strapped to the back. ‘They really did it! Just like you predicted, uh-huh?’
‘Yep.’
‘I can’t believe it. It’s just incredible.’ Larry smoothed a worried hand over his jaw.
‘He’s emailing a PDF. You can see it if you like.’
‘No, no. I believe you.’
They passed a row of uninhabited concrete houses, one of them used as a garbage depot: a great green pile of plastic Sprite bottles was heaped within. The next corner revealed a dirt road that dwindled into a cloud of grimy haze; open concrete sewers full of trash divided the busted hovels from the road.
It was a scene of apocalyptic dereliction, a scene from Iraq just after the war: shattered suburbs of desolate beige, with helpless brown wide-eyed kids staring in mystification at a world so totally destroyed by the grown-ups. The only difference was here there had been no war.
The traffic slowed and surged, and slowed; she thought of her father, being tested. In hospital. The blood test. Jessica had already accepted her own denial, she knew she wasn’t going to get the test, she wasn’t even going to call her mother. She was going to live her life until she couldn’t live it any more, whatever was really wrong with her. Anything else was intolerable: the knowledge of certain and appalling death was worse than the fear of her ignorance. Her conscious decision not to know actually gave her an odd elation, a kind of liberation. Self- acceptance.
Larry grabbed a slug of Inca Kola from a big yellow plastic bottle in the gear well. ‘You hear about Jay?’
‘No?’
‘Says he has been having nightmares. Nightmares about the Moche god, coming to cut off his head!’
‘Except of course technically, the Moche cut off their hands, as well, and their feet. As we now know.’
Larry’s sigh was derisive, yet resigned. ‘That’s the damn crux, isn’t it? They did it to themselves, voluntarily. I have no conceptual way of understanding this-’
‘The Aztecs self-mutilated.’
Larry accelerated into a traffic gap, between two green and red motokars. ‘OK, yeah sure, they spiked their penises with cactus thorns. They drew blood from their ear lobes. They scarred themselves. And lots of cultures scarify, Jessica. But this crazy-ass Moche shit is on a whole new level — cutting off your own healthy hands? To impress? To please the gods? Why? And then there’s the sex, the kinky stuff. Sex with skeletons? Sodomizing each other during horrible ritual murder? It’s like — like they must have been getting off on it. All the torture.’
‘Clearly. But the eroticism is a leitmotif throughout the culture, Larry — victims and perpetrators are all involved, all sexualized. We have the evidence of the murals. The aroused naked prisoners, brothers and sons, brothers and… and fathers…’
‘So they flay them and torture them and tie them up, their own sons and brothers, and then they slowly bleed them to death, and then someone drinks the blood from a special cup, and as all this is going on someone else thinks, hey, I know, let’s have anal sex in the same room at the same time just in case it gets a bit goddamn boring.’
‘And all this while the rest of the people are singing and dancing and watching, yep, it is incredibly bizarre.’
‘And then they bring in the pumas. They have sex with pumas.’
‘We don’t know the puma sex was consensual.’
‘Ah, no. Muy stupido.’ Larry’s laugh was wild and bitter. ‘Might have been puma rape, right? Now they’ve really crossed the line. Sodomizing old corpses, cool; drinking your brother’s blood, that’s fine and dandy; but puma rape? Heck. Someone call PETA!’
The pick-up took a turning, at speed. They were closer to the centre of the city now. The buildings fled past. A red Nova Scotia bank, a white concrete evangelical church, then a statue to a fat, forgotten general in an anonymous and dusty plaza jammed with imprisoned traffic.
Larry sighed. ‘It’s just beyond — beyond anything… It’s just… way out there.’
‘Yep. And Dan still doesn’t quite buy it, he’s still resistant. Emotionally. He doesn’t believe it really happened, and if it happened — well then he wants to blame it on El Nino. He can’t actually come out and say the obvious: that that this is just what the Moche did. Stuff they liked to do. Chop off their own hands, or feet, or noses. Mutilate themselves.’
A pink San German bus was passing them on the right, stuffed to the broken windows with poor tired people: weary fish-workers and bag-clutching housewives staring soulfully at the gringos in the Chevrolet.
‘So you fault him for this?’
‘Actually, yes, I do.’
‘Why? I thought you two were in love.’
There was a long silence. Jessica blushed, fiercely. ‘Is it that obvious?’
Larry laughed. ‘Yes. It’s that obvious. Everyone in Zana knows about you and the boss, babe. You’re not very good at sneaking around, you two. But don’t worry!’ He laughed again. ‘We’re all happy for you. You make a nice couple! And Dan is a very decent man and he was kinda lonely before you came along… So it’s a good thing. Don’t fret.’
She shrugged, half-embarrassed, and yet half-pleased. ‘Don’t know what to say. But I want you to know it doesn’t affect the science, for either of us. That’s separate, we’re still professionals. And Dan and I disagree on the Moche.’
‘How?’
‘I think he is hampered by political correctness. Like so many academics of his generation. Take cannibalism.’
‘If you insist.’
‘These days, if you believed most senior anthropologists and archaeologists, cannibalism never happened. Never ever, or hardly ever, and certainly not when poor brown people are being discussed.’
‘Right.’
‘Yet we know for sure that cannibalism has been, through history, a pretty widespread phenomenon. Dozens of cultures have recorded it, from the Anasazi to the Sumatrans to the Maori. Fiji. New Guinea. The Amazon. Scientists have even found bones, with saw marks on them, next to human middens with evidence of human flesh digested by human alimentary canals. And yet the bien pensant ethnologists still say — oh no, it’s racist, how can you accuse these poor people of such horrible things, perhaps a bear came in and used a knife?’
They were much closer now. The streets were definitely older and narrower, low-slung Spanish colonial buildings painted dirty orange or red, flickered past.
‘OK, Jess. But look at it the other way. Accusations of cannibalism were also, like, used as a neat way to disparage non-Europeans, right? So the questioning of cannibalism is a justified reaction to that, to the racist jokes about boiled missionaries, decades of horrible eugenics, fuzzy-wuzzies with bones through the noses.’
‘But it’s bad science. Science should be science. Uninfluenced by politics.’
‘I agree. But maybe not everyone is as ruthlessly clear-headed and ambitious as you.’ Larry was half-smiling, obviously teasing. ‘And Jessica, you gotta recall the emotional context.’
‘How?’
‘Dan has been studying the Moche for a decade. It’s like they are his family. The Moche are his people. Now someone comes along…’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. His smart and ambitious young girlfriend. And you say uh-oh sorry, Dad was a sex-killer and Mom liked threesomes with goats. He’s offended on behalf of his family. The Moche. So just… go easy, Jess. You’re vindicated. Be magnanimous.’
‘All right.’ Jess permitted herself a nervous laugh.
‘You had any thoughts about the gunman?’ Larry asked quietly. ‘Dan won’t even talk about it.’
‘Been trying to not think about myself, if I’m honest.’
‘Sure. But, didn’t you say you got some scuttle on this dude? This
… McLintock guy?’
‘He’s a Scottish historian. Or he was.’
‘Killed himself recently?’
‘Yes.’
