THE PRESIDENT’S FACE APPEARED on the screen from an undisclosed location. He was going to “hunt down those folks who committed this act.” Renata pulled up her jeans. He thanked “all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens.” She tugged the shirt over her head and tried calling Jack again, but got the message about technical difficulties. She tried calling her mother.
The President said, “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. Freedom will be defended. Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.” There was no point trying to find comfort or enlightenment in the words. It was a public moment, that was all; the occasion required that his mouth move and English syllables emerge.
She dialed Jack. Dialed her mother.
“The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: we will show the world that we can pass the test.”
Again she tried Jack. Her mother. Her hand felt dusty when she replaced the phone; a fine film covered everything, like a light sprinkling of talcum powder.
“I want to reassure the American people that the full resources of the federal government... The alternative to his words, turning the set off, was impossible. A shred of useful information might arrive. And who could resist the pictures of the burning, the running, the crushed vehicles and the concrete beams? Already barely an hour in the past, it was becoming theatrical; it was irresistible.
On the eighth try she reached Grace.
“I’m fine. What’s the trouble?”
“Do you have the TV on, Mom? Don’t you know what’s going on?”
“Oh, that. Yes, it’s terrible. But it’s not anywhere near where you work, is it?”
“Mom, thousands of people were incinerated. The towers crumbled. Didn’t you see?”
“I saw. What a thing to happen. But up here, you know, it doesn’t really touch us. It’s quiet here in the country.” Westchester, she meant. Her country. Unlike Franco Donati, the photographer of the homeless, the man who became his material, Grace wanted to be as distant as possible from the scenes that greeted her eyes.
“Mom, remember that book about the cave people Claudia and I used to read? The one we acted out?”
“You know I can’t remember much, Renata.”
“You don’t? I used to think it would be so terrible to live in cave times, with all the dangers, and you and Dad laughed?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I can’t reach Jack. I don’t know where he is. He could be dead.” The oblivious made ideal listeners—you could say anything.
“He’s probably fine. That’s your new boyfriend? The one who’s divorced?”
“He works right near there. Sometimes he has appointments in the towers. I don’t know what to do. What should I do? The phones here aren’t working. It took me eight tries to reach you.”
“He’ll turn up. Are you calling from work?”
“There’s no work today, Mom. The city is covered with smoke. Nothing is running.”
“Tsk,” Grace clucked. “And the air is so polluted to begin with.”
Sometimes Renata tried to shock her out of her oblivion by reminding her of everything she wanted to forget, but today she didn’t make the effort.
“Okay, I’ll call you later, Mom.”
Up From the Caves, the book was called, and she still kept it on a shelf in her bedroom. When she and Claudia were eight or nine they were entranced by it; they read it so many times that they knew it by heart.
“The early cave man and his family led a hard life. Their home was a dark, cold, stony place, with none of the comforts we enjoy today. In winter, when night fell early, there were no lamps to read by, no TV or tapes to pass the time. Luckily the cave people had fire. Families would sit huddled around the hearth dug into the cave floor, watching the eerie shadows cast by the flames flickering on the stone walls.”
Renata and Claudia turned out the lights in the basement and shone their pocket flashlights on the wall to make eerie shadows. But all they saw in the beams of light were the beige mesh curtains at the high window, the Bruce Springsteen poster taped to the wall, and an enlarged photo of Grace and Dan, impossibly young, not yet parents, jauntily dressed in white shorts and shirts, standing on the deck of a boat and holding between them an enormous fish. Nothing to inspire any fear.
When they first began to play their cave games, Claudia brought down a box of kitchen matches and lit them one by one, waving them in the air to create eerie shadows, but their father, suspicious of the dark and silence, came down and found them. He snatched the matches away and said if they ever did that again he wouldn’t let them share a room. That was enough to stop them. Being separated would be more eerie than shadows on a wall could ever be.
The President was back. “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil....It’s not a war against the United States, it’s a war against civilization.”
The book featured a cave family: Bodo and Zuna, their son Jiddi and infant daughter Samu. They had only “rudimentary language,” it said. How could they have names, then, if they barely had language, Renata asked. Her father couldn’t answer.
Bodo and Zuna were stocky but gracefully built. The boy, Jiddi, was lean and bony, and Samu was chubby and ruddy in her little leopard bunting. Except for their faces—low-browed, deeply ridged over the eyes, wide-mouthed—and their animal skins, they might have been a TV sitcom family on a camping trip, the Flintstones spruced up and slightly hairier. The illustrations showed them bathing in a stream, sitting around the fire eating hunks of charred meat skewed on sticks like the shish kebab in the Middle Eastern fast-food place in the mall, and curled up at night with other families nearby, each in its own sleeping area, as in a Red Cross shelter. Renata’s favorite picture showed Zuna kneeling at the fire, cradling Samu in her arms as though she were about to sing a lullaby, which of course she couldn’t do without language. Maybe she crooned wordlessly.
The book was a gift from their Uncle Peter’s new girlfriend, Cindy. Peter had met her in Mexico and two weeks later brought her to meet the family. Later on, Grace, who was always skeptical about Cindy, used to say Peter “found” her, not “met” her, in Acapulco, as if she were some rare, gaudy shell he picked up on the beach and tucked in his suitcase. Despite Cindy’s good intentions, the book was far too advanced for six-year-olds—crammed with information, as such books always are: the Neanderthals’ tools, habits, burial rituals, and more.
The girls must have accepted her gift apathetically, for Cindy shook her head, making her fluffy curls bounce and her long copper earrings sway. “Jeez,” she said, “I guess maybe it’s not the right thing. I mean, I don’t know many kids and Peter said they were smart for their age. I could return it and get something else.”
“Not at all.” Dan was always quick to allay discomfort. “They’ll love it. They just have to grow into it. I’ll read it to them until they can read it for themselves. Girls, say thank you.”
He was right. They grew into it. Two years later they were stomping around the basement on all fours, zooming through millennia in their reenactment of humanity’s ascent from the apes. That first illustration showed a single file of shaggy creatures, becoming successively more erect and less hairy. At the head of the line stood Cro-Magnon man. With his finely-cut features, proud stance, and full brown beard flecked with gray, Cro-Magnon man looked remarkably like Mr. Killian, who drove the school bus.
As for the benighted cave family, the book’s tone was distinctly patronizing. It’s only human to want to feel superior to someone, after all. But multiculturalism, just coming into fashion, left few groups one might scorn. If not Neanderthals, who else? “They had no washing machines or dishwashers, no toasters or blenders. They had no furnaces for cold weather, no air-conditioning for summer. They had no planes or trains or cars. Anywhere they needed to go, they went on foot.”
“Where would they need to go?” Claudia said. “The mall?”
Each day, Bodo and Jiddi went off hunting, hoisting long spears. “Their diet was not varied like ours. They hunted reindeer, wild boar, buffalo, leopards, and hyenas to bring home to their families. The women foraged for seeds, nuts, and berries.”
“Would you like bison for dinner tonight, dear?” Claudia asked, wearing a towel arranged to resemble a loincloth. “Or boar? How about a nice little, um, otter? I could pass by the stream and pick one up on my way home.”
“I was thinking of something light,” Renata replied. “Like bunny or squirrel.” She was the cave wife; her towel covered her chest. “With a seed and berry salad.”
“Often they trapped their prey in pits disguised by leaves, or forced whole herds off cliffs.” The illustration showed chunky men in loincloths at the top of a high cliff. Using thick stripped branches, they prodded a herd of bison down into the ravine far below. One large horned creature fell through the air upside down, its face poignant with shock. In the ravine, more hairy hunters waited to spear the fallen beasts.
“The hunters headed home in the dusk, carrying their prey, fearful of what might lurk nearby. The land was mostly open plains and prairie, where wild beasts roamed freely. Often they had to find their way home by the stars.”
“Turn right at Sirius, then left at Cassiopeia.” The girls knew the names of all the stars from The Book of the Night, a gift from their father. “Two blocks from Orion.” They staggered through the pitch-dark basement, their eyes fixed on the ceiling, where their mother had pasted glowing stars in patterns she hoped corresponded to the constellations. Grace had used The Book of the Night as a guide, keeping it open on the shelf of the tall ladder she perched on. She was a girlish, whimsical mother; she undertook odd projects in sputters of enthusiasm.
“Besides the struggle for food, shelter, and clothing, there was illness. There were no doctors or hospitals, no corner drugstores. Any minor illness could turn serious. Neanderthals didn’t live nearly as long as we do. Most died before the age of fifty. The less hardy babies might not live past infancy.”
“Wa, wa, I’m dying. Help me,” wailed Claudia. But mostly the cave people communicated by grunts, sighs, and moans. Tears? The babies would cry, like all babies, but what about the grown-ups? They’d cry when their children died in infancy, Renata imagined. But they wouldn’t cry from hunger or cold since those were the pervasive conditions, and even at nine she understood that people don’t cry, or at some point they stop crying, over given conditions. She wasn’t sure grown-ups cried anyhow. She’d never seen one do it.
“I do believe that child is breathing her last,” Renata said mournfully. “If only we had a doctor or hospital, like they’ll have in more advanced times.”
Claudia choked, gagged, let out a long, gargling rattle, and collapsed on the floor. Renata rocked the corpse in her arms. “Uh, uh, uh,” she grunted. When the death throes were over, she said, “Well, that’s one less mouth to feed.”
Outsiders were a constant threat: one picture showed Bodo and his mates advancing with rocks and spears against a bunch of strangers who’d wandered into their territory. The book didn’t say what would be done with the spoils of battle.
“They’ll eat them,” said Claudia. “What else?”
Renata gasped in shock.
After Claudia fell asleep in the other bed, Renata lay awake with her sister’s steady breaths lulling her through her fantasies. She liked to scare herself. She liked the clutch of fear, the verge of disaster, and there could be no real danger with Claudia six feet away. Renata joined the cave family. One evening, when Zuna sent her out to gather fallen branches for the fire, she got caught on the prairie in a snowstorm and had to find her way home in the dark, startled by every crackle underfoot, mesmerized by a whiteness so vast it blocked out the stars. She came down with a fever and tossed on her bed of skins, while all Zuna could offer in relief was water heated over the fire, with a fistful of bitter herbs thrown in. In her delirium she cringed at the shadows on the wall, certain they must be a lion prowling at the mouth of the cave. She longed to huddle close to Zuna and have her fears eased. But how could she, without words? If there were words at all, they were words for food and sleep, bear and rock. No words to express fear or ease it, especially fear of what might not exist—no words for fantasies. What would she be without words, only fears and feelings? Could she have thoughts? Could she even think “lion at the mouth of the cave?” It might be an image in her head, a series of images like a movie: the lion rushing in, splitting the darkness, bounding over to dig his teeth into the flesh of her thigh....
The whole cave family caught Renata’s illness and died. She had to bury them with elaborate rituals, with food and tools, as if they were setting off on a journey. She was left on her own to join the men in their hunts, chasing the bison off the cliffs, then tearing the dripping meat from the bone and stuffing it into her mouth before the vultures swooped.
When at last she had made herself thoroughly terrified, she would stop to breathe, and listen to Claudia breathe.
The most terrifying thing about her cave life was living it without her sister. And yet she didn’t take Claudia along on her fantasies; she wasn’t sure why. Maybe she wanted to go someplace alone, feel herself as separate, the greatest thrill and greatest danger of all.
Renata took firmly to heart the book’s plain message: Aren’t we lucky to be living now and not then? To live in houses, not caves, to wear sweaters and not skins, to eat steak grilled on the backyard hibachi instead of raw hyena? She didn’t care about the lack of TVs and telephones; what she brooded over was forever living in peril. Imagine being unable to step outside and walk freely, carelessly, feeling the sun on her skin and catching the river’s gleam in the distance. Life must have felt like a mysterious sentence of one pain after another. Happiness, if there was happiness, would be a rare moment of grace, maybe tinged with portent. Sometimes, padding down to the kitchen at night for a dish of ice cream, glimpsing her parents watching TV in the dim living room, she’d feel a surge of gratitude that she hadn’t been born in cave times. She managed gratitude even when bad things happened—when she sliced open her knee on a piece of broken glass in the driveway and had to go to the Emergency Room for stitches. In cave days her leg might have blackened and withered. Of course in cave days there wouldn’t have been glass or a driveway. Still, everything was better now. Compared to cave days, the small jolts that came her way were nothing.
Strange, she thinks now, how benign the cave people were, at least in the book. Bodo and Zuna never quarreled about doling out the food or about who would sleep closest to the fire. Zuna never sulked when Bodo failed to bring home the dinner; Bodo never raged if Zuna accidentally let the meat fall into the ashes. They never dashed their children against the stone walls of the cave when they cried too loud or too long, never crept on top of them under the animal skins for a bit of variety. What peril there was came from outside. Perhaps the author thought the other kind of peril would make too threatening a story for children.
Up From the Caves rolled to a sonorous close: “Think of the vast changes over thousands of centuries as the human race progressed from cave times to our own. Think of man’s striving to order Nature for his own well-being. Above all, man’s ability to invent tools to meet his needs is the trait that enabled him to reach his present level of civilization.”
Those words made Renata and Claudia giggle. Girls—women too—always laugh at pomposity. Then Renata grew up and moved through her life, and she did think.
Suppose Bodo and Zuna really had no dark side, she thinks. Suppose they were as impossibly goodhearted as the book implied, keeping their children alive through illness and danger, living in harmony with their neighbors, their only aggression reserved for predators. It must have been because the powerful darkness of the caves, of their lives, sucked out their individual darknesses and absorbed them, leaving them innocent and light and buoyant. If that was so, then our passage up from the caves and into the light would return our darkness to us. As the light struggled to grow and spread, it left the darkness with no place to retreat. It got compressed in the air and we breathed it in. We accumulated darkness within.
“If Bodo and Zuna were magically to return and visit a large modern city like New York or Chicago or Pittsburgh, they might think themselves in a different world. They might not even recognize us as beings like themselves.”
Maybe not, Renata thinks. Maybe they wouldn’t be so shocked at a city where homeless people live in underground tunnels or in large cardboard boxes and warm themselves around fires in waste-baskets. They might not recognize the boxes that once held refrigerators or washing machines, but they would surely recognize the pervasive conditions of human life, the conditions you stop crying about eventually.
But today, yes. They’d be startled if they magically happened to return on the day paper rained from the sky. They wouldn’t comprehend, any more than the rest of us did, the pair of high buildings swaying faintly like giant stalks, then bursting into bloom. They’d stand watching in bewilderment, as Renata and her neighbors stood across the river, watching the huge shudder, the withering into smoke and ash—great dandelions gone to seed. Something blew on them, hard, and the gray clouds scattered their seeds over the city.
“In the same way,” the book ended, “thousands of years from now, who knows what dramatic changes we ourselves might find? We, too, might not recognize human life or the earth as we know it.”
Well, all such speculation is moot. As she learned later in school, Bodo and Zuna were not our ancestors. The Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end. Our ancestor, Cro-Magnon man, was another species entirely. Bodo and Zuna’s kind died out; no one knows exactly why.
On the TV screen the President was declaring for the tenth time that he would find the folks who did this and smoke them out of their caves. Granted, he had not the gift of gab; vocabulary and syntax did not leap at his command. Renata tried to make allowances: there were no proper words. Bliondan had a much richer spectrum of words for shock: five degrees, ranging from mild dismay, dradosk, through stronger and stronger stages—dradoska, dradosken, dradoskona, to ineffable shock, dradoskis, which was first used to describe the response to a solar eclipse centuries ago. But even if the President were fluent in Bliondan, the task would be daunting. “This battle will take time and resolve,” he said. “But make no mistake about it, we will win.” Make no mistake? Why “make no mistake?” Who was likely to mistake him?
She looked out the window at the stained blue of the sky, then, for relief, studied the Chinese scroll on the wall: the thousand-year-old letter of advice to the newly appointed district magistrate who was urged to spread a civilizing influence. “He must clear his eyes and listen intently, so that he and his subjects may together be molded by the spirit and transformed.”
Transform us, she pleaded to no one. Change us back to what we were three hours ago.
“In Pao-an Circuit, people have been killed in broad daylight....There are many calamities in the area, and friends are all scattered.”
The sound of the phone jarred her as it would have jarred Bodo and Zuna in the cave. She leaped to it.
“Renata? Are you okay?”
“You’re alive!”
“I’ve been trying to call you for hours.”
“Me too. Where were you? I didn’t even know where you were.”
“I was uptown. And you? On the subway?”
“No, the bridge. I was late. I met the bookman. He was going to...Where are you now?”
“Walking over the bridge. It’s hard to talk. Meet me at my place.”
“But—”
“Please, just do it. And listen, buy some milk.”
“Milk. Okay.”
“Not regular milk. Baby milk. You know, like formula.”
“Are you sick?”
“No. I’ll tell you later. Get there, will you?” He hung up.
Outside, the cars were draped in ash, the streets strewn with paper. The air held a sweetish, smoky smell, like sausages in a distant oven. Some people had paper masks, others held handkerchiefs over their faces. She had a key to Jack’s place and let herself in. When she heard his heavy tread in the hall she rushed to the door. He was filthy and bedraggled and in his arms he held a baby in a pale blue terry-cloth sunsuit. Incredibly, the baby was sleeping. Over Jack’s shoulders was slung a powder blue plastic baby bag.
“Take him,” he said, then dropped the bag and fell onto the couch.
“What—?”
“It’s Carmen’s kid. Julio.”
“But why...Oh, no.”
Jack started to cry. “She was in there. Remember, I sent her? Remember she called when we were in bed? I asked her to go. I did it. She wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t—”
He sat sobbing. Renata put the baby down and held him. “Maybe she’ll be found. Maybe she escaped.” Maybe she was one of the bodies plummeting through the air.
“It was too high up. No one up there could have gotten out. It’d be a miracle. I sent her.”
All she could do was hold him in her arms, while Julio slept peacefully on the floor.
“I tried to go look for her,” he said, “but there was no way. I couldn’t get near. Then I started to come home, and then I remembered there was no one to pick him up. I know the place. I arranged it for her, so they let me take him. Carmen. She’s under there, Renata. It wasn’t so urgent, just some papers. Why did I even pick up, when she called? Then she wouldn’t be under there. Why didn’t I go myself? Why did I have to send her?”