Tribes (12 page)

"Bald is beautiful," he said. "You look like one of them Shaolin kung fu fighters. Pretty gutsy to shave your head for Grad."

I blinked. Was that a compliment? He waited for a reaction from me. I tried not to send signals of fear or antagonism.

"Do you have any plans for next year?" he asked. I was stunned; he wanted to converse. I remained silent, alert. At first he grimaced, then—a grin. "Happy graduation, Montmount," he said without a hint of malice, clapping me on the shoulder. Was graduation like the so-called afterlife in which forgiveness was offered to all? Or did the suit somehow make him transcend into maturity?

"Thank you," I said. "Same sentiments to you."

He gave me the thumbs-up and turned away. I stared after him until he was swallowed by the river of dark robes.

I found a corner and wrestled into my robe, a butterfly struggling to reenter a cocoon. As the gown slipped over my bare-skinned skull, something in me changed, as though each brain cell were suddenly imprinted with new understanding. I had accessed a secret layer of my corpus callosum, the site of intuition known to mystics and the greatest scientists. Eureka zone! My eyes focused perfectly. I looked down at the gown and saw the stitches a hominid had designed and bequeathed to mankind. A pattern within a pattern.

The graduates had coagulated into groups. Did an inner impulse draw them together like one-celled organisms? A genetic program passed to us by the amoebae?

I was on the edge of ascertaining this knowledge when the loudspeaker barked: "Ladies and gentlemen, please line up in the hall according to your last names."

Several teachers held up placards. I found M-P.

The line ahead of me had morphed. An apelike creature was at the beginning, followed by a slightly taller one. The next had wider shoulders, a straighter stance, then a fourth and fifth, each taller than the rest, still dressed in gowns. A vision. A reward. A teacher grunted and the line advanced. As each hairy graduate passed through the portal, we drew closer to the beginning of our own evolution. Step by inexorable step, I moved toward it too. What would be on the other side? I passed through, brain tingling.

The stage was lit like a football stadium. We shuffled across the gym floor, up the stairs and into the glare.

Several older tribes stared—fathers, mothers, grandparents, all witnesses to this ancient ceremony. We would be their replacements, the next batch of genetic material that superseded them. Our job would be to carry the human race forward for another generation.

Their eyes examined and measured. My naked skull buzzed, felt each molecule of air. We took our places, settling into seats set on risers. I spotted Elissa, her face hard as a Sphinx's.

The ritual began with Principal Michaels delivering a glorious oration to send us into the future. Time. Cut. Away. I snapped to attention for the valedictorian speech: our
über-teen
. A female who waxed on about how we would fulfill our biological destinies.

The principal returned to the mike, spoke solemnly, his words so deep they were garbled. But I caught the last few: "...a moment of silence for Willard Spokes."

I swallowed and glanced behind me at the S section. There was an empty chair for Willard. They had honored him. The silence lasted a lifetime. Then the spell was broken when a female yelled: "Willard rocked!"

Elissa. Everyone gawked at her, until someone began clapping: Marcia Grady. The graduates, then the audience, joined in.

When the noise died down, Michaels spoke again. An invitation. One by one we descended to the stage to receive our totems. Justin was one of the first. He brandished his diploma as if he'd pulled a sword out of a stone. The crowd applauded. A few graduates later, another Jock Tribe member repeated the gesture and was met with half the response. Student after student accepted diploma after diploma. Delmar walked up smiling, hair tied back. Somewhere in the crowd his mother made a
hi-ni-ni
sound. Several others repeated it. Marcia Grady soon followed, looking absolutely beautiful. If only Willard could have experienced this moment. I glanced back at his empty chair.

Then: Elissa. She walked slowly across the stage, gown flowing around her. A priestess in a solemn ceremony, she wore no makeup, no jewelry, and her hair was tied back. When she took her diploma I expected some symbolic action, perhaps defiance. Instead, she joined the line.

Soon my name was announced.

The voice of Fate. I advanced to Principal Michaels, who guarded the triangular pile of rolled diplomas. Three steps led up to the platform. I climbed using a system of flesh, blood, reflexes and nerves that had taken millions of years to evolve.

Then it hit me. I was genetically programmed to die. Nature's tidy system: We expire so we don't compete with our children. The faster we produce offspring, the faster our species mutates into something better adapted to the environment. I was next in line. One day I would be sitting in that crowd, watching my replacements. Would their feet be webbed?

I stepped onto the platform. A spotlight nearly blinded me. I extended my opposable-thumbed right hand to receive the holy paper.
Australopithecus afarensis
reaching for a bone that would become a tool.

FLASH.

Neurons fired too rapidly to comprehend. Applause thundered as I grasped the scroll. And suddenly...

FLASH.

I saw all history. From the beginning of the universe to now, condensed into shining moments. The earth forming. The first movement of life. The rise of vertebrates. Dinosaurs. Mammals. Man painting his cave walls. The Romans burning Carthage. Aztec priests cutting open the chests of prisoners of war and wrenching out their beating hearts, holding them to the sky. Gas flooding an Auschwitz chamber. Japanese hominids lifting their eyes, pupils dilated by a hydrogen flash, then my father leaving my mother for the woman with blond hair, leaving me for...

Wait.

That.

Was not.

A historical fact.

FLASH.

The crowd of hominids came into focus. Became individuals. There was my mother with her Mona Lisa smile. Beside her. Someone else. A hand raised in a half wave. A man.

My father.

Percival Montmount, Sr.

A glowing blue ghost. Waving.

I turned toward him. Stepped from the line of evolution into the brilliant light.

"Dad,"
I whispered. Then I was falling, pushing aside a chair. Falling off the stage, down into darkness.

My body felt something (pain?) but maybe just a harsh jarring.

Voices. "Are you all right?"

My mother knelt beside me.

My father? Gazing at me? Light beginning to glow.

"Want your eyes back?" I whispered.

"Whu-what?"

"Taking? Your eyes back now?"

Then blackness.

nineteen

AWARENESS

The heat was unbearable. The smoke so thick my eyes watered, and the scent of burning sweet grass permeated every molecule of air. I was shirtless, sweating exponentially, my body quickly becoming a shell.

Gray Eyes sat across from me, the bucket of fire-heated rocks between us. He pulled out what looked like a bull's horn and sprinkled water across them. Steam rose, hissing. He sat back. He hadn't spoken for the last twenty minutes. He'd built the sweat lodge this morning, at my mother's request. She sat to my right, eyes closed. Clad in white, her hair stringy and wet, her legs crossed. She too had been silent, not even an
omm
to interrupt this afternoon sweat.

The door, covered by blankets and a tarp, faced east, toward the rising sun, the rising of wisdom. The Sioux, whom Mom sometimes emulated, saw the inside of the lodge as the womb of Mother Earth, the darkness as ignorance, the stones as the arrival of life and the hissing steam as the creative forces of the universe becoming active. The fire represented eternity.

They'd explained all this to me after I crawled inside, then told me to forget it. To dwell on the symbols would only lead to confusion. The sweat would purify me.

I closed my burning eyes, and that made them feel better. Behind them, vague memories. My arm ached. I'd fallen from the stage last night. My mother had guided me home to bed, where I'd slept deeply. When I awoke she dragged me to the table, fed me tofu soup, the best I'd ever had. A quintessential stomach heater. Then I was brought here to the sweat lodge. Willingly.

Wait. There was something else. I'd seen my father, too.

Alive.

"Percy," Mom whispered.

I opened my eyes. "Yes."

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Here. Right here."

She smiled. "Good. Gray Eyes and I will leave you alone now. It's time."

"Alone?"

"Yes. With your thoughts. With you. It will only be for twenty minutes. But it might seem longer."

I nodded.

They crawled out the front, lifting the flap to reveal a fire, just a few meters from the tent. Tiny tongues of flame licked red embers, and inside that heat were several rocks. Gray Eyes returned a moment later carrying two more rocks on a forked stick. He dropped them into the pail and handed me the water horn with a wink.

Then: alone. Me and my thoughts. But what was I supposed to think about? The universe was too complex to comprehend. The last few days, months, years—even more complex. So I tried not to think of anything.

That worked for a microsecond.

Earlobes. That's what came to mind. Elissa's. The half-moon shape, the way she always wore some new, interesting earrings that jangled when she laughed.

Her laugh. High-pitched and from the belly. Her presence filled the lodge. I wept hard, struggling to muffle my sobs.

When I gained control of myself again, my mind's eye conjured an acne-scarred afterimage: Willard, smiling at me. It was as if I were staring at a cave painting, a message from an ancient time.

Where there's a Will, there's a way.

His voice. Speaking to me. The hissing of steam off the rocks. Then he was gone. Returned to sender.

I ached to talk with him again. And Elissa. The three of us together. But he was beyond us now, in his own universe.

I'd been still for too long. I had to move; I sprinkled the rocks and was enveloped in fresh steam. Time expanded inside this room. How long had it been since my mother had left?

The tribes had dispersed. Justin, Marcia, all the teachers: gone. Graduation was over and summer would swallow them. No longer would we walk the same hallways, breathe the same air, attend the same classes. Other students would fill Groverly, but I would have no connection with them.

Good. It was time to find new connections. New feelings.

An eon passed. My thoughts returned to the beginning.

I was suddenly at show-and-tell in Grade One, holding up a shrunken head, explaining to the class that it was from faraway Afreeka, a hot place. The head was from a white hunter whom the witch doctors had caught. I went into details: First they dismembered him, then severed his neck with cleavers. The teacher shooed me to my seat halfway through the story.

The plastic head had been a gift from my father, and I was only repeating a bedtime story he'd told me. Even then I was marked. His son.

Someone lifted the flap. My father crawled in, his glasses fogged with steam. Had I summoned him? He sat across from me and removed his specs. His eyes, so familiar, looked into mine. "It's hot in here, Perk," he said.

I sprinkled water and the steam rose. He wavered momentarily, then came into focus. Real. He was there.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you. Your mother said you'd be ready to talk now. How do you feel?"

"Disa...disassoc...crappy. And tired."

"You've done a good job of avoiding me," he said. "You ignored my phone calls. Always too busy to talk. Did you get my letters?"

"Yes."

"Did you read them?"

"No."

"Why, Perk? It's been hard to be in the field and to have lost all contact with my son. Three years without a word."

"You could have come back. Like you did when I was born."

He squinted. There were wrinkles around his eyes and only a vestige of his hair remained. Time was creeping up on him. "It's not that easy. I was halfway across the world. It takes years to get the trust of a tribe. You can't just give it up."

"What about the trust of a son?"

He bit his lip. "Percy. Perhaps...perhaps I should have come home sooner."

"You can have your eyes back."

"What?"

"I can't look through them anymore. I need a break."

I held out my hand, palm up. "Take them."

He still didn't understand, but he moved closer and took my hand. I felt an ache in my eyes. I blinked. My sight sharpened.

"I...I...I pretended you were dead," I said. "I believed it, in fact."

He furrowed his brow, wrinkling up his forehead. "I—I see."

Time was stretching again. Between us. Sweat trickling down my forehead, down his, too. Like looking in a mirror.

"How was the field?" I asked.

"Long. Tiring. It was my last trip. I'm moving home. To Chicago."

He looked disappointed that he had to admit this. I half expected him to launch into a story the way he had when I was a child, about piranha-infested rivers, giant boas, ancient temples. That wasn't his world now. He would have tenure and an office with a window and a rusty air conditioner that dripped. A home with a green lawn, lawnmower and Cindy Mozkowski.

Things change. They evolve. One has to adapt to these changes.

"It is good to see you again, Dad," I said, "with my own eyes."

"Oh, Perk," he said, "Perk. I'll see you more often now. I promise."

A wisp of steam rose between us. "I hope so, Dad. I do."

epilogue

The next day my father flew home. I borrowed Gray Eyes' car (an ancient Volvo) and drove Dad to the airport. We chatted in the lobby, saying nothing particularly significant to each other.