date. Unless he hadn’t known about it.
“We need to open it,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Anand and the other guy for a little while. You walk the aisles. Pretend to take some notes. Then see if you can get the lid off. Don’t make any noise if you can help it. Here.” She reached into her purse and handed me a tiny digital camera.
“Are we allowed to take pictures?”
She tilted her head and gazed at me in wonderment at my naiveté. “Darcy, welcome to New York City. Take pictures if you find bones. Quickly. Then cover the barrel back up and come find me.”
She walked off, loudly saying, “Keep on going, Darcy. I’ll be right back.”
“OK!” My voice echoed three times through the warehouse.
I listened to her footsteps walk the long way across the warehouse as I moved slowly through the aisles with pen poised over pad, leaning in to see the long white activity tags on every barrel and scribbling as I went. It worried me that there might be a surveillance camera monitoring the aisles until I looked up at the fifty-foot-high ceiling: an endless field of stained dropped ceiling but not a piece of electronics in sight.
I returned to the low shelf with barrel number 12-84992. Carefully and quietly, I slid out the barrel blocking it, then slid 12-84992 forwards enough to reveal the round lid. It did not appear to be sealed with anything more than pressure.
Laughter echoed across the warehouse. Courtney was keeping the officers busy.
Wedging my fingertips under the metal rim, I tried to pry it off but it was pressed tightly on and wouldn’t budge. I reached into my bag for my house keys. After a minute of loosening the seal in minuscule increments with the tip of a key, I was able to widen an opening enough to fit my fingers under the lid’s edge, and push. There was a slight popping sound. I waited, listened: no echo. My hands shook as I lifted off the lid and set it on the floor beside me.
Inside the barrel was a large brown paper bag with the same voucher number scrawled on its side. The top had been rolled down and sealed with a single band of plastic tape. I was afraid that taking out the bag itself would make too much noise so instead I reached in, detached the tape and slowly unrolled the bag.
I could see a haphazard pile of something sticklike inside the bag but it was too dark to tell if it was a pile of bones. I couldn’t make out color or shape except that some appeared longer than others. Positioning Courtney’s camera over the barrel, low enough to conceal a flash, I took a picture. And for the instant of the flash I saw them: the bones. I took another picture for another glimpse and saw them again: a heap of dirt-stained femurs and tarsals, costals and carpals, mandibles, tali, humeri.
To make sure the photos had come out I checked them in the camera and now saw the images in greater detail: some with a creamy natural hue, some streaked with black, some bulbous at one end, some jagged where they had snapped. In the bag, lit by the flash, they appeared vividly and irreverently tossed together. And I thought of the only thing such an image could evoke in someone of my background. I thought of my father and his boyhood job as a digger in the camps. How many heaps of bones had he seen with his own eyes? And then my imagination, my
memory
, though in fact this was not
my
memory, built the bones into the skeletons of people as my father might have seen them. Recognized them. Friends, neighbors, colleagues … family. How had his young brain processed so many thousands of bones? Had he rebuilt them, given them flesh and sight and sound and language? Had he given them the music of life as he dug and buried, dug and dug and buried and buried and buried? These random bones in the bag in the barrel came to life before my eyes as I imagined my father’s skeletons had come to life before his. Know them or not, you recognized them, these people robbed of life. They were his echoes.
“Why
“We need to open it,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Anand and the other guy for a little while. You walk the aisles. Pretend to take some notes. Then see if you can get the lid off. Don’t make any noise if you can help it. Here.” She reached into her purse and handed me a tiny digital camera.
“Are we allowed to take pictures?”
She tilted her head and gazed at me in wonderment at my naiveté. “Darcy, welcome to New York City. Take pictures if you find bones. Quickly. Then cover the barrel back up and come find me.”
She walked off, loudly saying, “Keep on going, Darcy. I’ll be right back.”
“OK!” My voice echoed three times through the warehouse.
I listened to her footsteps walk the long way across the warehouse as I moved slowly through the aisles with pen poised over pad, leaning in to see the long white activity tags on every barrel and scribbling as I went. It worried me that there might be a surveillance camera monitoring the aisles until I looked up at the fifty-foot-high ceiling: an endless field of stained dropped ceiling but not a piece of electronics in sight.
I returned to the low shelf with barrel number 12-84992. Carefully and quietly, I slid out the barrel blocking it, then slid 12-84992 forwards enough to reveal the round lid. It did not appear to be sealed with anything more than pressure.
Laughter echoed across the warehouse. Courtney was keeping the officers busy.
Wedging my fingertips under the metal rim, I tried to pry it off but it was pressed tightly on and wouldn’t budge. I reached into my bag for my house keys. After a minute of loosening the seal in minuscule increments with the tip of a key, I was able to widen an opening enough to fit my fingers under the lid’s edge, and push. There was a slight popping sound. I waited, listened: no echo. My hands shook as I lifted off the lid and set it on the floor beside me.
Inside the barrel was a large brown paper bag with the same voucher number scrawled on its side. The top had been rolled down and sealed with a single band of plastic tape. I was afraid that taking out the bag itself would make too much noise so instead I reached in, detached the tape and slowly unrolled the bag.
I could see a haphazard pile of something sticklike inside the bag but it was too dark to tell if it was a pile of bones. I couldn’t make out color or shape except that some appeared longer than others. Positioning Courtney’s camera over the barrel, low enough to conceal a flash, I took a picture. And for the instant of the flash I saw them: the bones. I took another picture for another glimpse and saw them again: a heap of dirt-stained femurs and tarsals, costals and carpals, mandibles, tali, humeri.
To make sure the photos had come out I checked them in the camera and now saw the images in greater detail: some with a creamy natural hue, some streaked with black, some bulbous at one end, some jagged where they had snapped. In the bag, lit by the flash, they appeared vividly and irreverently tossed together. And I thought of the only thing such an image could evoke in someone of my background. I thought of my father and his boyhood job as a digger in the camps. How many heaps of bones had he seen with his own eyes? And then my imagination, my
memory
, though in fact this was not
my
memory, built the bones into the skeletons of people as my father might have seen them. Recognized them. Friends, neighbors, colleagues … family. How had his young brain processed so many thousands of bones? Had he rebuilt them, given them flesh and sight and sound and language? Had he given them the music of life as he dug and buried, dug and dug and buried and buried and buried? These random bones in the bag in the barrel came to life before my eyes as I imagined my father’s skeletons had come to life before his. Know them or not, you recognized them, these people robbed of life. They were his echoes.
“Why
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