Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

After Rosemary had given me the latest news about her side of the family, she revealed she had an additional motive for meeting me for breakfast. “I bought a relic last week, but Alfred thinks it’s a fake,” she said.

“It’s because of the price she paid,” explained Alfred. “‘If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t.’ That’s my motto.”

“We were hoping you could settle the matter for us,” said Rosemary, and I told them I’d be happy to take a look at it. When we had finished eating, she went to the front desk to retrieve a parcel that she’d left with the clerks there, and we found an unoccupied seating area in a corner of the hotel lobby.

Inside the box, wrapped in a yard of muslin, was the femur of a deer, immensely old but in an excellent state of preservation, and I could immediately see that it wasn’t an ordinary one. The bone lacked an epiphyseal line, the remnant of the growth plate where new cartilage is added as a juvenile’s bones lengthen into an adult’s. The femur had never been shorter than it was now; the deer it had come from had never been a fawn. It was the femur of a primordial deer, created at its adult size by your hand, Lord.

I told Rosemary and Alfred that it was real; she was triumphant and he was sheepish, both muting their reactions because I was there, but I could tell they’d be discussing it at length later. Rosemary thanked me, and I told her it was no trouble; but where, I asked, had she purchased it?

“I went to see the mummy exhibit. You’re probably used to seeing things like that, but I thought it was spectacular. Anyway, there’s a gift shop accompanying the tour. It’s mostly postcards and books about the mummies, but there were also some relics for sale. Clamshells and mussel shells, of course, but some unusual items, too: bones like this one, abalone shells.”

That caught my attention. Was she certain there were abalone shells?

“Definitely,” she said. “I’ve shopped for relics before, and I’ve never seen an abalone shell. I had to ask the dealer about it. I was tempted to get it just for the novelty, but you can’t see the lines.”

I understood what she meant. The shells of ordinary clams and mussels have concentric growth rings like those of a tree. But the shells of a primordial bivalve are preternaturally smooth near their centers; only at their margins do they exhibit rings, each indicating a year of growth after creation. Such shells are the most popular relics among collectors; they’re not too expensive because they’re relatively common, but they display clear evidence of being made directly by your hand, Lord. By contrast, an abalone is a univalve, and the growth layers of its shell are only visible by drilling a hole and examining it with a microscope. To the naked eye, the shell of a primordial abalone is indistinguishable from that of any other abalone.

But that wasn’t why I was surprised to hear of one being sold in a gift shop; it was that I knew of only one place where primordial abalone shells had been discovered, and I couldn’t see how they could have come to be for sale at all. So after I finished my visit with Rosemary and Alfred, I took the bus to the church where the Atacama mummies were being exhibited.

There was a long line of visitors outside, and I suppose I could have gone directly to the gift shop and bypassed the main exhibit altogether. But contrary to what Rosemary assumed, I had never actually examined the mummy of a primordial human. I’ve read scholarly papers about the mummies, of course, and perused the accompanying photograms, but before today that was as close as I had come to an actual mummy. So although I had misgivings about the tour itself, I decided to buy a ticket and wait in the exhibit line.

As I stood in line, I overheard two people standing behind me talk about the mummies. A boy, maybe ten years old, asked his mother if it was a miracle that these bodies had remained intact since creation. His mother said no, and explained that they’d been preserved by an extraordinarily arid environment. She told the child, quite correctly, that so little rain falls on Chile’s Atacama Desert that the hoofprints of mules remain visible fifty years later, and such conditions prevented any bodies buried there from decaying.

I found this very heartening to hear, because many people are so quick to classify events as miraculous that it devalues the word. It’s that type of thinking that leads people to look to the mummies for a cure when medicine can’t provide one, and even if the Church no longer makes claims about the healing power of relics, it doesn’t do enough to dissuade the desperate. Among the ticket holders were one blind person and two confined to wheelchairs, all presumably hoping that proximity to one miracle could induce another. I pray that their suffering might be lessened, Lord, but I follow the secular consensus that there has been exactly one verified miracle—the creation of the universe—and all of us are precisely equidistant from it.

I must have waited in line for an hour before reaching the mummies, but that’s an estimate I made in retrospect, because seeing them was such a profound experience that I forgot all about the wait. There were two, both male, each in its own temperature-and-humidity-controlled display case. Their skin looked as delicate as the paper of a wasp’s nest, while simultaneously seeming to be stretched across their skulls as tight as a drum skin; I imagined that a slight jostling would cause it to tear. Both mummies wore guanaco hides around their pelvises, but nothing else; they lay recumbent on the reed mats they’d been buried with, their abdomens fully exposed.

I’ve handled the skeletal remains of primordial humans before, Lord, and as wondrous as it is to hold a cranium that has no sutures or a femur that has no epiphyseal line, it frankly cannot compare with the experience of seeing a body that lacks a navel. The difference lies, I think, in the fact that we are not conscious of the detailed structure of our own bones, so it requires some anatomical knowledge to recognize what distinguishes a primordial skeleton. But we are all conscious of having a navel, so seeing a torso without one induces awe of a more visceral, even intimate, variety.

When I left the exhibit area, I overheard the boy and his mother behind me again. The mother was leading the child in prayer, and they thanked you, Lord, for ensuring that the mummies were discovered by Church archaeologists rather than secular ones, because now they were being exhibited to the public instead of being hidden in the back rooms of a museum, where only select scientists could see them. I was less heartened to hear this. It’s not because I disagree with her, precisely. On this question, I’m of two minds.

I appreciate how powerful an experience it is to see the mummies directly, and this tour will bring tens or hundreds of thousands of people closer to you, Lord, by giving them that experience. But as a scientist, I feel that preservation of the tissue is the highest priority. No matter what pains the Church is taking, exhibiting these mummies across the country is bound to cause more deterioration than if they were stored in a museum. Who knows what techniques for analyzing soft tissues will be developed in the future? Biologists believe they are close to identifying the particles of inheritance through which organisms transmit their characteristics to their offspring; perhaps one day they’ll be able to read the information those particles carry. When that day arrives, we could have access to your original blueprint for the human species, uncorrupted by time. A discovery like that would bring all of humanity closer to you, Lord, but it requires us to be patient and not damage the tissue in the meantime.