Of course I’ve always understood that there should be a body inside the wreckage of this airplane. A desert climate like this one has the same effect as mummification, doesn’t it? A set of bones might be preserved for years or decades. Still. It’s one thing to tell yourself to expect this skeleton, to know that this airplane came down with a human being inside and that the remains of that person did not disappear into the air, that those remains are just that—remains—and not the actual person, the human being, the living soul. It’s another thing to see a boot attached to some trousers, to run your flashlight beam along the outline of those trousers and see the whiteness of bone, or rather the yellowness of bone, covered in dirt like everything is covered in dirt.

But you can bear this, like you have borne all other things. You can bear this skeleton. You can pretend it belongs to anybody, it’s just a skeleton like you find in an anatomy laboratory. The person who lived inside this skeleton, who animated these bones, is long dead. As for his eternal soul, if he had one, God knows it’s moved on by now, out of sheer boredom.

So. Let’s imagine I’m an archaeologist. Isn’t that what they’re called, these people who dig bones and artifacts out of the earth, who mine the soil for the secrets of the past? Say I’ve arrived in this morbid landscape to investigate the remains of a brand-new human species, a previously undiscovered branch of our ancestral tree. Mere scientific curiosity prompts me to step forward, to keep the beam of my flashlight trained on the boot of my subject, to observe its physical characteristics and note that it seems to be an army boot, a type of footwear with which I happen to be familiar. A large boot, sturdy, worn, desiccated, leather edges curled by the passage of time.

I drag the beam upward, from boot to trouser to tunic. The skeleton rests on its side, in an almost fetal position, except not quite so tightly curled as a fetus. Like a man who’s gone to sleep in a cold place, without a blanket. A skeleton that has gone to sleep. I come to stand near its chest. The tunic isn’t familiar to me, but then it wouldn’t be. This man would have been an airman in the Republican Armed Forces of Spain at the time of his death, a Republic that no longer exists, a brutal war that has since been eclipsed by wars even more brutal. How quaint and idealistic the Spanish fight seems now. This fellow in his tunic, this American fighting for a foreign cause, curled up to die.