My sister’s husband unearthed the sewing needle from the dirt and brought it home from the archaeological site wearing a cloth glove. He didn’t catalogue it. He told no one except us and then the needle made from animal bone likely in or right before the Younger Dryas was then my sister’s and my sister’s alone. I was afraid of the stolen sewing needle. Jacqueline’s husband Lukas was a luddite—in the spiritual sense—with a professional profile based on the discovery of a fossilized vole molar—flecked with bright green lichen—that proved a shared migration route between early neolithic humans and voles. His private view was that he avoided technology because he desired a different aesthetic reality than the one technology, in its present state, had devised. He did believe technology was useful.
I admired this view, although I sometimes felt aesthetically pleasured by a screen. Its pinwheel of colors. Shapes. Sheens.
I was afraid of the needle, which I knew was better than feeling desirous. There were histories of me desiring something of Jacqueline’s—a boyfriend with big eyes, a garnet necklace, an interesting and beautiful dream. We were close in age, and this made her gains more devastating for me, although occasionally it reversed, and I was inappropriately proud. She was very good at chemistry and won prizes. She was responsible for the radiocarbon dating of the famed vole tooth, and afterwards, she began an involved texting correspondence with the archeologist who had found the tooth, which eventually led to nudes, a shared theory brought on by fernet, a bridal veil with scalloped beading.
I lived close to Jacqueline and her husband in a neighborhood called Bilk. We lived in townhouses with gardens. People left their windows open in the summer and put lace fly nets over half-eaten Apfelkuchen. At a dinner party that summer, a few weeks after she’d been gifted the needle, my sister flirted with my boss—the curator of the museum where I cleaned the display boxes in which the artifacts sat—on the leather sofa on the patio of her two-story townhouse. The curator stood above her, leaning against a stucco column. Everyone else was deeper into the garden, behind the gazebo, lying in the grass, their plates abandoned on its wooden center, except for me and Lukas, who stood by the table of food.
Jacqueline’s research group was now carbon dating some fossilized footsteps found underwater between England and the Netherlands, she told the museum curator. The water there hid a submerged land that had once not been submerged and had been inhabited by Mesolithic communities before something called a Slide flooded the area and made England separate from Europe. The footsteps were the footsteps of children and one wolf. The curator was enraptured; his eyes rarely left my sister’s mouth.
“How old?” he said.
Jacqueline had a potion: a tube of limoncello, no water. She’d stopped talking. The green liquid touched her lips, but then she paused, letting it slide back down the flute. She was not tyrannical. She was a fair queen. I rarely saw her tipsy. But she was focused now, leaning back on the sofa’s purple cushion, her mantis legs forming an M as she propped her feet up on the chaise.
“The wolf?” she said.
“The children.”
“Some were three or four years old,” she said. “But some were probably sixteen. Seventeen.”
“Seventeen, even.”
I was thinking about the sewing needle. Standing by the table with the food, I tried to get Lukas—who was using a slotted spoon to transfer pitless kalamata olives, one by one, from a pasta salad into his empty wine glass—to agree. “Should we bring out the needle?” “Chloé! The gossip?!” He was very devoted to Jacqueline; he interpreted my scheme as jest. It wasn’t about gossip jeopardizing his career, I knew. He was unlikely to go through Jacqueline’s things without her consent.
She believed the former because of an exam she’d given early on in their marriage: four edges of one piece of paper, cut at the corners into triangles, put inside of a notebook, an etui, between the snap on a purse, and her wallet. If opened, the triangle would fall out of all four of these objects, but they never did—evidence of Lukas’ fidelity.
The museum curator had originally trained as a medievalist. In the times before the Renaissance, he was now telling Jacqueline, the significance of a child’s footsteps would have been their sound—the single clattering of a clog on the cobblestones could carry for miles. This was something we’d lost in our current milieu. Bells. A woman’s cry. The birth of a baby would have been witnessed aurally by the entire village. Oh well, he said. It was hard to compare which lost history was more depressing—the destination of a prehistoric child being stalked by a wolf on a forgotten landmass or the sound of a tardy choir boy’s gallop across the village square towards the cathedral.
“I’m more interested in the prehistoric child,” I said. Lukas looked at me in surprise. I realized he had been listening, too, and I had now broken what he had assumed was an unspoken rule between us: pretend to be occupied with each other, the kalamata, the slotted spoon, in order to observe Jacqueline’s conversation undetected.
“No, you’re not!” Jacqueline said. She finally took a small sip of limoncello. Then she sat up. “Chloé has a thing for the rescued codex. Especially ones that were thrown out of burning medieval cottages.”
Which reminded me that I’d been given gifts, too. I’d been given a chalice made of pyrite constructed by a sculptor who claimed to have found his materials near a cave in Spain where his mother had given birth to him. I’d been given a heart-shaped locket full of hair.
“That was one story I read,” I said.
“How do you feel about the codex, Lukas?” the curator asked. “Is it a technology you would use?”
“More text messages should be written on animal hides!” Lukas agreed enthusiastically. “Although, I think the hide from one sheep or pig only provides you with eight pages of parchment. But this isn’t my field!”
“Paper arrives in the thirteenth century,” the curator said.
“I do like the tactility of the parchment in my hands.” Lukas knocked back an olive into his mouth from the wine glass. Chewing, he said: “And if eight text messages were one pig, I’d be contacted less often!”
People were starting to move back through the garden and up the steps of the patio in search of wine. Lukas was sent into the house to get more bottles. The light was changing on the gazebo—white to gray—and the discarded paper plates vibrated in the weak summer breeze.
The plates were cold.
Turning to the curator, I asked him if he thought that medieval peoples had a more honest relationship to desire.
“Psychological motives are sometimes more interesting than economic or political ones, especially when considering the deeds of say, a robber baron in the fifteenth century,” the curator said. His eyes were on me now, and he was holding his empty wine glass upside down. It pointed towards the ground, I thought, expectantly. “Often, murders were committed out of pure vengeance. Or to defend someone’s honor. But sometimes desire was still related to money.”
“Maybe that’s not the kind of desire she means,” Jacqueline said.
“Of course it’s not,” the curator said.
§
My friend Charlotte worked in a restaurant that was inside of the owner’s living room, and I sometimes went to eat dinner there and visit Charlotte, who was the only server, and it was there that I heard the story about the Wall, which complicated my understanding of the sewing needle when it appeared in my sister’s possession. The restaurant was only open one night a week: Sunday. At the end of the night, the owner, who was also the only chef, would come out of the kitchen into the living room to pour schnapps and tell stories. Travelers were often passing through, and so she had collected many stories. Her name was Dove, and she was forty and thin, a lifelong smoker with beautiful dark-red hair, cut to her cheekbones like a spy.
The night I heard the story about the Wall was the winter before the summer that Lukas gave my sister the needle. I was not in my favorite pale green velvet armchair by the window. The green chair was one of two chairs reserved for solo diners, and so I was put in the other chair, which was a worse wooden one with a stiff back by the bookcase. Most of the candles on each table were low and needed to be replaced halfway through the meal.
Mine was fine. It burned slowly because I was far away from the window.
My favorite pale green chair was occupied by a man in his early sixties wearing a black running jacket with a high collar, zipped all the way to the top. He ate his Rindergulasch mit Knödeln very quickly and cleanly but not self-consciously, wiping his mouth with the napkin after every bite, and had no book nor phone, but was also not staring out the window at the trees, and instead seemed to be watching moving images inside of his mind. He ate the salad with pickled onion and beet at the same speed—slowing down only for the cheesecake with raspberries—and his posture impressed me because mine was bad. He thanked Charlotte very formally every time she brought him something, but didn’t comment on aspects of her choice accessories—pearl hair clip, old-fashioned checkered apron—like the men at the other tables.
It wasn’t of course until the plates were cleared, and Dove came out of the kitchen, and everyone stood to clap for her meal that I realized the man had a robotic foot.
After Charlotte poured the schnapps and settled into her place across from me, eating her own dinner, the stories began. There was one I hadn’t heard before. A French poet in the early 20th century had invented in one of his poems a phrase that then became idiomatic in German. Something about a Spanish king, and snow. The idiom wasn’t funny, but its irony was appreciated by everyone in Dove’s living room with a round of hums.
To me and Charlotte, it was obvious that the new story was going to come from the man with the robotic foot and be about the robotic foot. When Dove finished the story about the idiom, Charlotte reached under the table and pinched my thigh. This made me laugh. But then Dove stood up abruptly and closed the window, and the man with the robotic foot stood to help her, and as he did this it was suddenly apparent that they were lovers. His hand went to her hip as she secured the latch.
“This is my ex-husband,” Dove announced to the group, returning to her chair on the opposite side of the room. “And he’s just returned from the north.”
The north pole? Charlotte and I locked eyes. He sat back down, then began unceremoniously: “When I went through the Wall, I lived with a man on the other side—over two and a half meters tall—who called himself the Walker. It was necessary that his wife sew all of his clothes, as he needed them custom-made because of his size. Our job was to skin foxes for pelts. Drink seal blood. Stay alive. Our greatest joy was seeing twigs in the water after hunting for seal, because it meant our skiff was nearing mainland.”
The Wall. There was a large-scale dam that had been built optimistically ten years ago north of the Norwegian fjords at the mouth of an estuary connected to the Norwegian Sea. It was now defunct. As a speculative feat of macro-engineering, it had been beloved, but when it failed to prevent flooding, it was renamed the Wall and attracted the type of retiree-explorer who was aroused by the idea of traversing a man-made obstacle to get somewhere that, pre-Wall, would’ve been quite accessible. Dove’s ex-husband made sense to me as this type of man. But I was curious about it, too. The Wall conjured feelings of the sublime. The temple. Masonry. Stone with mortar. Two hundred meters tall, three thousand meters long. A place where something might happen to you. Something unforgettable.
Something divine.
“But one day we joyously returned to the hut only to find that the Walker’s wife was gone,” he continued. “So, we made coffee and waited. She didn’t return for three days. We speculated. Polar bear. She’d gotten lost getting the drinking water. Or she’d heard a voice from the other world and had gone out onto the fjord to follow it.”
Unlikely as it seemed narratively, the first option was the correct one. The wife had been on the side of the hut, maintaining the roof by nailing on a new sheet of felt, when the polar bear attacked and dragged her one mile north of the hut, further out onto the fjord. When they discovered her, she was nearly dead, abandoned in the snow, with a missing hand and a large wound on the side of her body. For two days, the Walker and Dove’s ex-husband nursed her back to health, managing to bandage the increasingly diseased hole where her hand had been, and when she could finally speak, she said to the Walker: “It wanted the needle.”
At this point in the story, a few people were distracted by the outrageousness of the story, it seemed. A paramedic with shiny yellow braids—who had disclosed earlier to the group that she was on call—smiled at her boyfriend, and he slid the tip of his tongue through his teeth. Three women—girl’s trip—yawned. They wanted coffee. But Charlotte was dreamily staring at the storyteller.
In the Walker’s wife’s pocket had been a sewing needle made from bone that she used to stitch the Walker’s garments, Dove’s ex-husband explained. The polar bear had dragged her, held her down, then successfully ripped off her coat. As he pawed at her side, he inflicted a large wound. But despite the Walker’s wife’s pain and fear, the attack was protracted; the blows weren’t fatal—she realized the bear wanted something. That’s when she took out the needle from the pocket of her jacket. The polar bear ripped off her gloved hand with its mouth, discarded the hand, picked up the needle with its teeth, and ran away.
Charlotte suddenly stood to make the coffee. I felt uneasy.
The final thing Dove’s ex-husband told us before Charlotte served the coffee was that he and the Walker had gone after the polar bear in retaliation. He lost his foot. But they successfully killed the polar bear.
The guests’ ability to listen had collapsed. Everyone clapped and cheered after he announced the latter. Stop. But Dove was sitting very still in the back of the room, her hands on her knees, staring at her ex-husband.
“Did she live?” I called out over the resumed conversations.
He made eye contact with me briefly, but then quickly looked away.
“The Walker’s wife died before we even killed the polar bear,” he said. “The Walker killed himself the day after we returned through the Wall.”
§
Our town was an important example of what could happen because of ice or the lack thereof. During the peak of a prehistoric glacial period called MIS 6, these townhouses and their gardens were a polar desert. Lithics were found alongside musk oxen bones underneath an eleventh century fortress, which suggests neanderthals may have nonetheless survived. Dusting the shoulder-level floor of a vitrine at the museum with a dry cloth, I wondered about anachronisms. The needle. The fallacy of naturalized time of secular modernity. People—and things—experienced a larger diversity of temporalities beyond the bounds of Newtonian time.
Maybe.
The curator had developed a serious interest in me after meeting my family at the garden party the previous week. The museum closed at 17—this is when cleaning happened—but he started staying after hours to talk to me while I dusted. Sometimes a feeling sharpened around us in the inside air, our noses aglow from the moody emerald light that underlit the fossils. I questioned him about breastfeeding techniques in the Middle Ages, and he avoided that by explaining orality. “Rhyme was invented when Latin was vernacularized.” That Friday, we had sex in his office. The location was my suggestion. He kissed me in front of a five-tiered vitrine dotted with fossilized opal, then pulled back to look at me helplessly.
“Your office?” I said.
The next day at Jacqueline’s house, lying on my back in the center of the gazebo in late afternoon, I thought about Dove. Why had they divorced? Opening a restaurant in your living room in Bilk verses scaling the Wall north of the Norwegian fjords required different sensibilities but were aesthetically harmonious. Jacqueline walked across the grass towards the gazebo in a dark-green halter top. She stopped in front of me, one-foot hovering midair above the single step that brought you onto the platform, staring at the sky to the east, which was deepening in color. Then she climbed up and laid down next to me.
With her so close, my fears resumed their rote. I was afraid that the sewing needle Lukas had found at the archeological site underneath the eleventh-century fortress was somehow the same needle that had cursed the Walkers, but in another, perhaps less fantastical vein, I was afraid that the curse was simply on those who obtained any sewing needle made from polar bear bone. Vengeance made sense. Still, it was unlikely a polar bear would come to Bilk.
“What did he say?” she asked.
The sky between the roof of the gazebo and the tops of the trees was swirling with clouds.
“During?”
“Chloé.”
“What?”
“Like before. Before it happened.”
“Something about rhyme.”
Jacqueline sighed, stretching her hands above her head.
“He really is beautiful,” she said.
I considered telling her about the bone needle. I felt released from responsibility. It was her choice. Later, I’d realize that I was only feeling so light because of the sex. But then it began to rain, anyway. Lightly at first, then more powerfully, and we were laughing. Lukas waved at us from the kitchen window inside the house. “We’re trapped!!!” Everything around us was vibratingly green.
§
In the days that followed, I learned from the medievalist curator about texts written in medieval times that invented pre-medieval myths such as that the emperor Claudius buried his autobiography in the ground after sealing it with a preservative fluid and putting it inside of a lead casket. Some people to this day bury coins, I mentioned. “Teeth,” he agreed, as we lay on the floor of his office, half-clothed and dreamy. He reached out to touch my earlobe. I weighed my options. To rebury the sewing needle from the Younger Dryas might be a gift to the earth. But would the bone be happy? Or did it want to return to its living kin?
After one week of repeated evening meetings in his office, the curator invited me on a real date. I suggested Dove’s. Charlotte was excited, making a big show of pulling out his chair for him, unfolding his napkin. Dove came out of the kitchen before the appetizer to look at us. Her red hair was secured inside of a fabric hair net. The curator smiled extensively at both of them.
Then he sat at the edge of his chair for most of the night.
“What do I do if they want me to tell a story?” he whispered, halfway through the duck.
“They won’t,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“They don’t force anyone to speak,” I said. “It’s not like that. The rotation is determined naturally.”
“I have a good one,” he said. “If they ask.”
But no one did, and the night was mostly led by a grandfatherly woman in a large purple raincoat who recounted Celtic myths about Rhiannon as though she was Rhiannon. The stories were soothing, atmospherically planetary, and always ended on a tropological note where the woman explained how this myth could be applicable to our own lives. When Charlotte brought out the coffee, the curator leaned back in his seat. He looked at me peacefully.
“I want to ask for your advice,” I said.
“Sure.”
I explained the sewing needle. The story was made more vivid by the fact that we were where I had heard the story and that I could point out the green velvet chair by the window.
“What would you do in this situation?” I asked him.
“You could bring it to the museum,” he said. “We could put it into a vitrine. No one would even have to know.”
He was back at the edge of his seat. He had impressive eyebrows, which he raised slightly. Then he lifted the coffee cup to his mouth.
“My sister would notice,” I said.
“Maybe. But what could she do then? Lukas shouldn’t have brought it home in the first place.”
§
The needle speaks:
| The rare sensations of this vitrine. I want to be where the necklaces are. But I am a bone. Like human flesh, I am not considered a precious gemstone, but perhaps we will both end up in that heavenly box with God’s jewelry, anyway. Moons. Magnetospheres. Then a black hole. They spin in the eye of the creator, and she is desirous. The human idea of her came from celestial bodies and only later became abstract. She sees herself in her own adornments. What garments could I stitch for her if I were more than polar bear? What fourth-dimensional bodies would I decorate? Instead, I kept you warm, and now that you are curious and the ice has melted, you pull me from the soil. I cannot sew now nor see. But there is no distinction between today and then for me. In the future, there are many gardens. There are many gardens, and there are humans sewing, and they are once again sewing by hand because they must. Some of them resent. But others do not mind, because they enjoy the feeling of me between their fingers. Some atmospheres will be beautiful forever, if not apposite for all mortal creatures. |
|
And that is good. |
§
Four months later, the curator and I stood in the lobby of museum, greeting guests. The museum had made national news for the mystery of how it had obtained a sewing needle from the Younger Dryas. The needle had been taken away for three months for study, and was now on temporary display for the weekend, until it would be taken away again to be further studied. The needle itself was unexceptional, but the mystery of how it had arrived in the museum—spotted by an employee responsible for cleaning the display cases—was still unsolved.
The party was quite large, with white wines and paper plates stacked with dates and cooked eggplant. People floated through the rooms, although in the central room, the sewing needle from the Younger Dryas amassed a civil crowd. I wasn’t surprised when, an hour and a half into the party, Jacqueline and Lukas arrived in the central room, although the curator seemed to be. “I thought she wasn’t speaking to you,” he whispered. But I’d known she would want to make a scene.
Jacqueline’s fingerprints had been the only ones discovered on the needle, and my story had been that when I found the needle in the storage room, she’d been with me and done a preliminary examination. Of course, she and Lukas would not want to challenge that story, given its actual origins, and so they hadn’t.
The curator and I were standing behind the needle, from the perspective of the door, among some others who politely moved away as my sister and her husband approached, although this was then offset by the cheerful attention of a photographer. Lukas quickly moved to stand between me and my sister for the photo, although she still managed to reach behind him and touch the inside of my elbow, gently, which was not visible when the photograph appeared on the museum website, weeks later. But I always remembered. That touch.
“I wonder what kind of woman,” Jacqueline said, when the photographer had moved on. “Puts a fossil back into the ground.”
“The case is quite nice,” the curator said. “It’s really not like the dirt at all.”
Jacqueline didn’t look at him. She stepped closer towards the glass, looking down at the needle. It was a lone, thin, twig-like bone, with an oval eye, resting on a black cloth. Its tip pointed towards the door.
“I was afraid for you,” I said.
“It’s easier to say it that way isn’t it,” she said. “You just want what I have. You always do.”
Lukas had accepted what had happened months prior and had been trying, it seemed, to get Jacqueline to look on the bright side. It could’ve been much worse, he reminded her. His career was at stake, after all.
“At least they did it discretely!” he whispered. “I mean, Chloé, you were right! It was a risk! It still is!!”
Jacqueline had turned to the curator now, who was standing slightly behind me.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you did this,” she said to the curator. “Your job is to covet the things my husband finds. You left a field that requires solitary and often unpopular devotion for a position where you could be the recipient of social splendor. When you couldn’t have me, you went for someone nearby that was similar to me. It’s my sister whom I love and respect. So, it’s my sister at whom I am angry. You don’t even deserve my anger.”
“Jesus, Jac,” Lukas said.
“That needle was not yours,” the curator said. “It belonged to someone in the distant past. And before that, it belonged to an animal. Before that, no one knows. The needle is no one’s.”
“You’re right,” Jacqueline admitted. “It’s not about the needle. It’s about betrayal. And the loss of shared ideals. A sort of philosophical confusion on my end similar to the period in Florence after the Middle Ages ended and the Renaissance began in earnest.”
“The date of that is contested,” the curator said.
“You know what,” Jacqueline said. “It suddenly makes sense to me now. You’re no medievalist. Your choices suggest the inflated egoism of a sad, sad Renaissance man!”
She said the last part loudly, which suddenly made me laugh. Then Lukas was laughing, too, putting his hands over his eyes, walking away from us towards the wine table.
The curator was looking at me sadly.
“Maybe it was a mistake,” he admitted to Jacqueline.
“It’s over now,” my sister said. “For now.”
Did I think we were safer from the retaliative nature of nature by seizing individual property and making it public? No. But perhaps it’s easier for the blame to be put on the masses, when old friends come back to town, wanting their property and prophecies back. And that is a very, very ancient tale indeed.
