3
It was February 1973.
With practiced self-control, Greer Farraday closed her eyes as the small Lan Chile plane began its descent. The pilot had announced that the eastern tip of the island would soon be visible from the plane’s right side, Greer’s side, but she wanted to wait until the entire island was visible, to absorb it in one comprehensive view.
With her eyes closed, the propellers thrummed even louder in her ears. All around her,Ooh s! andMagnífico s! andDios mío s! blossomed like a field of moonflowers. When finally the plane steadied and she opened her eyes, below her, like the jagged fin of a sea creature, the island rose from the water.
“Vértigo?” came a Spanish voice across the aisle. She turned to see the young man in the linen shirt studying her once again. His hair was dark brown, combed back, except for one thick strand that bisected his forehead. His cheekbones were high-ridged, his eyebrows two firm lines. He was handsome, and surprisingly unrumpled after the long flight. During the lunch service, when he had asked the stewardess for an extra piece of cake, Greer had offered hers: “I’m not eating it.Lo quiere?” He had accepted it with a smile, but his eyes betrayed surprise. She realized this was a breach of airplane etiquette—offering a portion of your meal to a stranger—and the dismayed stewardess returned moments later with a fresh piece, at which point Greer began reading her copy of Erdtman’sPollen Morphology and Plant Taxonomy; this would assure them she wasn’t going to start offering around sips of her coffee.
With a shake of her head, she now said, “No. No vertigo. Excitement.Emoción. Sí?”
“Ah, sí. Emoción.”
Then Greer turned from him.
Excitement—that was what she was feeling. This was her first fieldwork in years. For months she’d been researching this island, writing letter after letter to arrange accommodations and lab space, packing equipment. She’d always wanted to study an island ecosystem but hadn’t been sure she would, in the end, actually go. The preparations were such a useful diversion from life, from thoughts of Thomas, she began to fear it was their only purpose. But the day before, when her alarm rang, she had gotten out of bed, sealed her duffels, locked all the windows and doors, unplugged the appliances, turned the heat down—when that was done she double-checked everything to keep herself in motion—and finally stepped into the taxi, not looking back at the quiet house she was leaving behind. Now here she was, seven thousand miles from home, thirty-three, and alone. No one was depending on her. She was, for the first time in years, and in a way that felt almost frightening, free.
Greer pressed her forehead to the plane window, which framed, like a giant ocular, the long-awaited specimen of basalt. A mass of cumulus clouds hung just beyond its southern tip. Must be downwind, thought Greer. The warm air rising from the island is blown toward the sea, where it condenses. This was how the Polynesians had found their islands, settling every habitable landfall over eleven and a half million square miles of ocean a century before European explorers even thought to raise their sails. New Zealand was known as Aotearoa—“land of the long white cloud”—before the slender hulls of Polynesian canoes had reached its sands. Wouldn’t it have looked to them, Greer thought, as though the cloud had given birth to land? Even in research it was easy to confuse cause and effect, to see the cloud first and think the land below was its shadow. The cloud, though, was the real shadow, a white silhouette, the island’s ghost hovering above its igneous twin.
Greer could now see the whole of Easter Island—the southeastern vertex of the triangle of islands known as Polynesia. The island was itself an isosceles triangle, buckling inward at its three midpoints. In each corner there was an extinct volcano, bulbous and perfectly round, and dozens of smaller craters pocked the landscape. The island was oceanic, its raggedness the relic of an ancient deep-sea eruption. Leagues below, a fifty-four-hundred-mile scar stretched across the ocean floor; the East Pacific Rise, a volcanic mountain range, ran parallel to the western coast of South America, its occasional magmatic bleeding leaving well-known volcanic scabs: the Galápagos, the Society Islands, the Marquesas. Some two million years earlier, one of its volcanoes erupted and left another lifeless heap of cooled lava: Easter Island.
Easter was the ideal controlled experiment—this was what intrigued Greer. Never linked to a continent, the island had needed to wait patiently for flora and fauna to be carried to it by wind or ocean currents, and by a few determined birds whose feathers had swaddled seeds. Continental islands, like Bali and Tasmania, had been brimming with lemurs and mammoths and marsupials when the seas rose, and they were set adrift like overcrowded arks. But oceanic islands were tabulae rasae, naturalists’ favorites. The Malay Archipelago had lured Wallace; the Galápagos, Darwin. But Easter made an even better subject. Fifteen hundred miles from another landmass, it would have taken thousands of years for plant life to reach its shores, far longer for Homo sapiens. This time spread meant the number of outside influences, the unknowns and extras that made any scientific answers so eternally dubious, could be reduced. Easter Island was, she thought, the perfect microcosm.
Greer thrummed her fingers one last time on the book in her lap and crammed it into her backpack. It pleased her to see her bundle of field gear—notebook, pollen guide, camera. She needed this trip—eight months of solid research. Draping her mind in data had always soothed her. Even as a child, looking into her father’s microscope, she had discovered science was a room your mind could enter, a safe chamber of contemplation in which there was no space for sadness. Later, she came to realize it was a matter of scale. The minuscule—pollen grains—and the massive—geological time, the motion of epochs—made the day-to-day, made even the months and years of simple, human-size disappointments, seem trivial. Science had become, over the years, the blanket she reached for when she felt a chill from life.
And with her husband’s death, a deep chill had settled within her. As she moved through the house in Marblehead, packing up Thomas’s belongings, everything she touched—old photographs, his flannel shirts, his notebooks—dizzied her with memory and regret. When she couldn’t bear to see his things, or their things, she sat on the porch for hours, watching the ocean. When winter came, she retreated to the basement lab, listlessly reading old data logs, examining new pollen collections. If she left the house, it was usually for a slow walk through Harvard’s herbarium or the Peabody Museum.
The idea of this trip, though, had finally begun to pull her from her malaise. The arrangements kept her busy, kept her in contact with the outside world. For months, Easter Island had loomed before her as a goal, something, in the bewilderment of her grief, to look forward to. And here, finally, she was.
The plane nosed down now, and around her passengers clasped their armrests and checked their seat belts. But for Greer it was getting on the plane that had tried her nerves; arriving was easy. She simply tucked her hair behind her ears and pulled some chewing gum from her pocket.
The plane’s wheels gripped the asphalt and the machine steadied itself as silence filled the cabin. Through the window, Greer watched the twin propellers slow, the silver blades revealing their true shapes: swirling steel samaras, iron descendants of the winged maple seeds she’d watched as a child spin to the ground. So few viable shapes, she thought. The winged seed of the Asian climbing gourd (Alsomitra macrocarp) had inspired early aircraft and glider design. Milkweeds (Asclepiadaceae) and western salsify (Tragopogon dubius) could drift across entire valleys with their feathery umbrellas. Greer had always liked to imagine the awe of the first humans to see these seeds. How long, she thought, before envy arose, before someone wondered: CouldI do that?
The plane gently came to a halt. A brief applause swept the cabin, and immediately the passengers around her stood. They clutched their purses and straw bags, and something—an elbow? briefcase?—knocked the back of Greer’s head. “Perdón, perdón” drifted forward. Despite her excitement, after nine hours of sitting patiently, it seemed absurd to hurry. Greer remained seated, letting the rest of the plane depart before her. When she reached the exit, the impeccably groomed stewardess beamed at her. “Buen viaje!Enjoy your visit!” she said, her tone arrestingly cheerful. Greer couldn’t help but wonder what this woman did on bad days, how difficult it would be to smile like that in the midst of a divorce, after a lump had been discovered, or after your husband of eight years had died.
Greer was the last of the travelers to spill down the portable steps into the warm air of the tarmac. Before her spread a squat one-story building markedAEROPUERTO MATAVERI and below thatIorana, Bienvenido, Welcome, Wilkommen. A Chilean flag flapped from a tall pole. This was the smallest airport she’d ever seen, but the island was only about twice Manhattan’s size, and mostly uninhabited. She’d been told any correspondence, though she expected little, could simply be addressed: Dr. Greer Farraday, Correo Isla de Pascua. The Lan Chile flight arrived only once a week, and that, she knew, had started just a few years earlier. Nineteen sixty-seven—the same year MacArthur and Wilson publishedThe Theory of Island Biogeography, the monograph that had been a turning point for her own work. Greer recalled sitting at the kitchen table and noticing an ad in theGlobe ’s travel section for Lan Chile’s Santiago–Rapa Nui–Tahiti line. How perfect it seemed. Island biogeography, a fledgling theory about distribution and speciation on isolated landmasses, and Easter Island, the world’s most remote island. But at that time, she was working in Thomas’s lab. And Thomas’s enthusiasm for an Easter Island study was tempered, as was all his enthusiasm, by anxieties about his magnolia research. There was no chance of Greer getting funds to go alone, so she stayed in Cambridge.
The door of the cargo bay hung open, and a man in coveralls was tugging out the long box with her Livingston corer, struggling with the uneven weight of the six-foot steel rod and piston. Greer walked over to help—she’d carried that corer often enough, and couldn’t risk having it damaged—but as she approached, the man signaled her with an insulted shake of the head that he had things under control. Greer nodded, then shifted her attention to the crates beyond her corer: the ones markedEXTREMELY FRAGILE in which she had carefully packed her microscope, her slide mounts, beakers, and her centrifuge. Another markedTOXIC (YES,ONE WHIFF CAN KILL YOU )CHEMICALS pasted with skull-and-crossbones stickers held her jars of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids. She’d brought everything she would need to take core samples and analyze data—it was impossible to obtain scientific instruments on the island. Flanking her box of chemicals was a canvas sack bulging with letters—the island’s mail delivery, she assumed. Past that, another crate, withPORTALES stamped on all sides. Portales—the name stirred a vague memory, but one she couldn’t place. Greer thought it best not to hover and moved slowly toward the terminal.
The building was cool and dim after the bright sunlight. Most of her fellow passengers had left. A plump woman, hair pulled in a loose and slightly graying bun, held a sign that readFARRADAY and stared determinedly beyond Greer, out onto the tarmac. Her eyes were large and wide set, her nose broad, her cheeks full, slightly weathered by the sun—a face distinctly Polynesian. A white dress clung to the supple curves of her body, flaring at the knees, lending her a distinctly feminine grace, and she stood with one foot tucked behind the other as though at any moment she might curtsy. Around her neck hung a garland of white hibiscus. Family: Malvaceae, thought Greer. Species:Hibiscus moscheutos.
“Residencial Ao Popohanga?” Greer asked.
A look of apology softened the woman’s face. She had the solidity of one who had seen sons, husbands, whole nations, fall, but the gentleness of one who feared admitting the milk was finished, or that the cookie jar was empty. “Sí, sí.Residencial Ao Popohanga. But no more rooms. Maybe Residencial Rapa Nui. Or Hotel Pascua. They have a table for the Ping-Pong. Very very nice.”
“I believe I already have a room.” She extended her hand. “Doctor Greer Farraday.”
“Greer? Greer? Doctor?Una mujer? Ahh.”
“Yes, I’m a woman,” said Greer with a slight smile, trying to hide the frustration this moment still produced in her.
The woman’s hand rose to her cheek. “I not know!Doctora.Mujer . It is good. It is very good. Very American, yes?” At this, the woman beamed, lifted the hibiscus garland from her neck, and laid it over Greer’s head. She kissed Greer on both cheeks. The smell of gardenia and coconut oil lingered about her. “I am Mahina Huke Tima.Iorana .”
“Iorana?”
“It is hello and good-bye in the Rapa Nui language.”
“Well, hello for now,” said Greer.
“Yes, hello for now,” repeated Mahina, her hand resting gently on Greer’s shoulder. “Very very hello.”
The Jeep wound slowly along a red dirt path, kicking up light chunks of volcanic rock, red dust rising like vapor from its wheels. Each time the Jeep approached a figure on horseback, Mahina, now wearing a wide straw hat, tapped the horn and called out a greeting. She seemed reluctant to clasp the steering wheel, her fingers dangling like tentacles. A few times, as she shifted gears, the Jeep bucked. A woman who has learned to drive late in life, thought Greer.
“How many cars on the island?” asked Greer. “Cuántos autos en la isla?”
“Solamente un automóvil,”said Mahina. “For the mayor. Others have Jeeps, like this, but not many. This Jeep, not mine. It belongs to my brother-in-law. I ride the horse. You ride the horse?”
“Sí,”said Greer. But her Spanish was better for questions than answers. “Not for many years. But they say it comes back.”
“Yes, yes. And you drive the car?”
“Yes,” said Greer.
“The woman isdoctora. And the woman drive the car! Very good. And how many hours you are on the plane?”
“Almost ten,” said Greer. “Diez. From Santiago. Another thirteen or so from New York. One more from Boston.”
“Veinticuatro!So much time on the airplane!”
A strong wind rose up and Greer fastened her hair into a lumpy ponytail. She had meant to cut her hair before the trip—the island would be hot in February—but had forgotten, and it now hung well below her shoulders, tousled and unwieldy. She glanced in the sideview mirror: Her narrow face was pale from winter, tired from travel, but she saw the same high forehead, the familiar dark eyebrows. It was odd—nothing in her expression revealed the sadness of the past year. No sign of what her husband had done, that she’d been recently widowed. She appeared young, healthy, a bit disheveled, but basically composed, not at all like someone trying to start a new life.
Greer looked toward the coast, where the water shimmered in the light, a sharp contrast to the dull landscape. Even though she’d read about the island’s depleted biota, the terrain’s visible starkness surprised her. Only bleached grass—family Gramineae, that dogged monocot—had made its way across the land.
The island began lifelessly, thought Greer, but it would have welcomed stray seeds or spores that reached its shores. Igneous soil was rich in lime, potash, and phosphates—nutrients key for plant life. When a volcanic blast in 1883 wiped out all life on the island of Krakatoa, it took only thirty-five years for the island to replenish itself. The eruption was a dream come true for naturalists, the closest thing to witnessing the birth of an island. Hordes of investigators documented the appearance of each new fern and flower on the pumice-covered landscape, until the island’s former forest had returned. Of course, Krakatoa was only twenty-five miles from Java, a warehouse of flora and fauna. Easter Island was fifteen hundred miles from the nearest major supplier, Pitcairn Island. But when you did the math, Easter should have been forested. Two million years was ample time. So what accounted for this barren landscape? The prime suspect was some sort of extinction. A catastrophe that would have undone ages of ecological hospitality.
“Hanga Roa,” announced Mahina as she turned the Jeep inland and jabbed at the brakes. For a moment Mahina tried shifting into all possible gears before she settled on first and gently depressed the accelerator.
“Hanga Roa,” she repeated. They had arrived at the island’s sole town. Small light-blue houses, their front paths obscured by lattices of dusty millers (Senecio cineraria) and blankets of orange nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus), lined each side of the road. A broad cypress tree shaded three sleeping dogs, their ears twitching with afternoon dreams. Mahina turned left down a smaller road, this one dotted with flat cement buildings—stores, it seemed—roofed with corrugated tin. Out of nowhere, several children darted in front of the Jeep, racing to touch the lone coconut palm at the street’s end.
Mahina scolded them in Rapa Nui, then turned to Greer. “We have the church, thecorreo for the letters, the school. We are small but we have here what we need. I think you will like it.”
“I’m sure I will,” said Greer.
“Nowmi residencial, ” said Mahina as she turned left and parked the Jeep beneath a pungentamygdalina eucalyptus.
“Avenida Policarpo Toro,” Mahina said. “To go to the lab-or-a-tory you walk to Te Pito O Te Henua Street, then left to Atamu Tekana Street. If you like, I draw you map.”
Before them stood a one-story cement building. The pink blooms of two coral trees framed the dark wooden door. A small sign, lettered with black tape, was pitched in the ground:RESIDENCIAL AO POPOHANGA .
After climbing from the Jeep, Mahina went to the back and began to pull at Greer’s two duffels. Greer protested, but Mahina insisted, lifting each bag with surprising strength. Just then, through a line of bushes on the side of the house, came an elderly man wearing a faded red baseball cap, rubbing his eyes; the volley of offers and refusals had clearly interrupted his siesta. The man spoke firmly in Rapa Nui to Mahina, gesturing toward the luggage, but something in his tone suggested great tenderness to Greer. And from the measured rhythm of shrugs and sighs, she had the feeling this scene had transpired many times. The man examined the Jeep and when, it seemed, he had discovered no damage, he grinned at Mahina. Mahina, unamused, signaled Greer to follow her into the building. She hastily pointed back to the man, and said, “Ramon Liragos Ika.Vamos , Ramon!” she called, at which point he lifted Greer’s bags and followed them inside.
A shower of delicate bells heralded their entrance into a spacious room. The air was cool, the walls dark. From the ceiling hung two rows of green glass spheres in rope nets. Mahina carefully set her hat on the desk beside the doorway and from its stuffed top drawer extracted a key dangling from a white poker chip. Greer followed her across the room and through a door opening onto a lush courtyard: African flame trees, bamboos, and tall cypresses. In the midst of this cluttered vegetation stood a near–life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, her blue dress flaking at the folds. At the opposite end of the courtyard was a narrow porch lined with four doors. Mahina led her past the first three, and at the fourth she lifted the key, unlocked the room, and with a shove of her hip, the door opened.
The room was small. A double bed and two wicker nightstands crowded the far wall. Above the bed hung a round plaque of the Virgin Mary. Beside the door there was a writing desk and chair made of what appeared to be mahogany. Burlap curtains covered the single window.
“Good?” asked Mahina.
“Very good.” Greer needed at least six months on the island to take cores and do the analysis, but most of that time would be spent in her lab.
“Good for thedoctora !” Mahina smiled. “Of course, no piano. No Ping-Pong. Also, otherresidenciales have blankets much nicer. But we are short walk to laboratory. Yes? And I make the best food.”
Ramon rolled his eyes and placed Greer’s bags at the foot of the bed.
“This is just fine,” said Greer.
“The bathroom is there,” Mahina said, gesturing to a narrow door beside the desk. “When you want the hot water for the shower, you must put it on outside. I will show you. Also, we can get another lamp. Or, we move the desk. And if you are not liking here, we find you other room.”
The room was so small it was hard to imagine the addition of any furniture. But from the expression on Mahina’s face, Greer had the distinct feeling other guests had shown greater enthusiasm.
“This will suit me perfectly. It’s wonderful.” The sparseness of the room, in fact, appealed to her. Her house in Marblehead had become a jumble of furniture and books and artifacts, piles of unsealed boxes of Thomas’s clothing that she hadn’t yet decided what to do with. On top of everything else, it was the mess she had needed to get away from.
“Dinner I serve tonight at eight o’clock,” said Mahina, kissing Greer once more on both cheeks and retreating from the room.
Greer set her purse on the desk and toed off her leather sandals. The floor was pleasantly cool. From her bag she pulled and carefully unwrapped the apothecary jar with her magnolia seed, then held it to the light; there it floated, shiny and fat, in its bath of salt water. This had been Thomas’s wedding present to her—they were going to see how long the seed could survive in ocean water. Eight years so far, more than she had ever expected. For a while she believed the seed was a good-luck charm, taking it on all her field trips, setting it on hotel nightstands in Belgium and Italy. But when Thomas’s research grew frenzied, when Greer stopped fieldwork and spent most of her time in his lab, she’d let the jar sit on the mantel in Marblehead, collecting dust. In two years it had barely moved, but when she’d packed for this trip, she felt she couldn’t leave it behind. She now regretted her decision. Looking at it reminded her too much of Thomas in their first years together, when he still cared for science, and for her.
Greer set the jar down and looked up at the plaque of the Virgin Mary. There was a drift seed named for the Virgin Mary. Mary’s bean,Merremia discoidesperma , held the record for the longest distance traveled by any seed: over fifteen thousand miles.
Kneeling on the bed, Greer mashed her way across the sagging mattress, lifted the plaque from the wall, and placed it facedown on the wicker nightstand.
Better, she thought, and began to unpack.
It was late afternoon when Greer headed over to the lab. Ramon had driven her there earlier with her equipment, but now, more awake than she’d anticipated, she thought she would explore the village. As she walked along the dirt road, several stray dogs followed her and then lost interest, and a confused rooster crowed in the distance. She passed a building with a sign that readHOTEL ESPíRITU , a name she recognized as one of the other hotels that housed researchers. Through the front door emerged an older couple, mid-argument, their fingers dueling across the pages of the guidebook. They wore matching Hawaiian shirts.
“Iorana!” they called.
“Iorana,” said Greer.
“Let me guess,” the woman said. “American. East Coast.”
“Impressive,” said Greer, wondering what had given her away.
“You see?” The woman turned to her husband. “Ten for ten. It’s a skill, I’m telling you. I should work for the state department or an embassy or something. A countryman detector.” She thrust the guidebook toward Greer. “So what do you think of these things?”
“What?”
“Themoai .”
“I just arrived,” said Greer. “‘Just,’ as in hours ago.”
“Well,” the woman said, nodding at her husband, “she is in for a real treat. You’re in for a real treat. I’m telling you. Whatever photos you’ve seen don’t do them justice. They’re e-nor-mous.”
“The photos were quite small,” said Greer. “I imagine the statues must be larger.”
The woman squinted, then smiled. “Funny.”
“Well, enjoy your stay.”
She turned the corner and continued past another row of houses. Each one, she could see, had an extensive backyard. Chickens bustled and clucked within small wire coops. Guava trees (genus:Psidium ) and taro plants (genus:Colocasia ) grew from the thick lawns. Only here, in the village, in carefully tended gardens protected from the wind, could plant life thrive.
Farther along were the cement buildings. No signs advertised their purposes, but Greer could discern a distinct character behind each facade; she recognized the post office and the bank; the market made itself known when a woman emerged hugging a mesh sack stuffed with canned goods. Greer stepped inside and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. A red-haired man smiled from behind the counter.“Iorana.”
“Iorana,” she replied.
He was pale, with a dusting of freckles across his cheeks. She’d read the island had a mixed population. Early voyagers had noted that some people appeared distinctly Polynesian, and others European, known as theoho-tea: “the light-haired.” This was one of the reasons the origin of the islanders had been in question. A mixed race left many possibilities.
Greer wandered past bags of rice and grain, boxes of sweets and candies, an enormous pyramid of what looked to be canned peaches. Converting into dollars, Greer found the prices high, especially for the peaches. But all these items would have been shipped from the mainland, a costly endeavor. She pried one banana from a cluster and pulled down some boxes of cookies for the lab, carrying the awkward pile to the counter. She’d exchanged money at the Santiago airport and now handed the proprietor a wad of pesos.
“Inglesa?”
“American.”
“Ahh. New York? Los Angeles?”
“Massachusetts. Marblehead.”
From behind his desk he pulled a dog-eared atlas and opened it on the counter. “You show.”
Greer glanced at North America and saw that small black X’s had been placed over Los Angeles, New York, and Salt Lake City. “Here,” she said, pointing to the East Coast. “Marblehead. Massachusetts is the state.”
“Riva riva,” he said, pulling a pen from behind his ear and marking an X on the coastline. “Marblehead. Island? Yes?”
“Peninsula.”
“Pen-in-su-la.Riva riva .” He closed the map and slowly counted out her change.
“Gracias,” she said.
“Iorana.”
Outside, in the fading light, she peeled the banana and continued walking in the direction of the lab. She’d brought with her a well-worn brochure with a map of the island, the lab’s location having been circled by Mahina. The brochure offered in one brief paragraph the island’s historical highlights: the legendary arrival of the first king, Hotu Matua; the construction of the massivemoai; the undecipheredrongorongo hieroglyphics; Captain Cook’s visit; the toppling of themoai; the emergence of the bird cult; the war between the long-ears and the short-ears; the cannibalism in the island’s caves; the disappearance of the British scientific expedition; Admiral von Spee’s eight-day anchorage during World War I. No mention, of course, of the island’s geological history or its depleted biota. Amazing how little attention people paid to the narrative of the land itself. As though sixty-four square miles of stone were just a stage for late-arriving human actors, whose performance, in geological time, had happened in the blink of an eye.
Greer continued on, heard the slow plod of a horse’s hooves in the distance. A slight breeze stirred the red dirt of the path. Out of sight, a dog was barking. The quiet reminded her of Mercer, the town in Wisconsin where she’d grown up. Summer evenings, before dinner, she would walk to the general store, watching women sweep dust from their porches, men with rolled shirtsleeves push their daughters on tire swings beneath broad maples. A quiet town, where little happened—that’s how she remembered it. And the quiet here was the same, as though the island’s past catastrophes had been sealed away, untouchable.
The windowless building sat before her like a giant gray brick. Little had been done to disguise its utilitarian purposes. No guava or cypress trees here, no nasturtiums or daisies. In white letters,SOCIEDAD DE ARQUEOLOGíA DE AMéRICA DEL SUR fringed the building’s upper edge. Greer had arranged her lab in advance through SAAS, which had built this work space for researchers on the island a few years earlier. It was a bit of a scam, really—scientists paid for their own space and equipment yet had to acknowledge themselves as guests of the society in publications. Permission to do work on Easter Island was mainly the decision of the Chilean government, a lead society member.
Greer entered the building onto a long, bare corridor. Hand-lettered nameplates marked each workroom, and midway, on the right, hung her own:DR. FARRADAY. She opened the door and flipped the light switch up and down a few times before the three fluorescent bulbs flickered to life. Her crates were neatly stacked, the corer balanced atop them. Otherwise, the lab was nearly empty. The porous cement walls had been painted white, the rough floor, a shade of pink—coral, perhaps—in what seemed an amusing attempt at cheer. Two long metal tables, a wooden stool tucked beneath each, lined opposite walls. In the corner was a metal sink, a green garden hose snaking from its plastic pipe to a water source outside. Beside it stood a small white refrigerator for her core samples. A column of bare shelves rose above one of the metal tables. On the top shelf sat one dusty beaker—the only scientific instrument in the room—like a skull in a Renaissance painting, a reminder:Science is here.
There was certainly sufficient space for her equipment. She looked down at her crates; she needed something—a crowbar, a hammer—to pry them open. Nothing like that in her gear. And the building seemed deserted. She glanced at her watch: six-thirty. First thing in the morning she could ask Ramon for a lever and come back. She set her groceries on the table at the far end, took one last look around the cavernous room, and turned to leave. As she tried to close the door, it caught on an envelope on the floor. It contained a note:
Doctor Farraday:
I have been a fan of your work for a very long time and I look forward to meeting you. I am in the last office on the right side of the hall. Also, we all have dinner at the Hotel Espíritu Thursdays 8 pm. You must join us and tell everyone about your work here. Iorana! Welcome!
Vicente Portales
Greer slid the note back inside the envelope, shut the door behind her, and tiptoed to the end of the hall. The last nameplate on the right readDR. PORTALES. Beneath it sat the crate she had seen on the airplane:PORTALES. Now she recalled the name. When she was taking samples with Thomas in Belize, she’d read about his work on Mayan hieroglyphics. But what stood out in the article was that he was young and already held a world record of some sort, something to do with hot air balloons, or mountain climbing. Something athletic.
Greer pulled a pen from her pocket, pressed the envelope against the corridor’s cement wall, and wroteThanks, but I’m busy settling in. She slid it beneath Dr. Portales’s door.
She walked back to her own office, took the nameplate down, and between the wordsDR . andFARRADAY , she added, in small letters, the wordGREER .
A dinner would have been nice, but it wasn’t Greer he had invited. And soon Dr. Portales would realize she was not the Dr. Farraday whose work he admired, but his widow.
Greer turned and walked down the dark corridor. A sudden fatigue had descended upon her, as though she had been swimming for hours and her hand had just touched land; more than anything, she wanted to sleep.