How High We Go in the Dark
Sequoia Nagamatsu
30,000 Years beneath a Eulogy
In Siberia, the thawing ground was a ceiling on the verge of collapse, sodden with ice melt and the mammoth detritus of prehistory. The kilometer-long Batagaika Crater had been widening with temperature rise like some god had unzipped the snow-topped marshlands, exposing woolly rhinos and other extinct beasts. Maksim, one of the biologists on staff and a helicopter pilot, pointed to the copper gash in the earth where my daughter had fallen shortly before discovering the thirty-thousand-year-old remains of a girl. We circled the research outpost, a network of red geodesic domes peeking right below the tree line, before landing in a clearing. Maksim helped me out of the chopper, grabbed my bags and a sack of mail from the back.
“Everybody loved Clara,” he said. “Don’t get weirded out if people don’t talk about her, though. Most of us keep that kind of stuff to ourselves.”
“I’m here to help,” I said.
“Right, of course,” Maksim said. “There is, of course, another matter . . .” I half listened as I studied the land, breathed air that, like the fossils beneath us, seemed trapped in time. He explained that a quarantine had been put into effect while we were in flight. No one had expected me to come finish Clara’s work, let alone so soon.
Inside, the outpost’s central dome looked and smelled like a dorm common room, with a big-screen television, worn recliners, and a stockpile of mac and cheese boxes. The walls were covered with a mixture of topographical maps and movie posters—everything from Star Wars to Pretty Woman to Run Lola Run. Down the accordion-like halls, I could see unkempt people emerging from their bunks or labs. A woman in a purple windbreaker and running leggings sprinted across the room.
“I’m Yulia. Welcome to the end of the world,” she said, and disappeared into one of the eight tunnels radiating out from the central domes, punctuated with bunks like cells in a beehive. The team emerged from their workstations, slowly enveloping me with the musty scent of more than a dozen researchers.
“Everybody, this is our guest of honor, Dr. Cliff Miyashiro from UCLA—archaeology and evolutionary genetics,” Maksim said. “He’ll be helping us out with Clara’s discovery. I know all of us lab rats will get even weirder now that we’re not allowed to leave the site, but try to be nice.”
Maksim assured me the quarantine was precautionary since the team had successfully reanimated viruses and bacteria in the melting permafrost. He said government officials watch too many movies. Standard protocol. No one at the outpost seemed sick or concerned.
Unwanted orientations into how Clara lived her life here soon followed—where she drank her coffee and gazed up at the aurora; the route she jogged with Yulia, the botanist; the tabletop lotus aromatherapy fountain she and Dave, the epidemiologist, used for their morning yoga sessions; the cubby where she kept her snow gear, which would become my snow gear since we’re about the same size—and how for birthdays, some of the team would make the trip to the nearest big city, Yakutsk, for karaoke, to forget for a moment that the buildings around them were slowly sinking into ancient mud.
“Can somebody take me to the girl?” I asked. There was a notable pause. A researcher in the kitchen put away the plastic cups and bottle of whiskey he was no doubt bringing over to welcome me. The cluster of disheveled scientists, most of them in flannel or fleece, felt like a repeat of Clara’s memorial a month ago, a church filled with her friends and coworkers, most of whom we’d never met before. I’d shaken their hands as they lined up to tell me and my wife, Miki, how sorry they were—a man with spiky blue hair said he’d once tattooed a star system onto Clara’s back, a purple planet orbiting three red dwarfs, and called her a fucking trip; our old neighbors reminisced about how Clara used to babysit their twin girls, helped them gain confidence in math; a bald gentleman, her project supervisor at the International Fund for Planetary Survival, gave me his card and invited me to continue my daughter’s work in Siberia. After the crowd left, I held Miki as we rewatched the slideshow I’d prepared, pausing on a photo of three-year-old Clara at her foster facility. She held the purple crystal pendant she’d had when we adopted her. We both swore we saw her eyes light up with tiny stars whenever she gazed into it.
Outside the funeral home, our granddaughter, Yumi, played with her cousin despite the heat waves rippling the street. I could smell the smoke from the burning Marin Headlands to the east beginning to creep over the neighborhood. “Our daughter never seemed to need us,” Miki said, her voice barely above a whisper. “But Yumi does.” I clutched the business card in my pocket.
At the research outpost, Maksim led me away from the awkward stares of the crew to the mummified remains Clara had found before she died.
“Annie’s in the clean lab,” Maksim said.
“Annie?” I asked.
“Yulia loves the Eurythmics—her parents are still living in the eighties. She named the body after Annie Lennox.”
The clean lab consisted of a plastic sheet duct-taped from floor to ceiling, separating one side of the bone lab from the other. He handed me a box of nitrile gloves and a respirator face mask. “We don’t have funding for anything else, but we try to be mindful of the pathogens we may bring back with us.
“Probably nothing to worry about ninety-nine percent of the time,” he added.