The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  We ate and drank coffee and struck camp and got in the boat and paddled gamely off down the river, ready for adventure.

  But by three o’clock something was clear.

  There was nothing here.

  Nothing over and above the outstanding natural beauty, that is, but that wasn’t what we’d schlepped all this way for. We’d come for the cavern.

  And it wasn’t there.

  We’d cruised for four hours—as it got hotter and hotter—including navigating another short stretch of mildly turbulent water, then a further hour of calm. Eventually we reached the stretch I’d outlined, determining its position via GPS.

  We then rowed slowly along it with great anticipation, each member of the team instructed to focus their gaze on a specific level of the towering wall.

  When nothing was spotted, we gamely paddled back upriver, still watching.

  Then floated down again, everyone staring at different heights of the wall this time, to keep eyes fresh. Nothing.

  Then, at Molly’s suggestion, we laboriously maneuvered the raft over to the far side of the river—it was about eighty feet wide at this point, and very deep—in case the change in viewing angle made a difference.

  It did not.

  We went back upriver again, then down again, then paddled back up until we were in the middle of the search area.

  Nothing. Merely a lot of striated rock, pitted, pocked, and striped and—after a while—really not very interesting at all. This whole process took over two hours, most of it conducted in harsh sun.

  And there was no damned cavern.

  Usually when this happened there was a sense of the team being thwarted together—shucks, well, we tried: Onward and upward. I don’t know what was different this time but it felt like it was only me being proved wrong, in the company of people who were being fairly patient about it despite noses and foreheads now sunburned to crap.

  I stood on the last attempt, so Pierre could film me gazing up at the towering wall. This just made me feel even more like I was out on a dumb limb by myself.

  We finished, and Ken asked if I wanted to go again. I shook my head, sat down, took out a cigarette, and lit it.

  “Don’t start, Dylan,” I said. He’d already stopped me doing this on several occasions. He elected not to this time.

  The already precarious morale in the boat dropped further as people accepted it was also clear that we weren’t getting back to the hotel tonight. Some of the team seemed to regard the prospect of another night in the canyon with equanimity, even enthusiasm in Feather’s case. Others less so. Molly, usually stoic in the face of adversity, was suffering disproportionately from the ministrations of mosquitoes. She viewed the prospect of more of the same with zero joy.

  “There’s simply no way we can get back to civilization today?” Ken asked.

  Dylan shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  Ken nodded decisively. “In that case I have adjusted my goals, as follows. I need a drink and a piss, and then several more drinks. You’re either with me or against me. Bearing in mind I sign the checks, I’d advise you all to be with me.”

  People muttered assent and made an effort to cheer up.

  “Hey, we tried,” Pierre said.

  “I know,” I said. “And thanks.”

  Ken clapped me on the shoulder. “You know what we need before we call it a day, mate. And do it in one take, eh? I really do need a piss.”

  Ken and Pierre swapped positions so Pierre could shoot sitting down, keeping the camera low so the canyon wall looked even more gargantuan behind me. Molly knelt on the next bench and held the boom mike over my head. Her forehead looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to it.

  “So,” I said to camera, with my best oh-well-never-mind smile. “It seems this is another of those mysteries that will remain unsolved—at least for now. Regular viewers will know that’s the way it goes sometimes.”

  “Pretty much always,” Molly muttered. Gemma sniggered from the front.

  I ignored them. “And that’s okay. It really is. Because what matters most, what empowers us to grow and develop not just as individuals but as a culture, is never the finding of things. The finding isn’t important. It’s that…we continue to seek.”

  By now I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that Gemma was actually mouthing along to the words. I wondered if there was any chance I could get away with shoving her off the boat. And whether it might be worth doing anyway.

  “I’ve shown you the original newspaper report,” I went on doggedly. “You’ve heard the story of Kincaid’s cavern. It’s up to you now. I can’t tell you what to think—but I can ask you to think. To keep asking questions. Do you believe you’re being told the truth about America, and the prehistory of mankind? Are you happy about the way conventional science dismisses any idea that doesn’t fit a neat and tidy narrative? If not, let me know via Twitter and Facebook. And most of all—”

  “Wait,” Pierre said.

  I looked up from the lens and stared at him furiously. If he’d screwed something up technically it meant a redo on this whole embarrassing piece-of-crap sign-off, and I honestly wasn’t sure I could be bothered.

  He’d raised his head from the viewfinder, however, and was looking at something behind me. “What’s that?”

  “The same shit we’ve been staring at pointlessly all afternoon,” I said. “Fuck is wrong with you, Pierre?”

  “No,” he said, pointing. “Up there.”

  I turned and tilted my head to follow the line of sight indicated by his finger. High, high up on the striated rock face of the wall of the canyon was…more rock.

  “Seriously, Pierre. If you’re trying to be funny you’re missing it by a country mile. Screw this. We got enough. I’ll cap it with something when we’re back on dry land.”

  “Hang on a sec, though,” Ken said, standing. “Oi, boat bloke—try to keep us steady.”

  “Ken, I’m having something of a sense of humor failure here, in case you hadn’t noticed, so—”

  “Shut it, Nolan. Look.”

  I turned around. Ken was pointing at the rock wall, toward an area about a quarter of the way up, to the side of a long splatter of stain across the layers of sediment—a patch that looked as though someone had thrown an enormous cup of coffee across the canyon wall.

  And there, for a moment, smack in the middle, was a very small darker patch.

  “It keeps disappearing,” Pierre said. “It’s very small. And as the boat moves, the light changes on it.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Molly said, squinting against the slanting sun. “Are you sure…Oh, okay. Huh.”

  Everybody else stood and looked, too. Dylan did something with the front oars, and for thirty seconds the boat was relatively still on the water.

  “I don’t know about you, mate,” Ken said quietly, “but that, to my untutored eye…looks a lot like a fucking cavern.”

  Chapter

  11

  The beach was smaller this time. It was nestled in a bend twenty minutes downriver from where we’d made the sighting, semiprotected by an overhang. It was angled so as to catch the last of the afternoon sun, too, heat the rock would presumably hold for at least some of the night. Molly was, dare I say it, mollified. It wasn’t clear yet what we’d found, but we’d found something—and the mood was cautiously buoyant.

  Once all our stuff had been taken off the boat, Pierre found a shady spot behind a boulder and Ken and I crouched there together to take a look at the footage of the canyon wall. Maxing out both optical and digital zoom, and the rocking from the boat made it blurrier than Pierre’s usual rock-steady work, but it was enough to confirm there was a small opening in the cliff face, less than a quarter of the way up.

  This was only about three hundred feet above the river, far lower than Kincaid’s description, thus validating (I hoped) my suspicion that he’d seeded misinformation into his account. Three hundred feet is still pretty high. The opening wasn’t lar
ge, and looked even smaller from below because a lip of rock obscured it from view except within an extremely narrow angle of vision.

  “Heck of a job, Pierre,” I said. “That would have been easy to miss. Well, we did miss it, for a couple hours.”

  “I got lucky,” he said. “Plus you took us to the right place. That’s got to be it, right?”

  “It’s definitely something,” Ken said. “Worst case, we’ve found a feature that other people don’t know about. The question is how we’re going to get up there.”

  Pierre scrolled back through the footage. He played a section, then stuttered forward with a few pauses before letting it run again. “We can climb that,” he said.

  “Fuck off,” Ken said. “Have you met me?”

  “It’s not a walk in the park,” Pierre admitted. “But there’s a consistent concave in the wall, and a ton of crevices and handholds. We can use the rowing gloves. If we take it slow, it’s totally doable.”

  “Maybe for you,” I said. “But we’re not all you.”

  “So I’ll go first,” Pierre said. “Establish a route. If it can’t be done, it can’t be done, and you can figure out a plan B. But I know Molly’s done some bouldering, and from the look of her in the water yesterday Feather’s pretty athletic, too. I don’t know about Gemma, but my guess is she can hack it.”

  “Great,” Ken said. “I can ride on her back.”

  The three of us laughed and looked at each other.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  Midevening found Gemma and me sitting on opposite sides of the fire down by the water. Molly was applying liberal quantities of aloe vera to her face—and muttering darkly when it turned out her little pot of lip balm was empty. Feather was doing yoga. Pierre was cycling out batteries on his equipment and making backups of the footage he’d taken onto portable hard drives. Dylan was reading a book, weirdly. Only Ken was nearby, resplendent in a camp chair, looking up at the stars and smoking one of my cigarettes and sipping what was—by his standards—a remarkably small vodka.

  Gemma looked at me. “Congrats,” she said.

  “Everybody gets lucky once in a while, huh?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you should be feeling pretty good about yourself.”

  “Not yet.”

  “You do take all this stuff seriously, don’t you.”

  “Yes. Because not all of it is just made-up shit,” I said. “It’s remarkable how much of it ties together, too. Take Tutuveni, as a relevant example.”

  “And that would be?”

  “A collection of a hundred sandstone boulders in a nearby corner of Utah. ‘Tutuveni’ means ‘newspaper rock,’ and on just one of them there are five thousand petroglyphs, engraved into manganese-iron deposits on the surface. The official story says they’re clan symbols, carved by young Hopi men on a ceremonial rite-of-passage pilgrimage, over the course of a thousand years. Their way of proclaiming ‘I’m here, in honor of my tribe and the gods, as my forebears were before me.’ And there are plenty of images that do look like coyotes or cornstalks or other traditional symbols. But there’s weird stuff, too. Footprints, and most look right. But a couple with four toes, and a few with six—which look a lot more like fingers. And if there’s one thing a person who takes the time to chip something in rock tends to know—however ‘primitive’ their culture—it’s how many fingers and toes we have.”

  “So they’re some kind of paw symbol.”

  “Name me an animal with six toes.”

  “Elephants,” she said. “And giant pandas.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I kid you not.”

  “Huh. Okay, well, neither are indigenous to the American southwest, can we agree on that?”

  “Or were they?” she intoned mysteriously. “Perhaps the authorities are covering up the existence of roving flocks of pandas in American prehistory, the better to keep us woefully ignorant of—”

  “Shut up. Because what’s most striking is…hang on.”

  I got out my phone and kicked up the Evernote app. It bleated at me about not being able to contact the server. Gemma moved around the fire to see what was on the screen, coming close enough that I was suddenly aware that she was not just someone to be convinced but a woman who possessed physical form.

  “Good luck with that,” she said when she saw what I was doing, raising her hands to indicate a dark and signal-less sky.

  “I don’t need data. I’ve got thousands of pages of research cached on the phone. And what I need is…this.”

  I angled the phone so she could see the picture of Newspaper Rock, then expanded a section. Near the top of the explosion of designs are two figures close together, another a couple of feet above. “Ignore the higher one for now,” I said. “It’s close to pieces of modern graffiti, so it’s possibly not authentic.”

  “Goodness,” she said. “You have a dispassionate scientist side, too. You’re full of surprises.”

  “Do be quiet. Check out the other two.”

  Both drawings showed powerful figures, almost rectangular in the body, with stubby, widely spread legs and arms that were hunched up at the shoulders with big hands pointed down, in classic I’m coming to get you! style.

  “Spooky,” she said. “A bear symbol?”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. “Except bears don’t have horns. And there aren’t any bears around here. Though maybe they got eaten by the marauding packs of prehistoric pandas.”

  She laughed, genuinely—the first time I’d heard her do so. “But wait,” she said. She moved her face closer to the screen, frowning with concentration. “One has curved horns. The other’s are straight, like stylized antlers. And one’s got four fingers on each hand, the other has three.”

  “Exactly. They clearly depict the same thing and yet every detail is stylistically different. Not like some we-always-do-it-this-way clan icon, but as if two different guys were trying to draw something as accurately as they were able.”

  “Huh,” she said. “But relevant how?”

  “Where were all these young Hopi dudes headed, on this sacred pilgrimage, for century after century? A place they called ‘Ongtupqa.’ Now known as…the Grand Canyon.”

  “You know a bunch of weird shit, I’ll give you that.”

  “It’s a curse. Do you think I enjoy having attractive women thinking I’m a nut?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Are you hitting on me, sir?”

  “No,” I said. “If that comes to pass then I’ll make it very obvious, so you may reject me in the proper manner.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “My spider-sense tells me you are no stranger to waking hungover in a tangle of motel sheets and thinking, ‘So who the hell is this chick?’”

  “Your spider-sense is misinformed.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I was married.”

  “I know that. But faithful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good for you. Since?”

  “I went through a phase of wanting to prove I wasn’t dead yet. Sure. But soon realized that wasn’t the way to do it. Not that this is any of your business.”

  “It speaks to character.”

  “I don’t have any. I seem to remember that being your point yesterday morning.”

  “I never said that.”

  “It’s what you meant.”

  She looked away. “Yes,” she said. “But I have been known to change my mind. Grown-ups do. You’ll learn that one day.”

  “Jesus. Was it the chance to be openly hostile to everyone that first drew you to journalism?”

  She laughed. “No. That’s just a bonus.”

  “Then what?”

  “Trying to put the world right.”

  “Ah, how noble.”

  She made a face. “Yeah, okay, I know how that sounds. Deep background, and long story short. I was late getting ready for school one day. I was fourteen. My dad lost his temper. So I took my own sweet
time and picked a pointless fight and I still don’t even have any idea why.”

  “You were fourteen. That’s all you need.”

  “I guess. Anyway, eventually we leave the house and it’s silence the whole way. Normally Dad would do a reset and ask some question and we’d end up chatting. That morning he didn’t. We got to school. As I’m opening the car door he looks at me.

  “‘Know why I wanted to get to school on time today?’ he said. ‘I mean, more than usual?’

  “I shook my head, not caring even a tiny bit. ‘I’ve got a meeting,’ he said. ‘Kind of a big deal. I was hoping I could get downtown in time to have a coffee first, take a minute, get myself set. That’s not going to happen now.’

  “And I stared at him, thinking…‘Seriously? You escalated that whole thing’—he hadn’t, of course, he’d been calm throughout, or pretty calm—‘so you could get a hot beverage?’ I said all this. And more. I ripped into him about how it was all about him and Mom, all the time, and they didn’t care about me, and on and on and on.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He listened, and nodded, and said, ‘Okay, if that’s how you feel.’ He told me that he loved me and to have a good day, and I flounced into school aflame with self-righteous ire.”

  She stopped talking and looked away. I waited.

  “Cancer,” she said. “He died ten months later. The ‘meeting’ was to get his results. He had a pretty good idea what was coming.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah. But all that was okay, weirdly. As okay as it could be. I mean, we had time. I wised the hell up very quickly. I’d been focusing on the shortfalls—he got too wrapped up in his work, could be distant, impatient, blah blah blah. Luckily I had enough time to get that where it counted, he rocked. And I realized he genuinely liked me, too. We parted on very good terms.”

  “But…”

  “It’s not even the fact that’s the day he got the news. It’s just, you know, he wanted a damned coffee. A half hour to sit while he still hoped he might live forever. I stole that from him. Can’t ever give it back.”