​“You Love Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).” Gargoyle. Winter 2020.

Print: 127-131.​

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            At first it’s not so much for who she is as for

how she makes you feel. With Lucy you are strong

and smart and competent. When the two of you walk

along a riverbank or city street or through a grassy

park, her hand is fragile in yours. You stoop so she

doesn’t have to strain to reach you. The slightest wind

could buffet her away.

            Yes, with Lucy you are strong, purposeful, an anchor. It is a selfish love. But it grows into something more intrinsic, something about Lucy herself. Australopithecus afarensis.

            The two of you go to the Museum of Us in Balboa Park.

            You stand in front of a life-sized statue of her long-ago self, a version that required an artist’s imagination and a scientist’s precision as to skin and hair and eyes. 

            For Lucy, it is not quite like looking into a mirror; the ridge of her brow is about right, but the museum’s Lucy has much more of a chin than yours does.

            The Lucy mannequin seems to upset your Lucy, who tries to push through the glass to touch it. You lift her into your arms before she can hurt herself. You reassure her that there is no one quite like her; she is unique. And she is the best thing that ever happened to you. 

            Then you scold yourself for referring to her as a thing, even if that’s just an expression. Lucy is different, Lucy is Other; three-feet-seven, small brain, hairy snout, more ape than human; but she is your Lucy. A quiet, trusting, tiny creature who somberly parts your hair to look for nits, proving her affection (you dare to think of it that way) every day.

            Lucy loves to hear how you found her, or at least you love to retell it. You aren’t certain she understands English, or for that matter any language, but she basks in the warm sound of your voice. You describe the hot African sun and the grit that got everywhere, the shovel-v.-brush debate among the men who were looking for her—for something—for someone recognizably humanoid, in that long wild swash of dry Ethiopian soil. (You were a brush man, all the way.) You describe the ineffable joy when the first nubbin that might have been a bone, and was a bone, appeared in the gully where you were taking a stroll.

            You had found a bit of Lucy’s arm, dark and polished and turned to stone in the baking heat. Even more precious, a fragment of her skull lay nearby. It was all so beautiful. Standing in the museum, you describe it to her in the most sincere words you know. You circle her upper arm with your thumb and forefinger, cherishing her delicacy. You run a fingertip along the softly furred line of her cheek, hoping she will meet your gaze with hers.

            Lucy looks from your fingers to the tiny replica of herself behind the glass, her mouth an O of wonder. She has finally understood (so you reason) that the mannequin is not a lost family member, that it is something entirely separate from her. Something that never was alive.

            You sing her the song that inspired her name. This song played over and over in the tape machine that was the team’s only entertainment at night. It played while a dozen sweaty anthropologists fell into each other’s arms in passionate celebration.

            I’ll buy you diamonds, you promise. 

            She looks at you with eyes that ask, What is sky?

            And: What is love?

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Lucy doesn’t mind about your underemployment as a perpetual graduate student, teaching too many classes at community colleges so you can pay the bills. She doesn’t even seem to understand how degrading your work life is: a class here, another there, a stint in the electronics section of a superstore when you need a little extra. Is this love? It is perhaps ignorance.

            She stays in your apartment and watches romantic movies on Lifetime, which you turn on for her every morning when you leave.             She doesn’t change the channel because (you deduce) she doesn’t like sudden jumps in scene and sound.

            During the day, she makes enormous salads from greens that you buy at the grocer’s, though she is also known to raid the neighbors’ gardens for pineapples, roses, artichokes, figs, all of which she eats without regard for prickles and skins. She likes to sit in trees, and she rarely uses tools; she prefers to rip at what she needs bare-handed.

            In the language of the land where she was found, her name is Dinkinesh, which means You are marvelous. Sometimes you call her by that name. She peers at you with her head cocked to one side, listening, almost understanding. 

            You never use her third name, AL 288-1. It is ugly and unwieldy, and it is not Lucy.

            Lucy means “light,” you tell her. Light of your life, fire of your heart. Truly Dinkinesh.

            When you come home late, Lucy is waiting in your bed, and she wraps her reedy limbs around you in perfect trust. You make love to her gently and with infinite care, as if her bones are made of something much more fragile than other girls’ bones. They are glass; they are breath; they are life itself.

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            But Lucy has a boyfriend.

            You did not consider this possibility when you first fell for her—but how could Lucy be Lucy and not be loved? And once loved, in a jumble of bones and maquettes that made museum rounds in recent years, Lucy must be unearthed again.

            Your rival has found her.

            You hear his voice on your answering machine.  He sounds barrel chested, strong, forceful, though all he does is grunt and howl. 

            When Lucy hears these noises, she dashes around your living room, breaking a few pot shards you’ve kept as souvenirs from various digs. She seems happy. She climbs on top of the refrigerator and howls back.

            Analyzing the sounds that come from the machine, you reconstruct a face, date it, classify it. You know that you’re screwed. Lucy’s lover is Skull 5 from Dmanisi—heavy cheekbones, signs of fractures on the right, omnivorous diet—who has been on the cover of countless magazines, the subject of endless party chat. He is the archaeology world’s version of a rock star. 

            Skull 5 (or simply 5, as you decide to call him; it’s the least humanizing of his names) is younger than Lucy, a Homo erectus who follows her by over two million years. He is accustomed to stone tools and to building fires for cooking and warmth; he has lived in groups of hunters and gatherers. He is nearly as tall as a small modern man and could pass as a human, albeit a scruffy human, where Lucy could not. Somewhere inside that massive head and thick ribs, he has a capacity for imagination.

            For the first time in your life, you are furiously jealous. It’s not just that 5 has slightly more in common with Lucy than you do; their common ground is insignificant. He isn’t Australopithecus, and his brain is not much bigger than hers. Lucy clearly does not care about brains, or she’d choose you. 

            What really bothers you is the injustice: 5 is close enough to what you are, as a Homo sapiens, to make you wonder why he excites her. You found her first. You take care of her. What does he have that you do not?

            He has Lucy’s heart. Which may not be quite a human heart, the kind that has evolved over millions of years into a romantic, abstract muscle such as your own—but there is a something about him that you do not have. He inspires in Lucy—not love, exactly, but something.

            Watching her in a gleeful dance after one of these calls, listening to howls and yips that sound like a kind of music, you wonder what you can offer Lucy. If you give her all of your passion, she might die from it. She is so small, and there’s a nick on her pubic bone where a prehistoric predator took a bite. You must restrain yourself constantly to preserve her.

            If 5 gave her all his love—well, you just don’t know. Those grunts indicate a voracious appetite. He might devour Lucy, leave nothing behind but a heap of pebbles.

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            You take Lucy to the beach. You point at the waves—This is water—and at the clouds—This is sky. Her mouth again forms a wondrous O. She covers her tiny Pliocene ears; the roar of the surf is painful to her.

            Nonetheless, the moment is as romantic as a moment ever could be, in any era, in any place. The horizon turns pink and gold as the water prepares to swallow the sun. Lucy’s long, narrow face glows between her two fists, beneath the black hairs. 

            You get down on one knee, eye to eye with Lucy. You hold out a diamond ring.

            Lucy stares, curious about the tiny sparkle under a thickening marmalade sky. Though you are following a script ancient to Homo sapiens, to her it is as mysterious as birth, death, or arithmetic.

            Perhaps she thinks it is just more glass. She can’t know how you worked and saved for this ring. You will teach her. You are her teacher.

            Your hands tremble as they pry Lucy’s hands from her skull. Your voice trembles too, as you ask her to marry you. You think she must know what marriage is by now, after watching so much Lifetime.

            You try to push the ring onto her finger. It won’t budge past the first knuckle.

            Lucy helps. She takes the ring from you with surprising delicacy and holds it up to one eye. The band is white gold, very bright against the darkness of her fingers, with glittery diamond chips and a center stone of nearly a (flawed) half carat. She turns it this way and that in the fading light.

            You ask for an answer. 

Lucy puts the ring between her teeth and bites it.

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When you return from the dentist’s office, the machine is blinking to signal another message. Reluctantly, guiltily—it’s your fault that Lucy has lost two molars—you press the button. Once again, 5’s voice fills the room with grunts and burps.

            This time, Lucy doesn’t whoop. She doesn’t even seem to care—does she? you wonder hopefully. 

            She is woozy from the nitrous and her jaw’s swollen where the oral surgeon excavated the last roots of her broken teeth. She goes to the bedroom and lies down, holding that sore part of herself like a lost bird.

            You bring her an ice pack. You kiss her much-loved, high-ridged brow and press the soothing coolness to her face. You can actually feel your own heart bursting.

            You still don’t have an answer. Lucy accepted your ring, but it will take some time for her to get it on a finger. At the moment, it is working its way through the complexities of her digestive system, which is at least one part of the hominid body that hasn’t changed much in two million years, across a half-dozen extinct species. Unlike the mind and the heart.

            Can Lucy feel love? Will she feel it? Will it be for you, and will it complete her journey toward the human?

            For now, there is no answer but this, your tender watching over her tiny body, the roar of savages on the machine beyond as, together, you tumble through the kaleidoscope of time.

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