Dead Clod Walking

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People at rest, no less than objects, bear the marks of the forces that propelled them into motion. Indeed, only when people and objects come to rest can those marks be seen and interpreted. All geology represents the present-tense freeze-frame of the earth's history, condensed conveniently in the chemistry of rocks and soils. Ex libro lapidum historia mundi. Though the course of any single organism's life is infinitesimally minute by comparison with the history of the earth, only one species in the earth's parade of life — ours — has managed to crack the code. It is as though some geological variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents observation over a more meaningful time span. Any organism attaining the power to unlock the earth's secrets also acquires, by that very stroke, the power to destroy the earth itself.

As with sediment, so with sentiment: Our efforts at self-understanding have no chance of overcoming the mindless buzz of being and doing. We cannot understand feelings of the moment, with deep emotional footprints and even with lasting practical consequences, until we stop acting upon those feelings and seize the opportunity to look backward, in the serenity of solitude.

So it was during the summer I set out to cross the K-T. A chance encounter on the first day of a slow crawl toward Gubbio's outcropping of iridium-rich clay diverted me toward altogether different quarry. For the next two days I dutifully hiked the cliffs connecting Corniglia with the other villages of the Cinque Terre. Rome awaited; I anticipated no encounter with greater enthusiasm than dinner alone with Reena Harrelson.

Read the rest of this chapter . . . .Boarding the train out of La Spezia, Italian rail's gateway to the Cinque Terre, eliminated any realistic prospect that I would touch the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary on this trip. Having crossed from Cisalpine Gaul into Latium, I had no feasible way to restore my original objective of visiting the Bottacione Gorge near Gubbio. Human antiquity, orders of magnitude younger than its geologic equivalent, replaced the end-Cretaceous extinction as the object of my radically altered excursion. I found myself alone in Rome, charged with no mission more elaborate than to stroll the streets. The Forum, the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and the Vatican all beckoned.

Of all the attractions in la città eterna, I found myself inexorably and morbidly drawn toward la cripta dei Cappuccini, the crypt beneath the Capuchin monastery at La Chiesa della Santa Maria della Concezione on Via Veneto. For three and a half centuries the Capuchins collected the bones of their brothers and of poor Romans who came to die among them. In one of the most spectacular displays of the Catholic world's obsession with tangible evidence of the dead and with palpable hints of the resurrection of the body in a world yet to come, the Capuchins of Rome arranged their bones with extraordinary care in a crypt beneath the Church of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception. I visited crypt after crypt — le cripte della resurrezione, dei teschi, dei bacini, e delle tibie e dei femori. After dedicating an entranceway to the Resurrection and depicting the central mystery of Christianity with relics of the dead, the Capuchins separated skulls, pelvises, tibias, and femors into rooms of their own. I stepped from chamber to chamber, where the dead men lost their bones.

And then I walked, wholly unprepared, into la cripta dei tre scheletri: the crypt of the three skeletons. La cripta dei tre scheletri is somewhat misleadingly named, for two of the three skeletons scarcely warrant mention by comparison with the centerpiece of this room and indeed of the entire Capuchin monastery. Two smaller skeletons flanked a complete and magnificent skeleton surrounded by the circle of life. In its right hand, this personification of death held a bony scythe, symbol of the reaper that claims all life. The skeleton's left hand held a balance, also made from bones, intended to represent the divine judgment that would be rendered in God's great and horrible day of reckoning.

So delicately poised as if it were ready to reclaim its flesh and thereby to rejoin the living, the main skeleton stood as prominently as any representation of the crucified Christ, flanked by the two thieves that Pontius Pilate saw fit to execute alongside Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. That skeleton whispered the message that echoed throughout the Capuchin monastery and the Church of the Immaculate. Death marks the boundary between the known life and eternity. Though there is no proof (or disproof) of life everlasting, this much unites believer and skeptic: Death is forever. A placard at the exit of the Capuchin crypt reminds all visitors who can read at least one of the five languages on display: What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be.

From the Capuchin crypt I rose to greet once again the living city of Rome, a surreal city under the fading light of a summer evening. A crowd flowed through Piazza Barberini, so many. I had not thought death would claim so many.

The visual memory of the Capuchin cemetery haunted me. As a child I feared skeletons above all other representations of death, of the underworld, of monsters patrolling the darkest corners of my nightmares. Vampires and werewolves and zombies are demonstrably unreal, and that realization enables the conscious eye to tame the frightened imagination. But skeletons — invariably half-eaten skeletons of birds and rodents still clad in tattered feathers and skin — affront any child who has explored forests, fields, or even city sidewalks. Skeletons are as real as they are dead, and the infantile brain translates with ease the message borne by bones on the ground: You too shall be stripped of all flesh, for the pine trees that flank you now in life will surround you, in their death as in yours, to no avail. Your guts shall be food for worms, and your bones alone shall bear mute testimony that you ever stood and walked and talked. Consider Phlebas the Phoenician, who was once handsome and tall as you. In the streets of Rome, the fear I felt in my youth returned to me. And I trembled.

In a feeble effort to deflect these fears, my mind conjured the image of another set of bones. Wegen und gegen Tod in Rom erinnerte ich das ROM. I recalled a visit long ago to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which houses a diverse and fascinating stash of artifacts in its own right but is strictly sterile by comparison to the Capuchin crypt. The Royal Ontario Museum's collection includes a complete skeleton of a hadrosaur. Saurian skeletons, unlike their human counterparts, have a strangely soothing effect. The terrible lizards and falcons of the Mesozoic satisfy our atavistic fascination with serpents and dragons, while we sit safely behind the reassuring aegis of extinction. Their bones testify to a lost race of veritable monsters, whose reduction to skeletal form proclaims the impossibility that dinosaurs might return and reclaim our world for their own.

The Capuchin crypt and the typical dinosaur exhibit rest heavily on the public display of bones, but the resemblance ends there. The Royal Ontario Museum strives to portray the hadrosaur as it might have looked in life, albeit for the purpose of stressing how the entire superorder died out and will not return. By contrast, the Capuchins make surreal art of their brothers' bones in furtherance of an altogether different aesthetic and moral aim. Within Christianity, especially the Catholic variation on that theme, death represents the threshold of a different eternity. The dinosaur fossil on display looks alive and real so that museumgoers will know of its death in the past. The skeleton in the Catholic crypt stresses its death so that believers will aspire to a future life whose promise lies in its very invisibility.

Remembering Ontario's hadrosaur brought me no comfort. This duck-billed theropod figures prominently in the skeptical chronicles of the geological transition between Cretaceous and Tertiary time. If indeed some nonavian dinosaurs survived the event that deposited death and iridium at the close of the Mesozoic, evidence that some dinosaurs stumbled into the Paleocene comes from fossils above the K-T boundary in Montana's Hell Creek Formation. Distance above the K-T boundary translates readily into time, and four feet above the iridium layer suggests a geologically significant span of 40,000 years.


Hadrosaurs are the Elvis Presleys of natural history. Casual outsiders might be forgiven for imagining that waves of paleontologists seeking fame (or at least tenure) keep finding hadrosaur fossils in Cenozoic soil. Pollen samples near a fossilized femur found in Ojo Alamo Sandstone at the San Juan River in Utah suggest that at least one hadrosaurid species lived a million years beyond the K-T boundary, even more firmly in Tertiary times. If these fragments of the fossil record are to be believed, especially by their position relative to the iridium layer, then at least one branch of the saurian clade penetrated the Paleocene. Skeptical paleontologists argue that these fossils worked their way into the Tertiary by virtue of later abiotic forces. Hadrosaur fossils above the K-T boundary are fascinating, even shocking, but not if their presence in recent geologic time is attributable to everyday erosion rather than the survival of one or more saurian species beyond the great dying that ended Middle Earth.

As I trained my thoughts on Ontario's hadrosaur in a futile attempt to neutralize the terror of the Capuchin crypt, an even deeper source of fear gripped me. What if the dinosaur fossils found above the K-T boundary were not reworked by erosion into Paleocene sediments? What indeed if those relics do in fact testify to the temporary survival of this species? I recalled the work of David Jablonski, a paleontologist whose survey of marine invertebrates found a significant number of mollusk species that survived mass extinctions, only to succumb shortly thereafter or to remain forever stunted in population and diversity. Perhaps mass extinction events change physical environments in ways that doom certain survivors. Or perhaps the ecosystems that emerge as the earth as a whole recovers from mass extinctions disfavor those survivors. Whatever the reason, geologic time is studded with instances of "dead clades walking" — species that survive catastrophic events on strictly borrowed time and are destined, as an only slightly extended consequence of those disasters, to join other victims in the gallery of extinction.

The loudest hour of the day had come, the hour before dusk, when the city groans under foot and wheel. A waxing crescent moon hung low; its thin copper sickle scraped the western skies over Trastevere. The breeze of passing traffic swept my trembling hand, and I lifted my eyes unto the hills of Rome as I made my way toward Il Campo dei Fiori.

---

"The field of flowers," said Reena when we parted in Corniglia, "is the place where you'll find me. You just have to look for it by the name the Romans use."

Clever girl. On the basis of an hour's exposure to me, Reena recognized that I could not resist a linguistic puzzle. Ten minutes before the time designated for our rendezvous, I strolled into Il Campo dei Fiori, knowing she could be nowhere else.

Reena had also come early. She showed me something different than either my shadow at morning striding behind me, or my shadow at evening rising to meet me. She showed me yearning in that moment of lust. By the street lamps I could see her approaching the square. She wore a dress of solid red, cinched at the waist. The slits in the skirt matched her décolletage, as if to spell A-V-A, a symbol of primal womanhood. Have. Have Ava. Have her. Hava. Above her breast she had pinned a golden dragonfly with black trim. She stopped sharply, one precise arm's length before me, and flicked her hair to the right as she stood. In a summertime field of geraniums, pansies, and begonias, Reena Harrelson presented herself as the finest, rarest poppy in Rome. I gasped. A hint of opium, the suggestion of instant addiction, passed over my lips, and I stood speechless.

"Hi Ray." Reena mercifully broke the silence. "I'm sure you're hungry. There must be something you want around here."

"Wherever you go, I'll go too." Where you stay, I too will stay, and your people will be my people. "It's your Field of Flowers. I'm just passing through."

"You can't go wrong looking at Romans walking by. Over there." Reena pointed toward the last open sidewalk table at the nearest restaurant. "Let's sit. Then you can tell me what you want to see in town."

"Really, Reena, anything I see in Rome will be far beyond what I came to see in all of Italy. And I've seen precisely what I came to see in Rome. From this point forward, everything is a bonus."

But Reena was adamant. She laid out an itinerary more akin to a plan for conquest than a tourbook. She omitted no traditional tourist destination in Rome. She took pains to stress her favorite spots. The Sistine chapel. Ed anche La Pietà, in a room where women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. The mural outside the Forum showing the growth of Rome from a city-state to master of the Punic seas and ruler of the known world. Most temptingly, spots along the Tiber suited for bottled tea and uncorked conversation.

"You'll help me remember it all," she said. "Wherever I have my next adventure, I can think, 'Ray Kuo came to Rome and helped me celebrate my last days there.'"

As I scrambled to find some subtle way to communicate my willingness to join that "next adventure," our waiter appeared. Reena ordered filetto di salmone alla griglia. I ordered ossobuco.

That momentary return into halting Italian reminded me of Shelley Harrelson, whose insistence on linguistic comfort and congruence had triggered this entire adventure. "Reena, I hope your mother enjoyed her visit."

"Mother had a great time, thanks. That reminds me, Ray. There is one thing she wanted me to ask you." I nodded; Reena continued. "Why aren't you married?"

I swallowed hard. My conversational gambit could not have backfired harder. "I was."

"I don't mean to pry," Reena said. "And neither did Mother. She has a hard time imagining nice boys — or girls, for that matter — staying single for long. Her generation did things differently, I guess."

"I don't begrudge her, or you, an answer," I replied. "I am older than you after all, and that alone puts me closer toward understanding what your mother means by posing that question. You might say that I know the ways of old, ways of renown."

"The short version of the story, Reena, is this: Yes, I've been married. I no longer am. I've never been divorced."

"Oh. She died." Silence hung between us, as if hooked on the street lamps on the perimeter of Il Campo dei Fiori. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine. You shouldn't imagine that I found and then lost the love of my life. That adventure, I would like to think . . . no, I need to know it will happen yet. I need to know that I will find at least one great love in my life. Somewhere. Some time."

Right here. Right now. Please.

"But you don't need to worry. Cassandra died years ago. All the while, the world has moved on. As if I had any choice in the matter, so have I.

"What I'm about to say might sound cruel, but I hope you will not think of it, or me, that way. I loved Cassandra, as you would hope I did, and I had to watch her die. And as time passed, things found their way back to the place they might have been had I never known her. The world was mostly unchanged, and so was I, just a few years older."

To no god in particular, I prayed that Reena did not catch me in my lie.

"Time for mourning passed long ago. The Ray you know is the Ray who is ready to help you enjoy your final adventure in Rome. If we were still in Cinque Terre, I'd invite you to join me on the beach, to hear the mermaids singing."

"You do appreciate music," Reena replied. "I like that."

Voices musical and true. At her own mention of the word music, Reena began singing at a volume almost imperceptible to anyone besides herself, as she did the day I met her and her mother on the staircase to Corniglia. The making of this new musical moment reminded me of another voice, one falling far short of perfection in pitch, yet at once warm and terrifying as it echoed in my memory.

Despite straining, I could not remember the precise timbre of Cassandra's voice.

Between the soft melody of Reena's singing and the indifferent disharmony of other diners' streetside conversation, I shuffled frantically through the aural records of my mind. I recalled hearing Cassandra's voice, completely by surprise, on a tape some weeks after her death. I suddenly remembered every other detail of that evening — how I neglected to return to the dinner I had laid out for myself, how my home's heating system clicked off as the tape ended and cold crept across my carpet and over my feet, how I lay alone crying in bed till sleep overtook me and new light, as cruel as it was inevitable, forced me into a conscious confrontation with the following day. No feeding, no heating, no breeding. Cassandra had died, but her voice lingered on tape. Her death, the utter finality of her death, had changed the entire world in ways detectable by me alone, and a lonely, skeletal phonorecord of her voice built the sole bridge back across time, to a place where she was still alive and her breath, no matter how feeble, represented the possibility, no matter how remote, that I might yet redeem both life and love. The very strength of the memory of that evening shocked me all the more as I struggled to replay that tape — any metaphorical tape — of Cassandra's voice.

Reena continued to sing. In the desperation of my silent memory I heard her voice, passing effortlessly through paragraph upon paragraph of well rehearsed arias. I stabbed my meal. The knife struck the impenetrable center of the veal shank before me and slid with such force that it cracked the enamel of the plate below.

My surprised grunt broke the conversational stalemate. "Here in Rome, though, we're far from anything resembling a beach. Let's go tour the Forum tomorrow, to see the bleached bones left behind by the capital of the Republic or even of the young Empire."

"Good choice," Reena said. She resumed her singing; a single, clear note punctuated her approval.

The normal progression of dinner resumed. We spoke no more of Cassandra. And once I had chosen the Forum as the starting point for the final adventure Reena was determined to enjoy in Rome before her return stateside, we spoke no more of tourism. Two cups of espresso and the dinner check arrived; I slid one cup toward Reena and swept everything else toward my edge of the table. The time had come, our conscious wishes notwithstanding, to speak of life after Reena's stay in Rome.

Reena's musical training in Rome, it soon became clear, had yielded professional fruit. She praised her agent, who evidently had begun identifying auditions and even securing contracts. Reena lamented the need to fulfill a two-month tour of duty on the entertainment staff of a cruise ship, arranged shortly before she had won her Rotary scholarship. But that stint was all that stood between her evacuation from Rome and another excursion with her mother to New York. "Since I'm her youngest," Reena explained, "Mom wants to make one last trip so that she can help her baby set up shop. I don't know what she can do to help me find a day job and a place to live, but at the very worst I can take her sightseeing.

"You already know how she is about climbing stairs."

I smiled, recalling our encounter in Corniglia. "If it would help at all," I said, "I can come to New York and take your mother around town while you run practical errands. New York is far from home, but a lot closer and a lot more familiar than Italy."

"If she ever hears that suggestion, my mother will insist on it." Reena laughed. "She can't understand how I could possibly prefer the company of foreigners, bohemians and such to that of ambitious young Americans."

Having no answer I wished to offer, I instead stretched my eyelids to their limit. Reena continued speaking. "Surely you understand. You came here, too, to see exotic people in a beautiful place."

"Actually, Reena, you have that right, only in reverse. I came to see ancient natural history buried in obscurity beneath the glory of modern human culture. But I put that aside when I met a beautiful person in an exotic place."

A shadow fell between Reena and me. "Allora, Fabrizzio, come stai?" Reena spoke as she looked toward the center of Il Campo dei Fiori and addressed the man who had stopped between our table and the edge of the sidewalk.

Reena and Fabrizzio spoke at some length. Or so it seemed, as I suspended all efforts I might otherwise have invested in studying a conversation between an American and an Italian, the better to decipher the oral Rosetta stone presented by a dialogue between a native speaker and a determined, reasonably educated foreigner. As their exchange continued, Fabrizzio seemed as demonstrative as Reena seemed distracted.

Despite my efforts to maintain some distance from Reena and Fabrizzio, I inferred something singularly curious about their obvious familiarity. He called her by her full first name. Corinna.

Reena locked eyes with me, as if to convey her desire to interrupt her conversation with Fabrizzio. "Excuse me, Ray, I'm sorry." She raised a palm to Fabrizzio, as though to set a momentary conversational boundary separating him from Reena and from me. This is Fabrizzio. He builds stage sets; we met soon after I began singing for a light opera company near the Circo Massimo. As you can see, on his account I've learned a lot of Italian. But he knows he's losing me as soon as I leave Rome, and he wonders when we'll be done so that he and I might share a drink on one of my last nights here."

Ecco, il miglior Fabrizzio. "May I ask Fabrizzio a simple question?", I asked Reena.

"You might be better off asking me to ask him," she answered. "I haven't exactly taught him any English."

"I think I can manage this one. Fabrizzio, come sta? Canta lei? Canta lei bene, come Corinna?"

Fabrizzio laughed. His choking gesture confirmed what I could infer, only imperfectly, from his actual words. Having answered my question, he redirected his gaze at Reena and resumed their conversation.

"Più tarde, Fabrizzio. Ciao!" Reena gestured Fabrizzio back into the street and did not spin back toward me until she was sure that he had left. Her mouth hung open as she started speaking with me again. "Ray, I'm sorry."

"What could you possibly be apologizing for?" I exhaled before continuing. "He seemed really eager to talk to you."

"You could join us for that drink. I can call some other friends, and we'll make a party of it. Maybe even some of the other singers from the opera where I met Fabrizzio."

"Thanks. Truth be told, we have a long day ahead. I've really enjoyed dinner, and now I think it makes sense to rest. I'll see you tomorrow morning at the entrance to the Forum. I can't wait to see Roman history in its bleached splendor. With you."

"Okay." Reena opened her purse, reapplied lipstick, and resumed singing. Throughout the entire evening, she had maintained the same melody.

The sound of distant thunder overtook both Reena's singing and the ambient sounds of street life in Il Campo dei Fiori. A light mist descended. The sun had set long ago; even its two handmaidens that evening, Venus and the waxing crescent moon, had retreated beneath the western horizon. Brilliant evening star, whose beauty is fleeting as it is bright, that never reaches the zenith.

In the suddenly Stygian darkness I took stock of my abortive quest to reach Gubbio and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. I realized that I had erred in several crucial respects. My mistakes were not strictly geographic, though I found myself miles from my original objective and out of time and will to reverse course. Rather, I had made fatal errors in reconciling mythological and personal narratives with the geographic circumstances and emotional imperatives before me, in harmonizing the felt necessities of this moment with my intuitions of private desire.

In Corniglia I had taken pains not to look back at the sea as I escorted Reena Harrelson and her mother up a staircase. I fancied myself Orfeo, master of the voice and the lyre and by sheer willpower a would-be conqueror of death. In Rome, by contrast, a faraway storm rumbled, and its front edge shrouded the city in nighttime fog. The late summer heat gathered in the asphalt and the cobblestones of Rome vaporized the rain as it fell, and warm steam rose to meet the brooding omnipresence of that evening's mist.

A brief window to Tarturus had opened, and I looked through it seeking alternate sources of mythological inspiration. Orfeo, after all, merely visited Hades, long enough to plead his case, with ultimately devastating success, before the god of the underworld and his consort. To truly understand Tarturus, you must consult its permanent inmates. This is no easy feat: the dead yield no secrets, even less so those who lived solely in a mythological world, unless you conjure them back into reality by the sheer intensity of your imagination. And so I contemplated Sisifo, as Romans would call him, with all my strength. Sisifo also heard the sound of thunder, albeit beneath his feet rather than over his head, each time his stone escaped his grasp at the top of his hill in Tarturus. I too stood, momentarily immobile in Rome, as I watched my own version of Sisifo's Rock of Ages roll back toward its origin. Among rare earths, I have no doubt, Sisifo would choose tantalum — ductile, conductive, and fabulously unresponsive to the inorganic world's reactive temptations. Surely Sisifo by this choice, one of the few afforded to the residents of the underworld, would honor his equally proud and deceitful fellow Tarturan inmate. My choice, in spite of — indeed, because of — all that had happened on my way to Gubbio, remained iridium. Rare, dense, and richly evocative of worlds past and lost.

I tried my hardest to imagine Sisifo happy. An Italian expedition that had begun as anabasis in Liguria had ended, for essential emotional purposes, as katabasis in Lazio. Looking skyward once again, I reminded myself that each return to the struggle toward the heights, no matter how futile, no matter how doomed to repetitive failure, was enough to fill and sustain my heart. But Rome remained shrouded in clouds, and no stars returned my gaze.

I straightened my focus back toward earth in time to see Reena Harrelson walking away. She blew me a kiss as she stepped back into the street. The clack of her heels punctuated the grinding rumble surrounding Il Campo Dei Fiori. That evening I heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I stood perfectly still as I watched Reena fade into the Roman night. I stayed till I could hear no further trace of her voice. The streetlamps and storefronts returned my gaze as moisture gathered on my face, and I beheld the city through a curtain of miniature rainbows.

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