“Why?”
“I don’t remember, to tell the truth.” Memory wasn’t the only thing that was beginning to slip away from me at that point.
“There’s a message from B inside of it,” someone suggested. “Like a Chinese fortune cookie. That’s why you have to smash it.”
“There’s no way to get a message inside,” I explained stupidly. “It’s solid rock.”
“B could get a message inside.”
Several unseen listeners expressed confident agreement with this opinion.
Before I quite realized what was going on, a fossil-smashing party had been organized. I was uprooted from my table and hustled outdoors to stumble along in the center of a small drunken mob. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where we were going or why we were going anywhere at all. Others were leading, in search of some place or resource completely unimaginable by me.
As suddenly as we began, we stopped and were promptly squashed and trampled by those who continued to blunder forward, slapstick style. Someone ahead of me turned around, handed me a brick, and said, “Here!”
“Bring him over here!” someone else called out. A path opened up in front of me and I was led forward to a brick stack as wide and high as a pool table.
“Go ahead!” someone called out. “Let’s see what’s inside!”
“There’s nothing inside!” I protested.
“Here, give it to me!” another said. “I’ll do it!”
I clutched the fossil to my chest, and someone shoved me from behind. “Go on,” he said, in a voice no longer quite friendly.
With the brick pile at my back, I turned to face them. “I’m not going to destroy this fossil,” I said.
They received this news as if it were a thunderclap. After a moment someone at the back said in a puzzled tone, “I thought Shirin told him to smash it …?”
An imposingly tall man at the front said, “Are you a coward?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then why are you dithering? The fossil has no intrinsic value.”
A woman at the back called out, “He’s not a coward in general, Giinter. He’s just scared of this particular message.”
Two in the crowd spoke at once. One said, “What is the message?” The other said, “What’s he scared of?”
The tall man called Giinter stepped forward and spoke to me almost confidentially. “It’s not a thing you can just refuse to do, Jared. Charles gave you the fossil for a reason, and Shirin said you’d have to smash it to find out what the reason was—so you have to smash it. Otherwise this period of your life will remain incomplete and inconclusive.”
I knew he was right, and one way or another I knew I was not going to leave that place with the fossil intact, so with no more dithering I set it on top of the bricks and smashed it. While I stood there befuddled, Giinter stepped forward, plucked a scrap of white paper from the rubble, and instantly balled it up in his fist.
“Give me that!” I cried.
“There’s no way to get a message inside,” he told me gravely, already walking away. “It’s solid rock.”
The others laughed, and someone said, “Don’t pay any attention to him—he’s just teasing. It’s a trick, a sleight of hand. He’s always pulling coins out of people’s ears.”
On hearing these words, Giinter tossed the ball of paper over his shoulder without a break in stride, and a woman sitting on a stack of bricks nearby darted forward to scoop it up as a souvenir. As suddenly as it began, the show was over, and the crowd began straggling away. Only the woman who had retrieved the scrap of paper seemed prepared to stay. I felt like crying.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she said. “I was sitting next to Shirin the first night you came down to the cellar. Bonnie?”
“I remember you, Bonnie, I just didn’t recognize you. You look older.”
“I am older,” she assured me in all seriousness.
We stood there awkwardly through a long moment.