I wasn’t on the team that found the typewriter, though they called me out almost immediately. An intern met me near the road and drove me out to the site, our dune buggy sputtering its way over such an endless stretch of sand I was almost sure he had no idea where he was going. Then it appeared in the distance, normal-sized from a mile out, and finally looming over us. Larger than life, or any other cliché you can think of to describe it.
“Here we are,” the intern said.
“Oh,” I replied. “I thought maybe we were headed for the next giant typewriter.”
He didn’t laugh.
The team that found the typewriter was my ex-husband’s team. They were coming out here to look for some kind of prehistoric bird or flying lizard or bridge between the two. My ex-husband does bones and I do artifacts.
It’s not lost on us that we’ve both dedicated our lives to dead things.
“What do you think?” my ex-husband asked, walking toward me. He looked happy to see me, in a professional sort of way. His clothes were dusty, the same color as the sand.
“I think that’s a big fucking typewriter,” I said. He looked at me impatiently. “It’s humor,” I said.
Ignoring me, he went on. “What year do you think it is?”
“It looks like a 1920s model, but I’m not a typewriter expert…”
“Kathy.”
“I’m serious! That’s what it looks like. Look, Tom,” I said, “it’s magnificent. Really, it is. But I don’t think I can be much help here. I deal in arrowheads and pottery shards. This must be an old movie prop or fair exhibition or something, dumped out here to rust.”
“You’re always so logical,” he said, like it was an insult.
* * *
I stood around most of the day watching Tom’s team work, sweeping the dust out from under the giant keys. I didn’t want to get my own hands dirty yet, that would feel too much like committing to something. Cynthia, the woman Tom was sleeping with in or around the time of our divorce, was always going to his side, touching his arm, pointing to things, whispering words I couldn’t hear. I hated her for being one of those women who still looks beautiful on a site, her blonde hair swept back in a thick ponytail and her face smudged with dirt. Mostly I hated her for being the things I wasn’t: illogical. Adventurous. Ready to accept the more thrilling explanation instead of the most reasonable one.
Tom didn’t come to talk to me again until the evening, when all around us people were setting up a camp.
“Is the press on this yet?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We’re trying to avoid it. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”
“Have you tried searching ‘Giant Typewriter’ on Google?” I asked. He looked away from me, kicked up sand. “I’m sorry,” I said, “you’re right. It was probably aliens who left it here, or some civilization of giants we’ve never found any trace of before now…”
“I want you on board for this,” he said. “If it’s nothing, you can say you told me so. But I think it’s something, and no one is as meticulous as you and I want you here.”
I said nothing, just stood there with my arms folded across my chest. The air was already starting to change, the way it does in the desert at night.
“I’m not seeing her anymore,” Tom said. “We broke up months ago.”
“What do you want, my sympathies?”
“I just want you to say you’ll stay,” he said. I looked down at the ground, made circles in the sand with the toe of my shoe, wished I was somewhere on a beach.
“Okay,” I said. The sun was almost all the way down. He nodded, and turned to look back over his shoulder, where against the orange sky, his team members were climbing ladders up onto the typewriter, stepping cautiously onto its keys.
* * *
The typewriter: what kind of archaeological report on it can I possibly make? I know how to meticulously classify and date bones, arrowheads, pottery. The typewriter was something else entirely. Tom told me to approach it the same way I would anything else, but that seemed laughable and impossible. For example, I never bothered with precise measurements. They seemed superfluous. We couldn’t measure it and compare it to, say, all the other gargantuan typewriters known to exist. There was no writing on it of any kind, except for the letters on the keys, which were the regular Latin alphabet in their regular qwerty formation. From the research I did, it looked closest to a Royal 10 from sometime around 1923 or so. There were windows on the sides of it; that was what identified it. I never found any other models but the Royal 10 that had them. The keys were round, glass covered, the color of old parchment paper, big enough to stand in the center of. Stepping onto a key wasn’t enough to depress it; that was like the equivalent of simply resting on your finger on a regular typewriter key. You had to jump on them, or at least bend at the knees and crouch down and then quickly jerk back up, as if preparing to jump. Once we’d cleaned the windows off, you could stand outside of it and watch the pieces move when someone pounced on the keys.
“I’m out of my element here,” I told Tom.
“You’re out of your element!” he said. “This is what you do, things people use.”
“Not things like this. I don’t even know how to date this. I’ve been researching typewriter forensics, and it’s all about matching a document to a specific machine. I can sample the ink, I can sample the paint, and then what?” He looked away from me, unable to answer. Wanting, as he always did, for me to follow his leaps across vast chasms of logic and judgment. As always, I was stuck there on the dull, solid ground.
* * *
Under the keys, there was no floor, just sand. But the other section, the one with the windows, was enclosed. The floor was covered in felt.
“We could live here,” Tom said, running his hands over the floor like it was plush carpet. I didn’t ask what he meant by “we.”
“It’s to absorb sound,” I said. “They did it to make typewriters quieter.”
Our typewriter was so loud that if someone was about to jump on a key, the rest of us covered our ears. Our typewriter sounded like thunder, or something more synthetic than that. Like some kind of weapon, a bomb or a gun.
I wondered if there was any such thing as paper big enough to be rolled into that carriage, and what words would possibly be large enough for it if there was.
* * *
The third day, we had an accident. One of the paleontologists slipped on the R and fell down onto the F while one of the interns — the same one who drove me to the site — was up checking out the platen. The type bar broke all the ribs on his left side. Another few inches over and it would have killed him.
“Did you see that?” Tom asked me, after Cynthia had sped away with the intern in a land rover, when we were all still shaking. “He had a giant F printed right on him!”
“You know you’re crazy, right?” I asked. He just grinned.
That night, he told me Cynthia had decided not to drive back out to the site.
“She decided?” I asked. “Or you decided for her?”
“She decided,” he said, but he looked away from me when he said it, so that I couldn’t see the way his right eye twitched just once when he told a lie.
“Funny,” I said, “she seemed really excited about it. Really interested.”
“Excitement is fickle sometimes,” he said.
“You don’t have to shelter me from anything, Tom. I’m a big girl. I can work with her.” He was quiet. What I wanted to say to him was that the things he saw in Cynthia were inside me, too, latent, buried somewhere. A sense of adventure, a love of the unknown. But I didn’t say it. It would have been bullshit, anyway.
I don’t really know whether Tom was trying to shelter me or not. Whether he even cared. But Cynthia didn’t come back, and I can’t say that I missed her.
* * *
Around the typewriter, excitement turned out to be a fickle thing for everyone. Days passed, and the whole team was becoming demoralized. It should have been thrilling, except that no one knew what to do with the thing. They built scaffoldings around it, measured all the working parts, filled dozens of memory cards with photos, learned everything they could about old typewriters. But none of it could tell them a damn thing they wanted to know. It was an exercise in futility.
I’ve never been good with teamwork. I was going to become an anthropologist. It was the living among people part I couldn’t handle, so in the end I went for dead cultures instead. But even I noticed that everyone around me was sulking, working in silence and frustration. I’m used to being the detached solitary one at a dig site while everyone else seems to share some kind of camaraderie, but those weeks out in the desert, I was no more solitary or detached than anyone else.
“What’s the point of all this?” I asked Tom.
“We don’t know yet what the point is,” he replied, almost cheerful. “We’ll find the point when we get to it!”
Tom always used to tell me that the past was no more written than the future, and I got what he was saying in a general sort of way; there’s so little we really know for sure. But there are limits. I would go out into the field and maybe learn that a certain tribe of ancient people had a slightly different pattern of migration than we had earlier thought, or that they hunted mainly deer when before we had thought buffalo. I wasn’t going to find out that they beat the Wright brothers at harnessing the power of flight or anything else that was going to blow all of our notions of history wide open.
But then here was this typewriter, and Tom looking at me most of the time with a smug expression on his face, like here was something that would finally show me how little I knew about the world.
* * *
At night, I would toss and turn in my tent. The typewriter had a sort of heaviness; it always seemed like I could feel it towering over me. On the nights I actually got up and went outside, Tom was usually out there too, not working, just standing around, like he was waiting for something. Sometimes we talked and sometimes we just nodded in a show of insomniac solidarity and sometimes we didn’t acknowledge each other at all.
One night, we stood shoulder to shoulder looking at the typewriter for a long time, not saying anything. I was trying to decide what it meant to me to stand next to him. It should have conjured feelings of some sort, that the man beside me used to share my bed, that he knew my body as well as he knew the skeletons he assembled, that he loved my hip bones best. But our marriage seemed like a dream I had once, the kind of dream that hangs just on the edge of your memory all the next day. When it comes down to it, we forget more than we think we’re capable of forgetting.
“Do you ever wonder if it’s not really the typewriter that’s huge?” he asked. I didn’t answer. “Sometimes I wonder if driving out here we become smaller and smaller, so gradually we don’t realize it. How would we ever know out here in the middle of all this sand if we’d become miniature?”
I kept on standing there, saying nothing, wondering how it’s ever possible to know just how small we really are.
* * *
The thing that put Tom on the map, so to speak, was the new species he discovered in the Phorusrachidae family: giant, flightless, carnivorous birds more commonly known as “the terror birds.” These things held their own against saber tooth tigers, roamed the earth along with sloths the size of Volkswagens. Tom found these fossils that were originally thought to be part of a known species, and he kept arguing that it was something different. Eventually he found a whole skeleton and proved he was right. Tom’s brilliance or his luck has always worked that way; what seems like bravado or naïve faith for him generally turns out to be simple truth.
He found his giant bird just before we got married. He named it Kathy. Not the species, I mean, but the skeleton. It’s still at the Field museum in Chicago, all 9.8 feet of it. I’ve only been there once since the divorce. I stood there and looked up at my creepy fucking avian namesake and tried to comprehend my life.
The problem is that Tom never should have married me. Not long after we started dating, he told me about this pre-Darwin French naturalist-philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Robinet. Robinet had a vague concept of evolution, which I guess I’ll commend him for. But his idea of how we evolved… He had organ-shaped stones–he found stones that looked vaguely like hearts and livers and kidneys and penises — and he thought they were fossils. He thought we were built up from a set of organ-prototypes, that nature had practiced and prepared to make us.
“Isn’t that kind of beautiful?” Tom asked. And I had looked at him, puzzled.
“But it’s so wrong,” I said. And he should have known we were never going to work. But he loved me, for whatever reason, and he thought he could conquer all differences the same way he conquered everything else.
Tom looks at me, post divorce, the way you look at something that reminds you of your failures. Not because he committed any real marital sins against me; our fate was decided long before Cynthia came along. He failed by never quite managing to make me fall in love with his world, that world of possibilities: wild, limitless.
I dust sand from bits of broken bowls. I think of the dead hands that made them, the dead lips that drank from them. Human, tangible. He sketches beasts with feathers and scales. He wills them into being. The creatures of his dreams are just the fossils he hasn’t found yet. When science and logic and every other damned thing calls something an impossibility, he assembles a team and he goes out to the edges of the earth and he changes the limits of what we consider possible to mean.
For all the times I’ve called him insane, I’m not sure I’ve ever once told him how I envy him.
* * *
Late one night, Tom and I sat inside the mechanical heart of the typewriter. We climbed up onto the scaffolding and sat side by side, our backs to one of the windows. It was like being in the great center of something, how I imagined it would feel to be down in the belly of a ship, the engine room of the Titanic.
“I’m going to leave,” I told him. “I need to get back to real work. There’s a tribal site out in the woods, way up north in Michigan…” Just saying the words made me feel oddly exhilarated, and I realized for the first time that maybe Tom and I were both wrong about me. Maybe in the end it wasn’t that I didn’t love adventure, it was that I found adventure in a different place. Not in mythical beasts, but in human beings. In the ways we had managed to survive. The things we endured.
“From one desolation to another,” he said, and I nodded.
“Aren’t those the circles we travel in?”
I sat there for a few minutes waiting for him to be angry with me, but he was only quiet. That was always the most difficult thing about Tom: he refused to ever chastise me for disappointing him, which made the guilt so much heavier.
“I need to move on, too,” he said. “This is fantastic, but… It’s just too much metal for me. I need to dig up some bones.”
“Do you know what the smallest bone in the skeleton is?” I asked him.
“What kind of skeleton?”
“Ours.” It was dark way down there, but I could still make out the faint outline of his pondering expression.
“Something in the fingers?”
I shook my head. “The inner ear.”
“I guess it’s a delicate thing,” he said. “Listening, I mean.”
“I always thought the more impressive thing about the inner ear is that it keeps us from falling over.”
“Do you think we’re ever going to figure out where this thing came from?” he asked.
“Does it matter if we do?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I came out here looking for a bird.”
“I hope you still find what you’re looking for,” I said. His hand inched forward on his knee, toward mine. He balled it into a fist. Not tight, just enough to hold back. I put my hands between my knees, palm to palm. I tried to remember if we had ever actually said we didn’t love each other anymore, which of us it was who had finally said we were finished.
He stood up and started walking the maze of scaffolding, touching the movable pieces tenderly, looking up at the sky filtered through the type bars overhead.
“It really is a magnificent machine,” he said.
I turned and looked out through the window. I pressed my nose against it, looked up at the stars, so clear and sharp out there you could feel every one like a pinprick. My breath fogged the glass. I wondered where on this earth I could find the fossil record of my liver, my kidneys, my lungs. Where I could find the stone that would tell my heart what shape it was supposed to be.
