The Little Archeologist

” Male, six-five-eight-zero?”
“Yes.”
‘You know why I’m here?”
” Yes. Does it hurt?”
She kneels beside me, runs her eyes over me, speed-reading. Her voice softens.
” No. It won’t hurt. I promise you that.”

This is what they do now. They send one of these personal archaeologists to plumb you before you die. To excavate your hidden places, dig through the scar tissue; to lay bare and gasping things that haven’t breathed for years, before you snuff them out.

I lay on the bed, naked, little bloodless trenches all over, my archaeologist kneeling at my side. She runs her finger between my nipples, winding her fingertips in my chest hair, pulling it gently. She runs the finger down over my sternum. She pauses it above my navel. She is watching her hands. They are small, square, purposeful hands, slim fingered, short nailed, the backs are freckled. Some of her fingers are calloused at the tip, I can feel them, tiny, dry and scraping over my skin like so many arthritic spiders.

She kneels over me. It would not take much for this to be another place, another time, and she, paid, pretending interest in these bones. She is young, small, lithe. Her fingers work fast. Her hair, undefined, wispy, tied back but escaping, looks like straw. She has small even teeth, at least, mostly even. I like mouths. This mouth is relaxed, generous, unthinking. The one uneven tooth catches inside her top lip. She moistens the lips to slide them over the unevenness. There is something heartbreaking about that mouth, about the action. Her face is fine featured, intelligent. Unplucked eyebrows over grey eyes. Almost expressionless, she has remained for hours working in and over my body. Only the eyes have moved, flickered, shadows passing over them like the wind ripples the surface of the sea. Those lips have moved, speaking my body away into her microphone.

Now, her hand moves down over my belly and she cups me gently. “Have you always been kind, I wonder?” she says, not looking at me at all, holding me. I feel my skin contract, shiver.
”I feel kindness,” she says, her head lowered slightly, her voice disappearing. “I feel kindness,” she says again, disbelieving, looking up at my face now. I try to smile.
 
There has always been kindness. Never anything less. Sometimes more, but maybe she has not plumbed that. I have not raped. I have paid, sure, but they were always women, not things. Always people, not ciphers.  Always a girl, a woman with as much need as I. Different, but as much.

She pushes her fingers underneath the skin at the top of my thigh, bloodless, painless. “I wonder why?” she says, almost to herself.  Why? I close my eyes. There are so many, many whys. Because I have loved. Because I liked. Because I needed. Because I was so sad I thought I might never resurface. Because I needed company. Because the solitude of living in this body might have been enough to finish me were it not for the warmth of sliding into another. It reminded me I was alive, sometimes.

I am erect. She ignores me, feeling beneath my skin, closing her eyes, relying on touch. I feel the movement, small scrape of callous, the probe of her flesh. Her eyes snap open. “I have you,” she says. “Just once. There are adhesions. Did you know?” Scar tissue that runs from groin to lung, which tugged at me for years, which stopped any other woman coming close. I do not speak, but my eyes have filled. She takes out her fingers, and leans over me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I have to collate”
She kneels up, and leans over me, both hands now flat on my chest. She is weightless, like a bird. I can see small blonde hairs on her upper lip.

The lip has dried again, the single tooth catches it. I want to moisten it for her. She catches me looking at her mouth and runs the tip of her tongue over her lip, pulling it back against the lower. She smiles, her lips slicked, small, her jawbone fragile, as though I could crush it between my fingers.

“Here,” she says, rubbing the tips of her fingers below my left nipple. “We are nearly done. This will be the last excavation.” Her eyelashes are tiny straw spikes. Her eyes are grey. Pale grey like clouds.

She has done well. We don’t hear much about these excavations, only hearsay. They collect the body’s imprints, the buried memories deep in the tissue and bone. The torn, broken and mended. The invasion of disease, the counterpoint of serum. All those life prints left in us like so many fading impressions on sheets of paper beneath a letter. She has collated my body, spoken it into her microphone. Joining it to a million others. There is not room for us all to live late, like they used to. We have bartered health for longevity, planning and collation for a spontaneous end.

She straddles me, excavating my heart. Her small fingers move inside my chest, lifting, feeling, palpating. She speaks into her microphone. The words begin to blur, to fade. I can no longer catch the whole, but the gist.  “Good man, kind, who has loved only once.”
”No, not just the once,” I say, forcing the words up and out from where I am drowning.  My little archaeologist finishes her whispering, and sits back. She lifts herself, bends forward to my mouth, her small tooth caught again. This time I moisten her lip as she slides onto me.

“I wish,” she says.

Vanessa Gebbie is a journalist living and working in the UK. She teaches Creative Writing at a rehabilitation centre, and her own short fiction has been widely published in print and on the web.

Email: Vanessa Gebbie

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