Phase Shift (4 page)

"I thought I might do his hand as an
exemplar. You know, to give the students an idea of what they
should be doing."

"Remind me again why I never pursued a
career in forensic anthropology?" All I can think about is having
to examine a human body in the same stage of decomposition as Ringo
the Chimp. I don't know how Palmer does it. Teaching at the
University is only part of what he does. He is routinely called in
to consult for the Toronto Metropolitan Police, whenever they find
a badly decomposed body they need help identifying. He can look at
a skeleton and make a pretty good estimation of height, weight,
sex, ancestry, lifestyle, and death. It's fascinating work—if you
can stomach it.

"So how'd it go tonight?" he asks. He's
hunched over his project again, busying himself with scraping small
scraps of flesh from Ringo's bones with a scalpel knife.

The air coming in through the window is
chilly and I consider closing it for a second, but then I catch a
whiff of what's brewing in the pasta pot again and my stomach
lurches. "Uh, Palmer?" I manage to swallow the bile that rises at
the back of my throat by taking another swig of water. "Why'd you
have to use my spaghetti pot for that?"

"I'll wash it," he says, "don't worry." Not
once does he raise his eyes.

"It won't be enough. We're going to have to
buy a new pot."

Now he does looks up from his work. He
appears amused. "I'll wash it twice." He smiles at me and I have to
fight smiling back. This is serious—I love that pot. "The
dishwasher'll sterilize it, I'm sure," he says. He scratches at the
chimp's knuckle, first with his fingernail and then with the
scalpel. "So?" he asks again. "How did it go?"

"Okay, I guess. I got to catch up with
Serge. Oh, and Suzanne sends her regards." I say this half-teasing,
voice sing-songy. I consider sitting beside him at the table, but
there's something about watching him pick at the bone and the sound
it makes that makes me feel like puking. Instead, I walk to the
opposite end of the kitchen and stand behind him, far enough to so
his body obscures the details of what he’s doing. I concentrate on
the delicate movement of his arms.

"Old Lady Weatherly asked for you."

"Did she bring another of grandma's flow
blue china plates?"

I can't help but smile. "What's the deal
with that?"

"The first plate she brought to me was
authentic—well over a hundred years old. Since then, she brings me
a different plate every time." I can tell he remembers her fondly.
He stops scraping momentarily and shakes his head. "Every time I
see her she brings me another plate and every time I see her she
goes home disappointed."

"Well, there wasn't much more than that:
some playing cards, more plates, your typical attic fare. Except
for this one guy? Stanley Hume? Claims he found this box buried in
his backyard. Actually gave me the artifacts. Wouldn't take 'no'
for an answer."

Palmer looks at me over his shoulder. "What
do you mean, ‘gave’ them to you?"

"He insisted I have them. Wants me to do
some research on them. Gave me his card so I could give them
back."

"And you're going to do the research for
him?"

I think about this for a moment, actually
completing the research I promised the guy, but then I think better
of it. "Who has time for research? I'll probably just call him
later in the week and drop them off at his house when he's at
work."

He nods and then returns to his scraping.
"That's what I'd do too, I guess."

I watch him in silence for a moment. "Well,
that's it for me," I tell him, "I'm going to bed."

He looks at me over his shoulder and I am
overwhelmed by the urge to grab him from behind and nibble on his
ear. He puts down what he's doing long enough to weave his fingers
through my hair. It feels good. I try hard not to think about the
fact the fingers entwined in my hair are the exact same fingers
that were picking monkey cartilage off the bone only seconds
before. "You'll clean my pot tonight?" I whisper into his ear. The
whole eccentric professor thing is charming on him and I want to be
understanding, but try as I might, I can't be nonchalant about the
pot.

"Goodnight, Moll," he says, good-humoured
but dismissive. I release him from my grasp. His arms resume their
delicate scraping motion. "Be in soon," he says.

It is 2:26 by my bedside clock before I feel
Palmer climb into the bed beside me and I can't help but think
about the pot once more. I say a silent prayer I don't wake up to
day old monkey scum floating in a pot on the stovetop tomorrow
morning.

Dr. Trisha Purchase finished coloring in the
circle before exchanging the fat yellow crayon for a fat red one.
She gazed at the boy sitting across the table from her. Five year
old Cody Gruber sensed her looking and snuck a sideways glance
before he returned to his drawing. Trisha began outlining thick red
petals around the yellow circle. She had completed three petals,
nearly half her flower, before examining Cody's drawing in
detail.

Usually the boy busied himself drawing
pictures of him and his family in front of their new house, or of
elaborate cityscapes with roads under repair, drawbridges and the
CN Tower. But this drawing was different. Along one side of the
heavy, cream-colored paper was a stick figure of a boy with blond
hair and blue eyes, assumedly Cody himself. The stick boy was boxed
in with a brown rectangle. Beside the boy-in-a-box was a second
stick figure, tall and thin and wearing a long, flowing robe.

"Cody," Trisha began, "that's a great
picture you're drawing."

The boy smiled without diverting his
attention from the paper.

"What is it?"

"Well," the boy said, "this is me." He
pointed to the small stick figure in the box. "I'm in bed and I'm
sleeping."

Trisha smiled at him, trying to make the boy
feel at ease. "And the other figure?"

"That's God," Cody replied,
matter-of-factly.

So that was it,
Trisha thought.
At
long last we see the manifestation of the troublesome behaviour his
parents were talking about
. Twice a week for three long weeks,
Trisha and Cody had sat there, on opposite sides of the low coffee
table, drawing pictures. While Cody drew his cityscapes, Trisha
busied herself drawing brightly coloured flowers with thick, green
stems, stars, smiling suns and happy spiders with Kodiak work
boots.
At last, a breakthrough. Let's see if we can get to the
root of the problem, shall we?

"Cody? Sweetheart?" she asked. "Why do you
think that's God?"

"Well, because it is. He came to visit
me."

"And did he tell you he was God when he
came?"

"Nope."

"Then how do you know it was him?"

"I just know." Cody put down the black
crayon with which he had been drawing the darkness in the room and
picked up a white one. He began scribbling a long, white beard on
the face of the God stick figure.

Contemplating her next move, Trisha finished
drawing her daisy and traded the red crayon for green. She began to
draw a thick, green stem with the usual three fat leaves.

"Cody," she said, "I'm a bit confused. When
you say you saw God, you mean you saw a man who looked like God,
like how you imagine God to look, right?" She studied the drawing
of the person Cody purported to be The Man himself.

"Nope," he said, raising a single finger as
if to punctuate his point. "It was him, alright."

"How did God get into your room, Cody?"

"Well," he said, relaxing his crayon hand,
and resting it on the table. He looked skyward, considering his
reply. "He just appeared."

"You mean it was like he just appeared in
the doorway and walked right in, don't you?"

"Nope. I mean he just appeared. He was just
there, in the middle of the room, and then he wasn't. And then
Daddy got mad."

Trisha frowned. "Why did Daddy get mad,
Cody?"

"Well," Cody said, taking a deep breath
before continuing, "when he left, he left my room in a terrible
mess."

Trisha frowned again. God, it seemed, was
alive and well. According to Cody, he looked like Dumbledore in the
movie renditions of
Harry Potter
, and visited little boys in
the middle of the night to trash their rooms. Trisha stopped
talking long enough to finish her flower. She put down the green
crayon and chose a brown one instead with which she drew a small
circle—the body of a smiling spider with buck-teeth and oversized,
leather work boots.

"Cody," Trisha said, pausing long enough to
bite her lower lip, "why did God come to visit you?"

"I don't know," he said, continuing to
colour as he spoke. "I think he was lost." Cody looked up at Trisha
as if to gauge her reaction to this last statement.

"Why do you think that, Sweetie?"

"Well, he just stood there, looking around.
He looked at me and then at my room and then he just left."

"How did he leave, Cody?"

"He just left. And he messed my room up
good." His face lit up as he spoke, arms flailing wildly for
emphasis. "It was awesome! Poof! And he was gone! It was cool."

I absolutely love doing archaeological
research. On a site, there's just me, the soil, and the occasional
artifact—it's paradise. There are no daydreaming students asking
for clarification, no one trying to nickel and dime me for an extra
mark or two on their assignments, no whining because I refuse to
arrange for make-up lab time, just the sun and the dirt and my
trowel. In the case of historical research, the beauty is in the
century-plus written word. Volumes and volumes of lists of deed
owners, title transfers and mortgage liens; maps and census records
and tax assessment roles; microfiche and dusty, yellowed,
hand-written ledgers; for me, there's something desirable about it,
personal, sexy.

Although I generally jump at the
opportunity—any opportunity—to visit the archives, I never intended
to do any sort of research for Stanley Hume. I never do anything
for which I could get paid, for free. Besides which, my time comes
at a premium and there's very little of it to spare. There are
always lectures to compose, papers to grade, labs to run...Any day
I leave campus by six is a good day. It's a bonus if Palmer comes
with. Even so, unless you're a reality TV junkie (which I'm not),
there's not much else to do but boot up the computer and do some
work. Most nights I barely have time to eat or shower, so there's
no way I was going to spend some of my precious free time doing
research for a total stranger on a collection of artifacts that
would almost certainly turn out to be a fraud. I had fully planned
to hold on to the box for a while, maybe a couple of weeks or so,
and then contact Stanley, make arrangements to drop off the
artifacts and tell him I had found nothing.

But then the phone calls started to come,
and that damned tin box sat on my desk mocking me every time I sat
down, daring me to open it. Four lousy artifacts: a token, a photo,
a silver case and a small, metallic object—I don't know why the
collection intrigued me as much as it did. If Stanley had truly
excavated the box in his backyard, there had to be a logical
explanation for how these disparate artifacts found their way into
a box buried around the middle of the century. The trouble was, the
more I thought about it, the more I was certain I wasn't getting
the whole story from him.

For me, that settled it. The only way I was
ever going to resolve that conundrum of mine was to get up off my
ass and actually do the research, if for no other reason but to
prove Mr. Stanley Hume's micro-museum a hoax.

So I bit the bullet and did the research,
which is how I find myself standing on Stanley Hume's front stoop,
waiting for him to answer the door, which he does, after what seems
like eons.

Stanley greets me affably at the door,
wearing ill-fitted jeans, a Roots sweatshirt, and flip-flop sandals
over white exercise socks—eww! There’s something about socks and
sandals that reeks of old man in retirement villa in Florida. I
swear I would shoot Palmer if he ever wore socks with sandals.

Stanley invites me in and leads me on an
impromptu grand tour of the house. Crossing the threshold of
Stanley's house is like crossing a threshold in time. Stanley's
mother, it appears, was a woman of bland taste. Stanley, it
appears, is a man of no taste but for that of his mother. Every
wall of the house's interior is covered with something that looks
like bitter mint green. All of the walls are bare, save for the odd
too-large, too-ornately framed oil painting caked with dust. The
house would be perfectly, tastefully decorated—if this were still
the nineteen-fifties, that is.

In spite of the dust bunnies proliferating
on the floor and hanging from the ceiling and the odd cobweb
spanning the corner of the odd door jamb, the house is immaculate,
and gorgeous, I have to admit. From the original wood work framing
the room entrances and the cranberry and cobalt glass in the front
transom, to the dust and mildew in the air, this house is
definitely a piece of history.

"What I really wanted to show you was out
back. This way," Stanley says, and starts walking down the narrow
hallway which leads to the kitchen, bath and bedrooms at the back.
Stanley detours into a door under the stairwell which leads us down
a narrow, warped flight of stairs and out to the backyard.

Near the center of the yard, Stanley had dug
a very large hole, at least three feet deep. "In there," he tells
me.

I kneel down at the lip of the hole, trying
to eye the stratigraphy of it. Good thing I brought my digging kit.
I lower the canvas sack from my shoulder to the ground and work my
trowel free. "May I?"