She looked at me frankly, with no trace of embarrassment or fear, and allowed me to look at her, her face mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Slowly she reached behind her neck, gathered her hair to one side, and began to twist, wringing water from it. Then, releasing the long rope of hair, she began to swing her head from side to side, back and forth, causing her hair to pendulum, faster and faster, until soon she was whipping it around and around in a great circle, an immense dark halo, surrounded by a galaxy of glowing droplets radiating outward, as if she were some dark cosmic goddess creating the very universe, spinning out stars and planets.
When she had finished, she looked at me again, then stretched a hand toward me, palm upward. Hesitant at first, I rose, then walked to the water’s edge, where I stopped and stood. She waited, her hand still out, and at last I took a step, then another and another, into the water to join her. Just before I reached her, the bottom dropped from beneath me, and I sank beneath the surface. I reached out for her hand, but could not find it.
Flailing and struggling, swallowing water, I fought my way to the empty surface.
I awoke, in a fit of coughing, in my empty bed in my empty house in my sleeping Knoxville neighborhood.
CHAPTER 14
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS, I UNLOCKED THE DOOR of the bone lab, the steel door grating harshly as it dragged free of the sill. Switching on the lights, I closed my eyes against the glare of the fluorescents, gradually relaxing my squint so that my eyelids glowed red, the spider work of capillaries showing through, until I opened the lids and blinked in the cold brightness.
Venturing deep into the ranks of steel shelves in the lab’s inner recesses, where the stadium’s grandstands sloped down from overhead, I chose three boxes at random—three from among the thousands—and carried them to an empty table at the front of the room.
The corrugated boxes, measuring three feet long by a foot square, felt as dry and brittle as the bones within them. The labels on the ends of the boxes, listing the site and grave number and date of excavation, had faded and begun to peel during the decades since they had been printed and glued to the cardboard. A thick layer of dust—some of it Tennessee dust, some of it South Dakota dust, perhaps some of it the dust of Caesar—whirled away when I puffed a breath across the top of the boxes. Dust in the wind, I thought. All we are is dust in the wind.
Opening the first box—its lid hinged along one side—I peered inside and saw a large, magnificent specimen: a tall, robust male, his bones the rich color of caramel. The skeleton was virtually complete and in remarkable condition; even the long, thinly arching ribs were unbroken. A string had been threaded through the spinal canal of each vertebra and then tied in a loop to keep them together, and for a moment I imagined them as a bizarre necklace, a trophy that a warrior might wear to strike fear into an enemy from another tribe. The bones of the man’s leg—the tibia and especially the femur—were long and massive. Aligning the two and holding them alongside my own leg, I saw that the man would have towered over me.