Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Three months after the double funeral at Paradise Farm, Brian Nollinger’s point of view received some convincing support from the surgeons who had operated on Adam to enable him to speak. With permission, they released to the press several X-rays of Adam’s skull. Taken from different angles, these X-rays created a small sensation. Never before had RuthClaire or Adam let anyone examine him with an eye to precise physical measurement or speculative comparison. These X-rays, along with the plastic surgeons’ computer-generated “blueprints” of Adam’s head, revealed that he had a cranial capacity of 870 cubic centimeters. This figure exceeded that of most known fossil representatives of Homo habilis , but not by much. Even more spectacular was the discovery that in its overall shape and proportions, Adam’s skull bore a point-by-point resemblance to Skull ER-1470 in the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi. Because 1470 belonged to a creature once identified by Louis Leakey as an H. habilis individual, this startling resemblance led many paleoanthropologists to classify Adam, too, as a habiline. What RuthClaire had surmised about him on the first day she saw him, the scientific community had now also officially conceded. Even Alistair Patrick Blair had begun to come around.

By this time, however, the Montarazes had left the country. A few of their friends in Atlanta, among them the Blaus and the Loyds, knew their general whereabouts, but refused to divulge the information to reporters or scientists. RuthClaire and Adam had gone away to escape the public’s prying, to renew themselves on fresh and exotic shores. Moreover, I privately suspected that they mailed the postcards pinpointing their “current” locations only after having made up their minds to go elsewhere. Once they reached this new place, they lay low. Lying low, I told myself, was a survival strategy at which a Lolitabu habiline dispositionally excelled. If he did not want to be found, he would not be found—except by the rarest of accidents.

But the Montarazes apparently wanted to be found. Soon after she had sent us a postcard from Rutherford’s Port, RuthClaire wrote a bona fide letter. It reached us early in April. Here is what it said:

Dear Caroline and Paul,

Once, in a letter, Adam called Paradise Farm his “unjumping Eden,” because although everything else might go blooie for him, Paradise Farm would remain the fixed center of his Coming of Age as a civilized being. It was where he and I met, where he outgrew the feral habits of his youth, and where his son was born. Today, of course, it’s where his son lies buried, next to the coffin of his murderer.

Well, Paul has sold Paradise Farm, and Adam’s Eden has—forgive me, there’s no other word for it— jumped . We’ve come “home” to Montaraz, an Eden somewhat more Edenic than Paradise Farm but maybe not quite so paradisiacal as the dusty Lolitabu Hills (chronologically speaking). It’s like Chinese boxes, isn’t it? Edens inside Edens.

I’m writing not only to give you news of our doings but also to ask you a favor. One big favor, actually, with at least three little favors nesting inside it like—well, you know. Ready for the big favor? It’s this: Adam and I want you to drop what you’re doing in June and come down to Rutherford’s Port (our beach cottage, actually) for at least a month. We’ve already asked for and received the special permits to visit Montaraz that you’ll need from the Haitian Ministry of Tourism, and Adam has extorted from the publishers of Popular Anthropology enough money to cover your travel expenses, round trip. Caroline must simply agree to write an article for that magazine about your visit with us. This shouldn’t be too hard because the article will consist almost entirely of a historic taped interview at which she’ll function as moderator.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first little favor nesting inside the big favor of coming down here requires you to bring Tiny Paul’s ashes. Because Adam’s entire preconscious past belongs to Montaraz, we’ve decided to make the island our permanent home. We’d like to have Tiny Paul’s physical remains close to hand. Sentiment rather than reason talking here, but sentiment has compelling reasons all its own. The distasteful part for you guys—for Paul, anyway—is that you’ll have to dig up our baby’s burial urn and carry it down here virtually in your arms. No checking it with your airline baggage. No consigning it to steerage or the cargo hold when you board your Cavalcade Caribbean cruiseship out of Miami. It’s too valuable for that, and you may come to regard it as a nuisance before you’ve actually handed it over to us. Forgive us for asking such a thing, but we—or, to be fair to Adam, I —have no other choice. Do you understand?

The second little favor inside the big one: David Blau tells us that in only a few months Paul has become an able artist’s representative. (He wasn’t too bad at that while we were married, but he was always more interested in peddling avant-garde marinades and sauces than avant-garde paintings and sculptures.) Adam and I would like Paul to ply his new trade on behalf of a small contingent of local artists whose work you can see when you get here. You’ll need to bring photographic equipment with you to capture some of this work, however, and high-speed color films capable of producing quality images in poor, sometimes nearly nonexistent, light. (See the attached list for the recommended brands and quantities.) What Adam hopes for, Paul, is a modest habiline show at Abraxas similar to the Haitian exhibit of fifteen months ago. (Probably, though, we won’t want to call the artists habilines.) As you may have already guessed, these artists are Adam’s habiline relations. They exist. They live here. Because I’ve met them, I know they’re more than just the diminutive Caribbean equivalent of the Northwest’s elusive Bigfoot. Adam wants you and Caroline to meet them, too.

And the third little favor: Caroline’s interview and/or article for Popular Anthropology . If you arrive in June, Caroline will be able to moderate a historic meeting between Adam and the Zarakali bigwig A. P. Blair. This is the man who once argued that a photograph of Adam was in fact a photograph of a black man in a shaped latex mask. This past autumn, Blair hosted the PBS series on human evolution called Beginnings. Right now he’s trying to raise money for his digs at Lake Kiboko in Zarakal. Under the aegis of the American Geographic Foundation, he’ll spend the late summer and the early fall delivering paid lectures to audiences all over the United States. He’s stopping in Montaraz in June before going on to Miami and then Pensacola. Adam and I invited him to come—with the proviso that he withhold any written account of his visit until our own authorized account of the meeting has seen print in Popular Anthropology . He agreed. Not without some epistolary grumbling, of course, but he did agree. And it’s Caroline whom we want to do this piece.

As you know, Adam and I spent most of last fall on the Greek island of Skiros, working and recuperating. In mid-November, there was an international convocation of paleoanthropologists in Athens. This affair lasted a week, and the rumor of our presence less than a hundred miles away (as the Olympian eagle flies) got back to these men and women. Blair was in attendance from the University of Marakoi. (Richard Leakey was there from Kenya, Donald Johanson from the United States, and so on.) Blair didn’t want to commit himself to a wild-goose chase, but, if the rumor were true, he didn’t want to miss out on talking to Adam in person, either. So he sent a grad student from the University of Marakoi, an apprentice paleoanthropologist in his party, to Skiros to check out the scuttlebutt. She was a native Zarakali of the Sambusai tribe, and she tracked us to our little villa as expertly as her forefathers had tracked their enemies across the salt flats of the Lake Kiboko frontier. She wanted us to go back to Athens with her. If that was unacceptable, she wanted us to grant Blair an exclusive audience on Skiros at the end of the big paleo-powwow in Athens.