It had been another day of abject, raking pain. Lucy was miserable, and no matter what position she lay in, every bone in her body ached. Her Sharper Image massager had been on for hours and its low drone was giving her a headache, so she turned it off and lay staring at the ceiling. It was time for her medication, and she dreaded trudging to the bathroom with her walker.
She wasn’t complaining. Her life before her present state of frailty had been an exciting series of museum tours, mostly for display, but also for the occasional lecture series where she was under constant scrutiny by a veritable army of anthropologists. At those times as she lay in an antiseptic bed of gel, she would be carefully examined, picked over and prodded with instruments and scopes, maybe sent through a battery of x-rays or a CAT scans. Yes, she was old, 3.2 million years old, to be exact, and was observed with constant curiosity by an insatiable public. At times she had resisted all the attention – every woman deserves some privacy she thought – skeleton or not – but now the pain had turned resentment to bitterness.
“Who can open these damn safety things?” Lucy snapped as her boney hands tried to pry the lid off her prescription bottle. “I’d like to slap them!”
She grimaced as the bottle top suddenly popped open, spraying pain pills across the tile floor and down the register, leaving only a few on the edge.
“Yetinishi liji! She snapped, liji, liji, liji!” Anger always brought out her native dialect of Amharic. “Cursed pills can stay in the toilet for all I care!”
As her voice echoed across the hard tiles, she sunk down onto the filthy bathroom floor, vainly trying to scoop a few pills back into the bottle.
“One bone! One tiny bone!” she screamed out. “I just want… my one…. bone… back!”
In truth, ever since her discovery in 1974, Lucy had not felt quite like herself. Initially, the excitement of being the oldest human skeleton ever discovered had given her a new lease on life. She had taken a hard fall from a tree back in the BCs, and centuries of laying around in the dry arid desert had given Lucy a front row seat to the last three thousand years of history, where she watched entire civilizations come and go. With empires and emperors rising and falling right before her eyes, Lucy had been able hold a magnifying glass to history, and in her temporal state of decay, she absorbed the surrounding world events with keen observation.
When the archeologists came across the plateau with their shovels and pulled her out piece by piece, her dwarfish, excavated body had created quite a stir. An international tour was arranged involving travel to exotic places, special handling, and flattery. Oh my, the flattery! They even named her, affectionately as Lucy. As Australopithecus afarensis, laying in her glass hermetically sealed cage, she was the talk of each city she toured and treated like a lost princess who had come back to life again. Little did the adoring public know, she had not only come back to life, she had also never really died.
In 1975, upon her arrival in Britain for example, the London Chronicle wrote this:
Our city is filled with diplomats and dignitaries from every corner of the world and although we have had a royalty in good standing in the Commonwealth for eight hundred years, we now have a sister crown in Queen Lucy.”
The public excitement and uproar were the same everywhere Lucy went. When her tiny skeleton was staged for the International World’s Fair in Paris, lines of adoring spectators stretched along the Seine to the Museum le’Artistaca hoping for a glimpse through her sealed case and into the mysteries of time. As one onlooker passed her enclosure, he was heard to say, “Mme Lucy n’a peut etre pasle sourire de Moan, mais oh mec, regarde ces jambes,” which carried an unnatural tone of attraction: “Miss Lucy may not have the Mona’s smile, but, oh man, look at those legs.” All across the scientific and artistic avenues, wherever she was, everyone wanted a piece of Lucy – and that was the beginning of her worst nightmare.
Somewhere in her year-long touring series, hundreds whistle stops to showcase her ancient skeleton, a small seemingly insignificant mistake had been made –a slip-up by security, a miscalculation, an error of gross scientific negligence. Along the tour, someone, a passing tourist perhaps looking for a souvenir, or maybe a delinquent, had stolen one of the tiny bones from the lower back of Lucy’s excavated remains. All leads in the subsequent investigation had never revealed any clues as to who or why the sliver from her vertebrae had been stolen. Despite armed security and trained surveillance dogs, the case had gone cold, an indication that her vertebrae had dipped into the abyss of science’s dark and sinister black market. Overnight, Lucy had gone from a public sensation to “a bag of bones,” that no one knew about outside the scientific community.
No one, that is, except Lucy. She knew because she lived with the pain of an incomplete spine every day. The gap in her spine misaligned nerves that sent spidering pulses down her legs. In her debilitated state she found relief only by an increasing reliance on pills, but that did nothing for a normal life.
When she was first discovered in Ethiopia, Lucy was fully bent over, a specie demanding the highest order, feeling nimble and spright as a model Australopithecus and at her Paleolithic best. Now, the stolen vertebrae had slowly disabled her. In fact, she no longer dragged her knuckles in the dirt when she walked, and was even beginning to walk short distances upright, adding to the source of her embarrassment and excruciating pain.
As she lay on the floor, Lucy had one desperate thought, one ray of hope for her chronic pain and impending disability. She could call in a favor from an old friend, someone who might have some answers, someone who lived on the outside, beyond the dimensions of human history. There, at a level of immeasurable energy, lay what all unworldly creatures knew as the Realm, an area that had no known position or posture in the universe, except that in it, lay every kind of brute or beast ever known to man. If it had been in a fable or legend, rumor or folk tale, if it had existed on the fringes of the human imagination, it could be found in this unseen, silent place where everything from dragons to griffins to giant hydras coexisted.
There were rules in the Realm of course. Being a skeleton, Lucy knew them all too well. Naturally, there was a code of silence, a kind of no-fly zone where contact with humans was forbidden. The other rule, not as easy to keep, was that no creature could call for help without the loss of part of their spiritual currency. Requests could be made at any time, but each one would cause part of their hold on eternity to loosen, until, if help was not answered on the third, life would vanish into cosmic dust, implode into black, never to be retrieved. These were the rules monitored by the Realm, and some of its inhabitant like Paul Bunyan, jackalopes, and leprechauns were still stretching the intervals of time. This is where myths lived forever and ever until, by their own choice or mistake or carelessness, they vanished forever.
Lucy banged her boney hand on the floor and screamed. Her existence has come down to two choices, neither one of them hopeful. Either live in pain and forfeit any historical clout as the first whole skeleton every unearthed, or risk a call, her last call to the friend she knew could help here, the one person who could help her find the lost skeletal part and return her to a whole again.
“This is not fair! I didn’t steal the bone! I didn’t do this to myself.”
But she knew the rules, and she also knew that by asking, any reserves of eternal energy she had would dwindle when she reached out. And then there was this…
Lucy had doubts whether her friend even existed anymore in the Realm. And if he did, would he still remember her from a half century ago? What if her call did not go through? What would that mean? Would leaving a voice mail or getting a busy signal mean that her time would be up? So many risks, and yet she felt her life was already going up in a cloud of skeletal dust. It was the moment of truth, and the call might cost her everything. But Lucy couldn’t live this way, forever, anymore.