“But how will I know when I’m there?”
He smiled. “You’ll know.” I centered the stylus over the forehead and eased it forward, as the icon on the screen mimicked the movement. “Just shove it,” he urged. “Don’t worry; you can’t hurt it.” I pushed the stylus forward; the arm swung freely . . . and then stopped as abruptly and firmly as if it had hit a wall. I pulled it back toward me, then moved it forward again. Again it jolted to a stop when the small icon bumped the forehead. Intrigued, I slid it downward, feeling both friction and undulations as it moved over the contours of the forehead and the brow ridge. Suddenly, as I dragged the stylus across the lower edge of the brow ridge, the arm slid forward and the stylus icon plunged into the right eye orbit. As I watched, astonished, it careened through the opening at the back of the orbit—the opening through which the optic nerve had once connected with the brain—and disappeared from view. I tried pulling it back out, but it resisted my efforts.
“Help,” I squawked. “What have I done?”
Mullins laughed. “You’re trapped inside the cranial vault now. You can come out where you went in, or out the nasal opening, or even out the foramen magnum at the base of the skull, where the spinal cord comes out. I’m guessing you know all the emergency exits from a skull.”
I moved the invisible stylus in various directions, but didn’t manage to free it from the cavity where I’d trapped it. As I struggled to free it, I found myself growing nervous, verging on panic. What if I’d broken the system, trapped the stylus in some permanent, irretrievable way? Finally it occurred to me to close my eyes and move the stylus by feel, exploring the inner contours of the cranial vault. In my mind’s eye, I replaced the stylus with a tiny version of myself—a miniature spelunker within the cavern of a cranium—sliding my hands around the rough-surfaced perimeter, reaching overhead to feel the top of the vault, bending down to probe the gaping pit of the foramen magnum that opened at my tiny feet. My brief panic gave way to delight. The contours fascinated me; as I retraced the right side of the cranial vault, I felt the zigzag seam of the cranial suture where the frontal bone joined the parietal, then, just behind that, the grooves where the middle meningeal artery had once run, bringing blood to the brain. If this had been the first skull Pettis’s dog had found, I might have been able to feel the subtle fracture line that intersected the groove. But this was the second, more damaged skull, so I felt my way to the left side of the parietal bone, where the mastoid process had been broken off by a powerful blow. Sure enough, the stylus snagged on the ragged edges of the break, and I winced as I imagined a slow-motion version of the bone’s shattering.
“This skull was brought home by a dog,” I told Mullins. “We’re still looking for the rest of the bones.”
He nodded. “One of the first reconstructions I did was a case like that,” he said. “A dog in Vermont found a skull somewhere in the woods. The sheriff’s office looked and looked, but they couldn’t find anything else. Finally they put a tracking collar on the dog, hoping he’d go back for more.”
“And did he?”
“Nope. They never found anything more than the skull. But we got an identification from the reconstruction. Turns out it was a severely retarded boy who’d been killed by his dad. People thought the boy had been put in an institution somewhere, but he’d been murdered and dumped in the woods instead.”
“It’s possible that this boy, our boy here, was institutionalized and then murdered,” I said. “A reform school. A mighty grim one, by all accounts.” I continued feeling my way around the interior of the cranial vault. “This is amazing.” I’d spent thirty years examining skulls—usually their exteriors, though sometimes their interiors as well—but never before had I explored one in this way, as if I were a spelunker in a cave. The experience was mesmerizing and moving: an intensely intimate encounter with the skull of this unknown young man. Finally, after what must have been several minutes, I realized I was holding up progress on the reconstruction. I imagined the location of the foramen magnum and then imagined myself as a cliff diver, diving down into a small pool of deep water, swimming downward and out to the side. I opened my eyes just as the stylus reappeared on the left side of the skull, hovering roughly where the ear had once been.
“Amazing,” I said again. “I could spend hours doing that.”
“It’s addictive,” he agreed. “Like a video game, only real.”
“Ever see that sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage?”
“Sure, I have it on DVD.” He grinned. “A submarine full of scientists gets shrunk down to the size of a molecule and injected into a guy’s bloodstream.”