The Cradle of Mankind
1
I was running late for my flight home for Christmas when I heard some suspicious noises outside my bedroom door. There were voices murmuring, and it sounded like there was a whole group of people out there shuffling around. I became a bit nervous and started coughing, as I sometimes do, and then I reached my whole arm deep inside the mattress where I keep all my cough medicine. Just as I pulled some out, my sister Eunice barged into the room and demanded to know what I was doing. I was flabbergasted. “I was just on my way to the airport,” I blurted out. She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Right. Sure you were,” she said. It turned out my whole family was out there in the living room waiting for me. They had arrived here all at once somehow from all different parts of the country. I noticed my little brother had taped something to my bedroom door. It was a comic he had made that attempted to communicate something about the fraught relationship we shared with our absent father. What I appreciated most about this was that he had taped it up there knowing I was right there on the other side of the door, safe inside my bedroom. He knew I would discover it in time and didn’t need to barge in. My mother might have come into my room eventually, but I believe she would have at least knocked first. She was occupied at the time anyway, out in the living room attending to her three new adopted Chinese children. She had acquired them under mysterious circumstances from around the area where I now lived, but I felt it was all ultimately harmless and did not require my investigation. On the contrary, I thought she must have had a lot of extra love in her to adopt three new babies when she already had three children of her own. And during a surprise visit to her oldest, no less. But then again it did make sense somehow, seeing as we were all pretty much grown and lived apart in all different areas of the country. Then something strange came over me. I suddenly wanted to know everything there was to know about these three little babies. So I got all the way down on the floor where they were crawling around in order to take a closer look, and to perhaps gain some insight into their budding personalities. The oldest was a pudgy toddler with dull, beady eyes, and I understood he had recently entered his “terrible twos.” I went through them like that one by one, booping their little noses and making funny faces at them, laughing and playing and learning all about them, and before long I realized I had spent so long with the babies that I had forgotten I was in danger of missing my flight. But somehow it turned out I had gotten the day wrong and my flight actually wasn’t until later on in the week. Which was strange because by then I had actually wanted to get to the airport in order to get away from my family for a little while. I politely excused myself and went back into my bedroom feeling confused. Overwhelmed by the day and exhausted from all that had happened, I shut the door behind me. And as soon as I did, I fell dead asleep.
2
I woke up in a daze. The sun was peeking in through the blinds on all sides of my window in a big rectangle, like a border of light that kept all the darkness inside. It must have been mid-afternoon. I could see enough of how messy my room was that it made me want to go back to sleep. But then something amazing happened. Two white doves came flying in through the tiny little gap on one side of the blinds in a great burst of light, which shone particularly onto the floor, revealing an exceptional mess that had been accumulating on the carpet. Before, I might have been repulsed by this, but these doves had me in a state of wonder. And now that they were inside my room, they weren’t doves anymore. They were two white butterflies. One of them fluttered down onto the sunlit carpet where I could see there was not any of the usual kind of mess. Instead, there was actual dirt from the earth that had been building up inside my bedroom. And what’s more, in the little mesh grid beneath the carpet, some seeds my mother had given me had fallen in and planted themselves, and they fit perfectly into its little pockets just like they were made for it. And then grass started to grow in parts where the sun was shining. And there in the grass a sunflower grew up faster than any sunflower could ever grow, straight toward the light at the bottom of my window. The other butterfly flew over to the end of my bed, and when it landed there it turned into a small pink slug, and then a weird-looking beetle, and then, horrifyingly, one huge cockroach lying on its back that scared me right out of bed. It looked almost dead, but I could see its spiny little forelegs still kind of waving in the air. It gave me the impression of a blind man lying on his deathbed, reaching out for some loved ones who may or may not be somewhere nearby. I paused for a moment and considered what to do next. I decided I ought to be brave about this, because the thing with the doves is not something that happens every day. So I grabbed one of my big boots off the floor, took a deep breath, and swung down hard right on top of the roach. But this was a soft mattress, and the cockroach was very big, and not fully dead, and so it flipped right over and scurried away into the dark place between my mattress and the wall, down somewhere underneath my bed.
3
I decided the cockroach had probably just gone down somewhere into the darkness in order to die a somewhat peaceful death. Laying on its back with its legs in the air like that, I imagined it probably knew that its time had come. It was now simply seeking out some dark and quiet place where it could escape a terrible world full of giants who unanimously despised the existence of its entire species, and where it might have a little time for itself for a few final thoughts. I imagined if the cockroach had lived a decent enough life, that its last thought might be the memory of a time it was hiding beneath the refrigerator and saw some crumbs of food fall down onto the kitchen floor, and how it waited there for what seemed like forever, hoping and praying for someone to turn out the lights so that it could rush out and devour it all from within the safety of that darkness. By then I imagined the cockroach was probably dead. All that there was left to do was crawl underneath my bed and retrieve the corpse. In fact, that gave me a great idea. I thought that finding the dead roach could be the first thing I do before I clean my whole room, and after that maybe even the entire apartment. It would be the first act of cleaning that led to so much cleaning that it would change my life forever. And that made me feel great. But what I found there underneath my bed did not. Somehow I had never known that in all the time I had lived there, right beneath my pillow, under the bed where I slept almost every single night, was the entrance down into a great cave. When I looked under my bed, a man in a dark purple hood was sticking his head out of the hole, looking straight at me. He was kind of fat, and he kept his hair long even though it was thinning. He had patchy facial hair, and he smelled bad, but not the kind of smelly you get from spending time in a cave. And he wore small, round glasses that made his face look even fatter than it already was. He told me that I had been chosen to take part in a special ceremony, and that I should follow him down into the cave. I asked him if he had seen the cockroach, and he said he had. Then I asked him whether he thought the roach had looked very near death, and he said we could probably find out if I followed him down into the cave. That made sense to me. We took some torches off the wall and began our descent toward the cave room where the ceremony was about to take place. I was looking forward to meeting all the other men like him in robes and hoods. He told me about his job working in a comic book store, and the more he told me, the more I took a liking to him. He said that the men came from all different backgrounds, but that they were brought together by a shared interest in history and politics. When I asked him what kind of movies they liked, he said mostly old documentaries. When I asked him if that meant that they liked reading books, he said that they considered literature just a smaller part of politics, although some of them liked science fiction, and almost all of them enjoyed spending time on the computer. When I asked him what spending time on the computer had to do with literature, he told me it was a mystery that would be revealed in time. Then I heard some soft sounds of chanting coming from around the corner of the cave room, and I knew the ceremony was about to begin. I felt sort of weird about it, but we were pretty far down into the cave at that point. When I entered the room, they put their torches up on the wall and started moving around in a circle. Then I noticed something flickering on the floor. It was an ancient mosaic made of old stones and glass that was all covered in dirt, and it looked as though it had been there for centuries. It was the reflection of the torchlight on the stones which had caught my attention. The mosaic was made of ebony, ivory, sapphire, and some dark purple amethyst like the color of their robes. There were also some normal stones in between, to provide a relief for the detail of the design. Then all of the men laid down on top of the mosaic and started moving together in tandem like they were all a part of one big wheel, with their bodies positioned like you see in old Egyptian hieroglyphics. In fact, it looked a lot like some symbols I had been seeing on the computer around that time. It was all very interesting. Then my guide started singing me a lullaby, and began moving slowly toward me. The lullaby was a kind of reminder. I had been given a secret password when I was very young, and if I could remember it now, I could become a full member of their club. I asked him for a hint. He said it was a six-letter word that was related to darkness. I closed my eyes and concentrated as hard as I could. Then I remembered the cockroach, and the password came to me immediately. “Scarab,” I said aloud. Just as I spoke, the wheel stopped turning. My guide went ghost white. A new man in red robes came around the corner. “That is not the password,” he said. Things got kind of awkward after that. The man in red demanded to know how I had ended up down there, and I told him about the cockroach. Apparently, the roach was supposed to be kept alive for a little while, at least until I became a full member. My guide reached inside his robe and pulled out a mason jar. The cockroach was inside, and it was dead. He confessed to the group that he had neglected to feed it, and this made them all very unhappy. He began pleading with them. He said he must have forgotten about it while he and I were having such a nice time talking and getting to know each other on the way down to the ceremony. There was a general groan at this, and some of the men were starting to become angry. I was definitely ready to leave at this point, but they would not allow it. I guess it was some kind of a rule in their group where if somebody saw the ceremony who didn’t belong there, that either that person or somebody else would have to die.
4
What happened afterward down in the cave is not important. It became a gruesome adventure full of sacrifice and heroism, and David still emails me sometimes from the computers at the public library. Eventually, I emerged back above ground through a hole in the grass. It felt great to be back out in the light. The sky was so beautiful it gave me goosebumps. That’s when I noticed I was staring up at St. Augustin, the church my family had belonged to when I was a boy. It had grown by three stories in my absence, from two to five. I was surprised I had not heard about it, so I decided to go inside and ask around. As soon as I walked in the door, I ran into Clara Worth. She was a few years younger than me, and we had been raised in the church and gone to school together. Like me, she had moved away to the big city chasing a dream, and to no one’s surprise, she had achieved it. I had always admired her and her family. Her father was Luke Worth, who everybody called Big Luke. He was the Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop, and I will always remember the way he led the whole school in a booming rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” at the last school assembly of the year before Christmastime. He died of lung cancer from smoking cigarettes, but they told all us kids that he had worked in the coal mines as a boy, and that the black lung had caught up with him at last. Before he died, they held a big roast in his honor in the school gymnasium, and I like to imagine he died laughing. It was the perfect place for a roast because there were no comedians in our parish, and even though Big Luke provided most of the best jokes himself, other people still had to get up there and talk, and the setting allowed them to make the same joke over and over again about this being the longest amount of time Big Luke had ever spent inside a gymnasium. When he actually did die, the vice principal and head English teacher Mrs. Logan came into the classroom to make a special announcement. She was probably the wisest old owl I have ever known, and there are many other examples I could provide of things she said and did back then that I did not fully appreciate until years later, and which I believe I will go on appreciating more and more of as time goes on for the rest of my life. She sat behind the lectern with her hands folded beneath her chin, and back then I thought it looked like her hands were the only thing keeping her head propped up in place, but now I see that it was actually a way for her to observe us all for any reaction to her words. I had been an excellent student, and that year I was determined to win the award for perfect attendance. She announced that anyone who wished to attend Big Luke’s funeral service would be free to do so without being counted absent or penalized for any homework that was not turned in on time. She seemed to be speaking directly to me. When word got out that my mother had allowed me to attend, the other boys accused me of only wanting to go so I could skip school. And one of them said something that still hurts me to this day. His name was Paul Nespit, and he said I had no right to go to Big Luke’s service because I barely knew the man, and that the Nespits and some of the other families in our parish were all old friends and went on ski trips together over the holidays that my family would never be able to afford, and why would I be the one going to his service when he and some of the other kids who had actually known Big Luke would be staying in school on that day? I asked Clara what the story was with the new additions, and if she knew how I could get to the third floor. She laughed and said she did. She told me it had all been arranged by her father before he died. He knew his own family would do fine on their own, so instead of leaving all his money to them, he left it to the church, and he gave special instructions on the timetable in which they could begin building. Big Luke had three children. There was Luke Jr. who was the oldest, Anne the middle, and Clara who was the baby. He had granted each one individually the power to decide when their personal addition would be added, but it had to be done in their birth order, and there had to be a specific set of reasons for why they were doing it at whatever particular time, and they had to choose some significant people from the elder generation that their addition would be dedicated to. There also had to be one other living person who the addition was secretly meant for, should they choose to embrace it, and it would be revealed to that person at some other particular appointed time. It made me feel all warm inside just listening to the sound of her voice, and part of me hoped she would go on talking like that forever. She told me she remembered that I had come to her father’s service all those years ago, and that she already knew both her elder dedication and her secret person, along with all of her reasons for choosing them, and she had just been waiting her turn so that she could give them the word to begin building. Her sister Anne had become a bit of a perfectionist and seemed to be taking up her whole lifetime trying to identify her secret person, and she preceded Clara in the birth order which meant Clara had to wait. For a long time, Clara had been offering Anne suggestions on who her potential secret person might be, but every time Clara did so, Anne would storm off and seclude herself in her bedroom for some length of time before emerging to explain how Clara had been wrong, and Anne’s long-winded explanation always essentially boiled down to the conflict over who was to blame for their father’s death. If during one of Anne’s episodes she had been slamming too many doors or became quiet enough that Clara began to worry, Clara would call Luke Jr. and have him come over and talk some sense into her. He would tell Anne that no one put those cancer sticks in his mouth but him, and that while it was true their mother had been a meek woman, she was not helpless, and she had tried to help their father quit smoking many different times, and in increasingly subtle and creative ways that frankly had been totally lost on Anne during her selfish and bratty adolescence. Eventually Clara had had enough and gave up on Anne completely, and shortly thereafter Anne decided on a local man who loved skateboarding even though he was not very good at it, and it worked out great because there were so many different curbs and rails in the church parking lot for him to practice on. As a perfectionist, she drew considerable satisfaction from watching him fall down and hurt himself all day from her perch on the steps of the rear entrance of the church. She loved to see the look on his face as he got up off the ground and checked to see if she had been watching, and she would always make sure to smile and wave at him when that happened. Over time she lured him over to the church steps to present him with gifts, including a book on how to put together your own skateboard in the garage and some bandages she had made herself at home. By the time Clara was telling me this, Anne had begun the process of revealing everything to the skateboarder, and Clara said that it all seemed pretty much in the bag. Clara’s time had come at last. She told me to go down the hall and around the corner to an elevator that would take me straight to the third floor. I thought it was strange that they would install an elevator in a church that was so old. That was the thing my mother liked best about St. Augustin, and part of why she had moved us out here away from the city when we were all very young. I went down the hallway feeling strange, and when I got to where Clara had said I would find the elevator, it was just a set of stairs leading down into a part of the church I had never seen before, but which had been there all along. It was a hidden parish hall, and it was full of light. The floors were white marble, and someone was playing beautiful music on a piano. On the wall was a mosaic like the one in the cave, but in lighter colors. It was all I could do to stand there in front of it for a while in awe, trying to understand what it all meant. I did that for what felt like a long time, and when the sound of the piano came drifting back to me, I decided to go over and tell the pianist how much I had enjoyed his playing. He thanked me, and told me that no, unfortunately he had no more information about the mosaic, except that he believed it had been assembled over the course of many years, and that it had not yet been completed, and that during childhood sometime they give everybody a stone and have them write their name on the back of it to be added to the mosaic later, but they never tell anybody whose stone is whose, and when you come back to the church with your friends and family, you are supposed to go with them and stand in front of it and decide which stone belongs to which person, and which color best fits which person’s personality and why. He said it’s a way for people to stay together even after they leave home for good, and it hangs there as a testament to the enduring fellowship of man, and acts as a reminder that you will always have a home here in the church as long as you can stay alive, and as long as there are good people around to keep everything chugging along. As long as somebody’s spunky aunt is there to organize a bake sale for the needy, or as long as there are old ladies to keep the pews warm during the cold winter, or as long as there are folks around like Big Luke Worth who will spend every penny they ever made in their life in order to make just one person’s life a little bit better, then he figured there would be more than enough love to go around for everyone. I liked the sound of that, and I told him so. There was no interruption in his gentle playing as he pointed me toward the exit. I found a group of parishioners gathered outside after mass, including a woman in a red dress smoking a cigarette. She congratulated me on becoming a famous actor in the city and told me a lot of people had been talking about me. I thanked her even though I had never been interested in acting and could not imagine how word like that had gotten around. I wondered why Clara had given me directions to the parish hall when I had asked to see the new third floor, and the lady in red replied that some people are always trying to get to heaven when they know the answers are right here on earth. I asked her about the meaning of life, and she said it was to make a home and a family and not kill yourself if you could help it, or if you had to kill yourself to at least wait until after your kids turned eighteen. Then she ashed her cigarette on the railing and asked me if I hadn’t forgotten something, and I remembered I had been invited to a party that was to take place later on that night.