What can I say. My father and mother died in a fire. And then the towers came down and my brother died. That’s the truth. But what do I do with the truth? That’s the problem. Everybody was dead so I went back to college.

90

I like solitary places, where I can think. Who doesn’t? But once you find them they’re painful to lose. This happened to me because of another student, a girl.

Behind the science center are the archeology and anthropology buildings, much older, brick gripped in vine. They are attached to the university’s natural history museum. I’m taking an anthropology course and thus have access to the department library and even the museum. Some of the storage rooms house actual artifacts, thousands of years old. Strange old skulls and flaking bits of bone, cardboard boxes of teeth on steel shelves under fluorescent lights. None of the extremely valuable remains is stored there, but there is still plenty to look at.

Sometimes I walk around the department late at night or very early in the morning, pretending to be a harried student who must examine bones for his thesis. Such students exist and I like them. They are relentless, wearing cargo pants but not fashionably, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes all night long. Joy in the work. It seems that some of them, at least, would rather be out digging a hole in Mongolia than giving lectures or writing papers or fucking with each other in coffee shops as happens in most other departments.

I like to look at the fossil casts in the storage rooms. I often go there and handle the bones while I’m thinking. They keep the rooms at a constant cool temperature and humidity for the bones, so it was comfortable for me in my jacket. Usually I see only the occasional researcher or assistant getting examples for a class. I went and would handle levallois blade points or a replicated homo habilis jaw that might still scrape me if I dragged it across my forearm, or hold the tiny skull cast of some practically simian australopithecine of East Africa.

When the girl came in I was sitting cross-legged on the floor holding a vertebra up to my face. I can imagine how it looked— like I was kissing the bone, but I wasn’t. I thought she would just go on her way even though she paused for a moment.

I liked her immediately. She was very pretty. I haven’t been dating or going after girls for a long time now, since Jane, but I liked this girl. She walked along the shelves toward me and I put down the vertebra. It turned out she was looking for something that was right in front of me. I stood up and got out of her way.