unwelcomeness

We raid a Holiday Inn. Little resistance, a weird look from two desk clerks.

Dwarf yells: Prepare for death and eternal Winter!

In a cavern which is doubling as a convention hall, we sweep a catering table, stuffing staleing muffins and dinner rolls into the backpack, on top of Bog Man. Because we are running, no one can stop us. Someone at a podium stares, a few people get knocked out of chairs and their coffees spill. Into a commercial kitchen, we find some satisfying challenges. A security guard steps in front of Pingpong, and I toss him the tureen that I’ve just tried to drink old pancake batter out of, having spilled a lot of it on my shirt. Pingpong bangs the metal into the guard’s face, hard to tell the force of the blow, but it looks bad and the guard goes down, and then we are propelled out a back door and over a dumpster-sized grease bin, then away.

Jogging across a field of star thistles we eat stolen M&M’s with cashew nuts mixed in. I bump into something that might be a monster ground sloth or giant short-faced bear specter. I’m slowed but not stopped. Big shapes moving through grey air, Pleistocene in size. Whatever it was, it was furry and smelled like wet dog.

In a Target parking lot, Dwarf and I are resting on the hood of a Celica, and Pingpong’s walking off his run. The last of the Sun’s sucking itself down a hole in a row of buildings.

Proto flapjacks turn out to be not so good; I can feel the batter sloshing around in my gut, and the feeling’s turning into a sick pressure. Dwarf says to puke myself, so I stick my hand in my mouth, which is easy due to the fact that my jaw’s become unhingeable, and trigger a huge vomit event, after which I feel much lighter. The parking lot’s almost empty, and we bisect it looking for a place to hide. There’s a field behind the Target, and we lay down in it, wherever, in a pile, because as a group we are suddenly exhausted. I fall asleep thinking that Love has been killed by Disease, and I dream about Bog Man’s previously encarcassed self, killing things, and then it’s dawn again, like the movements of the solar system have been sped up, then slowed down.

Pingpong’s dead; we find him fetally posed in a few yards from last night’s sleeping spot. At first it looks like he’s levitating, but it turns out he’s not: he’s stiff and balanced on a piece of wood. Dwarf sticks two fingers on the side of his neck to make sure of the dead part. He falls off the wood. There’s a smoggy-looking cloud to my right, so thin it’s almost a smell. That’s Bog Man. Apparently, he got to kill something after all, but it’s impossible to say how he might feel about it, since he never communicated much even when he could write, and now he’s reduced to a fume. At this point a voice speaks to us in our backbones, at the top where the spine meets the skull. The effect is really unpleasant, like someone yelling into a fifty-five gallon drum, and you’re the drum. The voice tells us that killing Pingpong was actually an accident, and that the voice’s name is Eeyore.

I look at Dwarf, and for some reason we are running.

Your name sounds a lot like Eeyore, I say out loud.

It doesn’t matter, says the voice. Do what I say.

“We know a human made this turd, whereas we don’t know if that was a campfire.”

The items pictured above are coprolites, or fossilized shit, found in desert caves¹ in the Paisley 5 Mile Ridge in South-central Oregon. One of these has maybe finally laid to rest the much-challenged date of first human colonization of North America, or the “Clovis-first” theory. Coprolites are part of a larger group of animal remains called ichnotaxa, including also gastroliths, regurgitaliths, nests, cocoons and pupal cases. The challenging of a predominant scientific theory is not rare (for evidence, see the ‘Out of Africa’ model, which attempts to explain the origins of modern humanity, and which is squared off with the multiregionalist model; the fight’s not nearly over), and so The Clovis date (based on a particular kind of stone tool found in the ’30s in Clovis, New Mexico and subsequently elsewhere), which has been challenged before, is now most strongly threatened by the hard evidence of ancient turds. After a new DNA extraction technique found unmistakable human DNA in samples from the Paisley coprolites (as well as certain genetic markers found only in Native American populations), the archaeologist whose students found them, Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, sent samples to two different labs for radio carbon dating, and the results were identical: the excretion moment of these turds was 14,300 years ago, making them the oldest remains-based evidence of modern humans ever found in North America.

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