Anil's Ghost - By Michael Ondaatje Page 0,48
‘microfragmentation’ meant the customer in question had been blown to bits. They couldn’t miss death, it was in every texture and cell around them. No one changed the radio dial in a morgue without a glove on.
Meanwhile, bright tungsten bulbs gave the labs a clear optic light, the music in Toxicology was perfect for sit-ups and stretches when you found your neck and back had become tense from close-focus work. And around her was a quick good-old-boy debate and an explanation of a dead body in a car.
‘When’d they report her missing?’
‘She’s been gone, lo, these five or six years.’
‘She drove into the lake, Clyde. She already had to stop the car once to open a gate. She’d been drinking. Her husband said she just took the dog and left.’
‘No dog in the car?’
‘No dog in the car. I wouldn’t have missed a Chihuahua, though it was full of mud. Her bones had demineralized. Car lights were on. Skip the photo, Rafael.’
‘So—when she opened the gate she let the dog free. She already had a plan. It’s a by-herselfer. When the car started filling up, she lost it and climbed into the back seat. That’s where she was found. Right?’
‘She should have knocked off her husband. . . .’
‘He could have been a saint.’
Anil would always love the clatter and verbal fling of pathologists.
She had arrived in Colombo directly from working in sparse high-tech desert towns of the American Southwest. Although her last location, Borrego Springs, hadn’t seemed, at the start, enough of a real desert to satisfy her. Too many cappuccino bars and clothing shops on the main street. But after a week she was comfortable in what was really a narrow strip of civilization, a few mid-twentieth-century luxuries surrounded by the starkness of the desert. The beauty of the place was subtle. In the southwestern deserts you needed to look twice at emptiness, you needed to take your time, the air like ether, where things grew only with difficulty. On the island of her childhood she could spit on the ground and a bush would leap up.
The first time Anil had gone into the desert, her guide had a water-mist bottle attached to his belt. He gestured her over, sprayed the thin leaves of a plant and pulled her head down towards it. She inhaled the smell of creosote. The plant spilled this toxic quality when it rained, to keep away anything that tried to grow too near it—and so reserved the small area around it for its own water supply.
She learned about agave, which had at least seven uses, among them its thorn as a needle, its fibres as thread. She saw cheese bushes, dyeweed, dead-man’s-fingers (a succulent you could eat only during one month of the year), smoke trees with their rare system of roots (an exact underground reflection of their size and shape above ground), and ocotillo, which dropped its leaves to preserve moisture. And plants whose colours seemed washed out and those that doubled their rich colours in twilight. She spent as little time as possible in the small house she shared on H Street. She was usually within the flat-roofed paleontology lab by seven-thirty with a coffee and a croissant. In the evenings she jeeped into the desert with her co-workers. There had been zebras here three million years before. Camels. All the usual browsers and grazers. She walked above the bones of these great defunct creatures, on atolls left from ocean days seven million years earlier. There was a slight flirtation as she brushed the hand of someone passing binoculars to her to search out a sparrow hawk.
Once again she discovered the passion for bowling among forensic anthropologists. Perhaps too much care during the day picking up fragments with tweezers or using whisper brushes made them want to hurl things around with six-drink abandon. There was no alley in Borrego Springs, so each night they’d clamber into a museum van and drive out of the valley into nearby hill towns. They brought their own ‘hammers’—specially weighted balls for competition bowling. All through these nights, in spite of the active jukebox in the Quonset hut, she kept singing a woeful song: Better days in jail, with your back turned towards the wall. . . . Though there was no sadness in her during this time. It was as if she was expecting the sadness of that song to reach her eventually, almost knowing there would be a conflict with Cullis when he arrived.
Lovers