Other Terrors, page 17
The wide-open landscape was just as the excavation team had left it before the rainstorm, with a few important exceptions: the roof of the visitor center was no longer visible; the museum displays and commemorative paving stones had also vanished. The late-summer air and the enclosing forest were maybe the only common threads between sanity and whatever this carnage had turned into. We can fantasize and nerd out about opening portals, summoning or unleashing ghosts or curses, or discuss funding initiatives until we’re blue in the face—I expect nothing less—but the crucified body of Ivan was real enough as we passed by it along the track.
Yet the man I’d hated the most, he who had given me the most shit, seemed to have been the only other survivor of this rout. His survival and the realness of the decayed corpses of Varus’s legions were enough to drive reality home for me: This was no dreaming state, no abstraction of the ethics of what Ivan had attempted to fool the team with. The very fact that my wheeled prison had been fashioned after a wolf rather than a man standing upright solidified my understanding—the soldiers were real, their pain and humiliation of defeat were real, and to treat us invaders as the German tribes who had themselves routed this army, it was a purgative exercise through which they sought release.
Ivan had summoned something he could not send back, but the thought of Peg snapped me back into my own determination, and as the fire got closer, drying the tears that had betrayed my already terrible face, I recalled my own experiences with near death and as in some (but not all) nerd circles, I steeled myself back to presence of mind and the adage that takes so little real effort: “Not today.”
I leaned toward the tallest soldier and began to speak.
02
It wasn’t my first time falling off the sobriety wagon, but this time I wasn’t languishing in a desert. The Hotel Osnabrück had a bar where I didn’t have to worry about the lighting plowing my face into even more grotesqueries. Dealing with customs and the TSA had been bad enough, but the jet lag compounded by my humiliation in front of the excavation team had me spiraling to the point of just not caring. If I had to return to rehab back in the States when I got home, then that was for later. Right that evening, I’d needed a drink even more than I needed the income contracted to me by Craig and the excavation team.
In fairness to Craig, he’d done all he could for me during the orientation. But being heckled with a bunch of nonsense during my presentation to the team had made me more sad than angry. I decided that if a drink would kill me worse than the transmisogyny, then that was a chance I was ready to take.
But also, I sure as hell didn’t expect to find Peg Bishop sitting there at a table in the hotel bar, big as life and seemingly without a care in the world other than the piles of notebooks that surrounded her.
“Jesus,” I let out. “No way.”
Her eyes dashed right up, and we beamed. Even from across a room, we know the tells. I’d only met Peg online, so we may not have memorized each other’s voices, but we’d both geeked out about our projects at university. She was a linguist teaching at Oxford, and I wondered what she’d be doing here in Lower Saxony.
We got the “nod” and the hug over with, and after, I sat down across from her. I squinted into the murk for any signs of Jägermeister. I was back to my old ways already, but this finally felt like the time, and the place, for which my drinking might involve having less judgment hurled at me from without.
Right out of the gate, I asked Peg about the notebooks. This didn’t look like the type of work she’d been known for.
“I’m on my way to Hamburg,” she said past a stray tuft of hair.
“Seems far enough from Britain.”
I took my first drink since my so-called car accident. I needed it, after only a half hour of being laughed at by people I would be working with outdoors in September for a couple of days; being there with Peg galvanized me to abide.
She went on to tell me she was moonlighting away from her linguistics research.
In Hamburg she was interviewing several trans women who were verified granddaughters of the also-trans courtesans John Lennon had reciprocated during the Beatles’ residency in St. Pauli. Although I had reason to be skeptical of the veracity of this oral history passed down, I was only then just beginning to understand the logic behind it: Even if it turned out to be a complete bag of lies, at least we were talking about us instead of waiting to be seen and heard from the outside yet again. It was going to be an actual book rather than a post on social.
“I’m just sick of the hypocrisy,” Peg went on. “I mean, we’re talking real trans history here.”
“What about rock history?”
“Fuck rock history.”
“You’re going to piss some people off,” I told her. “Maybe at Rolling Stone.”
“And then a decade later, they’ll do their own feature with the same transcribed interviews.” Peg looked down, crestfallen. “Even if I’m still around.”
“Be around.”
I remember moving a little closer with my drink when I saw Craig coming into the hotel bar. He scanned the crowd and then locked his eyes on me. His shirt was untucked, and his hair looked scraggly at one end, as if he’d been rolled through something outside, across the quaint cobblestones and dog shit.
Or he’d gotten into a fight.
Peg shifted a little in her dress, but I held my hand out to her, at stomach level. We were safe.
Craig had hired me for the project and had shown deference since my arrival. He hadn’t met me post-transition and had proved as respectful as my trip from Mexico City had been long, but his silence during the heckling by the team during my presentation about the Kalkriese battlefield is what had driven me into this state. It turned out to have been a mixed blessing.
He glanced at Peg only a moment. She had packed her piles of notebooks into a bag and set them aside. Craig wasn’t part of our network, so I doubted he’d recognize her, Oxford cred notwithstanding.
Craig’s eyes were downcast as he approached the table.
“You can save it,” I told him. “If this team of yours is just here for the ride, then I hope we don’t find so much as a chicken bone in the ground.”
I introduced Peg, and they both just shrugged at each other. Craig had his agenda, but with Peg there, I was beginning to grow my own. She could tell, and we exchanged another pair of small but knowing smiles.
“I spoke with them after you left the suite,” Craig began. “Sofer had some choice words for Ivan and Dieter, especially. He offered to send them on the next bus out of here, and that shut them both up.”
Werner Sofer was curator of the Varusschlacht Museum, and was the one to oversee us. A citizen science team had uncovered the skeleton of a mule and a few buckles, but their time had been limited, so Sofer decided to commission a dig team before winter set in.
Craig had known me from way before I transitioned, when we were on the Anasazi project in Arizona. That hadn’t gone so well, mostly due to the greed of a few team members who got away with looting. But Craig now had a leadership role with this contract, and knowing my background in Roman history, he called me in.
But I sure as shit wasn’t going to stand for what had happened during my PowerPoint, and I told him this right away.
“Also, it looks like you’ve been mugged,” I went on. “Was it Ivan?”
Craig saw I was looking at his mussed-out hair, and he tried to flatten it down. “You should see Ivan,” he grunted.
Ivan hailed from Adelaide, and was open about his penchant for Nazi memorabilia. A real class act. He didn’t seem to care what the legalities in Germany were, so I wondered if he’d brought some along for his new pal Dieter’s benefit.
“I don’t know why you hired these two,” I said. “Neither of them knows any Latin, and Ivan doesn’t speak a word of German. Did you pick them out of a randomized Google search?”
“Their networks,” Craig said.
“Follow the money, yes,” Peg offered, then demurred. Craig wasn’t an intimidating presence, but she seemed to sense he’d been hurt. I gave her a little shush, because better things were about to happen anyway.
“Look,” Craig recovered, “you’re the real consultant on this. Anything we find in the ground runs by your appraisal. I made it clear to the rest of the team. Sofer knows that too.”
And this was for the money, by all accounts. When you lose your tenure just for deciding to go on living, that really puts the zap on your head. I could abide some more transphobia for a few days for the sake of making an equivalent almost-year’s income. Here’s a state secret: Most transition costs burn a white-hot hole in our pockets. So despite the upset, I needed the income. And seeing Peg, another veritable unicorn, quite by chance in that noisy, dark, and stunted hotel bar, I can only attribute to planned happenstance.
“And Sofer told me he’s definitely in your corner. His niece is trans.”
I furrowed my brow at him.
“You’re second in command,” he said.
“But without the agency to send anyone packing.” My reply was as much a statement as a question.
“Leave it to Sofer,” Craig tried to assure me. “But keep your ears open.”
“And your eyes,” Peg said.
I was glad the Jäger shots were wearing off.
“We have another day before going out,” Craig said, standing up as if in salute. “Relax with your thoughts.”
And he was off to relax with his own. The crowd noise had died down into a tired rumble. Peg and I looked at each other, and you couldn’t have shot us out of a cannon fast enough to get us out of that bar and into her room.
03
Battlefields live on, long after the dead and their wares and tactics and reversals have gone, recovered or lost, remembered or forgotten, and the same goes for the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, where Varus’s seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth Roman legions were led into a Germanic trap and decimated.
Apart from brief footnotes in history, knowledge of the Varian Disaster at Kalkriese had only been in the public consciousness a few decades. Peg herself had questioned me on this.
“I don’t know why you’re bothering with this,” she’d said after our thirteenth orgasm together. The booze had worn off, and I was feeling impeccable, natural elation from the companionship of someone like me.
“Clunn already uncovered the lion’s share of this battle,” Peg went on.
Unlike me, Peg was a Brit, so Clunn’s discoveries at the battle site in the late twentieth century had been a point of English and German pride for as long as we’d both been alive. Rome had fallen, so I cannot speak for their own affinity for Kalkriese, despite the lion’s share of artifact recoveries being of their own imperial pride, two millennia on.
Next morning, Sofer gave us a quick tour of the displays in the museum. Although I’d read the histories and guidebooks and pretty much devoured the website, being there made the difference, not only because of how well put together it is, but we were in actual proximity to the recovered objects. The massive Imperial mask replica greeted us with a resigned solemnity that made Peg’s words echo through my head: Perhaps, just as the Roman attempts to subjugate the German tribes during the first dynasty of Rome, this was all for nothing.
I didn’t pay much attention to Ivan or Dieter during the meeting or the tour. To them this was merely a diversion from a pub or a trip to an Osnabrück Chick-fil-A franchise.
On the other hand, having Peg and Craig there with me was enough to rouse me for the purpose of our few days of excavation, which if it didn’t turn up so much as a bone fragment, at least I got to experience a battle site that had haunted and intrigued me for so very long. Seeing so much of what had been uncovered already and preserved with such professionalism and care for the collective memory of the battle stirred me deeply: Even the loss of my tenure due to the bigotry of my so-called peers seemed like a turned, maybe torn-out page of my past, and the rest would take care of itself for a young trans woman’s hope, or folly, or faith.
“This place,” Sofer told me as an aside, “is like our way of trying to make the wrong right.”
“I’m not sure you can achieve something that human,” I said, glancing at the displays of Roman formations, tiny doomed soldiers dotted in blocks of discipline. “You can pay tribute to them, but honor is kind of their own call. You don’t honor the spirits of the dead with replicas.”
“These are exhibits,” Sofer countered. “And Rome knew how to put on a show.”
“In the arena.”
Sofer nodded, and we left it at that.
Peg told us that had it not been for the Kalkriese battle, Germany may have been assimilated into the Roman Empire, and the history of humanity could have been altered in some magnificent but perhaps stunted ways.
“It’s not up to us,” I told Sofer. “But if we find anything here, I’ll be glad to see it curated.”
Craig smiled, shrugged.
We were then led into the observation tower where you can see a panorama of the entire site, field and forest verge alike. As it was early September, just as the battle itself, we had the dregs of late summer, and Sol Invictus seemed to favor the entire project ahead of us, brief though it would be. The complex was plated with panels of rusted metal, giving the whole place an aptly sanguinary look that complemented the verdant greens and imposing blue skies.
The others had left, and it was just Peg and me gazing out at the horizon from the tower.
“This was like September eleventh for the nascent god Augustus,” I told Peg, probably for the hundredth time since we’d first hooked up. The battlefield stretched out before us in a midday fuzz of paganized avowal. “Literally.”
“How many on this team, besides you, speak any Latin?” she asked.
Peg was great with her Latin, but she was about to embark to Hamburg for her own excavation, trying to cull the deliciously scandalous dalliances of an immortal rock star from storied granddaughters in the Hamburg St. Pauli district, trans women who, like their ancestors, were just trying to eke out a living among the screwheads, jackoffs, and imposters of this world.
“Cis” is not a slur. It’s Latin: “the same side of.”
I smiled at her, shrugged, and, glad for a moment alone again, we kissed deeply and held one another, enjoying what we could in what remained of the late-summer heat. If anyone else came up into the observation tower, we didn’t notice them. There was plenty else to experience.
The next morning was just as hot early on as it had been midday of the museum visit. I didn’t notice I was setting out with a hangnail until we began digging the initial layers. Before embarking on my connecting flight through Portland, the TSA had confiscated my nail clippers after taking me aside into a room, where they made me expose myself just for the shits and giggles of it.
I knew my biting at the nail would only make it worse, so I asked members of the team if they had any clippers. If in reaction to this blank stares or smirks were dollar bills, I could’ve taken the next flight home with more cash than this project’s guarantor.
These people were nerds but not my kind of nerds. Even Craig seemed out of his element this morning, aloof and not running at one hundred percent.
Sofer had marked well where the previous excavators had uncovered the mule skeleton, and a few yards farther along, the buckles that had been appraised as true of Roman legionnaires.
The flags were not far from the famed swamp that had winched Varus’s forces against the Kalkriese hill. The Romans had been harried for three full days not only by Arminius but by the place itself. Also the gods had not favored them—the downpours had ruined their shields and arrows, and their sense of duty had only served to play into the hands of the “barbarian” Germanic tribes. The whole thing had been a rout and a deceit. Not many appreciate this in hindsight, but these soldiers were people, not robots. Many days’ ride from home, I could speculate for their terror and bewilderment as I stood surveying the site. It brought to mind the fictionalized depiction of the collapse of the Marines in the xenomorph hive in Aliens, and that was maybe twenty soldiers compared to the nearly twenty thousand who’d met their demise here.
Panic, disorientation, and the Roman way all forsaken to the sticks, mud, and ancient mounds.
A tiny chipmunk darted in front of me after I passed the paving stones meant to approximate the forest track made by the doomed Romans.
I hoped it was a good omen.
Instead, the distress of the small, furred courier transferred, and took my physical dysphoria to a level I hadn’t experienced since arriving in Europe. There is no army in across-the-Rhine Germany—
“What’s up?” Dieter asked at my shoulder. “You’ve been staring at that area since we got here.”
I shook my head.
“It was the swamp,” I said. “It was drained hundreds of years ago, but in the time of the battle it was a pinch point. I keep thinking of how many of them tried to make for it when they were outnumbered.”
“Or how many bodies were recovered.”
I wanted to ask if Dieter was from Hamburg, but was still wary of him because he and Ivan had been such fast friends. He looked like he was about to ask me something else when someone cried out to us.
The layering had begun slowly, so I’d have been surprised if they’d found anything already. I’d bitten at my hangnail all morning despite any strength of will, and I’d not even glanced at a trowel. There was some effect the place was having on me—back in Arizona, Mexico, or even in Ohio, you couldn’t have dragged me away from the soil until I’d turned up some kind of artifact, a link with someone who’d lived epochs before and might have even been trans themselves (or were wondering about that, despite jaded edicts of the time). But at the field I was tentative, cagey, as if our actual tread was a form of rape. The landscape of the preserved battlefield was too beautiful to disrupt, even though it had been curated and landscaped for our modern, timid, condescending gaze.
