The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (20 page)

Yet another morning alongside her colleagues under the relentless rising sun where they continued to make tiny gestures with grand implications. They were almost a month of the way into it and there were those who suffered sunstroke and dehydration and those who started to lose it, muttering inane words and nursery rhymes to themselves as they mashed their fingers against rocks. They sent one young man from Australia packing after he started eating dirt.
Oy, mate. You've got gravel on your lips again
.

The tougher her skin grew, the tighter her muscles pulled, the more Emma's imagination soared. There was silence in the dirt: wide room for reflection. In the rhythm of work she found a sense of innocence and awe that she could only associate with the colour of sunshine in her childhood bedroom and the sight of Blue's face when she brought him a book on Picasso. Rare moments when the world had felt large and full of promise.

She wanted to recall that feeling, re-enact the play, draw out the middle section, the one where they laughed, and rewrite the ending so that the Oliver didn't always get the final say. There'd be no big bolt of
lightning, no curtain that fell so heavily at the end that all that had come before was erased. It would be one delightful act from start to finish, with Audrey Hepburn playing Elaine, and Johnny Depp cast as Blue, and, of course, a long fought-out battle between Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder for the part of Emma. There would be no casting call for Oliver's part. Oliver would simply be a distant memory, a gravesite Audrey and Johnny and Jodie/Winona could all visit once a year on the anniversary of Oliver's final soliloquy.

If only it were that easy. If someone leaves, is it because you are really better off without them anyway? Could Oliver really have gone postal? If he were registered mail, there'd be grounds to sue. As it was, there was no regulating body to complain to or blame. There was nowhere to take it, not even a grave. If he had vanished for good, they'd have to keep it in their bodies—swallow all the unanswerable questions whole, where they would fester in their stomachs and become phantom pregnancies—swollen bellies out of which nothing would ever be born. She and Blue were bound to be sterile—the possibility of the next generation had long ago been killed.

After six weeks of work, exactly halfway through the dig, Professor Rocker took the remaining initiates to a musty old pub to celebrate. They drank pints of cold lager and ate pretzels and chicken wings and some of them stood to play a game of drunken darts. Emma monopolized the conversation between the remaining four at the table. Monopolized it to the extent that when she finally paused to take a breath it was just the two of them left there with a row of empty pint glasses between them. She kept asking Professor Rocker questions about his career and he kept denying that it was a life of glamour and intrigue.

“Come on,” she encouraged. “Tell me about something that you found that made you really feel it was all worthwhile.”

“I'll tell you this, Emma,” he said, brightening. “I once worked on a site in Northern Ontario where we were trying to establish connections between the ancestral Huron in the area and natives in the Midwest. We had some knowledge of a historic relationship between them but no archaeological evidence from the pre-contact era.”

“Uh-huh,” said Emma enthusiastically.

“Well, we hadn't come up with anything after three months of excavation and, well, to tell you the truth, I was getting bored.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I slumped myself down one afternoon on a hillside and started to do some sketches. Hobby of mine. I was sketching the flora around the site, doing so pretty mindlessly, until it dawned on me that some of the plants might not have been indigenous to Ontario. Sumpweed, for instance, and chenopod.”

“Yeah?” said Emma, not seeing the point.

“Well, sure enough, I went and did a little research on my own and discovered that these were plants indigenous to the Midwest—plants that had been of particular social and economic importance in pre-contact times.”

“So you established a connection, and …?”

“So we established a connection based on the flora. The plants had obviously been carried from the Midwest to Northern Ontario.”

“And?”

“Well, that was the theory we came up with.”

“That's it?” Emma asked. Surely there had to be more to it.

“Yes. It was considered an important development—establishing a connection based on flora. It hadn't been done before.”

“Well, where did you take it from there?”

“I made it the subject of my Ph.D. thesis.”

“Wow,” said Emma, trying not to convey disappointment. “And what about after that? What else have you found that's been of interest?”

“Well, nothing that hasn't been discovered before. I'm afraid that a discovery like that is, in archaeological terms, sort of the highlight of one's career.”

“I see,” she remarked, crestfallen.

“Emma, the odds against finding anything bigger or more unusual than that are incredibly rare. A ‘big discovery of a lifetime' would be something like finding an unusual wear pattern on stone. Finding evidence to suggest that it might be possible that people cultivated maize as early as 9000 B.C., rather than 8750 B.C. as we currently believe.”

“You don't get discouraged?”

“No. Because archaeology is about the details.”

“You don't dream of finding something bigger?”

“Well, of course you always have hope that you're going to be the one to make some huge discovery, but the big stuff is mostly intangible. You know, the big stuff, like religion. You're not going to discover a religion; you're going to unearth the tangible remnants of a form of worship. It's actually a lot like life. You're not going to
find
happiness or meaning. It's in the details. The petty details, of yours, mine, whoever's life, and how you make them all add up.”

“That's kind of depressing,” Emma said.

“All depends how you look at it,” replied Professor Rocker, draining the last of his pint.

She made her way back to residence with the taste of disappointment in her mouth that night. It was as if Professor Rocker had put an
aspirin on her tongue and told her to suck it. She was hoping the bitter pill would dissolve quickly even if it left a rancid aftertaste.

Her heart lifted a little at the sight of a letter from Blue. She pulled the grey envelope out of her mailbox in the porter's lodge and tore it open.

“Another love letter?” the porter said, peering up at her from his newspaper.

“Hardly,” she replied, embarrassed.

She turned her back to the porter and skimmed Blue's letter. His tone was rushed, elated even, not at all like Blue. The reason? He'd apparently met the girl of his dreams. Wait a minute—Blue's in love?

“I'd shack up in Alberta, live in an igloo, become a Mormon, and grow strawberries for a living if that's what she wanted,” he wrote. “It's a crazy, crazy feeling!”

She wanted him to be happy, but she couldn't help feeling slammed by his news. Blue was far enough away already, and with this declaration, he was migrating that much further. She could feel herself slipping into the distance on his horizon. He was waving to her, cheerfully, obliviously, his spirits lifted by new arms, while she was foraging on all fours in the dirt, looking for sumpweed.

Emma moaned aloud with the weight of a falling heart.

The porter looked up from his newspaper and stared at her.

“What?” she said abruptly.

“Nothing,” the porter replied, startled.

“Did I say something?”

“Something about feeling blue.”

The next morning, she pulled her overalls over her shorts and T-shirt, and put on a sweatshirt over the entire bulk. She rushed
past the porter's desk and travelled across and out the other side of the city.

Blue's declaration of love sent her head and heart first into the dirt with renewed, nearly manic conviction. Whatever she was digging for, she was going to find it. There was nowhere else for her to go.

Later that day, Emma sat beneath a tree in the courtyard of the residence under the orange sun. Frisbees floated and sprinklers punctured holes in the humid air. A baseball game was under way at the far end of the adjacent field. She was a spectre against the backdrop of summer hoots and hollers, a stranger, a foreigner, writing field notes in her lab book, sketching a bad approximation of another fragment of pottery they'd unearthed that day.

“Dear Blue,” she wrote in the last page of her lab book and leaned back against the tree. She stuck the end of the pen in her mouth then because she didn't know what else to write.

“Booly boo?” she called out, looking up. “Where are you?” The words travelled across the country, slammed into the Rockies, and came back to her as an echo: “Boo hoo.” He couldn't hear her, there were giant obstacles in the way, he was too far away for telepathy, perhaps even too far for understanding.

They'd spent an entire winter trying to communicate telepathically when they were children. At home, before they fell asleep, they would synchronize their watches and agree that at precisely nine o'clock, Emma would purge her head of all thoughts and try and listen in to his. It didn't seem to work, nor did it work the other way around, where Blue went blank and invited her thoughts into his head. They just weren't conversant in the sixth sense, no matter how hard they wished or tried.

She lingered at the lonely edge of that echo. He couldn't hear her, and if that were true, was she still his sister? She wasn't sure.

His sister sounded like she was cracking up. He had just received a letter from her and the envelope was full of dirt and cigarette ash. He didn't really know what she was yammering on about in her letter, though he suspected she was in the midst of another one of her identity crises. She was asking him where he was. Saying they'd drifted apart. But she was the one who had left and moved to Andrew's. She was the one who had decided to go off to university and become an archaeologist. There was distance between them because every time she went off to try and be someone else she had thrown the baby out with the dirty bathwater of the life they had lived that far.

Now he was busy trying to have his own life and she was asking him where the hell he was. So he'd tell her. He was in Banff and he was in love with a woman named Amy. “She's amazing,” he wrote. This one was for real. There had been a string of one-night stands when he first got to Banff, a couple of mistakes, including one bearing a minor, but contagious infection, but this one-night stand had lasted for two weeks already, and it was spilling more and more into the daylight hours.

Amy was a stripper, and she worked at the Heavenly Bawdy, a strip joint beneath a restaurant on the road to the next town. The official name of the place was Jingles Singles Club—for members only—a respectable front for the questionable activities that went on behind its doors. The place was occasionally raided for minors and drugs, so the manager, Larry, had a system. If the music suddenly looped from bump and grind into Billy Holiday, the strippers would sit down at tables with the clients and make like they were simply looking for husbands. A drag queen would come onstage and mouth “Summertime,” and the happily pretending and not-so-happily pretending would dance cheek to cheek around the parquet floor. The Jingles Singles Club.

In and amongst the crowd on any given night there would be at least a couple of Mounted Police. You could tell, because despite being unmounted while in attendance, they still had manure on their boots. They paid like anyone else, even though what went on was completely against the edicts of the strictly guarded business regulations in the National Park.

Blue had only been to a strip joint once before. One of his tow-trucking colleagues had had a stag party at Jilly's in Toronto, and although he had been mesmerized by the long, young bodies that floated in and among their tables, he had been disconcerted by the men around him. They looked like they'd been stunned stupid. They sat with their greedy mouths open, their hands wandering, and were gently chastised by the women moving their bodies in luxurious waves before them. When the song was over and they had to be men among men again, they flipped it all over in their heads and hurled crude insults at the women who, minutes before, had so enchanted them that they'd lost all motor control. Blue had felt embarrassed. Kept his eyes fixed on a pierced belly button and tried to smile politely at the woman who finished dancing in front of him.

On a summer Saturday night as cold as winter, Mitch picked him up at the hotel and said he fancied seeing a little pussy flirting in his face.

“Enough with the language, okay?” Blue said. “Don't you have a sister?”

“Of course I have a sister.”

“Well, imagine if guys spoke about your sister like that.”

“Oh, come on, Lou. Relax, man,” he said, pushing the accelerator and careening down the main street.

In the club, Blue gripped his beer bottle and looked for a pierced belly button to give him purpose. He stared at a woman with a snake tattoo that curled from the top of her thigh to her nipple, and when she caught him staring she asked him if he wanted her to dance for him. “I was just admiring your tattoo,” he said to her, blushing.