The Weapon of Young Gods #31: Artificial Archaeology

(10PM – promoted by RiaD)

My mother used to say that I had an advanced case of “Prince Henry the Navigator Syndrome,” and she was more prescient than I think even she knew. When I was a kid I absorbed ridiculous amounts of historical and geographical trivia, even before the onset of nightmarish insomnia made those useful distractions a necessity. Crumpled National Geographics and outdated Britannicas taught me about anything I wanted to know, anywhere in the world, but that didn’t make me want to actually visit any of the places I studied. Home may have been a disaster zone, but it was still home, the devil I knew as opposed to the unknown vast outside universe. The few family road trips I was subjected to as a child were sagas of hellish torture and crushing boredom. One summer, Modesto was a wretched sauna, Yuba City a muggy, sweaty armpit, and Arcata took the crown of Nastiest Refuge for the Crazed Legions of Plague-Ridden Killer Insects-or so I felt at the time. I garnered little sympathy from my stepfather on these occasions; one of the most vivid memories I have of him was enduring his withering, exasperated scowls as I whined pathetically all the way up the highway toward our next rest stop.

Of course, Prince fucking Henry was royalty, so that coddled little bastard could lounge around all he wanted in that cozy castle retreat in westernmost Portugal. He could watch the caravels sail in from India or Africa or America, and he was anxious to leech out the conquistadors’ tales of foreign lands for the sake of his own cartographical amusement. I’d always tried, all those years, to not be insulted by Mom’s unintentionally accurate caricature of me, but it annoyed me then and still rankles today, ten years after her death. I was trying to explain all this to Frankie in her dorm room on the night after I returned to school, still reeling from the potent stimuli of the weekend’s mild rock deviance and harrowing sexual fear. I hadn’t meant to spill out random family history to a girl I that I was apparently-according to Olivia-supposed to mistrust, but like everything else at that time, I had no idea what really mattered, and anyway, I never failed to rise to the challenge of out-weirding anyone else’s exotically bizarre family stories. Anyway, the Italian Front had been quiet for a good twenty-four hours, but I could feel it stirring in its sleep ever since I got back from the train station, so when the action finally began I was more than ready.

Previous Episode

Soundtrack (mp3): ‘Artificial Archaeology’ by Low Tide

“So how was the gig, Roy? You haven’t said a word about it all night.” Francesca Rossettini took the first shot of the engagement, and I felt the master sniper’s bullet whizz overhead as I extricated myself from an impenetrable biography of Elizabeth I. I’d blown off all studying prior to the Blue Monkeynuts show, and now the Virgin Queen-along with her country’s entire early modern history-was breathing down my neck in the form of yet another midterm, and of course I was hideously unprepared.

Frankie’s question hung in the air, so I turned to focus on her. “Um, it was…okay, I guess,” I shrugged, reaching over to the stereo to turn Bjork’s volume down. Not the right soundtrack for Mediterranean engagements like this one. Frankie was back to being her old schizoid self again, acting like the past month of on-again, off-again fuck-teasing was completely normal. I’d had no real purpose when cruising over here after dinner, but the midterm gave me a good excuse to cut conversation. I didn’t trust myself to keep quiet about Olivia, and blurting out any self-incriminating information was far more likely under nervous circumstances.

“Just ‘okay?'” She threw me a mildly skeptical look before cutting up another photo. Aside from waiting on a mountain of laundry to spin through its cycles, Frankie had been avoiding real work too, creating another photo collage to join the three poster-sized tributes to high school nostalgia that already crowded her wall.

“Well, no…I mean, actually, it went pretty well,” I hedged, avoiding eye contact. “We played fine, but it just took the band a little while to get into it, you know? First show, new venue, that sort of thing.” I looked around in desperation, hoping to latch onto anything but her perceptive stare. The room was a chaotic mess; my eyes perused her open closet, overflowing wastebasket, and cluttered desk. I’d usually ignored the sensory overload of visual detail that was omnipresent in Frankie’s dorm room, mostly because I’d usually been otherwise occupied, either in appreciating too much attention from her, or instead wondering why that well sometimes ran cruel and dry. Tonight, though, the sheer mass of mess was almost impressive.

“As long as it was fun, right?” Her voice got lighter, and it seemed like all my paranoia was for nothing.

“Yeah, it was fun.” My eyes landed on something new among the random crap: a fold-out map of the Philippine archipelago, tacked up half-hidden and a little crooked behind the open closet door. I pointed at it, looking back at her again. “When did you get that?”

She smiled. “This weekend. Pulled it out of an old atlas in the library.”

“Huh.” I ignored the obvious lie-the university library kept all its geographical and geological resources under tight scrutiny-and got up to take a closer look. I stepped over an unzipped green duffel bag that sat atop an avalanche of clothes spilling out of the closet. “Why the Philippines?”

“Lived there for three years as a kid.” She sliced up another photo. “Haven’t I told you that story yet?”

“Don’t think so.” I became a little more attentive. “Is it a good one?”

“Naturally.” Frankie drew a dramatic breath before beginning. “So, I believe I mentioned my folks are geologists?”

I nodded. She’d told me this when we signed up for an introductory geology course together. “Well, that’s where they met,” she continued. “They were both there in the Peace Corps during the early seventies, and after they’d been back in the States for long enough to start our family, they were invited back in like, 1982 or so, for some field work opportunities. My baby sister and I got all packed up and were dragged halfway around the world.”

“Field work?”

“Helping out surveying and planning and stuff,” she explained. “Since they were still kind of tri-lingual they got roped into doing all sorts of things.”

“Three languages? Cool. Did you pick up anything yourself?”

“A little Tagalog and a whole lotta Spanish,” she nodded. “The whole time was one of the best experiences of my life, really. I cried when we had to leave.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I was about eight. Dad told me later that he didn’t want to be there when Marcos was on the way out. He thought it might get messy.”

“Wow.” I felt like a dumb yokel. “I wish I had something like that under the belt. I’ve only been to, like, five states and Tijuana.”

Her eyes goggled in surprise. “No way! Roy the geo-genius hasn’t really been anywhere?” Frankie looked genuinely shocked, or maybe disappointed.

“Guilty as charged,” I admitted, chafing at the backhanded compliment, and told her about my mom’s diagnostic opinion on that issue, but then Frankie cocked her head in confusion. “Who’s Prince Henry?”

“Portuguese guy,” I replied, stuffing Elizabeth I in my backpack. It was almost ten-thirty and studying was becoming futile. “Hid out in his castle during the fourteen-hundreds, poring over all the maps the conquistadors brought back, but he never went to any of those places that fascinated him.” She looked impressed, and I could see her next question from a mile away. It had to come sooner or later, but I still tried to pre-empt it.

“Yeah,” I continued, “but I used to hate it when my mom said that. I got over it, though, once I realized how true it was.” Frankie smiled warmly. “She sounds like a smart lady. When do I get to meet her?”

“If you’re lucky, you won’t meet her for a very long time.”

“What?” She looked at me like I’d spoken Swahili.

“Nothing. She’s…dead, that’s all.” I said it plainly, but Frankie looked horrified.

“Oh my God…oh, fuck.” Frankie furrowed her brow long enough for me to begin elaborating, but I didn’t get far; as soon as I drew breath to speak, three quick raps sounded at the door. She jumped at the noise, even more thrown, and looked from me to the door and back again, shakily saying “C-come in.”

I almost laughed in spite of myself-we were just talking about the place-as Ana the Filipina stuck her head and shoulders around the door. “Hey Frankie,” she said, giving me a cursory glance, “are those your clothes in the dryer? All the rest are full and I got shit to do, baby.”

“Oh!” Frankie stood up immediately, but otherwise looked like she wasn’t too keen on interrupting story time, “I’m sorry, I totally forgot…and I had another load after that, too.”

Ana rolled her eyes and turned to leave, saying something about monopolizing the remaining washers as she went. Frankie hastily gathered up clothes at random off the floor, but confirmed her fixation. “I won’t be gone long, Roy-you can stay here and wait for me if you still…um…want to talk…” Her voice trailed off and she looked at me expectantly.

“Sure, yeah.” I gave her what she wanted but tried to stay cool, reaching for my book again as she smiled sympathetically and shut the door behind her. I closed my eyes and counted to twenty, then opened them and surveyed the enclosed panorama of domestic destruction around me. I lay back against the bed and stretched, looking randomly at the trash can, full of mutilated photos. I glanced at the Philippines again before realizing something with a jolt and snapped back to fish something out of the garbage, something that had caught my eye for a split second.

One of the pictures Frankie had cut up was a posed shot of three people, and the two she’d cropped out to throw away had their hands clapped around her shoulders: a red-headed girl I didn’t recognize, and none other than Lisa Arroyo, Liv’s older sister, brightly sneering at the camera and giving Frankie bunny ears. I gawked stupidly at the image as planet-sized explosions annihiliated my thought process. Olivia and Frankie must have met each other, or at least knew of each other, through Lisa. Liv must have thought I’d known this, or been told-but then she still held out on me once she realized I wasn’t in on anything.

Shit. Shit! Another fucking inside joke I’d been left out of. “Goddamn,” I said softly, but amorphous animosity suddenly surged through me. Violently curious now, I plunged my hand into the trash again, digging for other familiar faces. I was rewarded with a second shocking revelation, but barely had a few stunned seconds to register the new face-strange in this context but familiar nonetheless-and then stow both that photo and the one of Lisa in my bag before Frankie returned.

She dropped the load of clean clothes on the floor, shut the door, and “How?” was all she said. How? How wha-oh. My mom. She was still back there with my dead mother. I stared at the girl in front of me, but was still thinking of the girl from this weekend, and felt the last drop of empathy evaporate off my skin. I thought about the two photos currently burning a hole in my backpack, the one of Lisa, slashed out of Frankie’s life like a bitter mistake, and the other one, clean and whole but thrown out just the same: an airbrushed senior class photo of a smirking Christian Addison. Lisa and Liv’s cousin. I could hear his braying sneer in my head now, erupting from the New Year’s party five months ago, and knew I was not going to tell Frankie the truth about much of anything now, or probably ever again. People ought to be honest and open about their fucking past, I thought to myself, and I’ll be damned if she’ll get to know anything like that about me after trying to omit this shit.

“It was, um…cancer. Skin cancer.” I whispered the lie quietly, hoping Frankie would swallow it whole. I glanced up into her eyes and tried to look grim. “Yeah, my mom died of melanoma when I was…when I was sixteen.”

Frankie’s worried expression relaxed considerably as she sat down on the floor and wrapped her arms around me, not unkindly. I knew she wanted to hear more, but I was too tired to improvise anything else, so I said I didn’t really want to talk about it and she let it go. She started folding her laundry, and I tried to jump back into Elizabeth I’s life and times, but I couldn’t concentrate. I needed to study those photos, to think hard about what this might mean. I ended up staying in her room all night, but nothing else happened; I watched her fall asleep still fully clothed, and before too long the whir and hum of my own boiling thoughts wasn’t enough to keep me from going under too.