by Steve Hockenyos
Prologue
Taman Negara National Park, Malaysia
October, 2000
You almost make it through the front door of your hut before realizing you are - save for a leopard-print banana hammock - stark naked.
Intending to spin on the ball of one foot to head back to the clothes piled next to your bed, you turn too sharply and cause both feet to fly out from under you - landing you flat on your back and bouncing your skull off the weathered slats. Ah, good, you muse, it’s not officially a hangover without a migraine.
Blinking the stars from your eyes, you shakily get back to your feet and tenderly rub your tailbone to make sure there is no serious damage. You limp over to your bed, slowly, painfully shrug into your rumpled clothes then stagger back onto the porch and into the topless military-issue green jeep parked practically on the patio steps. You pray the old heap will start as you fumble the key into the ignition. You stomp on the brake and clutch, squeeze your eyes shut, hold your breath and turn the key.
Oh pleasepleaseplease don't get a bug up your ass today!
A sudden yelp of relief of relief escapes you when the engine mercifully cranks on the first try - the backfire from the battered jeep startles you and sends leaves raining down as vibrantly colored macaws explode squawking from the nearest branches overhead into the iridescent emerald canopy of trees high above your team’s huts.
You floor the gas, and for a panicked instant, wonder why the jeep isn't moving. Then you notice your foot is still firmly planted on the clutch and release it, the spinning rear tires skate back and forth, spurting twin arcs of dirt into the air before getting traction. Suddenly the tires bite into the dark brown soil and the battered jeep yanks you onto the ancient path that snakes along the green embankment and down into a yawning canyon perpetually blanketed in hazy mist.
Below, the dig site you have spent the better part of five years wading through reams of paperwork to gain access to stretches out before you in a lush carpet of greenery. Overhead, the jungle canopy opens in a nearly perfect circle, permitting an oval of shafts of late morning sun to cast a natural spotlight on the ancient shrine’s ruins, occupying the surface of what you estimate to be about the size of the foundation of a fairly large two-story house .
Your gut’s never steered you wrong before, and it’s been confidently - albeit, fitfully at the moment, thanks to Rich - telling you that all of the bureaucratic entanglements will be worth every hoop the government of Malaysia has made you jump through since early ‘95. Especially if you discover what is behind the legend that you had become a bit obsessed with since first told to you by a local shaman - a legend whose origins trace back through nearly forty thousand years of folklore to the Malay islands’ original settlers, the Negritos.
As far back as any of the locals can remember, the sacred island upon which the ruins, which were already clearly ancient to the newly-arrived Negritos was called Pulau Dewata or Island of the Gods, and was not to be approached or even looked upon by human eyes. Yet despite the best efforts of the native inhabitants to obey the ancient commandment, there had been a persistent rumor kept alive by the local fisherman who worked at night repoting of a faint bluish light radiating through the island’s dense foliage...
The first bars of Beethoven's Fifth blasting from the iPhone in your pocket, startling you from idly wondering why you had felt it necessary to even listen to Rich, let alone allow him to talk you into drinking all that tequila last night - cause you to nearly drive the jeep over a cliff. And just who could that possibly be? Why of course, it’s the Richstigator! Last time I ever agree to play another drinking game with that shifty sumbitch, you think miserably.
Fumbling the phone from your t-shirt’s breast pocket, you stab the accept button under the photo of your ever-faithful - right, you think - assistant Rich, taken during last night’s half-remembered debaucherous activities.
You don't even need to punch the speakerphone button, missing the first few words of Rich's sentence, who didn't wait for their phones to completely connect, as he tended to begin speaking as soon as someone answered when he got really excited about something: "--something you're not gonna believe! Boss, where the hell are you?"
"Relax, I'm almost there." you reply, dropping the phone back in your shirt pocket. You slow when you see Rich's lanky figure jogging toward you from the dig site. You nose the jeep off the path, yank the parking brake and climb out.
"What's the rumpus?" you ask, doing your level best to make your way to a ladder extended down into a trench approximately three meters deep with as little stumbling as you can manage. You mount the ladder, with Rich close behind and your nostrils are greeted by the familiar smelsl of freshly turned soil and the tang of generator fuel.
Rich's voice is slightly muffled by the thick jungle air above and the puttering generator below, "The ground penetrating radar picked up something buried about half a meter down in the southeast quadrant. It appears to be symmetrical and hard."
In the early days of your undergrad work, such an announcement would have piqued your curiosity and ignited your imagination, much as it apparently has with Rich. But you quickly learned that pings from the GPR seldom warranted excitement, due to a combination of the excavator's expectations and the equipment's poor resolution. “How hard we talking about?” you ask.
“Extra-EME-ly hard. If I were a betting man, I’d put my money on it rating around a ten on the Mohs Scale.” Mention of the word ‘bet’ from Rich alone would have caused you to pause to angrily glare at him, but hearing this startles you enough to momentarily lose grip of a rung - and what Rich says next causes you to fall off the last rung: "Whatever 'it' is, it's emitting energy."
Rich is suddenly standing over you, his hand gripping yours to help you to your feet. “Jesus, Boss. My bad.” You absently rub your abused coccyx and rub your throbbing skull as you stand, then dust yourself off and limp over to the tent that covers the workstation and generator set up next to the dig site. Your team of grad students had prepped the site the previous morning, with stakes driven into the site’s perimeter and strings tied to the spikes eight centimeters from the ground to form a grid comprised of five meter squares.
You pull a metal crate up to a laptop perched on a stack of plastic storage crates and gingerly sit down, then wake the computer from sleep mode. Rich leans over your shoulder and points at a small white square in the bottom corner of the application window. You flick your eyes down to the corresponding spot representing the ground of the dig site.
Rising from the laptop, you pick up the archaeology department's beaten up old Geiger counter, then shove a leather tool pouch tied shut with a rawhide strip into one of the deep pockets of your cargo shorts. Out of habit, you limp around the string border, careful not to step over until you have reached your intended digging spot. You set the counter on the ground, switch it on and sweep the detection wand toward the spot. Though your crew did a preliminary sweep when they set up the site, you want to be certain that the area is safe to dig into. The machine weakly clicks as it passes over, confirming yesterday’s readings and satisfying you that you and Rich are in no danger.
You switch off the Geiger counter and pass it back to your assistant, then kneel down. You grab the leather pouch and untie the strap to unroll your excavation kit. You select the hand trowel and brush that you have been using for decades, blow the bangs away from your face and set to work.
But soon the brutal combination of one hundred percent humidity and boiling hot sun overhead conspire to sap you of energy. It is not long before sweat is pouring down the rugged planes of your face and into your eyes, momentarily blinded by the stinging drops. You quickly peel off your sweat-drenched shirt and send the phone skittering across the earthen floor - wipe off the sweat, then fashion the tee into a makeshift bandanna. Rich retrieves your phone and hands it to you. You quickly drop it into one of the pockets in your shorts and resume the arduous dig.
After an hour of alternating between digging and probing, your trowel scrapes against a solid object. You replace the trowel in its slot in the tool pouch and slip out a brush with stiff bristles. You then begin to carefully brush aside the remaining layer of soil, estimated to have been new in the eons following the Earth’s collision with a planet known as Theia - when the surface of the planet was almost entirely molten lava. In other words, you are excavating what was some of Earth's first land.
The half-buried impossible thing you see reflecting the hot morning sun causes you to involuntarily gasp and your heart is suddenly running at full-throttle. You practically jump to your feet, frantically yanking your phone from its pocket. You switch it on and notice your hands are shaking as you try to swipe from the main screen to the camera application while frantically waving Rich over to confirm what your eyes are trying to tell you, yet your brain is refusing to accept. You shut your eyes, take a deep breath and silently count to ten. When your eyes open again, your hands are steady and you can think more clearly.
Rich crouches over your find, and when he talks, you can pick up on a slight quaver in his voice. "That shouldn't be there. I mean, it can’t be there. So either we accept that we’re both somehow sharing a very realistic hallucination, or what we’re looking at is real...and I’m not finding either possibility acceptable.”
You Adrenaline magnifies your voice, and startle yourself a little “So it sounds like we’re both in agreement that I’m not hallucinating and my phone’s not malfunctioning?” Rich nods in agreement for the camera. You re-pocket the phone and squat in front of the hole.
The logical portion of your mind struggles to make sense of what you are seeing. However you are unable to deny the truth spoken by Rich’s question: "That's a Menger Sponge, isn't it?"
Again, you are only capable of nodding, as your mouth still hangs wide open.
Your phone rings, a riff from Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing. Dad.
The emotional high of discovering the single most important find in this planet’s 4.5 billion year history is immediately shattered by the worst news you can imagine hearing. Somehow, your dad manages to keep it together as he shares with you the worst news he could imagine hearing, “Your mom has stage four ovarian cancer.”
You reply quickly so that he doesn’t need to stay on the phone with you, “Hang tight. I’m on the next flight out of here.” You hang up, completely running on auto-pilot now as you numbly drop the phone back in your shirt pocket - you begin to shiver, despite the intense noonday heat.
Feeling tiny and utterly helpless, you look up at a concerned-looking Rich. Your voice sounds hollow when you speak, “My mom’s got stage four cancer.”
“Oh Jesus,” he whispers, then helps you to stand up, “first thing’s first - let’s get you out of this hot sun.” One step at a time, he cautiously guides you - on very shaky legs - back to the tent, lowers you in front of a stack of metal crates, and gently leans you against them. He quickly stands and riffles through the plastic crates and pulls from one a thick wool blanket.
He squats back down in front of you, tilts you forward enough to wrap the blanket around your shoulders then eases you back, “You’re going into shock, and every movie I’ve ever seen where a person goes into shock has them getting wrapped in a blanket. Is that the right thing to do here? I dunno, but it always seems to help the people in the movies. So I figure it can’t hurt to try it.”
From another plastic crate he pulls a desk fan, finds a nearby outlet to plug it into and sets it on another stack of crates a few feet across from you, angling it towards your face. The gentle breeze begins to dry the slick sheet of sweat coating your face, slowly reviving you out of your state of shock.
Although you’re physically feeling slightly better now, your emotions spin out of your control and, powerless to stop them, tears start to flow freely.
***
The next morning, you board a flight with your eventual destination being a hospital room in North Carolina where your mother has been checked into a hospital and is undergoing batteries of tests.