A Story for the Ages

i.

I came because Dr. O’Meara wouldn’t tell me over the phone what she had discovered. “You won’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t.”

“I’ll believe it,” I said.

“You won’t. And I’m afraid you might think the desert has gotten to me, and maybe it has. The locals tell me they see it, too, but I can’t be sure they’re not humoring me. They’re paid by the day. If I have to go away for treatment, they lose work.”

“You do sound distressed.”

“For good reason. For god’s sake, Del, just get here, okay?”

As it touched down, the helicopter threw sand around like something angered. I saw Dr. O’Meara—Kate—racing toward it. She held on to her hat with two hands to keep the prop wash from blowing it off her head. I gave her a wave through the scratched-up windshield, but I don’t think she saw it—the glare of the sun had probably transformed the windshield into a paintbrush smear of gold.

I sat in my seat next to the pilot until the rotors had come to a full stop. Long experience had taught me to do so. I’ve seen two lives cut short because of an eagerness to get in or out of a helicopter. There was pounding on my door, and it surprised me. I hadn’t seen Kate approach. I opened the door to find her already talking—some kind of remonstrance about why was I just sitting here.

“C’mon,” she said. No hug, no So glad to see you, no happy chatter about how things were going. Katherine O’Meara always moved with purpose, as if she had just left one important meeting and was on her way to the next—always the case at the university, and always the case at this dig. But she was at a run now.

The locals working at various tasks saw Kate and me and stopped doing what they were doing to hurry after us. No less than forty of us in a shallow V, our shadows comingled, created a sheet covering up this corpse of a hill. At the top, Katherine pointed at a spot thirty feet below and at the far right side of her excavation.

She was right. I didn’t believe it.

She and her various teams had been digging in stepped tiers over a nine year period now. She had gone from a lowly associate professor, who had to beg for every dime to keep this dig funded, to become paleontology’s superstar. 

It wasn’t just the number of unknown species she had found as it was the number of hypotheses she had overthrown—and the new theories she had established that now guided how science viewed the when’s, where’s, and why’s of the Cretaceous Period. 

“So,” Kate said, “is that there? Or do I need help?”

I had no idea what to say; and the stupidity of my questions made that apparent. “Well, I mean, you touched it? You’ve put hands on it? You’ve questioned the crew?”

“Yes, yes—all that, everything,” she said, half-relieved that I, too, saw what she was seeing, and half-exasperated that I would ask such stupid questions.

“Can I walk down? I won’t disturb anything?”

“Follow me,” she said. We made our way down railroad ties embedded in the earth to serve as steps. To the left, the exposed jaw of a titanosaur, and beyond that, what looked like the femur of an abelisaurid. To the right, two-dozen buckets of sand and earth that would be hauled up to her lab for grad students to sift through, looking for micro-fossils of flora and fauna.

Our two shadows segmented the object before us into three separate pieces, making it look more like what Kate was used to seeing, something fallen apart, and not this, something whole. Something fully intact. Something that didn’t belong.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s a joke. The mystery is how anyone could have pulled it off.”

“It’s not a joke,” Kate said. “We dug down to it. From the surface down. It’s passed all tests. It’s been in situ for 73 million years, and it’s exactly what it appears to be. We tested it against current specimens. Though that’s not the word, is it?”

“I feel…the Earth is spinning,” I said. I put hands to knees and inhaled slowly. 

“So, you see,” Kate said. She exhaled hard.

“But what are we going to do?” I asked. “How are we going to handle this?”

Kate chuffed an anxious, single-note laugh. “That’s why I wanted you to come, Del. Because I have no idea. I have no…I have no training for this.”

“Can I touch it?”

She nodded.

I stepped forward and squatted down. I extended my hand and laid it tentatively on its side. To the touch, yes, metal. And this was definitely a door. Here was the handle. Still squatting, I side-stepped to the left. And here was the curvature of the wheel well. And the rubber of the tire, warm from the day’s heat. I stood. I don’t know whether I was being funny or serious—probably both—I needed to be both—when I asked, “Do you know the model year?” 

“Yes,” Kate said. “We checked it out. It conforms exactly to the model built in 1967. It’s a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle. But it’s indisputably 73-million years old. And contemporaneous with every dinosaur species we’ve uncovered.”

                                                   ii.

She had opened a bottle from the case of the 2008 Spottswoode Cabernet I’d brought her; and we were both sipping our second glassfuls like civilized people. We had swallowed our first glassfuls as if we’d been parched. She had changed out of her clothes and showered, and now sat in her chaise in a light linen robe, her hair still damp. I always liked seeing her this way—shed of her command mode; shed of the mantle of Dr. Katherine O’Meara, and become simply Kate.

I sat sprawled on the chaise opposite hers. I was exhausted by thirty-two hours of getting here from San Francisco. Jet. Jet. Rattling prop plane. Helicopter. However, I wasn’t sleepy. I was over-stimulated. Jangled.

Ten years ago, and to her specs, I had built her a compound of modular homes and work spaces. She and her crew had plumbing, electricity, and internet. She had reached an understanding with the local chieftains: Let her work in peace, and she’d name every new species she found after them; plus, of course, there’d be the highly ceremonious (salaams, tea, and dates) transfer of the monthly baksheesh—which I funded, of course.

We had met on a dig in Montana 20 years ago, lowly post-docs. She was the obvious superstar-to-be; I, just another competent workhorse among many others. The only distinction I had lay outside of our field. I was filthy rich, having inherited my father’s fortune made from luxury liquor brands sold worldwide.

It was nothing to have poured a hundred million dollars into Kate’s dig here.

We gazed through the glass of her lanai at the huge tent a hundred yards off. Her crew hoisted it up every night to cover the dig. It, too, was designed to her specs. It was deployable in one minute to prevent simooms from giving birth to sand all over her excavation; and it was sturdy enough to withstand the monsoons coming in from the coast. Most importantly, it kept the sun off bodies, so she didn’t have crew members dropping from heat stroke. The tent looked like a gray cuboid dented in the middle. To my eyes, it looked like a doughty ark plying rolling seas.  

My concern at this moment was keeping her discovery from getting out. That 1967 Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t a half-comical, fully shocking anachronism. It was the seed of world destruction. It was a bomb about to go off—because the human narrative of time and history; of the what-is; of the what-can-be—and why and why not—was now debunked. Destroyed. In the heart of all that terra firma out there was all lack of terra firma. We no longer had anything to stand on. What would the world do with this understanding?

Yes, there were positives in this discovery. For many, there’d be wonder and glee. For many, there’d be a rehabilitated (even resurrected) interest in the meaning of their lives and life itself. For those weary of the very dreary way of the world, there’d be hope for a re-set, a new beginning: starting from zero could be good; could be great.

But for those with their power derived from—and dependent on—knowing how and why things are, this was a disaster; and for those who needed those people to be right, this was a disaster. So, what would they do to avoid it? Kill?

“You have a crew of what? Forty?” I said. “That’s forty voices; and how many cell phones are all over the camp? The minute this gets out, you’ll be fending off the world, not digging. And you’re going to lose. You’re going to lose control of your own dig, because this is no longer about dinosaurs.”

Kate nodded as she thought this through—not in agreement necessarily but as a show that she understood my point; found it reasonable.

“I think,” she said, “that I’ve got this pretty well islanded for a while. What’s a while? I don’t know. But for several months. I can get a lot done in that time; answer some questions. Like, are there more VW’s—or more cars, period? Is there contextualizing stuff—remains of roads, houses, gas stations? Civilizations? The more answers we can provide, the less people will run amok with speculation. And that’s why you’re here, Del. To help me figure out how to control this. How to contain it. First thought? We submit a paper to some dry-as-dust academic journal—and let this seep into the world under the guise of ho-hum, workaday science. Like, oh, by the way, we found a 73-million-year-old VW. No biggie. It will take a while for people to think, ‘Wait, what?’ That kind of slow, low-key rollout will buy me time.”

“Okay,” I said, “but ‘islanded.’ You’re not alone on this island. How are you going to get everyone to stay quiet?”

Kate took a long sip of her wine, nodding the whole time. She put down her glass. “My grad students and post-docs won’t breathe a word,” she said. “You don’t go into paleontology because you’re motivated by money. And this is the greatest paleontological find in history. They’ll want their co-author status on the paper we’ll write more than they want anything else in the world. I guess I should say it’s the greatest archaeological find. Anyway, they’re acutely aware that they could get pushed out by any number of people and organizations—and the VW taken away from them. So, they’re real, real motivated to keep their traps shut.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “People love money and attention. And it only takes one student, one student who’s had too many beers…And what about the locals? Amin and all of them?”

Kate chuffed a laugh. “My students would spill the beans before Amin and his family would.”

“You’re sure because…?”

“Because they’re the ones motivated by money. They’re shrewd. This is reliable, long-term income here. It’s safe here, too. For all of them. Talk about an island.”

Kate tucked her legs up underneath her. She looked like a gentle doe in a meadow. “You’ve got a frown on your face,” she said.

“I do?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m thinking about Amin. He’s a devout Muslim.”

“Yes,” Kate said, waiting to see where I was going with this, and then (I saw it in her eyes) knowing exactly where I was going with this, but letting me finish. 

“What has he said about this find?” I asked her. “How does he square the circle?”

Kate nodded. “He doesn’t. Whatever happened 73-million years ago is irrelevant to him—as irrelevant as dinosaurs. The VW is fascinating to him, but The Prophet is still The Prophet and Islam is still Islam. It’s as much a fact to him as the VW, and it takes precedence and rules his heart. And I’m going to guess that’ll be more or less the case for all religions. They’ll accommodate this into the narrative. Faith is supple. Jesus did what he did and asked what he asked, and that’s all that matters. Abraham, the same. The Buddha. Any and all of them.”

“There will be no…hue and cry?” I asked.

Kate looked off at the tent. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired, Del.” She turned and gave me a smile. It went from Thank you for listening, to coy. “But I’m not exhausted.” She pushed herself up from her chaise and extended her hand to me over the coffee table. “Let’s go to bed.”

I was happy to follow orders, of course, but I wanted more than sex from Kate. I loved her; which she knew; but she didn’t love me back. Which we both knew. On the other hand, she could smile lovingly and at length into my eyes while we were in bed—and in that time, I could actually believe that one day we’d be together.

I helicoptered out the next afternoon. The backpack in my lap felt heavier than it probably was. It contained the most significant fragments of artifacts the world would ever see. It also contained half-a-dozen thumb drives of documentation, video, photos, and detailed explanatory mini-lectures from down in the pit. All in all, a convincing amount of evidence. Kate and I were not going to risk sending anything through a wire and into cyberspace.

We knew the editors at the paleo journals that mattered and decided that the person we could trust was Karl Fischer, the editor-in-chief at Swiss Journal of Paleontology. A brilliant guy, he’d guide Kate through the year it would take for her to complete a first draft. Most of all, Karl was tight-lipped, and a guy who enjoyed knowing he had a secret more than sharing one.

Kate and I had kissed, a lovely sweet kiss, her hands on my cheeks, before I got up into my seat. I almost said, “I love you,” but I didn’t want to ruin the moment—the moment that after the kiss still held the sensation of the kiss and made a huge space between all moments prior to it and all moments that would ever come next. A moment to live in.

In Ankara, I caught a flight to Paris. In Paris, I caught a flight to San Francisco and home.

I put the backpack on the desk in my office.

                                                   iii.

I had been home three days after my visit to Kate. I had spent the first day back pretty much sleeping. The traveling to Kate; the intensity of the discovery; and the traveling back had taken everything out of me. The second day, I had to catch up on emails and phone calls, and I had a deadline on a small paper that I myself was writing about an unusual mastodon discovery I had made in the Yukon.

On the third day, I had planned to FaceTime Karl and ask if I could see him in Bern. Normally, people like Karl Fischer don’t monkey around with second-tier scientist like me. But I’m the richest person my colleagues (if you will) know, and as they spend every other waking hour worrying about money, I zip through their minds quite often. They need to be nice to me. They need to take my call.

But before I could FaceTime Karl at 8:00am as planned, I heard my phone go off at 3:19. It was Helen, my assistant. “I’m at your door,” she said.

I sat up in bed. “My God, what’s wrong?”

“Let me in,” she said.

We sat on a couch in the light between two standing lamps. She took my hands.

“Della,” she said, “there was an earthquake.”

She stopped to let me put the pieces together. I did. But I wanted to hear the story.

“It struck nine hours ago,” she continued. “They’re still trying to affix an epicenter. But they think it was somewhere in the Wadi Derna. It rolled through the site. It was about 5:30pm their time. They were all still working.”

Helen stopped. She would let me digest all she’d said up to now.

Who knows what my face was showing her? But I guess she picked up in it that I was ready to take in more. But I wasn’t. I never would be.

“They’re all gone, Della. The walls collapsed all around them, burying them all. Then, that entire area of desert imploded. The camp is gone, too. Sunk out of sight and buried.”

Helen leaned me and hugged me. “She’s gone, Della.”

                                               iv.

So. What to do? Lots of things pass through my mind these days. I could of course figure out how to re-open the dig and build a new camp. I could find Kate’s body and take it home and bury her in our family plot, next to where I will be. That’s all that I’d want from re-opening the dig. I really don’t care about any of the rest of it.

I’ve shoved the backpack in among a bunch of Christmas decorations in an upstairs hallway closet.

Last time my eyes fell on it, I noted that it was gathering dust.

                                                      The End