Homesick

by Nino Cipri

  So, Damian shows me pictures of these bones, and I can see he’s got two complete skeletons: an adult and a juvenile. And I started getting excited, because I’m a bone nerd. That’s what my niece says. Two skeletons, almost complete, is a huge find.

  And then Damian shows me this other set of bones, with markings on them. No. With words on them. They’ve been carved and dyed. Preliminary carbon dating on both the bones and the dye put them at three and a half million years old. And I’m thinking, even if this is a hoax, it’s a damn impressive one.

  And then Damian tells me that they’re digging because the state is planning to sell the land off to a natural gas company, and they’re going to frack the whole area. Ten minutes after that, I made some calls, packed up my car, and started driving north.

  ***

  Ray had never thought of himself as histrionic, but Min and Damian apparently brought it out in him. He took a shuttle to the airport early that morning and, when it was obvious that changing his flight was more money than he could really spend on a dramatic gesture, rented a car. He’d lived his entire life on the high prairie, where a four-hour drive was routine and a ten-hour drive was a normal weekend trip. But three days on the road was a trial even for him.

  Luckily he had cousins in Utah and Colorado who were willing to put him up, all his father’s Lakota kin—he’d dropped contact with most of his white mother’s family after they started posting MAGA memes on Facebook and yelling about Standing Rock being a liberal hoax. His dad’s family weren’t the kind of cousins you could reliably trace a blood connection to, but the kind who knew to ask after your grandma’s diabetes and shared embarrassing stories about your uncles from back in the day.

  “Where are you coming from again?” Cousin Anita in Fort Collins asked, between shoving a plate of reheated leftovers at him and scolding him for coming in so late.

  “California. The Smithsonian’s doing a documentary about the weasels.”

  She whistled, impressed. “Gonna be a movie star now too?” She grinned. “You got the face for it. You’re Bachelorette material for sure.”

  They joked around as he finished eating her food. He had missed being teased, being taken not-so-seriously. It was one of the reasons he had kept in touch with Min; she always had time to take him down a peg or talk endless shit about the quagmire that was academia. It was one of the things he still missed about Damian. Everyone in Kansas was too polite, too soft with their ribbing. They kept all their meanness behind closed doors.

  “How are those weasels doing?” Anita asked.

  “Still intelligent and still dead,” he answered. “Just like the last three million years.”

  Ray was a bit of a curiosity to the tangled extensions of his family. They teased him about living in Kansas, which they seemed to collectively regard as the only state potentially worse than South Dakota, or about his perpetual singlehood, but mostly about his brief fame as one of the guys who discovered some kind of smart weasel from a few million years ago.

  None of the Lakota side of his family took the premise that an animal could have a rich, social, intelligent life as bullshit. None of them scoffed at a weasel having enough introspection to want to write things down. That all made sense. The only funny part of the whole thing was that he’d helped discover it—Frank Walker’s youngest kid, the one who’d thrown up at the school recital and broke his nose trying to catch a fly ball during baseball practice.

  But they respected that he’d gotten the state of Nebraska to back down from destroying a chunk of Pine Ridge. He still had cousins buying him beers for that one.

  Maybe that was what brought him around on the whole stupid documentary. It was a good story, after all. A weird little collection of activists and nerds made a discovery, organized, and saved the land from being torn open and destroyed. It meant a lot, that his siblings’ kids had a story like that to grow up with. Ossicarminis, in his mind, confirmed that the separation between animals and people wasn’t an impermeable border. It was hand-shaking distance between neighbors. They were all tied together, hardly different than Ray and his far-flung cousins.

  You didn’t put your neighbors’ bones on display in a museum for schoolchildren to gawk at. It was good to know that ossicarminis were here first, that such a people had existed. But they had been put in the ground with care and love, and that was where they should have remained.

  He hadn’t meant to let all of that out on camera, but...well. Maybe it was for the best. He’d told Damian he didn’t want their whole thing to be part of the documentary, but he wasn’t sure he knew how to separate the two. Damian had a good heart, but he was devoted to getting what he wanted. He mostly wanted good things— that was what had attracted Ray in the first place, along with the fact that Damian had biceps for days—but the stubbornness that made him an effective activist also made it impossible to argue with him. They hadn’t had a falling-out so much as an inevitable collision.

  The land east of Fort Collins stretched out comfortably, grasslands and ranches sprawling like animals at rest. Ray never felt more at home than in the high prairie, but he wished there was more to occupy his mind. With no scenery to distract him, there was nothing to do but click endlessly through radio stations and be bored.

  Boredom wasn’t all bad. Ray tended to take a long view, probably a side effect from thinking in terms of epochs and eras. There were about a billion years when life on Earth amounted to some extremely unexciting sludge. Boredom gave things time to ferment, to evolve...

  Ray realized that he was basically reciting one of his freshmen microbiology lectures to himself and abandoned it.

  Damian had been the opposite of boring ever since Ray met him, first as a voice talking too excitedly into the phone, then as a grainy, pixelated image holding up fossils to a shitty webcam, and then finally as a surprisingly short guy going toe-to-toe with the Nebraska energy commission. Damian had apparently called everyone that he knew to come down and swarm the site: a lot of environmental activists, a double handful of scientists, folks from local towns, and a large contingent from the Pine Ridge reservation. (Nobody Ray knew personally, but it only took ten minutes for them to figure out common acquaintances and that several of their fathers had served in the same infantry division in Vietnam.)

  He stopped for gas just past the state border, after greeting the Welcome to Kansas sign with a “Hello to you too.” He stretched as the gas pump clicked away.

  He’d known, a day after meeting Damian, that he was exactly the sort of guy that made Ray weak in the knees. But Ray had never been a romantic—not when he was in his twenties, and not now that he was slouching through middle age. Damian had more passion and ambition than either of them knew what to do with, and an inability to sit still that made Ray itch. So he’d never expected anything longterm from Damian. Ray figured he’d be like a lot of other flings, the kind of attachment that came with a long lead rather than a short leash. That’s what he’d hoped, at least.

  They had celebrated long into the night when the state announced that it was holding off on developing the land due to its historical and scientific significance. Then the state officials announced they were loaning the skeletons to a museum. That was bad enough, but then Damian announced his book deal. Ray had caught the look of seething betrayal on Min’s face, and felt something in him rear up defensively. Getting cut out of a project like that was like watching one of your own limbs getting lopped off.

  The gas pump clicked off, knocking Ray off the carousel of memories he’d been going around on. He pulled the pump out of the car, replaced it, and went to get a bottle of Coke and some chips. He still had a long way to go.

  ***

  Seriously? Holy crap. Please tell me you’re going to animate a fight between Smilodon and a band of ossicarminis. There’s no way that ever would have happened, but who cares, it would be awesome. For the record, my money’s on ossicarminis. They were social animals and probably hunted in packs. And they were effective enough
to have maybe brought down a Teratorn—

  Of course they would fight together. Okay, we don’t know that they hunted in packs, and their teeth definitely indicate omnivorous diets, so it’s possible that most of their food was vegetal. But I believe, to the core of my being, that they would have fought together. It’s possible they found a dead Teratorn and scavenged the bones, but it is way more badass to imagine them fighting together.

  So yeah. They definitely could have taken out a sabertooth tiger. No problem, as long as they...as long as they stuck together.

  There were six voicemails and seventeen missed calls on his phone by the time he got back to his little house in Emporia, and even more the next morning. All the voicemails were from people on the Smithsonian crew, up to and including Annika herself, reassuring him that it was completely understandable if he needed some time away from the shoot, but to please remember that he was still under contract, and to let the scheduler know immediately if he wouldn’t be able to make it to Nebraska the following week. The “or else, motherfucker” was heavily implied.

  The rest of the calls were from Min and Damian, who were both, of course, allergic to leaving messages.

  He left them all hanging for another day, and spent the next day running the sort of mindless errands that he inevitably put off during the semester: changing light bulbs, cleaning out his truck, throwing out all of his students’ homework that he’d meant to grade but hadn’t. He tried to imagine Min or Damian being happy with the kind of life he’d carved out for himself and knew they couldn’t. They had both joked about his relative lack of ambition, teaching in a small town in Kansas; he didn’t have the heart to tell them that for most of his students, and for him, Emporia was relatively cosmopolitan. Hell, he was still one of the success stories in his family and around the Rosebud reservation, a weapon his siblings used to bludgeon the importance of education into their kids’ heads. It annoyed him that Min and Damian saw where he was and thought he’d settled for less than he deserved.

  He called the producers back first, assuring them that yes, he’d be in Nebraska next week, and yes, he was very sorry for running out, it wouldn’t happen again. After that, he debated between calling Min or Damian back, and realized that if he actually wanted to communicate with either of them, texting would probably work better.

  Dinner next week? He sent to Min. I’ll be in Omaha on Thursday.

  The answer was immediate. Yes please. It was followed by one of those interminable ellipses as she typed an apparent novel into the message box. But all that came through, eight minutes later, was We have a lot to talk about.

  He sent a thumbs up emojo, or whatever they were called.

  ***

  The first day of shooting in Nebraska wasn’t, in fact, at the dig site, but at a studio in Omaha. They had made a to-scale model of the cave, an almost perfect replica. The two skeletons were in the center of a faux-dirt floor, illuminated by an ethereal play of light and shadow. It was almost more real than his actual memories. The rest of it felt wrong: too hot from the lights and dry, noisy from all the bodies moving through the space, calling out to each other, smelling like wood dust and paint instead of wet dirt. It was disorienting, like being in two places at once.

  “Doctor Walker!” Annika Wagner-Smith said, after an assistant had abandoned him in the middle of the chaos. He braced himself for an uncomfortable amount of eye contact, but this time, it was the prolonged handshake that threw him off.

  “I am so happy you made it,” she said, and her sincerity was like a brick wall crashing down around him. “So, so, very, very happy you are here.”

  “Ah, same, thanks.” He liked her, he did. At least she was serious about this project. But having that seriousness aimed in his direction was intimidating.

  “I want you to know that we really appreciate your perspective,” she said. “I understand that emotions run high during shooting—”

  “Yeah, sorry about—”

  She squeezed the hand that she was still holding. “You should never apologize for an authentic expression of the self.”

  “Just let us get it on camera next time,” Kamal muttered.

  It took him a second to translate that into words he could understand: dramatic shitfits were acceptable, as long as they were recorded for posterity.

  Annika finally let him go, and he self-consciously stuck both hands in his jacket pockets, lest she try to grab them again.

  They conducted his main interview in the fake cave, as well as shooting a bunch of shots of him examining the prop skeletons, pretending to scrape away the dirt and soft claystone in which they’d been buried. The props looked extremely realistic, but felt rubbery and hollow—which of course they were. Ray could appreciate the artistry, and the metaphor, at work.

  The interview was surprisingly enjoyable; some of the questions were tiresome, but most were at least entertaining. Hell, even the crackpot stuff made him laugh. Space weasels? It was stupid as hell, but Ray liked to imagine his sisters’ kids watching the documentary and getting a kick out of that. Annika showed him some of the conceptual art, and Ray asked for a copy to hang in his office.

  Then she threw a genuine curveball at him. He should have expected it.

  “Would you mind telling us what Mister Flores and Doctor Hong said in San Francisco that made you so upset?” She said it so casually, like it was a natural follow-up to parasocial relationships in mammals.

  Damn. Ray took a sip of coffee to buy some time to think. He didn’t want Min to get in trouble, and god knew she’d be in deep shit if her school found out she’d switched the real things with the replicas. Damian’s vindictiveness hadn’t extended to saying anything on camera; he’d only wanted to snitch on her to Ray.

  “Sorry, this is, uh,” Ray muttered. He ran a hand through his hair again. “I don’t know if I...”

  What would Damian do in this circumstance, Ray thought desperately. He’d lie his ass off, right? No, he’d tell enough of the truth so nobody knew his true intentions.

  “Damian and I were...together,” he blurted. Min was going to owe him so fucking bad for this. At least he couldn’t be fired for being queer in Kansas anymore, and he’d already gotten tenure.

  Annika, to her credit, didn’t bat an eye at the admission. Kamal, however, grinned like a cat that had just spotted a broken-winged canary.

  “Together?” Annika prompted.

  “Uh. Yeah. Romantically.” That didn’t seem entirely accurate, but there probably wasn’t a word in English for how he felt about Damian, then or now. “We didn’t end on the best terms.”

  “How so?”

  “I think the exact phrase I used was ‘egotistical, fame-chasing fuckhead.’” Holy shit, were they going to make him film a reenactment with Damian?

  “So ossicarminis brought you together.”

  “I guess, yeah.”

  Annika made the hand gesture that meant, remember to speak in sound bites. Ray grit his teeth. “Ossicarminis brought us together.”

  “And it broke you apart.”

  “And it—”

  “No, that doesn’t scan well.” Annika tapped her pen against her lips. “And it tore you apart.”

  Ray took a deep, calming breath, thought of Min being forced to go back to a retail job with her ballooning student debt, and said, “And it tore us apart.”

  Kamal fist-pumped while Annika smiled beatifically.

  Min was already at the Cracker Barrel where they’d agreed to meet, nursing a glass of water. She looked better, to be honest—beneath the makeup she’d worn in San Francisco, her exhaustion had been etched onto her entire face. Dissertation year was hell.

  “I can’t believe you wanted to get dinner somewhere without alcohol,” Min said. Ray cursed. He’d wanted to take some petty revenge on Min by making her eat in the most smotheringly homey chain restaurant, but had fucked himself over instead. Story of his goddamn life.

  “Yeah, to hell with that. Come on.” He jerked his head
toward the door. Min shot him a concerned look, but grabbed her sweater and followed him to the Applebee’s across the road. He ordered the least expensive cocktail with the highest amount of alcohol, and drank half of it seconds after the waitress set it down on the table.

  “Are you okay?” Min asked. He started to bring the glass back toward his mouth, but Min took it out of his hands. “Tell me what happened, and then you can have your Bahama Mama back.”

  “I told Annika that Damian and I used to fuck.” He grimaced. “That we dated.” That seemed worse, somehow.

  Min blinked. “Okay, so?”

  “On camera, during my interview.” He put his face in his hands. “I gave details.”

  Min slid his horrible cocktail back to him. “And you’re upset because—”

  “Because I really did not want to rehash all of our shit on camera, but it was the first thing I could think of when they asked why I’d stormed off in San Francisco.”

  Min was silent for so long that he risked a look at her. She was crying.

  “Aw, jeez,” he said.

  “Sorry!” she said. “Sorry, I’m—I don’t think anyone has ever taken that big of a bullet for me.” She blew her nose on a cocktail napkin. “Also, now that I’m done with grad school, all of my feelings are coming back and I don’t remember how to regulate them. I cried during a cat food commercial yesterday.”

  He dug out his handkerchief and handed it to her.

  She took it gingerly and dabbed at her melting mascara. “How are you such an old man?” she asked. “You’re only like fifteen years older than me.”

  “Is having a handkerchief an old man thing?” he asked. He’d always found it handy. It was literally in the name.

  Min smiled. “Drink your Bahama Mama so we can go get actual food.”

  They ended up at a steakhouse on the outskirts of town. Now that the immediate trauma of talking about his sex life on camera had faded, Ray felt able to laugh about it. It helped when Min pointed out that there were small-town queer kids in his classes who would feel a lot better knowing one of their professors was like them.