Excavations: A Novel

Introduction

It’s never just a foot. It’s not that easy.

First, you get the lasers. You survey the whole thing, blast a billion pin pricks into the ground, then look at the screen to see if it’s even worth packing shovels in the van. Then you mark it out with yellow tape and delineate a rectangle of here and not here. Then get rid of the crust on top: the stuff that’s been trampled over, rained on, and scorched to death. That first six inches is easy. It’s wet. It’s farther down that’s hard, past the one-foot mark; any gravedigger will tell you that. And it’s not straight down like a rabbit hole. It’s wide and down: a human hole.

The only good thing about the first few feet is the Nazis. There’s no one down there but them. The top—that grassy, dog-peed-on part I was talking about—that’s today, or like 2002. But one, two feet in is about the time the Germans were here trying to tell us they descended from Greek gods. You don’t give a shit about that nonsense, which means you can hack at it, put the word shove in shovel. Go for it. Doesn’t matter if you hurt anything—the cigarette packets or Deutsche coins or newspapers—and you always do. Forget it; they were nothing if not determined to spread their stuff absolutely everywhere, and you see they succeeded.

Another foot down, it’s the Brits. The cartoony, pith-hatted colonialists who really screwed this thing up. They came in here and dug around for the big stuff. They wanted more Elgins for all the marbles and had the balls not only to break stuff that got in their way en route, but to try and get to it like scooping your way around the vanilla ice cream for the cookie dough chunks. They were rummaging around layers of the historical record to maximally jumble things up into no particular order, so that dumber versions of you and me might think: Man, it’s wild how much Latin these Greeks spoke. It’s a mess. Thank God, at least they didn’t clean it up; digging disturbs history, but cleaning up your digging reimagines it. Don’t do that.

Then you’re past all that, finally, and you switch to trowels for precision digging. Even though this world has enough Roman ruins, apparently it’s still frowned upon to so much as fart on a rock engraved with Latin. The Romans are here now, and you can tell because it’s stupidly overbuilt. You run into sturdy walls and real roofs and just tons of stuff that no one asked for, and everything is signed. Like, Yes, we get it. Take your dicks out of the inkwells. No need for an autograph on every single boring-ass clay pot.

And that’s when you get slower. By now you’ve almost definitely encountered an earthquake or two, you’re crouching about four or five feet underground, and the layers on the dirt walls surrounding you might be slanted. At first you think that’s weird, but then whoever is standing six feet above you on earth reminds you that Greece has more fault lines than California does, which isn’t comforting when you’re down there. But it’s the truth, and that’s just the business you’re in, so you switch to your toothbrush. With the bristles you can be ridiculously careful. It’s excruciatingly slow, but that’s the point.

Now you’re in it, the part that counts. There’s small stuff here because the Greeks lived here for a really long time. Thousands of years. Remember how long this just took us, how many tools we had to use, and poor excuses we had to come up with just to get down here four thousand years? It took us five feet, and you got to use a shovel for half of it. Now you’re holding a toothbrush in your hand, and I need you to do another thousand, down past the white togas and way down past the white wine and philosophizing and into the naked, savage, human-sacrifice layer of this hillside.

What I’m trying to tell you: there’s never some dude’s foot just sticking up out of the ground. Something happened, you moron. Get up here.

Part One

Chapter 1

We were here.

"Oh, we were there all right, and then bampfh!" She honked.

One minute, we’re here, sure. The next, gone-zo. Done-zo.

And let me tell you the pièce de résistance—the coup de grâce, she said. (She mixed those two up, so she always said them back-to-back to give herself a fifty-fifty shot.) Over the past hour she’d called a half dozen friends to recount her latest indignity, ensuring a trainful of passengers knew every conceivable detail of her most recent separation.

It was critical, in Z’s experience, to tell these stories as she processed the feelings—better yet as she felt the feelings—so she could shape them. This way she massaged her feelings with the very words she used: pummeled them into submission, molded them into benign bon mots. The tears she had no control over. She closed her eyes, having exhausted the slew of friends who’d pick up a midday call, and shook with loud sobs at her window seat. Surrounding her was a jagged moat pixelated with empty blue cushions, beyond which sat her unwitting audience. More than one pointed cough had been shot her way as she blubbered into her phone. These commuting squares were probably all blissfully married to their high school sweethearts, she thought, and unless they had an ounce of morbid curiosity left to hear how her story evolved on the sixth retelling, they’d better rip off the corners of those Wall Street Journals to stuff in their ears.

She was going for it, as she felt she deserved to. Through so many similar betweens—between jobs, between partners—she had kept remarkably cool, breezily propelled by the power of polished anecdotes. It was all explainable—fun to explain, even—and she bounced from one doomed entanglement to another, each of which she wrapped up in a self-deprecating yarn. But she was sick of it. Now in an idiot’s ouroboros, her own compulsive storytelling was depressing her more than the stories themselves. She pulled a can from her tote bag and popped open the next beer. The crack pulled gazes her way from around the train car, eyebrows rising above their coffee cups.

Earlier that very morning she’d been feeling downright grandiose, struck with the brilliant idea to carve this eternal, romantic sentiment into a tree while on a walk with her beau (boyfriend, if he was feeling linguistically magnanimous): we were here. She drew neither a heart, nor initials, nor indicated a time frame such as forever since they had yet to define their relationship. Indeed, those three words would prove painfully accurate. They were there, it was a Saturday morning, and they were walking along one of the city’s waterfront parks. They were nowhere near forever.

She’d met this latest young man four months ago at an ice cream truck outside the Met, where the two instantly mistook one another’s passions: his for museum work, hers for candied nuts. It wasn’t the first time that she’d clocked a foundational misunderstanding like this and proceeded anyway. In her lifelong, misguided optimism, she viewed these dalliances as opportunities for her to learn to care about things like art, real estate, optometry, etc. They all seemed like things she should care about, at some point, probably. But she never quite got there, exactly. Her pairings were never quite right, neither comfortable nor exciting enough to inspire her to dig in; she viewed them just as merciful breaks from the relentless current, like a fish latching its suckers onto a whale for the ocean ride. When coupled, she could at least tell her friends and family that she was, as they all suggested, trying to settle down. They didn’t need to know exactly what this looked like: dragging a pocketknife across a tree trunk in a public park, listening to this man explain the difference between art and vandalism, and wondering aloud why hot dog carts do not announce themselves with bells so they can be easily located—for example, during long walks along waterfront parks.

A more accurate carving for the ages: a ding-dong was here.

They walked by a series of baseball diamonds, and her eyes ran the bases longingly. She’d been a mediocre player in high school and absolutely loved it. Being an overenthusiastic, near-violent member of various corporate softball teams gave her the greatest sense of belonging she’d felt in years. But no matter how nicely she asked him to go have a few throws with her, he insisted they keep walking. All along, of course, he had an endpoint in mind.

A few blocks later she saw her opportunity for breakfast: a glimmering, silver-wheeled mirage on the near horizon heralding feasts of two-dollar franks. Her beau was motioning toward a bench nearby and trying to tell her something as her thoughts drifted into a serious consideration of condiments. Then, all of a sudden, she heard something that sounded a lot like—

"I don’t know if you’re the one for me.

"I can’t really see us getting serious."

It might not have been in that exact order. By now, her memory had been blown out into two rolls of Amtrak toilet paper tissues. She let out a long moan, then inhaled through the gauze of snot across her nose and mouth, making alarming gargling, gasping sounds.

An uninitiated passenger rolled a suitcase toward her empty row and paused. She looked up, and a familiar splash of self-destruction gushed within her veins—Hark, a male! What a way to meet. What a great story this would make!—before a glob of drool plopped onto her chest, propelling her would-be soulmate into the rows ahead. I’m fine! she shouted to him, to no one, to everyone on the train who’d begun to conspire nonverbally about when they should band together to pick her up, jam open a door, and hurl her onto the tracks.

She was en route to her parents’ place, where she’d crash-landed half a dozen times in as many years during these between periods, such as the one she was undergoing now.

It wasn’t that she was so heartbroken over this particular man, but rather that he was the latest in a long, undistinguished line. Turning these quagmires into quips wasn’t cutting it anymore; if anything, it was hastening them. Her heart hadn’t broken today—not exactly—but it was breaking down, choice after choice, crack by crack.

She dreaded her arrival home, where her parents would invariably reiterate their advice to settle down. They would accept any form of it—romantic, professional, social—and dangled every fun phrase in the book to get her to heed their counsel: biological clock, saving for retirement, more like your brother. They couched this encouragement as a kindness toward her: certainly she would be happier with a bit more structure?

"Pfft!" She honked aloud again just thinking about it.

The Northeast Corridor rattled by, graffitied obscenities shouting to her one vacant factory at a time. She scrolled through her feed, not really able to read any of it, her finger flicking like the tail of a snake whose head’s just been chopped off.

Then something stopped her.

Gary!

Gary, of all people, was blasting out an email for summer staff in Greece again. A ping from the past, her feral college years brought forth to this wretched sliver of present as if to say My, how the tables have hardly turned. Isn’t he how this whole unfortunate pattern began? Wasn’t this all Gary’s fault, really? He’d been the inaugural boyfriend in the withered lineage. Yes, it was all his fault, she thought, in the same way that a house burning to the ground was the chimney’s fault for getting struck by lightning.

She held her breath as she read his note. Mountain village, baklava, some light exhumation.

She’d had one great job in her life, the same job she was skimming a description of at this very moment: junior excavator on an archaeological dig. It was one of those glorious, canonical summers she thought back to often, usually on the wrong side of a desk from HR. So much of her life felt fleeting, by her own sloppy hand—the blurry parties, the never-quite-right dudes, and the shifting allegiances among friends and colleagues thanks to partings of every kind. But that job, that work in the dirt, had made her truly feel—yes—I was here. It anchored her to the earth. She’d studied archaeology in college, morbidly fascinated by all the skeletons and their personal effects, but working on a dig was a different sensation entirely. Ever palmed a skull, exit interview Suze? Once Z had worked at the Mega excavation, she’d gotten a taste of the forever—had felt what it was like to be tethered to the earth-time continuum. No wonder she’d squirmed her way out of each and every cubicle since.

She was still in touch with Elise, a lifelong British digger in her forties whom Z had glommed onto that summer. For years now they’d traded emails, and Z felt closer to Elise than she did to most of her friends here. She was spellbound by Elise’s descriptions: of scrambling over a mountainside to stake out new trenches after a bone discovery; of unearthing a complete, delicate glass lamp, four thousand years old; or even the tantalizing minutiae of applying sunscreen each and every day to her neck, chest, and shoulders. Z’s responses back about meetings, restaurants, and roommates felt lifeless by comparison.

Not to mention how Z had felt about Gary that summer: too-tall, wild-haired, crinkle-eyed, open-mouth-smiling Gary. They hadn’t been in touch for six years, but her memory of him was preserved in the most golden amber. She pictured him forever standing on the side of that emerald Greek mountain, squinting into the sun with one foot up on some rock, his binoculars chiming in the wind against the metal ruler that hung from his belt loop. This gorgeous dork rose larger than life in her memory, affixed upon her timeline to this formative place.

They’d sneaked around the dig at night, smuggled beers in their backpacks, stargazed in the grass, and wondered aloud about them—the bodies lying parallel beneath their own, all the tree-carving yahoos who came before. It was like being together with someone when you experienced a death; it bonded you. And there they’d been among the ruins, surrounded by the dead, corpse-drunk and infatuated.

Gary was the resident laser guy, a budding lidar expert who straddled the two impossibly colliding worlds of 3D mapping technology and ancient pottery. He blasted pinpricks of light to render the big picture: the perimeter of the city, grade of the road, or number of buildings. He was a creator of worlds, while the rest of them scrounged around in glorified garbage piles. By the standards of the archaeology department, he was a tech god. He spent countless hours in the offices of senior professors, whom he loved like grandparents and for whom he had bottomless patience.

He’d been a football player in high school, or so he claimed; though he certainly had the size for it, Z simply could not fathom him exerting an ounce of aggression. The man got jazzed about birds. He’d crouch on a steep slope of grass next to his closest associate (a gray, beam-blasting box with three sturdy yellow legs), adjust his glasses, and jot down notes, only to interrupt his own focus with an abrupt—

Quail!

She preferred to remember him precisely like this, instead of at the moment she’d broken up with him, crying and crushed on the edge of a tangled bed in Pylos. She’d bolted, predictably, after he told her he hoped they’d be together forever. That sounded too much like settling down. The fact that he was still in Greece, still finishing up his dissertation, and still mapping the excavation was what bounced her from him in the first place. How could she have stayed in place at twenty-two? She blew her nose, this time on a napkin and not her sweatshirt sleeve—a testament to just how far she’d come.

In this moment, a weak one by any measure and certainly if you measured it by the number of passengers pointing the conductor in her direction, an escape plan to Greece was irresistible. She was used to taking whatever horrible feelings she most recently experienced and hauling them over into the next quagmire, like a human mancala game. This day would be no exception.

Her heart lifted its head off the floor.

Here was the eject button for her life. It always appeared, and she always pressed it, but usually not so soon. She pressed it now.

Days later, she sat cross-legged in the passenger seat of a blue sprinter van speeding between switchbacks up the side of a mountain. It was a profound discombobulation. Her head still spun from making this rather abrupt (even for her) change of plans to return to the excavation—though it could hardly be described as a change when she hadn’t had a plan in the first place. It was a return to a kind of starting line for herself, back in time in every way, an opportunity to reset and even go so far as to perhaps make some non-terrible life choices going forward. Anything could happen.

Kara, a half-Korean, all-Connecticutan peer from Z’s last time at the excavation, picked her up at the chaotic Athens airport. Z had barely paid attention to Kara that summer because of the woman’s interest in actually learning something beyond finding the best make-out spots and hiding beers in the bone bags. She was gorgeous, far more so than Z remembered, with acres of gleaming black hair and skin that announced, Yes, I take expensive care of myself. She wore a linen top with pleated shorts and fiddled anxiously with the enormous round sunglasses dangling from one of her buttonholes. Kara now had some important letters behind her name, and had risen through the ranks at the excavation. Presently, she was trumpeting to everyone in the van forced to listen that she was in charge of the lab now. Good for her.

Up, up, up Kara drove toward the relentless sun, testing the bounds of the van’s gasping air conditioning. Z was savoring it, knowing it would be the last for a while. Hours ago they’d left the city limits, then the trickle of small towns, and beyond those, miles of low green hills dotted with short trees. Now they were aimed straight up the mountain, toward the Peloponnesian peak they’d call home, slowing on the ascent past orchards full of walnut and fig trees. Z saw the occasional cluster of white Corinthian columns visible on the nearest slope, too. Some were stumps; some had fallen sideways; some were still towering stone—cracked, chipped, all alone up here, and so quintessentially ancient-looking that Z imagined she could pick one up to find it was a hollow plastic prop. But she knew from experience they were as real as it got. They passed a cluster of white, hand-painted signs for a few cities and one sea, all dozens of miles away. The olive-green mountain grass sizzled in the heat, and the last sign of civilization before they made the final climb to their summer village was a lone old woman in a navy-blue headscarf, sitting behind a tiny table selling paper plates of gooey baklava for a euro each. At the sight of their van, the woman stood and proffered one in each hand.

Pull over. I need that, Z said. In the intervening years she’d thoroughly romanticized her Greek food experience. Now she pined for a version of it she’d never eaten at the dig: flaky phyllo, salty feta, tangy olives, syrupy sweet squares like the old woman’s. In the days leading up to her departure, she’d regularly assuaged her doubts about whether or not she was making a terrible mistake by telling herself that no matter what—at the very least—she’d eat a lot of baklava.

I think not. Kara rolled her eyes, under the impression that street treats were some kind of joke. She did not slow down. Z twisted her body backwards, near-tearfully watching the glistening snack table grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

As irritating as she was, Kara could be stomached for a summer. A Kara was a known quantity. The city contained hundreds of thousands of Karas, and Z had off and on been one herself, whenever she was working at a new job, trying hard for a while and attempting to date someone boring. Kara was on the intense end of the spectrum all right, and richer than the rest of them combined (from what Z remembered), but they shared a set of traditions, rituals, regimens, and probably even friends if Z had any desire to play the wretched name game that plagued her demographic.

Their proximity was unfortunate insofar as it took a brutal measuring stick to the top of Z’s head—they’d both started out here as junior excavators. Now Kara was the one with goals and a working credit card. She’d taken the interesting approach of not bailing: checked the grad school box, didn’t piss off her boss, wore sunscreen, didn’t throw up in the van. We get it, you’re perfect.

And, of course, these two shared a bond from years ago, when the intellectual heavyweights on the dig couldn’t stretch their minds to differentiate Kara from Zara. She’d become Z and stayed that way.

In the six years since college, Z had had as many jobs, each of which directly pertained to fun but was not, itself, fun. She’d worked entry-level roles at the corporate behemoths atop theme parks, cruise lines, and movie theaters, and her performances at each could’ve been best described as phoned in—had she at any point been willing to pick up a phone. The constant discussion and analysis of fun had been an unforeseen downer, a depressing day in, day out reminder that she was not, in fact, having any. She was fired from each of these places and felt relieved every time, hungry for the in-between stints where she could physically participate in the activities she’d been relegated to half-heartedly spreadsheeting about.

It became obvious to Z how ill-suited she was to a life behind a desk, and she regularly admitted to herself that she’d be much happier working outside. Maybe she’d thrive as a camp counselor, tour guide, or some kind of resort employee—anything where she could move around a lot, talk to new people every day, and anchor her achievements to the lowest possible stakes. Some days her body felt downright claustrophobic inside these interchangeable, stifling buildings; she was desperate for fresh air. But she felt hemmed in by her social circle—by the Karas of the world and her other lifelong, exorbitantly educated peers—and at the same time she was unable to admit that a white-collar path had defeated her. Her parents were overly supportive, if anything, of her exploratory phase, so long as she stayed within the bounds of being A Corporate Professional. Frankly, she’d thought often about returning to the excavation for its academic, professional version of outdoor labor. The problem was that this gig only lasted a summer. Nonetheless, she’d see where things shook out on the other side of August.

Requiring zero encouragement, Kara continued her unsolicited filling in of what Z had missed over the past half decade. She was speaking as warmly as if they were old friends, rather than one-off colleagues. Listening gave Z the feeling that, somehow, she loomed much larger in this woman’s life than vice versa. When Z thought about the dig, she certainly did not think about Kara. This dynamic, combined with a stick shift and the airport beer she’d chugged upon arrival, produced quite the feeling of whiplash.

Well, you probably read about this, but obviously the most exciting thing we found since you left was Victor. Kara drummed her perfectly rounded nails along the steering wheel and nodded as if in conversation with herself. The biggest find of a full athletic statue in a century—I’m serious! He was about a foot tall, and his arms were raised up in the air like a winner, hence the name of course. I mean, it was nothing short of extraordinary. A century! Here! I’m sure you saw.

Z’s friend Elise had mentioned this briefly in one of her emails, along with some choice words about Kara’s contribution to the event. Elise despised her.

Elise was the one who found him and removed him from the trench and . . . well, I don’t know if I should say anything. Kara put a hand to her chest and appeared to be choking up. She stared straight ahead at the road for a moment, pursing her lips as they passed by a series of gray stone houses crawling with green vines. At the edge of the tiny neighborhood was a small, gold-domed church with windows rimmed in blue.

Z straightened up in her seat. Out with it, woman.

Kara checked the rearview mirror. She confirmed that the back of the van contained four conscripted undergraduates. Each of them was strapped into headphones and completely zonked out, having blissfully missed this interminable status update on a place whose entire purpose was never changing.

"Well, it’s just that. Elise was the one who found him in the dirt, and then I, of course,