Three Moments of an Explosion (7 page)

The signs in the bar that read
CONEY ISLAND
were in a different font from
NUTS! BEER! VODKA!
,” and those that pointed out toilets. McCulloch pushed his way between loud groups and found Cheevers just as Cheevers saw him and waved McCulloch over to the corner where he drank.

As he did most days, Cheevers wore a dark suit more expensive than most on the island. He was only a little older than McCulloch, and similarly graying and heavy. They enjoyed their disparity—the shrewd, well-dressed lawyer and the shabby storekeeper, alcohol buddies alike and unalike enough to bring to mind two versions of the same man from alternative timelines.

Cheevers sat with a trim, pale man. He was forty-something, and his lumberjack shirt was too young for him. “So?” he was saying to Cheevers as he blinked over a whiskey. “Is the landlord some displaced New Yorker or what?” He moved to let McCulloch sit.

“I’ll let this old lag explain,” Cheevers said. “John McCulloch, Daniel Paddick. John knows this place pretty well. For an outsider.” An old riff.
Island-born, some of us
.
Not like Johnny-McCulloch-come-lately
.

“Used to be a strip joint,” McCulloch said. “Signs used to say
Cunny
Island.” He looked to see if Paddick understood. “When Jay took over and cleaned it up he only changed the letters he had to.”

“That’s classy,” said Paddick. “How often are people disappointed? Here for cunny?”

“You’d have to have a pretty old guidebook,” said McCulloch. “Why? Were you . . ?”

Paddick smiled, took the tease and bought a round.

“You’re from London?” he said to McCulloch.

“That obvious?”

“Your mate busted you. Although yes. You’ve hung on to the accent impressively.”

“I swear it’s got stronger,” Cheevers said.

“Stepney,” McCulloch said. “Long time ago. Wanted out but I’m too thick to learn a new language and too lazy to change money.” The island was technically independent, an imperial throwback.

“When was this?”

“Since way before the new digs. Wondering if that’s what brought me?” McCulloch shook his head. “That your business?”

Paddick nodded. “I’m an archaeologist. You must get sick of us all.”

McCulloch shrugged. “Pays my rent. I met your students. Banto, is it?”

“No,” Paddick said. He glanced away. “That’s another lot. I’m in Free Bay.”

“Right. I heard about that. I didn’t know about them others.”

“Totally different. Different institution. Different dig, methods, aims. Everything. Last minute. I don’t think either of us was expecting to overlap.”

There were always teams at work, mostly around Free Bay and the temple at Miller, where a permanent encampment of excited scholars dug out pillars in a field surrounded by ill-tempered commuters on a ring road. That hadn’t been the case when McCulloch moved to the island almost three decades before. Few Britons—or anyone—had heard of it then, which of course had been much of the draw for him. When the second wave of investigations began, the new attention had troubled him.

Of course the island had filled with visitors. Its permanent population had increased. The capital had spread out.

But as it turned out, not by much. For a tiny not-rich place, its local authorities had always been restrained about monetizing the remains, and the new times had not substantially altered that caution. Digs, development and tourism were all controlled: the chamber of commerce constantly complained. Elam was only a little larger than it had been when McCulloch immigrated.

Paddick was gazing into his drink. “Who was it told you about Banto?”

McCulloch and Cheevers glanced at each other. “Tall girl. Short quiet lad. Came into my shop. I suppose you all know each other—-”

“Well,” Paddick said. He finished his drink. “It’s a big enough island.”

When he went to piss, Cheevers clicked Paddick’s glass in his absence, then McCulloch’s. He raised an eyebrow.

“What was that about?” he said. “A nerve has been touched.”

“Academics,” McCulloch said. “Hate each other worse than lawyers.”

“How dare you, sir? I’m curious. Oh, for a sprinkling of the old sodium pentothol.” Cheevers mimed opening a compartment on his signet ring and pouring something into Paddick’s glass.

“Curtain-twitcher,” McCulloch said. Cheevers raised an eyebrow.

“Leave it out,” Cheevers said in a dreadful London accent. “You’re the nosiest chap I know.”

“Objection,” said McCulloch. They sometimes played each other’s caricature like this, barrow-boy and silk.

A petrol-station-cum-store marked the center of Banto. There was no town, only a scattered stretch of squalid little farms over acres of dry land and dusty growth.

“I heard there was a dig somewhere,” McCulloch said to the cashier and she showed him on a map. He drove another five miles toward the volcano. It was a bright day and the long-cold cone was languid, framed by clouds and scattered with late blooms. Rooks went back and forth above the slope, intrigued by something. Under a red plastic arrow a sign read
DIG
.

There was a track between trees, and where it ended there were three big tents pitched by two cars. Some distance away was the kind of flat-bottomed pit with which McCulloch, an islander even if not by birth, was familiar.

A security guard with the broken nose of a fighter approached.

“I was looking for Sophie,” McCulloch said.

“Sophia.” She emerged from a tent and corrected him. She frowned to see him and for the first time McCulloch considered how it might seem to her, for him to have overheard her name, and to have come looking. He was embarrassed.

The young man Will came into view behind her. McCulloch was relieved. “Good,” he said as the guard wandered away. “I was hoping I’d find you two.”

Behind them a second young woman came out. Her clothes were muddy and her hair was tied up in a head scarf. It looked like Rosie the Riveter’s.

“Why’re you here?” Sophia said.

“Just curious,” McCulloch said. “I couldn’t find anything out about this place. And I was up this way and I saw the sign and I thought I’d give it a punt.” He saw Sophia hesitate. “I can go. It’s just I’m here now, and I know you have to do education outreach and that. I could be like a check box for you. And I’ll knock something off on future groceries.”

Sophia smiled. It’s a small place, he imagined her thinking. We need to get on with the locals. “Give me a minute,” she said. She headed for the pit.

“You working here too?” McCulloch asked the other woman.

“I’m Charlotte. I’m with the opposition.”

“Paddick?”

She nodded. “But I’ve known Soph since we were at York, so I drove over to say hi. Easier than her coming to me.” She grinned, all freckles and dust.

Sophia came jogging back. “Prof’s up to her elbows,” she said. “But I can show you something.” She led him toward the tents. “You know about the preservation process?”

As if he could live here and not.

Brickwork, pillars, channels had always protruded from the island’s undergrowth and dirt, but it was only in the nineteenth century that the amateur excavations of a local platoon’s commander uncovered a mosaic floor that intrigued specialists and scholars. They came, elbowing aside the disgruntled descendants of British soldiers, shipwreck survivors, and convicts who eked out a living on the slopes.

The only known antique reference to the catastrophe was an aside by Tacitus—“The island caught fire. The gods neither loved nor despised those farmers.” Volcanologists said the mountain had been silent for many lifetimes before the eruption, and for the almost two millennia since. There were no eyewitness accounts, no survivors’ testimonies—what escape had there been, from this tiny remote place? It was from the Younger Pliny’s descriptions of Vesuvius that writers borrowed images of burning darkness, a tree of smoke, of locals in their agoras choking in gases from under ground, of the pyroclastic flow.

A slurry of burning ash and rock had gushed through the townships and temples and boiled the sea. It had left buildings standing, random artifacts carbonized and whole.

When they dug, the archaeologists found holes. Burrows without entrances. For years they simply cracked them open and picked out bones and bits within until, in 1863, they got word that Giuseppe Fiorelli had poured gesso into a similar air pocket of Pompeii, and let it set.

There was a first time that the earth was scooped away from plaster, when the ground gave birth to someone dead.

Bodies had rotted leaving charnel foundations, spaces in the shapes of anguish. Hunkering deaths, the pugilist poses where cooking sinews had clenched. Anti-corpses made by plaster into figures like bones. Even the shapes of their cries were preserved.

After Pompeii, the island.

The hollows left by the preserved dead underfoot were filled, their plaster forms uncovered. Women, men, children, dogs and cats, domesticated bears in the ruins of dwellings. Now they lay in the island’s museums, in the visitors’ center at the largest dig.

Sometimes casts were lifted gently onto planes for overseas exhibitions with titles like “The Other Pompeii.” The most famous figures were named for their dead poses: the Lovers; Defiant Boy; the Runner.

In 1985 McCulloch had seen them in the British Museum. That had nothing to do, he always insisted, with the choice he made later, to live in Elam.

“We’re still using pretty much the same techniques as always,” Sophia said. Even guarded at his presence, McCulloch could see she was excited. “Sort of. But the prof—Well.”

She unzipped the door to the larger tent, and McCulloch went in and blinked in the red brightness of the sun through the canvas. It smelled of sweat. In each of the four sides was a clear plastic window covered by curtains.

Something shone and glinted on the canvas floor.

McCulloch was looking at a half-man. A cast, like those he had seen many times, a person with his arms outstretched, his mouth open below the holes of his eyes. His body ended at his waist, abruptly, but that was not what made McCulloch gasp.

The shape was not dirty pitted plaster. It was transparent as crystal or glass.

The surface of the cast looked polished, but it was studded with pebbles. There were smears of dirt within its substance. Matter swept up and embedded, muck in suspension.

McCulloch got to his knees. To look closer. Light refracted through the body.

“We’re trying a new process,” Sophia said. “It’s a kind of resin instead of plaster. When we find a hole we pour in two chemicals and when they mix they react and get harder and harder. Then two, three days later, you’ve got this. Don’t touch it.”

“Wasn’t going to,” McCulloch said.

“Eventually you should be able to, that’s part of the point. It’s tougher than plaster, and it isn’t porous. But we’re still getting it right. Different mixes, different set times.”

He wanted to run his hands over the shiny clear face. He wanted to put his eyes right up to the clear hole eyes and look through them.

“We don’t know what happened to his legs,” Sophia said.

The figure glowed. Perhaps he had died incomplete like this. Or perhaps long after he was gone, crumbling earth had filled the leg holes and eradicated half of him. Matter absenting him.

“Hello.”

McCulloch stood and turned at the new voice.

There was a woman in tall and straight-backed silhouette in the tent entrance, brushing dust from her hands. Her hair was tied back but it escaped in wisps of black and gray. She stepped into the red light of the tent so McCulloch could see her face.

Nicola Gilroy was a few years younger than he. She regarded him with sullen and mournful courtesy. Her eyebrows were raised, her head tilted back, emphasizing craggy features, a Roman nose. She was covered in dirt.

“Prof,” said Sophia. “I hope it’s OK, I just—”

“It’s fine.” She made an effort to smile. Her voice was thin enough to be a surprise. “I gather one has you to thank for the crisps.”

“I’m McCulloch,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind me stopping. I’ve lived here donkey’s years and I didn’t know there was a dig.”

“Yes, well. This is recent,” Gilroy said. “Trowels on the ground cross-referenced with satellite images.”

“When’d you find it?” McCulloch said.

“I didn’t. They brought me in. New methods for a new find.”

McCulloch wanted to turn and stare at what she’d brought out of the earth.

“Was this a temple or what?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“It’s beautiful. The statue.”

“It isn’t quite a statue,” she said.

“Fair play. You looking for something specific?” he said.

Gilroy did not answer. As if he didn’t know.

Cheevers met McCulloch at the cheaper of Elam’s two cinemas. The program had changed from the one advertised, and neither wanted to see the detective movie now showing. They went instead for tapas across the way.

McCulloch told Cheevers what he had seen.

“Did some googling,” he said. “Turns out she’s not the first to try resin. There’s a Lady of Oplontis in Pompeii. You can make out bones and whatnot in her, clumped at the bottom. But she’s like wax or dirty amber or something. This one was completely clear.”

“So why’s Paddick still using plaster?” Cheevers said. “Assuming he is. Why’s anyone?”

“He is. Everyone is. That’s what that kid Charlotte told me. Gilroy’s stuff’s experimental.” He rubbed thumb and forefinger together. “Plus plaster’s cheaper.”

“Terra incognita,” Cheevers said. “Although, the
terra
’s always
cognita
enough, I suppose. What isn’t is the lost body. The
perdidi corpus
? It’s the hole that’s unknown.
Cavus incognita
?”

McCulloch snorted.

For the first few years of his island life he had not known Cheevers. Given Elam’s size, and that Cheevers was hardly unobtrusive, this later came to seem surprising to him. Their association began when McCulloch tried to buy property, a small lockup in the town’s outskirts, and discovered that local laws meant he might have to disclose his criminal record.