22
By late October, Greer had taken and examined all her cores. She’d sent off her sediment samples for radiocarbon dating to establish the island’s ecological timeline. A copy of Selling’sStudies in Hawaiian Pollen Statistics had finally arrived, along with herbarium samples from Kew that would help her, for the next month, identify the unknown pollen grains.
Vicente and Sven were helping Burke-Jones excavate amoai at the quarry—in preparation for his experiment they had to loosen ground beneath the statue—and Greer worked alone in the SAAS building. The hours passed quietly as she pulled her stool between the two microscopes on the lab’s long worktables. She had devised an angled platform for her microscope so she didn’t strain her neck, and on long days she wore a thin brace. At noon, Mahina brought her lunch, and Greer would sometimes show her the pollen. Mahina had a good eye for the subtle differences—she could spot a small indentation in the exine immediately—and liked to compare what she saw in the microscope to the pictures in the pollen guide.
Occasionally, when they took a break from their work at the quarry, Vicente would stop by to say hello, or Sven would burst in with a joke: “So how are thePollen Esians today?” Sometimes, at night, while waiting for her centrifuge, Greer would stroll down the hall to Burke-Jones’s lab, where he retreated at the day’s end to fine-tune his miniature worlds.
Greer suspected that her emerging picture of the island’s early flora could help him. At the middle levels of her cores, she had found pollen of theTriumfetta semitriloba, the tree widespread across the Pacific that was used to make rope. If ropes had moved the statues, she told Burke-Jones, they probably would have been made from the bark of this plant.
“It still grows in Tahiti,” she said from the doorway of his lab. He was uneasy with visitors, so Greer never crossed the threshold. “We could have some sent. I’m sure you could get SAAS to pitch in. Talk to Isabel.”
He pushed his chair back and surveyed his dioramas. “I do think they used something soft, something fibrous.”
“Well, let’s get some shipped, then. And we can all help with the weaving. How much do you need?”
Burke-Jones stared straight ahead, as though reading calculations in the air. “One hundred and seventy-eight yards.”
“Let’s say two hundred.”
“Twenty-two yards will go to waste.”
“We’ll find a use for them. If worse comes to worst, we’ll make asemitriloba hammock for future SAAS researchers. Shall I write the forest service on Tahiti?”
“I’d like the simulation to be as accurate as possible.”
“Then let’s have genuinesemitriloba rope.”
He turned to her with a small smile. “That is something to be happy about.”
“It certainly is, Randolph.”
Other plants as well were emerging from the island’s past.
Pollen from theSophora toromiro tree, similar to a Japanese pagoda tree, appeared in cores from all three craters. TheSophora genus was known for its bell-shaped calyxes, white and yellow flowers, pinnate leaves. TheSophora toromiro was undoubtedly the small tree noted by Captain Cook:Only two or three shrubs were seen. The leaf and seed of one (called by the natives Torromedo) were not much unlike those of common vetch . . . Thetoromiro , then, had outlived all its botanical peers.
Other pollen types appeared only in the cores’ upper levels: pollen almost identical toBroussonetia papyrifera , the mulberry trees whose bark fibers were used to make paper, and like the mulberry used throughout Polynesia for making tapa cloth. Again, Cook had observed:in several places the Otaheitean cloth plant, but it was poor and weak, and not above two and a half feet at most . . . The mulberry’s pollen, however, was absent from the lowest sediment levels, suggesting it had arrived with the first settlers.
At the lowest levels, the pollen record shifted drastically. Here were spores of at least ten different Pteridophtya, including the expected ferns.
Most interesting, though, was an unknown pollen type clogging the bottom of the cores—oblong grains with a large depression bisecting the center. Whatever this angiosperm was, it had once blanketed the island and had been extinct for several hundred years, the pollen beginning to thin out just as the paper mulberry appeared. Greer would have to send a sample to Kew to see if they had anything similar—but the chances were slim. If this plant had been on the island for thousands of years, it was so far removed from its ancestors that its genealogy would be hard to trace.
And still, the question of wood lingered. Roggeveen and Cook had mentioned canoes with long planks—but neither theSophora toromiro nor paper mulberry trunks could suffice for boat building. Was the pollen at the lowest levels from a large heavy-wood tree?
The Frenchman Jean-Fran?ois de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, visiting the island in 1786, also made note of the canoes:
They are composed only of very narrow planks, four or five feet long, and at most can carry but four men. I have seen three of them in this part of the island, and I should not be much surprised, if in a short time, for want of wood, there should not be a single one remaining here . . .
The exactness with which they measured the ship showed that they had not been inattentive spectators of our arts; they examined our cables, anchors, compass, and wheel, and they returned the next day with a cord to take the measure over again . . .
Monsieur de Langle, La Pérouse’s companion, who made his way inland, observed shrubs of paper mulberry and mimosa, remarking that only one tenth of the island was cultivated, the rest covered with coarse grass. The only birds sighted by Monsieur de Langle were terns at the bottom of the crater. The statues seen through his telescopes had all fallen. None of this, thought Greer, differed from previous travelogues.
What struck her, however, was that Langle and La Pérouse both assumed the island had once hosted different vegetation. Langle estimated the island’s human population at two thousand and added:There is reason to think that the population was more considerable when the island was better wooded. La Pérouse even accused the Rapa Nui of deforestation. He complained of the lava rocks strewn across the land, explaining:
. . . these stones, which we found so troublesome in walking, are of great use, by contributing to the freshness and moisture of the ground, and partly supply the want of salutary shade of the trees which the inhabitants were so imprudent as to cut down, in times, no doubt, very remote, by which their country lies fully exposed to the rays of the sun, and is destitute of running springs and streams . . .
. . . M. de Langle and myself had no doubt that this people owed the misfortune of their situation to the imprudence of their ancestors . . .
Greer was reading this one evening in the main room of theresidencial when Mahina came in.
“Iorana, Doctora!” She cradled several cans of peaches. “Look.Peti .” She set the cans, one at a time, on the edge of her desk. “Ramon give uspeti .”
“Iorana,Mahina.”
She glanced down at Greer’s book. “Thedoctora always work.”
“I know. Another European travelogue of Easter Island. Do you know about any tree stories in the island legends? Trees that once grew here? When Hotu Matua came?”
“I’ve already told you the story of Hau Maka, and of the dream soul who flew toward the sun and found the most beautiful island.”
“In that story, were there trees?”
“There was everything.” She sat behind her desk. “The fish and the fruit and the flowers. The dream soul sees everything she desires.”
“La Pérouse says that the islanders cut trees down. And I’ve found a strange pollen type in my cores, at the lowest level, and I’m wondering if there’s anything in the oral tradition about trees.”
“There is one story I heard as a child, but it is only legend, as you say. It is not for your science.”
“Try me.”
“Well, it is the story of how the big tree came to be. There was a woman, Sina, who loved the man Tuna, but she could not have him. Forbidden. She had many other men, suitors, you say, and the suitors came together to capture Tuna in a big net. The night before they kill him, Sina came to see him, to sayiorana , and Tuna says the next morning she must plant his head in the ground and it will grow a large tree that will remind her of him.”
Greer wrote this down, and Mahina examined it to make sure it followed her account. It was the same motif that appeared in every mythology—the tree-spirit, the Maypole, tales of death and regeneration, sacrifice and growth. Human life was always bound to plant life. In Australia and the Philippines, trees were thought to hold the spirits of dead ancestors. The Russian Kostrubonku and Indian Kangara held funerals for dead vegetation. According to Norse myth, Odin created the first man and woman from two logs he found by the shore.
These stories tried to explain the world, to make sense of the wilderness that surrounded primitive people. Why tell a story of a large tree when none grew?
“It is make-believe,” said Mahina.
“Vegetation myth,” said Greer. “But useful.”
“Myth,” repeated Mahina. “Because we have no big trees here.” She walked over to Greer and examined the first few pages of the book. “La Pérouse. Yes, it is good.”
“A lot of pages wasted complaining of stolen hats.”
“Hats?”
“Hau,” said Greer, pointing to her head. “Every travel account so far describes an almost obsessive theft of hats. The islanders seemed to like them.”
Mahina pondered this for a moment.
“Maybe,” she said, “they need the shade.”
It was the first week of November, summer, but gray clouds hung overhead all morning. The crowd stared expectantly at the sky, hoping that if it rained, it would at least begin soon, before they rolled back their sleeves, wrapped their hands around the fibrous rope, and began dragging themoai down the hill.
Burke-Jones, dressed in safari gear, stood over a diorama on the hood of his Jeep. He had assigned each small figure a number correlating to one of the fifty life-size humans awaiting his instructions.
There was a great excitement in the air; Greer could feel it. For the past week everybody had been talking about this day. Burke-Jones’s announcement at the conference had, in fact, catalyzed the island. Almost one hundred islanders were now milling about the grassy slopes of Rano Raraku, themoai quarry, waiting to see how their ancestors had done it. For Burke-Jones, for Vicente, even for Greer, this was a scientific experiment. But for the Rapa Nui this was not a fact to be filed away, this was their heritage, the epic of their ancestors.
The logistics, however, were daunting. The fifty volunteers first had to stand in a long line that snaked through dozens of fallenmoai as Burke-Jones handed each one a numbered placard on a necklace of string. He then called people over in groups of five, and showed them on his diorama where to stand. When her group was called, Greer was surprised to see that Burke-Jones had included himself—a small toothpick figure beside a red matchbox Jeep in exactly the position he was standing. She was relieved to know there were researchers more obsessive than she was. He had assigned each group a team leader—toothpicks with red tips. Theirs was Sven.
“Oh, no,” said Vicente, sporting a number “34” placard over his tan shirt. He had rolled up the sleeves, and was wearing khaki shorts rather than his usual pants.
“It’s about time I got some respect,” said Sven.
“There is always room for a coup.” Vicente winked. “It’s in my blood.”
Burke-Jones looked up from the diorama. “Pay very close attention to where you are supposed to stand.” He pointed to a row of toothpick figures. “Team two takes up the middle row on the statue’s northern side.”
Sven turned to Greer and Vicente. “I’ve been informed that team two will take up position on the statue’s—”
“It’s hot, Sven,” Greer said.
“You see how my subordinates speak to me?” Sven asked Burke-Jones.
“What we won’t put ourselves through for science,” sighed Vicente.
Burke-Jones stared fixedly at his diorama. “You have your assignments,” he said. “Team three!”
“Good luck, Randolph,” Greer said.
“Promptly, please!”
The volunteers were clearly put out by this rigid show of authority. Teams three and four walked away from the Jeep disgruntled, and Sven eventually gave up on his own game, threw his arm around Burke-Jones, and said: “No society, no matter how advanced, could have been as organized as you. Let’s get started with the shimmying.” But Burke-Jones would not be swayed from his agenda.
It took over an hour, but soon everyone had a number, knew where to stand, and had been assigned a group leader. Vicente, who had brought a camera, took shots of Burke-Jones as he delegated and pointed and examined his diorama, and as he then compared it, with a look of amazement, to the scene before him. It was remarkable, thought Greer: on one hillside, three orders of magnitude. The toothpick people, the life-size volunteers, and above them, on the crater, flat on its back, a twenty-foot stone giant to be hauled down the hill to loom above everything.
As things were about to start, Vicente turned his camera over to Mahina, asking her to document the experiment. She stood off to the side with dozens of islanders, the older and meeker who had come to watch. Greer was one of only two women who would be pulling, and she had had to fight Burke-Jones for the chance. He wanted to replicate the historic conditions, and it was a near certainty women hadn’t helped move themoai. Vicente finally persuaded him she couldn’t hinder the results. He had pointed to Sven across the dinner table: “Let’s face it. They certainly didn’t have Swedes to help, or British architects to coordinate.”
Isabel, who had stayed on for the experiment, stood by Mahina in pink culottes and white tennis shoes, her arms crossed. Every few minutes she dipped her head, inched her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose, scanned the volunteers, Sven in particular, and then tapped her glasses back into place.
“Positions!” called Burke-Jones, and the crowd approached the supine statue. A web of ropes, handmade from theTriumfetta semitriloba trees flown in from Tahiti, had been lashed around its neck. For the past several nights, Greer and Sven and Vicente had gathered at the Residencial Ao Popohanga, where Mahina taught them and several of her friends to weave the fibers. They had made over two hundred yards of rope, which now hung in loose lines about the statue like locks of hair.
Burke-Jones blew his whistle three times, and everyone crouched and lifted their ropes, tentacles coming to life. Greer sunk her feet deep into the grass, bent her legs, and prepared herself. Vicente was in front of her, Sven in front of him. The whistle blew—two long, one short—and all the teams heaved. Greer’s face flooded with the heat of exertion. Her palms burned around the rough fibers of the rope. She shifted her weight from leg to leg, but no matter her position, every muscle rebelled. All sorts of sounds began springing up. Grunts, moans, a distinctMi madre . Someone on the statue’s other side cursed Burke-Jones. Finally the whistle blew, and all of them, dizzied and hot, let the ropes drop and collapsed in the grass.
Several women from the audience waved canteens at the volunteers. Vicente and Greer sipped from their own.
“This will be a long day, I think.”
Disappointment had already set in among the volunteers. They drank their water, wiped their foreheads, leaned against the statue. Greer carefully stretched her neck, which was now bothering her for the first time in over a year.
Again came the whistle. They lifted their ropes. Burke-Jones blew again. Greer could feel the furnace of her muscles burning, the skin on her hands chafing against the coarse rope. Again the quit whistle. Nothing.
Burke-Jones had clearly anticipated this. Three of the team leaders were summoned, and a project of collecting stones began. Within an hour a pile of rocks had been wedged beneath themoai ’s head—this might raise the statue enough to get some leverage on the ropes. While the rocks were set in place, the sun reached its full height. Volunteers tied scarves and bandanas over their heads, doused their necks with canteen water. Only a slight breeze rolled off the ocean. When Greer looked toward the coast, she saw Luka Tepano on his horse at the bottom of the hill. He was studying the motions of the volunteers, the ropes being tested, the stones being rolled. This was a good distance from the woman’s cave, and it seemed he’d come simply to watch. He appeared transfixed, but when Greer looked a few minutes later, he was gone.
A team of volunteers flanked the head, seated so their feet could further wedge the stones beneath themoai as it was pulled. Again, the whistle blew; this time Burke-Jones had ordered a rocking motion, in the hopes that the simultaneous force of all fifty people would help.Uno. Dos. Tres. Hee-yaa! Etahi. Erua. Etoru. Hee-yaa! Then on the opposite side shouts exploded, and the whistle spluttered, the sound of a referee madly calling a time-out. Everyone released their ropes. With Vicente and Sven in tow, Greer ran to the other side: Team number three, five panting men, were heaped on top of a very disgruntled team four. One of the ropes had snapped.
Burke-Jones called a lunch break while he examined the torn rope and made adjustments on his diorama. Mahina had come down the hill to sit with Greer and Vicente, and Isabel stretched out her legs in the grass. They all shielded their eyes from the sun.
“These ropes aren’t strong enough,” said Vicente. “Perhaps if they were thicker.”
“Let’s hope it’s the ropes,” said Sven, “because I don’t want to think we’re not strong enough.”
Vicente sighed. “Poor Burke-Jones. He has been planning this for months.”
“Well, Burke-Jones will get the job done,” said Sven. “I have faith in the man. He has plans A through Z filed away in his mind. We may be here all day, all week, but he’ll get it done.”
“Now we can appreciate how hard a task it was to move these things,” said Vicente.
Greer was thinking of the tree legend Mahina had told her. She’d been reading further and had found a similar myth from other Polynesian islands—the myth of the coconut palm. Of course, there hadn’t been a trace of coconut palm pollen in any of her cores. The unknown pollen was still unidentified—neither Kew nor the Swedish Museum of Natural History was able to name it. They both suggested she send a sample to Strasbourg, France, where a new International Laboratory of Pollen Sciences had just been established, staffed with the best pollen-typing experts from around the world. She’d done just that and crossed her fingers. Whatever it was, the species was endemic to the island, and so far removed from any parent plant, it had lost all traces of its inheritance. But what if it were some sort of palm? A large tree used for construction, strong enough to move themoai ? Ropes and stones clearly weren’t sufficient, a thought that had apparently occurred to Burke-Jones as well, who was now distributing five-foot gnarled planks from specially flown-in Japanese pagoda trees—the closest match to thetoromiro tree that had once covered the island.
Planks in hand, their numbered placards flipping in the wind, the volunteers looked like a group of marathoners preparing to riot. They dragged their wedges up the grassy hill and reassembled around the statue. Greer doubted this would work—pagoda wood wasn’t very sturdy, and the planks were too short to be of much use. What were needed were planks as long as the statue, fifteen to twenty feet, that could slide the statue on its back.
The whistle blew. Half the volunteers were still pulling ropes, team three was still wedging stones, but now two teams were shoving planks beneath themoai ’s head, trying to use the wood as levers. Then came a crackling as one by one the planks snapped, and then another rope was torn in half. Burke-Jones sounded the whistle, defeated.
Greer sat to catch her breath. Some of the spectators had already left, like fans heading home when their team’s score is too low for hope. Mahina, though, remained, taking pictures of volunteers collapsed in the grass. Greer looked at her watch—almost four—and knew that soon Burke-Jones would have to call it a day.
Greer, weary, glanced toward the coastal path where the Jeeps were parked and the horses tethered, and there was Luka Tepano again. This time the woman from the cave was seated behind him on his horse, holding one hand up to shield her eyes from the sun. They slowly approached the site, but stopped at a distance of about forty yards, staring at the scaffolding. Sven, deep in conversation with Isabel, who was dabbing his forehead with a lace handkerchief, didn’t notice them. Only Greer seemed aware of their presence, and lifted her hand to wave.
“How many strikes until you’re out?” Sven was asking.
“The last time is the luckiest, no?” asked Vicente.
“Forty-eight men, two women, a hell of a lot of rocks, and trees. How many trees did he get, Greer?”
“Ten pagoda,” she said, pulled back to the group. “And fifteensemitriloba for the rope.”
“Twenty-five trees,” said Sven. “You can’t accuse the man of not trying.”
“Poor Burke-Jones,” sighed Greer, watching him rearrange his diorama, “soon we’re actually going to have to try moving this thing with toothpicks and dental floss. We’ve nothing else left.”
“We have our effort,” said Vicente. “And our spirit.”
They took their positions once again, now on themoai ’s other side—Burke-Jones had shuffled everyone around, as though simple rearrangement might offset the ineptitude of their tools. Greer noticed Luka and the old woman were still watching. The whistle blew, the last fragments of pagoda wood were jabbed into the ground, the ropes were held like lifelines, the rocks rolled. Curses flew through the air as the volunteers, on this last attempt, gave their all. But when the quit whistle finally sounded, Greer dropped the rope and stepped back from themoai with enormous relief. A silence descended on the scene; the crowd looked to Burke-Jones, whose face, fixed on the statue, was expressionless.
“I think he’s going to want the whole bucket of pisco tonight,” said Sven.
“He looks ill,” said Vicente. They all three wiped the sweat from their faces, and stumbled toward the Jeep.
“Let’s call it a day,” said Sven, patting Burke-Jones’s back.
“Randolph,” said Vicente, “you’ve done a great thing here. We must always test our hypotheses, and follow the answers wherever they lead us.”
“I see an ice-cold pisco sour in your hand, my friend.”
Burke-Jones’s mouth hung open for a moment, then closed. It was as though after six hours of unprecedented activity, he had spent himself. He had, it seemed, nothing left to say.
“Randolph,” began Greer, “I think what we saw here today might be related to something else I’m seeing in my cores—”
Burke-Jones nodded slowly, then climbed into the Jeep, started the engine, and drove off. The diorama, which had been resting on the hood, flew into the air and fell to the grass, the matchbox Jeep landing exactly where the actual Jeep had sat, the small toothpick figures scattering in the wind.
When Greer returned to theresidencial that night, there was a letter from the International Laboratory of Pollen Sciences in Strasbourg waiting beneath her door. She tore open the small envelope. The letter was handwritten:
Jesus! I don’t have a thing here that resembles that little critter you sent me, but I would bet my ass it’s a palm species. Call it an informed hunch. You’ll need some proof though, verification (all good scientists do, don’t they?). Maybe look for macrofossils. Fossilized leaves, bark, nuts.
Easter Island!—I feared you’d dropped off the face of the earth (forwarding address with the p.o. next time? or a phone number? Do they even have phones there?). When I heard about Thomas I tried to get hold of you. Looks like somebody didn’t want to be gotten hold of. They should let you run the Witness Protection program! Anyway, I ought to offer my condolences.
If you’re ever passing through Strasbourg you must come say hi. The paté is divine, the wine, primo. No scuba diving here, but I gave that up anyway ’cause I slipped a disc. I smoke, I don’t know, about five packs a day. I’m happy.
I’ve thought of you often, you know. Please visit.
All good wishes,
Josephine (French pals insist—I kind of like it now) Banks
P.S. You should think of going by Dr. Sandor. When I saw Dr. Farraday on the analysis request form, I nearly had a heart attack. Also, have you heard about the National Geo expedition to Surtsey in February? Right up your alley. They’re looking for palynologists.
Greer sat on the bed and set the letter beside her. She tugged off her boots, peeled off her damp shirt, and looked again at the piece of paper. Jo. Greer thought she’d never hear from her again, that Jo had given up on her. Greer had never blamed her for this, knowing how hard it must have been for Jo to see her accused of plagiarism, humiliated in front of the whole department. Jo, who without a moment’s doubt knew what Thomas had done and then had to watch Greer’s stubborn denial. Jo must have known her accusation of Thomas would be suspect, that the simple act of defending a friend might seem the jealousy of a spurned lover. In the end, Jo had no choice but to let Greer figure it out on her own. She probably hadn’t thought it would take Greer five years.
Greer looked at Jo’s signature, the familiar handwriting. This unexpected hello should have made Greer happy, but sitting in the small room where she’d spent the past few months, she felt suddenly edgy. The note brought back too much, too suddenly. Jo, Thomas, the dissertation. Things she’d come here to get away from. That whole part of her life in Madison now seemed incomprehensible. Ever since Thomas’s death, the question plagued her: How hadn’t she seen it? Why hadn’t she realized his betrayal? She was an intelligent woman; she’d graduated summa cum laude from college, had a Ph.D. in botany and palynology. Yet when the evidence was presented, she simply turned away.
Greer looked at the letter once more, folded it, and slid it back in its envelope. She could feel the ache in her limbs, but wouldn’t be able to sleep now. She didn’t want to lie in the bed whispering taxonomy to herself.
Instead, she changed clothes and went to find Burke-Jones.
The laboratory was dark. Vicente and Sven, worn out, had gone back to their hotels to sleep, and perhaps Burke-Jones, too, was back at the Espíritu. But his silence at the moment she’d last seen him made Greer think otherwise. She turned on the lights and peeked into his room. Everything was in order, but no sign of him. As she now stepped across the threshold, she saw, for the first time, the full scope of his constructed world. The long table against the far wall was just the beginning. Perpendicular to either side of the room, six small tables each displayed their own green papier-maché islands, smallmoai enmeshed with dental floss and toothpicks. In some places the statues were propped up with piles of jellybeans. She ran her fingertips along one’s head, the same grainy texture as the real statues—volcanic tuff. Had Burke-Jones paid a carver to make hundreds ofmoai the size of soda cans? Or had he carved them himself, as he’d so meticulously built everything else?
She walked through the labyrinth of alternate universes—the differences between each were subtle. In some themoai were only slightly more upright than in others, and then she realized: chronology. Here was the history of the island laid out on all the tables in the room. On the final table he had included the toppledmoai, a barren landscape of fallen statues.
Greer flicked off the lights and went back outside. The air was cool now, the sky dark, and she made her way toward the village with her flashlight. She stopped into the Hotel Espíritu, and was told by a groggy Elian, the night watch, that Burke-Jones hadn’t yet returned. Elian lifted an invisible glass to his mouth and swigged. “Se?or Burke-Jones drink, I believe.”
Greer left the hotel and cut toward the main street—no sign of him. Heading out of town she spotted his Jeep beside the road to the old leper colony. She followed the path to where the moon lit the semicircle of abandoned huts. She saw a figure seated beside one of them.
“Randolph?”
There was no response, but as she moved closer she saw that it wasn’t Burke-Jones at all, but Luka Tepano.
He sat with his knees bent to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs, and his hands folded atop his shoes. His chin was tucked, but he now looked up.
“I saw you by themoai today,” she said. This was the first she’d spoken to him. “Habla usted inglés?I’m looking for a friend. The British engineer. The man who arranged the experiment.”
He offered a half-smile, but Greer wasn’t sure if he understood. He let his chin rest on his knees. He was old, his face deeply seamed but perfectly shaven. His thick hair was neatly parted, and despite the shabbiness of his clothes, he seemed well groomed. There was a quiet dignity to the way he sat. He was apparently lost in thought. If Burke-Jones had come this way, she doubted Luka Tepano had noticed him.
“Iorana,”she said, and made her way back toward the coast, continuing farther along the path, toward the cemetery—the same route she’d taken her first week on the island. There, among the scattered crosses, she saw him.
“Randolph, it’s Greer. I’ve just come to see if you’re all right.”
She moved closer to the crosses, white against the black sky, daisies and nasturtiums scattered before them.
He was leaning against a headstone, his hands in his lap, serene. “Look.” He tilted his head back. “One. Two. Three. Four. The Southern Cross.”
Greer looked up at the blizzard of stars. “There are some advantages to having few streetlights,” she said.
She sat down beside him. The cross before her read:Te Haha Huke. 1864–1922. Born in 1864, the year the missionaries arrived, long after the lastmoai had fallen.
“Listen, Randolph, there’s something in my work that could be of help to you. Not just theTriumfetta semitriloba trees, but palm trees,” she said. “There may have been some sort of palm tree on the island. I have fossil pollen from a plant that would have covered this whole island when the settlers arrived, but there’s no known match. I suspect palm, a good researcher in Strasbourg suspects palm; but I don’t know the exact species. There are an endless number of properties it could have displayed, so without knowing the species, it won’t tell us much about island life. But there was more here than theSophora toromiro. That I’m sure of.”
“Fine.”
“They had more than rope,” she said. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”
He shifted toward her now, his face peaceful—she thought he was about to answer, but he pressed his mouth to hers. His lips were warm and dry and moved tenderly against hers. Greer could sense her body’s curiosity at this forgotten intimacy.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away.
“It’s all right, Randolph.” She sat back against the headstone. It was her first kiss in almost a year, her first kiss with anyone but Thomas in a decade. She felt strange.
“Have you ever seen Lydia?” he asked. He slowly retrieved from his back pocket a wallet stuffed with small scraps of paper. Without a moment’s search he extracted one small photograph, its edges worn; in the dark Greer could vaguely discern the face of a woman. “Lydia,” he said.
“She’s beautiful,” said Greer, holding the picture before her as though the image were clear. “A beautiful woman.”
“She once read about Easter Island. A book with pictures. And do you know what she said? She said, ‘Randolph, I wonder how they moved those giant things.’ ” He took the photo back and slid it into the wallet. “Enough of that.”
“Randolph,” said Greer, standing. “You should go home and sleep.” She held out her hands and he clasped them—he sprung from the ground, so much lighter than the statue she’d spent the day trying to budge.
They drove in silence back to Hanga Roa, leaving the Jeep in the street. At the Hotel Espíritu, Elian emerged with a grin, no doubt imagining Greer had found Burke-Jones dead drunk in the road. He rushed forward to catch his arm and guide him inside.
Greer then headed back toward Mahina’s, past the other small hotels, theresidenciales; she looked at the lines of light filtering through wooden shutters, and wondered if behind those windows were other people like Burke-Jones, who had come to this island in search of some impossible answer. At the sign for the Residencial Ao Popohanga, Greer turned left, toward the road that cut to the southern coast. It was almost ten, but she wasn’t yet ready to go back to her room, to the letter, to a reminder of what she’d lost.
When Thomas’s fraud was exposed, he resigned his chair at Harvard, packed up his lab and his office, and moved everything to Marblehead. Through all of it he was silent, carrying his whole life—twenty years of notebooks stuffed with data, framed awards, press clippings, citations, a letter from Albert Einstein—in cardboard boxes, making lists of where they were going—attic, basement, office—as though to organize the confusion. Greer herself was still trying to grasp what had happened. He had forged his data. There was no Mags. Bruce had exposed him. But where had she been through all this? What was she doing married to a man who cared so little for science? Who cared so little for her that he had, she now realized, years earlier appropriated her equation for himself?
Greer knew she had to leave him. She just didn’t know how.
“I don’t expect you to stay with me,” Thomas said one night.
Greer wanted to laugh—after years of her trying to meet his expectations, he expected nothing.
“I’m not leaving you because of the scandal,” she said. “You know why I’m leaving.” Her anger was too large to express.
“I know,” he said.
He was sitting on the porch, an old Wisconsin notebook in his lap. He seemed strangely calm, as though nothing had happened, as though he owed no apologies.
“How come you never mentioned pollination by deceit?” she asked. “Those intro lectures. Strangler figs. Malay rafflesia. Wormwood. Why not include something about ghost flowers or sun orchids? Flowers that pretend to be something they’re not. The mimics. So they can lure the bees.”
“Lily, you’ve a right to be disappointed.”
“I’ve a right to be f*cking furious.”
“It had nothing to do with you.”
“That, Thomas, is the worst part.”
Deciding to leave was one thing, arriving somewhere new was another. Greer wrote letters to other universities, inquiring about research positions; she applied for several grants. And then, while Greer was still trying to figure out where she wanted to be, Thomas had a heart attack. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
She hadn’t asked him about the dissertation, but it was clear now he’d taken her equation. What she still couldn’t understand, though, was why on earth she’d let him. For months this haunted her. While she packed up his things, arranged the funeral, and waded through the paperwork of insurance, she kept going back to that night in Madison when he returned from his conference and pulled out the champagne, wondering why she hadn’t said to him:You stole from me.
But finally, after all these months on the island, after the confusion and exhaustion of her grief had settled, Greer now understood why she hadn’t. She’d turned away from his betrayal to keep alive the idea of the man with whom she’d fallen in love, clinging to the illusion of him, of their shared past.
Love, Greer thought, or the memory of love, was single-minded in its will to survive, the fittest of all emotions.
Greer wasn’t sure how far she’d gone along the path. She was tired, the day’s effort lodged in her limbs. She wandered down to where the grass met the rocks, and stretched herself out. A cool breeze swept in from the ocean and she could see the sliver of an opening in the cliff below. So many cracks in this island, she thought, as though the whole place had once been carelessly dropped from a tremendous height.
Her eyes felt dry and heavy, tugging closed. Before her on the dark ground it seemed a miniature crab was moving toward her, its legs jointed and fast. It inched closer, glossy and black in the light of the moon, a flash of red beneath its belly.
“There you are,” she mumbled as she felt herself drifting off to sleep.