They are miles out in the country, so you will have to
imagine them at the glass-topped table, having their oatmeal,
watching the awful house finches fight at the feeder, squirrels
gathering up the scattered seed. She tells him about the Copper
Age Iceman in National Geographic, the oldest intact human, 5,000
years old, dug out of snow in the Italian Alps. She describes
his body, lean as a jackal, flesh sucked against the bone, his
face dark and a little moldy but still entirely covered by skin.
“He looked tense on the snow,” she says, “his hip torn by a
jackhammer, his genitals broken away.” They watch the finches.
Her husband asks about the jackhammer, and the genitals.
“It was a policeman who did it,” she answers, “thinking he had
a newly dead man to pull out.” They talk about the blundering
human race, as people do in the complacency of oatmeal and
oranges, before they start their day. The husband is thinking
about his Baptist childhood, the sin of the world placed on his
small heart, and the Iceman’s hip crushed like a bird’s
wing. He wishes the Iceman had been left under the glacier
holding his precious packet of cells. “They’re afraid of
being alone. That’s why they dug him up,” the wife says, slicing
her orange. “We keep longing to find our old selves still under
the ice while we’ve gone on inventing cars and airplanes.”
“But what will happen to him now?” he asks. “Behind glass,”
she replies. Their separate thoughts converge at the glass
and look in. The woods are bright as glass, after the rain.
The closer they look, the more the Copper Age man breaks up,
like a newspaper photograph at close range. In town, other
people are at church, singing hymns. If you could get to a point
as high as God, the man, the woman, and the congregation
would turn into dots, just the same. You would miss the wife’s
hand coming to rest on the husband’s knee like a blessing.