Fake news : Far from the Madding Crowd : A time of reinvention : Death by PowerPoint
Sheriff Dalton stood outside the HooDoo Diner, staring through the window, shading his eyes with one hand. He carried a copy of the Red Rock Times folded in thirds under his arm. The door opened, a bell jingled, and a heavyset man in denim overalls came out, working a toothpick in his mouth. “Stan’s in his regular spot,” he said, trundling past.
“Am I that obvious, Pete?”
“Pretty much,” he said without stopping.
Dalton yanked open the door and went through.
“It’s a heck of a thing,” the woman behind the register said.
Dalton held up the paper. “I know.”
“I meant Bruce. Didn’t figure him for it,” she said. “They say his wife found him. Is that true? Because if it is, I don’t know what kind of world we’re living in anymore.”
“Can’t talk about it,” Dalton said.
“It’s okay. I understand. I just wanted to say something.”
“Jenny, I’d speak to it if I could.”
“I know. You’re a good man. Can I get you something?”
“How ’bout a piece of Stan Forsythe?”
Jenny slapped Dalton’s shoulder and pointed to where Stan was sitting.
Forsythe was spread out across the whole table, an iPad on one side, a legal pad on the other, a plate with the remnants of his breakfast in the middle. He was scraping the last of his hash browns through a streak of ketchup. When he saw Dalton, he sat up and said, “Let me explain,” right as Dalton lobbed a copy of the paper into the center of Forsythe’s plate.
“There was still good food on there,” Forsythe said.
Dalton pointed to the headline: ARE THE FEDS BACK FOR YOUR POTS?
Stan looked down with a fork and knife sticking out of his fists.
“That is garbage, Stan,” Dalton said. “Completely false.”
“Garbage and falsehood are not contraries, Sheriff, and besides, a question can’t be true or false. This is meant to provide my readers an opportunity to ask questions and reflect. It’s called critical thinking. Backbone of a free democracy.”
“I’m not here to split hairs.”
Stan lifted the paper from his plate and turned it over, ketchup side up. “Splitting hairs requires a delicacy that is missing from this morning’s repartee.” He folded the paper in half the other way and set it aside, then looked at his plate and decided he was done.
“I told you we’d be issuing a statement,” Dalton said.
“I’m sure you will, but in the vacuum caused by your bureaucratic punctiliousness, a whole town is wondering why a pillar of their community took his own life on a morning he might normally have been found in church.” Stan gestured to the diner. Dalton looked around to see everyone frozen, watching him. Stan lifted a half-empty glass of orange juice and toasted Dalton.
“Don’t you have some oath to do no harm?”
“I’m a newspaperman, not a Greek physician. I ran a story with the best information available at the time. And if you had read past the lede, you might have noticed that the article doesn’t point a finger at anyone, it merely recalls comparable events from a few years ago in an attempt to make certain the citizens of our community don’t jump to any rash or uninformed conclusions. I mean, really, Sheriff. Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
Someone in the diner shouted, “Yes!”
Dalton looked around and lowered his voice, “There’s all kinds of reasons for a person to take his life that have nothing to do with federal government. You planted that idea in people’s heads, and now you’re responsible for it. Couple of months ago I went to the doctor for a pain in my eye. Thought I was going blind. Doctor said when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”
Forsythe made a show of thinking about what Dalton said. “What was wrong with your eye?” he eventually asked.
“That ain’t the point.”
“You brought it up.”
“Plugged tear duct.”
“That’s awful. I had that happen to a salivary gland once. Fixed it with some of those sour candies.”
Dalton scowled. “This is an ongoing investigation.”
“I never said Bruce killed himself because of the Feds. That story was just a little history to provide context. When you’ve got something for me to print, I’ll print it. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” Forsythe said.
Dalton threw up his hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know who said that?”
Dalton shrugged.
“Thomas Jefferson. The primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Governor of Virginia. Secretary of state. Third president of—”
“I know who Thomas Jefferson was,” Dalton shouted, then he composed himself. “I’m just saying you made my job about a thousand times more difficult. You get this town tied up in knots, and we’ll have more grief on our hands than what we’ve got right now.” Dalton didn’t wait for a response. He walked to the register. Before he could ask for it, Jenny had a Diet Coke ready in a to-go cup with a straw. He took a twenty out of his wallet and said, “Thank you. This is for that muckraker’s breakfast. Please keep the change.”
On the counter by the register was a line of business cards in little plastic holders. He noticed that three of them were for real estate agents. He took one of each and stuffed them into his shirt pocket. “I’m sorry for turning your place into a dinner theater,” he said.
“It’s okay. We’re still doing breakfast,” Jenny said with a wink.
___
Sophia turned off the highway and followed the long line of taillights that led through the crowded cluster of hotels, gas stations, and fake frontier buildings outside of Bryce Canyon. She was listening to the audiobook of Far from the Madding Crowd, and she thought to herself how ironic it was that the only traffic she dealt with anymore was in national parks.
She had been listening to a section of the book where Bathsheba and Troy encountered a pregnant woman on the road who was destitute and making her way painfully toward the Casterbridge workhouse. She was Fanny, Troy’s old love. Troy sent Bathsheba ahead in the carriage before she could recognize the woman, then he gave Fanny all the money in his pocket. She spent the last of her strength reaching her destination, and a few hours later, she died in childbirth, along with the baby. Their coffin was later brought to Troy and Bathsheba, who discovered the two bodies inside.
As Sophia sat in the backed-up traffic, waiting to get through the entry station, she thought about the bodies she’d seen in museums, mummies desiccated and sometimes entwined. She thought about the ones she’d seen in photographs curled together in stone burial cists. One pairing from Mexico was layered in yellow and blue feathers, the bodies decorated with turquoise. Sophia realized that behind all the data, context, and information, there was a great sadness to the ruins she studied, a sorrow the artifacts would only sometimes reveal. The rest of the stories came from what Dr. Songetay called a historical imagination. He caught hell for that term from his colleagues but never walked it back.
The swirl of thoughts triggered by her book, and the idea of mummies trapped forever in museums, made her eyes misty. The whole purpose of Thomas Hardy was to give her something to think about that wasn’t archeological, but at this point in her life, her work was a black hole that pulled everything into it. At the entry station to Bryce Canyon, she could have used her government plate to skirt the line, but she wanted to talk to her friend Lucy, who was working the gate today. She even moved over, so she’d be in her lane, then she rolled down her window and waited. The two of them met during the seasonal employee orientation. Lucy smiled when she saw her.
While Lucy helped visitors on the other side, Sophia checked her phone for messages.
“Oh crap, are you crying?” Lucy asked, pointing to Sophia’s face.
“Me?” Sophia said, dabbing her eye with the pad of her finger. “No. Well, yes. It’s this stupid audiobook I’m listening to. I should stick with the Shins, right?”
“How’s the research?”
“It’s good. I need to crunch some numbers, though.”
“I’d love to get out in the field,” Lucy said, gesturing to her sandstone enclosure and the lines of cars. “What book is it?”
“Far from the Madding Crowd,” Sophia said.
“I love that book. Well, I saw the movie,” Lucy said.
Sophia sat straight. “Both are good. I better get moving before they honk. It’s been a crazy couple of days. I’ll take you out sometime and we can catch up. Text me.”
“Yes. You’re doing a talk at the lodge today, right?”
“Yep. I’m supposed to share my research project with the taxpayers. Here’s to transparency.”
“Right? I will be stuck out here. So, break a leg.” Lucy gave her a double thumbs-up.
Sophia passed through the entry gate, crossing the threshold from the regular world to the front country of the park, the most artificial of transitions. She pulled ahead, plodding along with the rest of the traffic past the visitor’s center with its stone, timber, and glass architecture—half college campus, half shopping mall—designed for the visitor who can’t be without amenities for even an afternoon.
Sophia meandered through the parking lot and turned down the incline to the drab backside of the building where the staff parked. It reminded her of the false front sets on a movie backlot; with two and a half million pairs of eyes on the front, there’s no sense wasting money where it won’t be seen. In 1916, when they set up the National Park Service, they couldn’t have imagined all this.
As she was parking, she ran the legislative language through her head: parks were meant to preserve the scenery and nature and historical objects, and somehow also leave them unimpaired. All these buildings and roads and buses seemed like the opposite of preservation. Not all the parks were circuses like this one, though. Where she was doing her fieldwork, there was only backcountry, no offices or kiosks, no pavement or parking lots. The contrast was extreme. Everyone working for the Park Service or the BLM seemed to understand these contradictions, but all of it was complicated. Learning the ins and outs clarified very little.
She took her backpack to the door, where she punched in a key code. The air was filled with a deep pine scent and the hush of the ponderosas. It seemed like a shame to come up here just to go inside, but she had paperwork to complete before her presentation, or she wouldn’t get paid. She was also hoping to grab a few minutes of the park archeologist’s time.
She headed upstairs and checked her small mail cubby. Inside was a newsletter, an invitation to a potluck for seasonal employees, and a schedule of her interpretive presentations for the rest of the summer. There were three more to do after this one. She stuffed everything into her backpack and went down the hall to the archeologist’s office, whose door was open.
“Hi, Dalinda,” Sophia said. “You got a minute?”
Dalinda looked up and cracked a smile, followed by an eye roll that Sophia wasn’t sure how to interpret. She was wearing the gray-and-green uniform, her hair in a bun. Sophia’s eyes lingered on Dalinda’s silver, turquoise, and coral earrings. When Dalinda relaxed her smile, her crow’s feet disappeared. Sophia then noticed her desk, which was strewn with three-ring binders. “Come in and sit,” Dalinda said. “I’m just finishing an email.”
“If you’re busy, I can—”
“It’ll be worse later,” Dalinda said, beckoning.
Sophia set her backpack on the floor and sat down while Dalinda returned to her typing.
The office walls were covered in maps. A few were framed watercolors capturing the exquisite misapprehensions nineteenth-century cartographers had about the American West. The rest were working maps thumbtacked to the wall and flagged with notes on colored squares. They were plain but beautiful in their own way, like mathematical formulas, exact where the others were imagined. One displayed the distribution of debitage in lithic scatters. Another revealed stratigraphic layers of Indigenous habitations. Each map told a different story of the people who once lived here. Sophia thought about how maps charted space but also invoked time. Every map described a place but also told a story about the thoughts and attitudes of the age that produced it.
Sophia unzipped her backpack, took out a notebook, and wrote that idea down.
Another of Dalinda’s maps showed an array of sacred sites in the park. This one had been marked and amended by hand many times. It was part of an ethnographic project Dalinda was working on with tribal liaisons. Native people had been bitten by the government so many times, the project was constantly at risk. So much of the information here was protected. Somebody couldn’t just walk in and get access to it, even with a Freedom of Information Act request.
A confidentiality clause had been built into Sophia’s grant project. She would have to redact sensitive information about cultural sites when she wrote her dissertation. The complexity of the laws and regulations pertaining to federal land made her head spin. It was a whirlwind of acronyms. It was all meant to protect park resources from looters and vandals and the negligence of tourists, but these directives often looked backward, overlooking contemporary Native peoples, the way their lives and concerns were unfolding. An exhibit in a visitor’s center might present traditional agriculture methods, but it won’t say a thing about a tribe’s struggle with diabetes.
Her mind jumped to a lecture where she remembered the professor saying that our laws were simply a catalog of our injustices to one another. Legislation is always written in hindsight, by the victors, who revere the vanquished but turn a blind eye to the survivors.
She nodded to herself and wrote that down, too.
“Okay,” Dalinda said. “Sophia Shepard, it is good to see you. What’s up?”
“I’m freaking out a little about this presentation,” Sophia said, a little nervous about skipping the small talk. She tucked her notebook back in the bag and zipped it up. “I mean, I teach undergrad classes at Princeton, but doing this is just—I don’t know—it feels like some armchair archeologist is going to pounce on me and wreck everything.”
“That is one-hundred-percent guaranteed to happen. An hour on the internet beats an advanced degree.” Dalinda stretched in her chair. “I took a look at the slides you sent. You’re going to do fine.”
“I’m not just worried about the visitors. It’s having you and the superintendent there.”
Dalinda’s face dropped. “About that. The superintendent can’t come. He has a funeral down in Kanab today. It’s a sad story.”
“Is it for the guy who—”
“Bruce Cluff,” Dalinda said. “He was an amateur collector who knew everybody. Apparently, he took his own life Sunday.”
“I heard. That’s terrible,” Sophia said.
Dalinda motioned for Sophia to close her door. When it was shut, Dalinda leaned forward and said, “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Cluff has been a problem for us for a very long time.”
“Oh,” Sophia said. “I didn’t know.”
“Cluff was tight with his senators, so he got special consideration he didn’t deserve. He did whatever he wanted and never checked with us. And he never got busted for it. If the Paiutes had Cluff’s access and influence, we’d be doing very different jobs right now.”
“That drives me out of my mind,” Sophia said.
“It is what it is,” Dalinda said, leaning back in her chair. “You’ve seen what it’s like around here, white guys calling the shots, sweeping Native people under the rug. When the tribes push back, they’re told to sit down, shut up, and mind their own business. Status quo is as status quo does.”
Sophia froze, her jaw set and her mouth a straight line.
“You know the Native population of the county you’re working in is less than two percent,” Dalinda continued.
“What?”
“Yes, one point five five percent, actually. It’s not a mistake that you don’t see them. It’s a hundred and fifty years of concerted effort. For a while in the eighties, tribes had a seat at the table, but they’ve been shut out again.”
“But it’s their table,” Sophia said.
Dalinda nodded. “You are correct. Congress is ready to sell off the parks to energy companies for pennies on the dollar, but if anyone starts talking about giving it back . . .”
“How do you keep going?” Sophia asked.
“I’m an optimist. That’s why I sit all day, sending emails into the void,” Dalinda said, gesturing around her. She made an exasperated face that softened into a crooked kind of half smile. “We’re doing good work, Sophia. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. We make progress despite everything. It’s not a straight line, but it’s something.”
Sophia sat up and thought about the coils of bureaucracy that were looping silently around her. It was a strange world, equal parts hope and cynicism. How could you ever survive it? Sophia realized time was getting away from her, and she had much to do, so she queued up her other question. “Dalinda, have you ever been threatened when you’re working? Sorry to just change direction on you.” Sophia was nervous about putting the question out there. She didn’t want to seem naïve, but she also realized maybe this wasn’t something to fool around with.
“That’s okay. You mean, like, out in the field?”
“Yeah. Yesterday a couple of guys near Antelope Flats made some threats.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s pretty common, I’m afraid. What did they look like?”
“One was tall. The other short. They were weird, like cartoons. Drove a turquoise pickup. I forgot to get the plate.”
“Don’t worry about that. It sounds like you came across the Ashdowns. They’re poachers and pot hunters—goons. A month ago, somebody reported them trying to yank a petroglyph panel off a cliff wall with that truck and a tow chain.”
“You’ve got to be kidding. How come they’re not in jail?”
“We’ve got bigger fish to fry and not enough evidence to build a case. All it takes is money, which is in short supply these days. Did those knuckle draggers shoot at you?”
“No. Just verbal threats. Intimidation. They suggested that I could get hurt out there. It was so stupid. I filed a report at the BLM offices in Kanab.”
“Okay, that’s good, but they are so shorthanded down there, who knows if anything will come out of it. If you see those two again, call dispatch, okay?”
“I don’t have a radio.”
“What? They didn’t . . .” Dalinda was beside herself. She pulled a notepad close and wrote something down.
“They had this hand-drawn map, which they were obviously using to dig stuff up.”
“The thing is, everybody’s got a map,” Dalinda sighed. “And they all think they’re going to strike it rich. I’ve only seen a couple maps that are even in the ballpark. Leave those guys to law enforcement.”
“All right,” Sophia said.
“But I am going to get you a radio. We’ve got policies about that. And I’m pissed that they sent you off without one.”
“I am, too, now that I know they were supposed to give me one but didn’t. Thank you.”
There was a ping from Dalinda’s computer, and she cursed under her breath. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to respond to this. Another fire. Some ranger broke into a meeting in Denver—never mind. Good luck, Sophia. You’ll do us proud. I’ll try to make it over, but if this Denver thing comes off the rails, it’ll wreck my whole afternoon.”
“It sounds awful,” Sophia said, gathering her stuff. She took another look around Dalinda’s office and tried to imagine herself in the archeologist’s place, juggling fieldwork and bureaucracy. It didn’t feel like a good fit for her.
“And really,” Dalinda said, “I’m going to get you a radio. I’m the worst mentor.”
“No, you’re amazing,” Sophia said. On the way out, she asked if Dalinda wanted the door open or closed.
“Closed,” she said. “All the way, please.”
___
The Ashdown brothers barreled down the winding double lanes of the Virgin River Highway. The steep gray stone walls of the gorge shot skyward as they descended. Lonnie watched for the open spaces that would momentarily reveal terraces of Joshua trees receding into the sunlit alcoves. The view would open for a second, then disappear.
As they dropped in elevation, the air temperature rose. Lonnie tested it by laying the back of his hand against the windshield. It was still desert here but completely unlike their home in Cane Beds. They rode together in silence with the stereo off and Byron hunched over the wheel, his jaw clenching and releasing without pattern. When Lonnie reached for the radio knob, Byron slapped his hand without looking.
“It’s a long time to have zero music,” Lonnie said.
“I need quiet. I’m thinking,” Byron answered.
“About what?”
Byron turned his head and glowered at him. Lonnie got nervous and pointed to the road ahead of them, which was curving. When the rumble strip buzzed, Byron turned his attention back to the road without speaking. After a spell, he said, “I’m thinking about what that girl’s gonna say.”
“She didn’t know what we were doing.”
“But she’ll probably say something, right? You know, since she works for the Feds.”
“Nobody will find us because we’re not there anymore.”
They both squinted as the sun broke through the mouth of the canyon and they shot out into the open desert. The light was blinding on the open plain, which ran unobstructed to the dark hulking mountains at the horizon. Byron pulled a pair of cheap orange-and-black sunglasses from the visor. Lonnie lowered his visor and tested the heat again.
“At least we got the maps, and you put them in something for protection,” Lonnie said, reaching his hand back to knock on a cardboard tube sitting in the gun rack. “And they work. I mean, we found a couple pots without really trying. That’s something. Plus the money we’re gonna get from this guy. I’m just worried about what happened to that old man.”
“Yep, the maps worked. That’s what I was trying to figure out.” Byron shook his head. Three birds followed each other through the air in front of the truck and disappeared through the raised arms of a Joshua tree. “What happened to the old guy is why we need more money now. We’re gonna have to lay low. We’d be okay if we were just trading this stuff for cash, because it was supposed to be break and enter, take the maps, steal some other household things, couple of pots, a rug, get out, and nobody knows nothing. Now there’s a dead guy and we didn’t negotiate for that. How long you think it’s gonna be before somebody figures out none of it is what it looks like?”
“I don’t know. Couple of weeks?” Lonnie said.
“You really don’t get it? What that guy had us do was just to slow them down. Once they start doing the science on us, we’re screwed.”
“DNA?” Lonnie asked.
“DNA, chemistry, microscopes, you name it. They’re going to figure it out, so if you quit talking to me for a minute, maybe I can think.”
“So, no radio, then?”
Byron hit the brakes and yanked the truck over to the side of the road. A minivan behind them blared its horn and swerved around the truck. Byron gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead, snorting and sucking air through his nose like a bull.
“You want me to get out and walk?” Lonnie asked.
“Walk to where?” Byron yelled back.
“I don’t know, you pulled over, just like Mom.”
“You realize we’re not playing a video game, right? You know there’s no reset button on this thing.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Braining that guy is pretty much the definition of stupid.”
“I know it. But saying the word ‘stupid’ doesn’t help.”
“Jail is full of morons, Lonnie. Overflowing with them.”
“Doing something stupid is not the same thing as being stupid. Remember, I said if they put you back in jail I’d be alone again. Dad’s gone. So is Mom. So. I had to do something. If we got caught, okay. Then maybe I could just go back there with you.”
Byron looked across the interstate at the abandoned two-story house and the cluster of mobile homes that squatted behind it. “Alone is better than that place, little brother.” He rolled down the window, spat once, then rolled the window back up.
“I take it back, then,” Lonnie said.
“Well, you can’t.”
“Not what I did, just what I meant by it.” Lonnie turned toward the window. “Maybe jail is a good place for you.”
Byron checked his mirror. He waited for a semi to pass, then he lurched back onto the road. After they got up to eighty, Lonnie reached for the radio. Byron didn’t stop him. They drove that way, listening to classic rock, for another fifteen minutes, then they exited the freeway on the south end of town and parked in the CasaBlanca Casino, where they were supposed to meet the guy who would take the maps and pay them off.
“We’re early,” Lonnie said.
“Early is on time.” Byron fished a small spearmint tin out of his pocket and twisted off the lid. He leaned over and opened the glove box and took out a banged-up empty ballpoint pen barrel.
“Oh, man,” Lonnie said. “Do you have to?”
“Don’t want to hear it.”
“Meth makes you crazy.”
Byron stuck the pen down into the tin and snorted quickly, rubbing the side of his nose with a knuckle. He did it again on the other side, stuck the empty pen into his shirt pocket, and closed up the tin. “Let’s do it,” Byron said, sniffing rapidly.
“He ain’t gonna be here for, like, an hour.”
“Early bird gets the worm.”
“Maybe.” Lonnie said. “But the second mouse gets the cheese.”
Byron laughed, then let it decay to a frown. Lonnie knew his brother was starting to feel okay, but he also knew that feeling would change into something horrible.
“Second mouse. That’s a good one,” Byron said.
“It’s not me. Some guy had it on a T-shirt,” Lonnie said.
They got out of the truck and looked around. Byron carried the cardboard tube with the maps. Lonnie walked along, with his hands in his front pockets. There was no sidewalk, so they headed through the heat toward the front doors. As they drew closer, they heard the patter of a waterfall that marked the end of the covered valet parking zone. The whole area was blooming with bright red flowers and surrounded by dwarf palm trees. A dry wind blew through the brittle fronds. Lonnie reached over and pulled off some flower petals to see if they were real. He cupped them in his hand and sniffed. They smelled like his mother’s perfume.
They went in through the sliding doors and were accosted by the clamor. Instantly, they were hit with the smell of cigarettes and air conditioning, and they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of slot machines, each one playing its own repetitive melody that gathered into a flapping, clicking, boinging sonic wave. Lonnie thought it sounded like a gigantic toy orchestra tuning in a great, infinite loop, but he kept that idea to himself because his brother wouldn’t understand it.
Byron stopped, sizing up the room. Almost everyone there was stone-faced with small plastic buckets of coins. The real gambling was farther in, where nobody would be distracted by people coming and going. Lonnie started to look around. “Hey,” Byron said. “We need to pick the right place.”
“Didn’t you tell him where to meet us?”
“I said in the bar. He doesn’t get to decide the details. I set this part up.”
“Han Solo would choose there.” Lonnie pointed to a corner with a round table and a booth against the wall.
“That’s a good pick,” Byron said, and he followed his brother but sped past him so he could sit in the corner. “You get the chair.”
They sat, and Byron arranged the cardboard tube so it could be seen at a distance. He set his truck keys on the table with a clunk, the heavy brass skull keychain lying on its side, the twin ruby eyes glinting. A pair of fake palm trees curved through the stale air overhead, and their table gave them a panorama of the entry. “This’ll be good,” Byron said, nodding over and over in a way that started looking crazy. A minute or so later, a waitress in a tight black skirt and pantyhose stopped at their table and set down a couple of coasters. Her name tag said CJ, HOMETOWN NASHVILLE.
“How about a shot of Lord Calvert?” Byron said, both hands curled into fists on the table.
“No Calvert, but we’ve got Jim Beam,” she said. “Will that work?”
Byron’s face fell. “Fine,” he said, spitting the f.
“How about you?” she said, turning to Lonnie.
“Beer is all.”
“Oh, honey, don’t make me run through the list.”
“Hamm’s, I guess,” Lonnie said.
“How about a Coors? It’s on tap.”
“It’s not my favorite, but okay. And some cheese fries—chili cheese fries.”
“Y’all are so metal,” she said.
After she left, Byron leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “I don’t need you crapping your pants from all that grease.”
“I’m starving. What good is being here early if we just have to sit here dealing with a skipped breakfast.”
“Being hungry keeps you sharp.”
“Agree to disagree,” Lonnie said.
The drinks came. One shot glass. One beer. Napkins. Lonnie filled one cheek with air, passed it over to the other. Byron bit his nails, took out a pocketknife, cut his cuticles with the scissors. A group of people in the same color jackets moved through the space, heads pointed in every direction. Walls staying in one place. Lights just sitting there. People twitching at the slots, moving like broken machines. Chili cheese fries. Hot, salty, soft. Byron didn’t want any. Pushed the plate away when Lonnie offered it. A person stood behind someone at the slot machine. She set a hand on his shoulder. Jackpot. Coins spilled into the bucket but it was too much and overflowed. The rest went into an empty glass. She went away and came back, handed him a drink, took the coin glass. Their waitress appeared, waved her hand. Byron sat up and handed her his shot glass. She came back with a beer, set it down, took the empty glass, plate, napkins. A group of girlfriends moved across the room. The one in the middle pulled up her shirt for a photo. Lonnie pointed. The girls vanished. Lonnie looked again. The space suddenly filled with friends with white beach towels draped around their necks. In the distance a guy was checking in at the front desk with fat arms, a mullet, and a spray tan. A guy in a silver suit walked past, sizing him up, a small box of chips under one arm and a highball glass in the other. Some guy kicked a slot machine. His stool went over. Nobody seemed to notice. One waitress (not theirs) started yelling at another waitress (also not theirs). She just stood there and took it. Byron’s jaw muscles flexed, and he took hold of the tip of his ponytail and tickled it across his cheeks.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Byron said. He moved the tip of his ponytail over to his lips.
“You should quit playing with your hair if you want this guy to think you’re somebody to worry about,” Lonnie said, then he looked down for his fries and realized the plate had already been taken.
“It’s soothing,” Byron said.
“Also, not tough.”
“Am I supposed to skip my self-care?”
“Maybe you wouldn’t need so much self-care if you weren’t always gearing yourself up.”
“Really?” Byron said. “You’re going to lay that on me?”
Lonnie shrugged.
“I should have done this by myself,” Byron said.
“How will we know it’s him?” Lonnie asked, trying to change the subject.
“He said he’ll know us.”
“And you don’t think that’s weird?” Lonnie said. “What if this guy is the cops?”
“Would the cops have told us how to clean up your mess?”
Lonnie thought about it, but before he could answer, Byron did it for him. “One thing—I always know when it’s the cops.”
“Must have picked that up in prison,” Lonnie said.
Byron leapt across the table and grabbed his brother by the shirt. “Enough,” he said. “No more talking. We’re gonna do our business, then we’re out of here.” When people looked over, Byron let go and sat back. After a few seconds, things returned to normal.
Lonnie pointed out all the people. “Maybe our kind of business needs a private place.”
“We do this in private, and he’ll kneel us down and put a bullet in the back of our skulls. I picked this spot on purpose. It’s strategic.”
There was a crash, and the Ashdowns turned. A guy with sculpted sideburns and his cap on backward lurched through the crowd. Two casino bulls were behind him. They grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him out the front doors, knocking his cap to the ground. One of the bulls stopped and picked up the cap, carried it to the door, and threw it after the man, who didn’t even pick it up. He just stood there, screaming, flipping them off with both hands.
“That’s me on the inside,” Lonnie said.
“What?” Byron said.
Lonnie checked for the missing plate again. “Never mind,” he said.
The waitress appeared. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
But before either of them could answer, a man in a silver suit handed the waitress two twenties and said, “They’re all done.” The man was neither small nor large, and his face was tan, like a hide. His chin was lowered, and he stared out from the tops of his eyes. The fabric of his suit caught the lights of the room and made him look like someone who ought to be on stage. He set a Walmart sack on the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down without saying hello, interlacing his fingers to make a single, giant fist.
“You must be Byron and Lonnie,” he said.
“Maybe,” Byron said.
The man opened his hands and said, “Well, I’m Nick Scissors.”
“What’s in the bag?” Byron asked.
“A surprise,” Scissors said. “For the both of you.”
“From Walmart? Nice,” Byron scoffed.
“You go to war with the big-box retailer you have, not the one you wish you had,” Scissors said, leaning forward. “A news item in your local paper confirms that you two followed my instructions. I had my doubts, but I stand corrected. Consider this a bonus.” He patted the bag and smiled.
“You mean, like employees of the month?” Lonnie asked.
“Something like that. You have the maps?”
Byron pointed to the tube.
“Well, that’s just a tube, isn’t it?” Scissors said.
“They’re in there. You can check,” Byron said. “Besides, that’s how you told me to do it.”
Scissors kept his eyes on Byron. “I want you to look around this room, up at the ceiling. Start at one o’clock. Don’t move your head, just the eyes.” Byron looked. “Okay, now three, seven, nine, and eleven. I realize you can’t see your seven.”
“Cameras?” Lonnie asked.
“This location was not a stupid choice, Mr. Ashdown,” Scissors said. “The anonymity of this carnival, and the panopticon surrounding us makes certain everyone minds their p’s and q’s.”
“What does panopticon mean?” Byron said.
“It means, we’re not going to roll out this transaction in plain sight, but . . . an exchange will take place,” Scissors said.
“It’s simpler than you’re saying. You give us the money. I leave the maps sitting right here.” Byron said, gesturing to the tube with a nod. “We take off, then you stick around for a while.”
Scissors reached into the side pocket of his suit coat and held out his hand. He relaxed his grip slightly; a brass skull dropped and spun on its chain.
“Hey, wait,” Byron said, a look of panic streaking across his face.
“You’ll leave when I decide you can go,” Scissors said.
“When did you—” Byron said.
“Trade secrets, friend. A magician never tells you how the trick is done. Feel around on the floor,” Scissors directed.
Byron moved his boots from side to side and he kicked a small package. “What’s that?” he said.
“There are two envelopes, one for each of you. I took the liberty of dividing your fee up front . . . in the interest of family harmony.”
Lonnie smiled and gave a tiny fist pump. Byron glared at his brother. Lonnie lifted his eyebrows and said, “What? I trust you.” When Byron looked back at Scissors, he was holding the cardboard tube.
“Hold on a minute,” Byron said.
Scissors stood and slipped the tube almost invisibly inside his jacket. “Open your bag,” he said.
Lonnie grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Inside was a pair of blue swim trunks covered in red, green, and orange popsicles. He lifted it out and held it up. There was a second pair inside and a small key card folder from the casino.
“I’m going to have you two stay here for a couple of weeks, let things cool down. You’ve got a room, paid through the end of the month. Two king beds. And there’s a prepaid credit card in there too, with five hundred on it. For incidentals.”
“That’s cool,” Lonnie said. “But what about my job back in—”
“Shut it,” Byron said.
“Consider this a time to reinvent yourselves. Sit by the pool. Read a book. Binge-watch something. Stare at the walls. But don’t go home. I’m serious about this.” Scissors then turned and walked through the slot machines. A man in the row got a jackpot, and his machine lit up. A second later, Scissors was gone. A huge grin came across Byron’s face, and Lonnie thought his brother had gone crazy.
___
Sophia spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in a conference room, doing paperwork and finishing up the last of her PowerPoint presentation on the ethics of preservation and the problem of restoration. To clear her head before the program, she dashed to the shuttle stop and hopped on a bus right as it was leaving. It was packed with people in a way that was familiar to her as someone from the East Coast who was still somewhat uncomfortable in the openness of this western landscape.
There were no seats, so she took hold of an overhead bar and listened to the bits and pieces of conversation: a jambalaya of Japanese, Korean, Italian, French, German, Polish, and a little English, but not much. Because of her research on the impact of archeological sites under different jurisdictions, she constantly thought about the numbers of people who came here. The National Park Service was one agency among many in the United States, which was one of many governments around the world trying to manage the erosion of history. Her interest came from a course on the history of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was an organization that seemed amazing from one perspective, but over the course of those fifteen weeks it had been unpacked and reformed into a complex colonial force that left her unsure if there were any good institutions at all anymore. It was one thing to study theories in the classroom and something else entirely to watch power and money in action.
Sophia let her eyes drift through the bus. She watched a father in a nearby seat tracing the path of the Fairyland Loop on a map for his daughter. She asked questions in Cantonese and sucked on the rubber straw of her water bottle as he answered. Sophia could only guess what a trip like this might cost. Surely less than Disneyland. What experience did he hope for her? For himself? What memories did he want her to have of this place when she was old and he was gone? This was the question that fueled all of her studies, the work she felt driven to do. Would that girl treasure the water bottle and its memories when she left for college? Would she find the map in her father’s things when he passed away? Which stories seep into the everyday things we leave behind? Which ones evaporate?
She looked up and down the aisle of the bus as it stopped, some people stepping off, new people climbing on. She wondered if any of these people would be coming to her presentation, or if they were just interested in snapshots of the scenery. So many people think an archeologist wears a fedora and a leather jacket, cracks a bullwhip, and jumps from trains onto the backs of galloping horses. But so much of the work is slow and meticulous, the gathering of information, the sifting of it. Mountains and mountains of paperwork, so much of it digital these days.
One of her professors would read Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” to her students, tell them that living memory dies and our knowledge of the past survives only through the trace of physical things, which eventually crumble and blow away, leaving us with two stone legs, a partially buried face, and a single half-crazed witness. This professor was fond of saying that the only thing left behind to speak of us will be the Statue of Liberty buried to the waist with the surf crashing all around it. Even this reference, Sophia thought, was almost lost, gone like Charlton Heston, French science fiction, Romantic poetry, and every other good and noble thing.
The shuttle stopped at the lodge, and Sophia waited while everyone in front of her stood and filed off. She stepped down the bus steps and back into the fresh air, surrounded by towering ponderosas. The buildings, shingled in brown and green, came from another age, like buildings imagined for a film.
Across the parking lot was a white tour bus with a massive red swoosh across the side. In the front window was a cling banner that said RANCHES, RELICS, AND RUINS in a gaudy Egyptian font. Tourists spilled from the doors of that bus as well and filed into the lodge under the direction of staff people with clipboards and palm-sized walkie-talkies. She couldn’t imagine having your first encounter with a place like this be something like that, but maybe it’s better this way than not at all. Maybe it’s better than turning them loose on the place like shoppers on Black Friday. She didn’t know anymore. The lodge was packed, and if she didn’t have to be there, she would have gone right past it and out to Bryce Canyon itself, the majestic red-rock amphitheater that sells this park to the world. The sculpted expanse makes the lodge a mere curiosity by comparison.
When she finally made it to the auditorium, she found the room empty except for a young ranger in a uniform and the broad-brimmed campaign hat. He switched on a computer projector and motioned for Sophia to come on in. The room was large and open and entirely built from wood, glass, and stone. The wood was glazed with varnish that made it glow. The glass doors along the back caused a rippling reflection. The stonework made the room look like it had been there forever. She examined the vaulted ceiling with its open crisscrossing timbers that gave it the appearance of a country church.
The ranger glanced up and hailed Sophia. “I’m Thad. Dalinda sent me your slides. I have them loaded on the laptop,” he said.
“Thanks, but I’ve made some changes, so I have it here on a USB drive.” She dug it out of her backpack and crossed the room to hand it to him. “It’s on a file called Mission Impossible.”
“Oh, no,” Thad said with real alarm. “We called it Preserving the Past. It’s on all the posters.”
“It’s okay,” Sophia said. “It’s a joke. Preserving the Past is correct.” Thad kept staring at her like she was going to say something else, but she didn’t.
Eventually Thad said, “Phew. That’s good because we put up posters everywhere.” He laughed a bit nervously. “But I get it. Preservation can be a hard sell sometimes.” Thad looked like he might have more to say about that if he were off duty.
Sophia watched him nod and swap the files on the computer and start the slideshow. An image of a glowing orange sandstone cliff appeared with streaks of dark brown desert varnish running top to bottom. On that wall was a line of anthropomorphic petroglyphs: tall figures with radiating headdresses or wide horns. Beneath those figures was a cluster of gorgeous white spirals and below them, scrawled in black, were the words LLOYD ♡ AUBRI 4EVER. Superimposed over everything in white Times New Roman was the title “Preserving the Past: The Impact of National Parks and Tourists on Cultural Heritage Sites.” Sophia caught Thad’s eye, smiled, and pointed to the screen. Thad gave her the thumbs-up.
Sophia moved to the back of the room to get a look at the slide. She felt the words and images could be easily seen. Her heart was starting to pound, and she felt restless thinking about what she was going to say today about museums and parks and the impact of millions of people on cultural sites. She wanted to leave these visitors with a sense of what it takes to preserve and protect these treasures. She wanted them to know it doesn’t happen on its own.
As the first visitors entered, Sophia made her way through to the front of the auditorium. By the time she got there, she saw that people were lined up and flowing in quickly from their tour buses. Thad handed her the clicker. “Dalinda gave me some notes for an introduction.” He looked at his watch. “When you’re ready, I’ll get things started, then get a head count, then I’ve got to run over to the Fairyland Loop Trail.”
“That would be great,” Sophia said, looking out at the people gathering in the room, who were all sitting and turning in her direction. So, nobody from the park would be there. She knew it was because they were all stretched thin, but part of her wondered why. Maybe they wanted to separate themselves from her presentation, or maybe they thought they had already heard it a thousand times before. Maybe they trusted her. She didn’t know for sure.
Soon, the seats were filled. Thad stepped between the aisles and without fanfare took out a small sheet of folded paper and read, “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you all for coming to Bryce Canyon National Park and for making this interpretive presentation part of your experience today. We have a special treat for you. One of our seasonal employees, Sophia Shepard, will present some of her research on the preservation of cultural history sites that exist on federal land in the area. This work is part of ongoing efforts by the NPS to preserve important resources for your present and future enjoyment. Ms. Shepard comes to us from Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a doctoral student, doing work to help us document the ruins of the Indigenous peoples who disappeared from the Southwest around seven hundred years ago. As I said, the data she collects will go into the archeological record to help guide policy and decision-making as it relates to the use of our public lands and resources.”
From the middle of the crowd a hand went up.
Thad looked at Sophia, who shrugged. “Yes?” Thad asked.
A man with a French accent said, “You have said that the Native peoples used to live here. Will she speak of those who remain? They seem to be hidden, you know?”
“Good question, aaand . . .” Thad said, turning to check with Sophia, who nodded. “That is a yes, this will definitely be part of today’s presentation. But we should save all other questions until the end.”
Thad stepped to the side of the room, and the audience’s attention landed on Sophia. “Before I begin,” she said, “I’d like to recognize the fact that Bryce Canyon National Park is located on the seasonal hunting and gathering ground of the Paiute Indian people, who first occupied this area around 1200 C.E. Before them, this region was the home of the Fremont and Ancestral Puebloans. We also recognize the continuing presence of the Paiute people, the Utes, the Diné, and all Indigenous peoples who are represented by the National Park Service.”
The man who raised his hand before raised it again.
“Could we wait for comments?” she asked.
“But you said continuing presence, which I do not see here in the park,” he gestured around the room. “We have not seen any—”
“We will get to that very important point,” Sophia said, scanning the varied rows of faces before directing everyone’s attention to the image on the screen. “As you can see from this first slide, the past and the present are always colliding. We often think of the past as a single thing, maybe because it has already happened, but history is a complex mosaic of people and their intersections through time. Often one group of people would arrive in a place new to them only to find the previous residents gone. Sometimes, as we see in this image, we’re able to see how different groups of people left their marks on a single cliff.” She used the laser on the clicker to guide their attention to the row of figures, then to the carved spirals, and finally to the names of the two lovers who left their recent mark with some charcoal.
“More often we see cultural intersection—and some may call it vandalism—from another perspective.” She advanced to an image of three pots lit harshly behind the glare of plate glass. “These Pueblo and Zuni artifacts were found a little over a hundred years ago in places that are less than three hundred miles from here, as the crow flies. They are now located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is about two thousand miles from here, as the crow flies. You will find artifacts like these scattered across the globe, some in museums and some in private collections. Some we know about, most we don’t.”
Sophia felt her pulse accelerate. The auditorium was close to full, and with the reflections of the people in the window glass, the room seemed twice the size, which made her neck and shoulders tense a little. She tried to calm herself and muster some courage by thinking about how important it was to share some of her fundamental ideas about museums and parks and ethics. Her talk had to be the right balance of sermon and seduction and she wondered if she would achieve it. She advanced the slide again to a photo of a large brick building with tall windows, pilasters, and cornices. It looked like a blue-collar version of a Greek temple.
“This is the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which is part of Harvard University. The Peabody was founded in 1866, and it is one of the oldest and largest museums focused on ethnography and archeology. In the last one hundred and fifty years, the Peabody’s collection of artifacts has grown so much that there is little space to contain them. The work of cataloging and organizing everything—even with the help of computers, bar codes, scanners, and a massive endowment—is absolutely overwhelming. The Peabody’s website has this to say about its collection: ‘The Peabody is well known for its significant collections of archeological and ethnographic materials from around the world, many of which were acquired during the era of European and American expansion, exploration, and colonization.’ This is good self-awareness on the Peabody’s part, but it doesn’t change the fact that they brought these things from the four corners of the world, and now they can’t manage it. Most of this massive collection of millions of artifacts is—as the man who spoke earlier said—hidden.”
Sophia walked them through a series of images. Human bones loose in a cardboard box. Human bones laid out on a table in the shape of a person. An Egyptian mummy in a gold-and-lapis sarcophagus. Two semicircle groupings of stone spearpoints and arrowheads fanned out on felt. Some were made of flint, some jasper, and others were knapped from obsidian. There was a magnificent robe made of blue and gold feathers, a grouping of six human jawbones, then a cedar burial box carved with bird and beaver faces.
She watched the audience carefully, the light changing on the multitude of their faces with each advancing image. Some leaned forward. Others nudged a neighbor. From time to time a phone rose, obscuring a face for a moment, replacing it with a blue glow while they posted pictures they’d taken. She tried to imagine what this photography might look like as it ascended into the cloud in real time. Then an idea came.
Sophia checked the room and saw that Thad was gone. She pointed to the image of the burial box and said, “There’s only one of these boxes. Two hundred years ago, you’d have to travel to the box to see it, and you’d have to know where to find it. In all likelihood, the Coast Salish people wouldn’t take you to see it. Travel to British Columbia at that time was difficult. You can imagine the way people must have thought that it would be so much more efficient to bring these things to the places where there were people instead of the other way around. Of course, that would be for people with money to pay the price of admission and the leisure time to attend.”
She advanced the slide to an image of the Moon House ruins, with its beautiful overhang and delicate rooms, which was threatened by over-visitation. But this image didn’t fit the new script, so she backed up to the burial box.
“This is where we get the Peabody and events like the Chicago World’s Fair and all the marvels of the Gilded Age. Suddenly thousands of people had trolley access to the world. If you think about it, museums were the internet of the nineteenth century. They gave some people—a certain kind of person—access to ethnographic treasures, but to accomplish this, they had to remove them from where they belonged and ship them off.”
Sophia could hear the people creaking in their chairs. The audience had stopped taking pictures and she could see the small white pinpoints of the projector light repeated in their eyes. She was no longer certain where she was in her presentation, but she meant to move them from the problems of museums to the half solution of national parks, and from there to the new problems parks have created.
“Let me back up,” she said. “The real first internet was probably a sixteenth-century German compendium, maybe the Library of Alexandria, but museums made a real splash. They unlocked the wonders of the world. Today, it seems hard to understand the impact because, with a cell phone, people can look at the Rosetta Stone from close up. You can hear a Sioux war song, see Indonesian dancers. You can fly virtually through the Grand Canyon, over and over and over again. Before all this, the experience had to be physical, and that took a lot of money. It was an amazing feat of the age to organize and fund explorations to send wealthy white Europeans across the globe in search of your antiquities. There’s a reason the movie was called Raiders . . .” she paused for effect, “. . . of the Lost Ark.”
Sophia wished she were recording this talk. It felt like ideas that had been rolling around loose in a box were finally coming together. She paused for a second to try to keep track, then she dove in again.
“Museums are amazing places, but they are . . .” Sophia hesitated while she tried to find the right word. This was the danger of improvisation. The right word for a graduate seminar would have been that museums were “racist” or “ethnocentric.” One of her professors would always say “Gordian,” which was only the right word for him. The correct word for this when meeting with Dalinda or other Parks or BLM people would be “multi-jurisdictional.” The term “tricky” came to mind. “Convoluted.” Maybe something folksy like “messed up.” But in the end, she settled on “complicated.” She picked up again: “Museums can be complicated. One person’s artifact is another person’s ancestor. The presence of something in a museum only points to its absence from the place it left. And this is the thing museums don’t want to say out loud. All of their holdings came from somewhere else. So, the most important questions anyone can ask are Who did this amazing thing belong to? And who had it before it was here? Who took it away from them? How did it even get here? Who had it first? And like the man in front asked before, Where are these people now? We have a word for the answers to these questions, and it is ‘provenance.’”
Sophia drank some water and scanned the room to see if anyone from the park had slipped in. She felt these visitors deserved to know what lurked behind their vacations. As she looked around the room, she met people’s eyes, and some motioned to the screen behind her.
“I’ve heard people talk about museums like they are some kind of pirate ship, but in reality, they are privateers, since their theft is so often sanctioned by the state. My father is from Alabama, but my mother comes from Iran. I grew up hearing her talk about the way her own country—and Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—was systematically plundered by the British and French. This is true of Central America, China, and Ireland—pretty much every place on the planet has had its heritage stolen and relocated somewhere else, usually accompanied by people talking about how the civilized world can help let light into the dark areas of the globe. Sometimes those places were called backward sectors. The U.S. president has other names for those parts of the world.”
A woman near the back stood and excused herself. Her husband followed a few seconds later. He stood in the doorway looking back at the screen for a lingering moment before she called for him to come.
“Some people argue that artifacts should remain in place. They can be documented best right where they are. Some say artifacts should be documented, then removed to repositories so they aren’t destroyed. Some say it’s finders keepers. Some say the people making these decisions don’t have the right to make them.”
Sophia looked down at the laptop to get her bearings, and when she looked up, she saw a raised hand. The man who raised it was slim, balding, wearing a fleece vest. He looked like the kind of person with an NPR travel mug and a Subaru. “But a park,” he said, “like this one, is just a museum in reverse, right? You aren’t taking these things anywhere, but you’re bringing all of us here to see them.”
“That is a good summary,” Sophia said, realizing too late that she’d allowed the lid on Pandora’s box to be lifted. Her presentation had just become a Q&A. “The national parks have dual responsibilities. They are supposed to protect the resources for right now and make sure what’s available right now will be also available to people in the future. Some people call them the dueling mandates.”
“Like dueling banjos,” somebody called out. In the murmur that followed his joke, Sophia tried to gather the group’s attention back.
“Does that make sense?” she said to the NPR man, who nodded, sort of. She went on. “For many years these sites were plundered by the people who settled here, and ‘settled’ isn’t really the right word. They took what they wanted, destroyed much of it outright, saved a little, sold the rest. They erased the people who were here. Now it’s impossible to know what really happened, what it was really like. Because it is not our history, what we are able to show you is inaccurate.”
Another hand went up. He looked European, with a sweatshirt tied around his shoulders. He didn’t wait to be called on. Instead, he stood and spoke. “Who owns history, then?” he asked in a German accent. “Is it the people of the present day or the people of the past? This is a question I often ask myself, and the more I think about it, the more I am unsure. German people are enchanted with the American Indian, and these western lands, but perhaps we love something that no longer exists. I’m sorry if this is an unhelpful question. Perhaps it is not even a question at all.”
Sophia felt the room narrow. This was what she secretly hoped her digression might open up. His question was the key to her work, and she loved how he put it so simply.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Reinhardt,” he said.
“Reinhardt, I don’t know if I have an answer, but a good archeologist is always asking herself that question. The answer depends on so many things.”
“I am a physician, so I lack the necessary training to ask myself this as a professional. But I pursue these things as a hobby. I study the American Indian only as an amateur, as a lover of such things. I will take my answer from this chair. I did not mean to create a distraction.” He sat down and tilted his head slightly to one side.
As Sophia began to formulate her answer, another hand shot up. It was a man with a giant red maple leaf on his shirt. He didn’t wait to be called on either. “A guy at work says Indians came from spaceships that crashed, like, ten thousand years ago. They just got stuck here. He says when they all disappeared it’s because that’s when the rescue ships came.”
“Oh, don’t. Please don’t say things like that. First off, they didn’t just disappear. Second, it’s already hard enough—”
“You don’t really think we’re the only intelligent life forms in the universe,” the man replied. There was some laughter, and Sophia was furious that he had stolen the room. Her jaw clenched, and everything seemed to get louder.
Just as Sophia was about to launch her counterattack, the German spoke again without rising. “Perhaps there are no intelligent life forms anywhere.” The audience laughed, and the man waited for it to grow quiet again. “But in reality, given the immensity of space, the chances of us existing in the same small window of time as other intelligent life is immeasurably small. That doesn’t even factor in the time delay of such cosmic distances.”
“Look,” the maple leaf guy said, “the U.S. Navy has seen UFOs. They’ve got pictures.”
Reinhardt smiled and shrugged.
From another corner of the room a man’s voice called out. She couldn’t see his face. “They came across the land bridge from Russia.”
“Okay,” Sophia said, “that may not be true either. It’s just one story and it’s not set in stone. Genetic data is showing us other possibilities—”
Another hand went up. It was a woman, finally. Her jacket matched the one her husband next to her was wearing. “Do you know anything about the man from Kanab who killed himself? They say his house was a kind of museum. How does he fit into all of this? Nobody gets to see his stuff.”
Sophia was advancing through her slides to get to the one that outlined the main points of the Antiquities Act of 1906. People in the audience began talking back and forth. Soon there was a rising, confounding cacophony of languages. When she came to the slide she was looking for, she had clicked too many times, overshot it, and had to back up. As she did, a Korean man, who had been sitting quietly through the presentation next to his wife, sat up straight in his chair on the aisle. His eyes went wide with alarm as he gasped, tipped forward, and fell. The people around him moved away as he hit the floor. His wife knelt immediately at his side and looked around pleading for help in her language. Sophia couldn’t see what was going on, but she began to run for the door to get help.
“Let me through. Let me through,” said Reinhardt. “Clear the way.” He knelt and checked the man’s breathing and pulse, then looked at Sophia, held up two fingers, and pointed to his eyes. “You. I believe he is in cardiac arrest. Call for help, then come back here. If there is a defibrillator in this lodge, please bring it back.”
Sophia rushed from the room and wove through the crowded corridor. She cut the line at the front desk, which triggered a series of disgruntled complaints. “We’ve got a heart attack in the auditorium. He looks older. I didn’t get a good look, so I don’t have a description.”
The desk clerk was young. Her name tag said SILVIA, HOMETOWN TRNAVA, SLOVAKIA. Sophia could see that the girl couldn’t process what she was saying. She reached over the desk and grabbed the phone, dialed the number, and called it in. When she was done, she handed the phone back to Silvia, who held it without hanging it up.
“Do you know where a defibrillator is?” She pantomimed placing the paddles on a chest and the jolt that followed. Silvia’s face fell, and she started to panic. “Never mind,” Sophia said.
She ran back to the auditorium and found the crowd gathered in a circle around the fallen man. The German doctor was on his knees performing CPR, singing softly to himself as he leaned into the compressions. It was the Bee Gees. “Stayin’ Alive.” After many strokes, he leaned down and gave two deep rescue breaths.
Someone from the crowd called out: “They’re saying don’t do mouth-to-mouth anymore.”
The doctor returned to his compressions. “Danke,” he said to his critic. “Physicians receive different training.” Then he returned to his song.
A woman in a rhinestone shirt turned to her husband and asked, “Is he singing Saturday Night Fever?”
Her husband shrugged. “Maybe. I haven’t seen it in a long time.”
“Do you think he should? I mean a man is dying right there. Maybe it’s tacky,” the woman replied.
Someone standing next to Sophia said, “Lady, I think whoever does the CPR gets to pick the music.”
The doctor continued to give compressions and rescue breaths. He checked the man’s pulse at regular intervals. Sophia heard the sirens and started pulling chairs aside to make a path. In a few minutes, the park EMTs burst into the room with a rolling stretcher. When the doctor saw them, he stood immediately and let them do their work.
“I began CPR within ten seconds,” Reinhardt said. “He has a pulse, and he’s breathing on his own.”
“We’ve got it,” one of the EMTs said.
“I’m a doctor.”
“Congratulations,” the other EMT said, shouldering past Reinhardt so he could transfer the man to the stretcher.
Sophia looked around and stood on one of the chairs. “Ladies and gentlemen, could you all please step to the side? Maybe just right up against the walls?”
A tour guide wearing a Ranches, Relics, and Ruins T-shirt approached the EMTs with her arm around a frightened woman. She said, “This is that guy’s wife. You should take her with you. Mr. Kwon doesn’t speak any English. Do you?” she asked Mrs. Kwon, who nodded.
“Only a little,” she said. “Not so much.”
“They’re going to take you both to a hospital,” the tour guide said. The crowd parted, the EMTs left with the Kwons, and the space closed up behind.
One of the other people in a tour group T-shirt said, “Okay, everybody, let’s break into our small groups and carry on. Make sure you have enough water.”
Another tour group person said, “Don’t worry. Mr. Kwon will be just fine.”
People who were not part of the group milled around for a while, then disappeared. A third tour group person said, “Before we go, a round of applause for Dr. Kupfer. He’s the hero of the day.” The remaining people clapped and cheered. Reinhardt looked up surprised, and he waved off the applause. As the room continued to empty, Reinhardt sat in one of the scattered chairs, and he hung his head.
Eventually the only people left in the auditorium were Sophia and Reinhardt. As she shut down the projector and ejected her USB drive, she watched Reinhardt stand and walk around the place where Mr. Kwon had fallen. He took out a small bundle of sage tied in string. As he circled the area, he shook the bundle once in each of the four directions, then held the sage to his nose and breathed in deeply. He lowered his head and said a few words so quietly Sophia couldn’t hear them. When he was done, she said, “He’s probably going to be okay.”
“Cardiac arrest is very serious.”
“But you’re a doctor, right?”
“A dermatologist.”
“Oh,” Sophia said. “A doctor anyway. Nobody else knew what to do. I didn’t.”
“I better continue on to the next event,” he said.
“You’re on the tour?” Sophia asked.
“Yes. It is a very bad one. I made a mistake. Their website was misleading.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Everything they show us here is a cartoon. Bright colors. Strings of flags. Hot dogs with ketchup. I would rather see something quiet and real and true, not always a Schauspiel.” He paused for a second. “Not always a . . . pageant, you know?”
“It’s even hard for me to know what stories to tell, and I have an advanced degree,” Sophia said.
Reinhardt tapped his fist against his sternum. “The stories should come from here.”
Sophia did not agree with him on this point. The heart has a habit of falling in love with beautiful falsehoods, but this guy had just saved somebody’s life, so she gave him his moment. Instead of rebutting, she said, “Hey, there’s a lot of amazing stuff to see around here. Keep your eyes open.”
“Danke,” the man said, shouldering his backpack. As he was leaving, Thad returned.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay.”
“It’s not normally like this,” Thad said.
“How could it be?”
“They’re taking the Kwons to Cedar City. Regional is going to send you a link for an incident report, but you should sit down as soon as you can and take some notes. Details get slippery as you come down.”
Sophia wandered out of the lodge and walked through the pines to the edge of the amphitheater. As she took in the intricate expanse, her phone buzzed. It was a VIP email notification from Paul. She tapped the email and it opened.
Sophia, good news. I’ve got some days off this week that I have to take before the end of the fiscal year or I’ll lose them. I was wondering if I could interest you in an adventure. Do you remember that site we talked about when we were climbing a couple of weeks ago, a place called Swallow Valley? It’s the one that requires a technical approach. There’s a lot of scrambling and some pitches we’ll have to climb. Keeps most people out. Nothing too gnarly. I know you could do it. It would take two days to get there and back again. What do you think?
She closed her eyes and tried not to smile as tourists passed her on either side. So, it was true, he did have plans, along with the presence of mind to share them. Climbing with him was the best thing she’d done since she got here. She didn’t know how she would do outside the gym, but it turned out she was good at it, and Paul was like nobody else. A flutter expanded inside her chest, and she calmly tried to gather it back up, but it billowed like a parachute, which made her all the more aware of each breath.
She lifted her phone and wrote: Gnarly? Paul said corny things like that all the time, innocent, naïve, endearing things. He was one of the only men she’d ever met who seemed almost entirely without guile. She stared at the phone for a moment, thinking about what he’d do when he read her message, so she hit the delete key seven times and wrote:
I will answer your call to adventure, but only if you promise to never, ever use the G-word again in my presence. I am ready to climb again. The harness and shoes you loaned me were fantastic. Send me a packing list for everything else and remind me to tell you about how I gave some guy a heart attack today.