as if to a session his first psychiatrist had insisted on recording.
“Nobody told me we had a paleontology major in the class, let alone a PHD.”
Every disguised another glance at the clock behind his upturned water bottle. The young woman was blushing by the time he set it down.
“Please, continue. You’re doing a better job of it than I can, and this is quite important.”
She nodded.
“Descending from the first reptiles to evolve terrestrial egg laying and water-tight scaly hides, proto-mammals were not constrained by proximity to bodies of water like amphibians continue to be. They are also considered to be our own ancestors, at least those that filled ecological niches well suited to endure a mass extinction event.”
“Such as?”
“Such as burrowing for shelter.”
“And?”
Her eyebrows slanted harshly downward, as if there were some physical demand in thinking as hard as she now had the occasion to.
“And omnivorousness. General adaptability.”
“Ding ding ding. So, young lady,” another sip, “you contend that our ancestors developed this adaptivity prior to the extinction event, a stroke of luck that insulated them from those circumstances which claimed their larger and more specialized cousins, rather than following it in some Hail Mary response to those same circumstances. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And how do you know this? How do we know this?”
“The fossil record, sir.”
“DING DING DING!”
Every slammed his fast-depleting water bottle on the desk with enthusiasm enough to generate an auditorium wide debate regarding its contents.
“Meet my new favorite student, everyone! I would ask your name, ma’am, but by now it might just hurt too much. Please, while we all have this time together - please give us your best estimate of the percentage of individual animals that fossilize.”
“Small, tiny. A fraction of a fraction of a percent.”
“And of that fraction, what percentage can our own species proclaim to have unearthed?”
“That percentage is statistically negligible.”
“Statistically negligible. That, my friend, is poetry.”
Every’s bottle was empty.
“So, of that negligible number plucked from a modicum of possibility, is it feasible that we’ve identified, categorized, and Latinized the names of every critter who scuttled along the eons on four legs or two?”
“We almost certainly never will.”
“I love an optimist.”
The professor parted two tidy stacks of manilla folders to create a throne for himself on the desk. His legs dangling, Every produced a second water bottle that he promptly unscrewed with his back teeth.
“You touched on the evolution of hard-shelled eggs. We can thank the fossil record for our understanding of that critical development too, can’t we?”
“Yes, professor, we -”
“Call me Every. Every - ha - every-one else does.”
“Yes, Every, eggs can fossilize as well under the correct circumstances. We know by their deaths in proximity to near-viable embryos, for example, that some dinosaurs evolved rudimentary maternal care behavior tantamount to those of extant bird species.”
“Woah! Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, favorite student. Why jump to the mesozoic when we have a deposit of tenderly nurtured eggs dating back to our favorite alliterative epoch to ponder? A deposit the size of Rhode Island, no less.”
Every’s favorite student looked confused and uncomfortable, the orchestra of coughs and fraternal chit-chat doing nothing to assuage either.
“I suppose I’m being unfair. Allow me to explain.”
First would come another sip, a long look at the clock, and a wobbling survey of his audience meant to ensure that his rules regarding phones continued to be minded.
“We left off in Siberia, a rosary in a heathen’s hand, and a surprise. That surprise was a hole - NO - it was two holes just beyond the end of the landing strip, three hundred feet deep a piece, divided by a wall of earth no broader than yours’ truly at the shoulders - like the Venn diagram that never was.”
Giggling.
“They were more like canyons than holes, really. But the big-wig Federal agent who explained them to me said hole, so we’ll stick to it. ‘Each hole is about half the size of Rhode Island,’ he says. He was an American, the first I’d seen and a surprise all its own. It was only natural that the American fellow would choose a state for his size comparison, albeit the littlest one, but a mighty state nonetheless.”
Unadulterated laughter reigned in the auditorium. None of the students, in their delight, felt compelled toward subtlety while the professor himself brandished his blood alcohol content with impunity.
“So we’re standing at the precipice of this city-sized-state-sized chasm, me and the American, and I am in awe. So I say - so I say ‘sir, what is this place? I’d have seen such a place on Google Earth, I know it!’ And the man tells me, verbatim, ‘Google Earth is clip art beside what we’ve got.’ Fair enough, I tell him, but you haven’t explained the holes.”
“So, class, does anyone want to take a shot,” Every took a shot, “at what his answer was?”
A new voice staked its claim.
“Impact craters?”
“Wrong.”
“Calderas?”
“Creative! No. Try again.”
More like a college mascot than an internationally celebrated professor, Every was, by now, pacing before his class, flapping his arms to churn their interest, and demonstrating his own by cupping a hand behind his ear to filter answers from the general buzz.
Then came a familiar voice, small and timid and more heavily accented amidst all the excitement. It was an answer more like a stroke of genius than of luck, a contention made by a person born to solve puzzles without pictures on the box. Every liked to think he’d have given that sort of answer.
“A nest?”
Every dropped to both knees across from her.
“Tell me your name, young lady.”
“I am called Airi.”
“Airi,” Every thrust himself to his feet, “you are correct. You are - well, you are half correct. But half correct is good enough. Everyone!”
Every clapped his hands, at once startling Airi and instigating a chant of her name with a cluster of Greek lettered clothing for its epicenter. Every spoke the name as well, above all the others until they held their tongues, and then again much more softly.
“Airi… You are correct. One of the holes, spanning one-hundred-and fifty-vertical feet for half o
f Rhode Island’s perimeter, is lined in rows of fossilized eggs. Rows. Before we discuss how spectacular that is, why don’t you tell me how you figured it out?”
“Context, sir.”
“Your modesty is enchanting. You haven’t ceased to amaze me, Yairi, so please don’t start now. Because, because - now I must ask whether you have enough context left in the tank to explain the purpose of the second hole.”
Airi spent the next few seconds in a problem-solver’s reverie. She spoke again sooner than Every could have expected, and although her answer arrived in the form of another question, her professor reacted as though it were the correct one.
“What do you mean purpose?”
“You are special, aren’t you? Pay attention, class, genius seldom strikes twice in the same place. I can see it on Annie here’s face. She has another question on her mind. Please, Annie, ask away.”
“How could any species apart from our own have moved such volumes of earth?”
Designed to encourage her to continue her train of thought, Every made a gesture more like that of a rude customer in the periphery of his overwhelmed waitress.
“No terrestrial vertebrate could possibly lay so many eggs in its lifetime. There must have been… cooperation between many individuals of the same species. A communal nest, constructed to be populated in what you have described as rows. As if deliberately - as if meticulously. Is that possible, Every?”
“It is possible. I will tell you how, my dearest Aimee, when you tell me what was in the second hole.”
“It was a grave, wasn’t it?”
Every’s head pivoted as if toward a creak in his empty house at midnight. His eyes were wide when they fell upon the marine, astonished by his answer and distraught to see him gathering his things to leave.
“I think you’ve had enough, professor.”
Every had the bottle to his lips before the soldier could hope to snatch it, and drained before the class could process what was happening.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The marine made for the exit. Every made it first.
“You should be proud of yourself!”
His body planted against the double doors, his neck craned, and his eyes glued to the narrow face of an inverted clock - Every knew his time was up.
Permian- Emissary of the Extinct Page 1
