Borrowed Bones

Katabatic winds sped out of the South Pole, obscuring the small figure who walked resolutely into them, her solitude as reckless as the winds. Ice crystals bit at her face. The fine hairs inside her nostrils froze into sharp needles. Her eyelashes grew heavy with adhering snow. Snow mounded on the shoulders of her red parka and on its hood lined in fake fur. Her footprints disappeared as quickly as she made them.

She looked back once to the sound of her name, “Chaya, Chaaayaaa.” Searchlights moved dimly in the distance, seeking a sign of her as she forged on into the freezing skirls. Antarctica’s jagged wind-scoured peaks loomed ahead. She thought she might find rest there, perhaps a cave where she could die again and where her bones might hide forever in layers of cold oblivion, far from the hot desert sands of her birth.

Chaya began in a highly classified laboratory in the Rajasthan desert, where a poor Dalit woman, a surrogate, gave birth to her, then collected her fee and disappeared back into her tribe, never realizing that she had brought into the world the first human clone, a Neanderthal woman who had lived 150,000 years ago. 

The scientist who developed the project, Doctor Morgana Grey, could have kept Chaya in a cage, like a chimpanzee. Instead, she brought her to Virginia and raised her as her child.

Chaya found it hard to admit that the brilliant, ungainly doctor, whom she called “Mom,” had come to love her as a daughter rather than just the subject of her groundbreaking discoveries in biotechnology, that the doctor was a good person in spite of her lack of professional ethics, that she loved her back. 

The search party from the cruise ship undoubtedly included Mom, ordering everyone about in her loud, clipped voice, panicked not only at the loss of a daughter, but the ruin of her life’s work.

Amidst the blizzard, Chaya suddenly heard Mom crying out, her voice keening like a loose electric wire in a storm, then howling wildly, magnificently. It caused her to pause momentarily and smile in spite of herself, tasting the plaid scarf drawn across her nose and mouth, tasting remembered happiness. 

Chaya had been a quiet, healthy, amber-haired child with a dash of freckles across her broad, flat nose. She looked like every other human child except she was a bit shorter than her peers and had enormous pale green eyes, the color of glacial runoff. As she played and went about the business of her young life, she hummed so softly, so absently, that those close to her couldn’t be sure they heard anything more than breath. It might be described as the vibrating energy of the silence that surrounds sound.

---

For as long as Chaya could remember, Mom told her that she had been adopted, but dismissed any questions with, “You are mine as much as if I carried you in my body.”  Then she’d clatter away, pushing her thick black-framed glasses back up on her small nose, leaving Chaya to answer her own questions and imagine that her true mother dwelled somehow deep inside her in a sort of reverse maternity. This unknowable mother whispered to her in a language she did not understand, a humming language, full of the solid smoothness of loss.

Mom meticulously kept a “baby book,” or rather a series of baby books of Chaya’s life, freighted with photographs, height and weight entries, notes on progress and achievements, and Chaya’s drawings and quotes. All this was in addition to the exams, probes, and blood work at the Virginia “hospital,” which Chaya would later learn was another highly classified laboratory.  

At five years old, Chaya had traced her own chubby little hand on a page of the baby book and crayoned it red. It could have been the Sistine Chapel the way the lab doctors exclaimed, rubbed their chins, and endlessly asked why she had drawn a red hand. At the time, she had neither the vocabulary nor understanding to tell them that it was not she who had done it, but her true mother gently guiding her. She simply said, “I like it,” and traced her hand again, this time defiantly coloring it black and scribbling outside the lines.

Another crisis occurred when Doctor Grey commented to her colleagues that she noticed Chaya enjoyed excellent night vision. “Like an owl.” Immediately they ushered the child into a dim room, dropped stinging liquid into her eyes and wedged her head against a phoropter. 

“No,” she screamed, throwing herself into an opulent tantrum, afraid that the monster machine could see inside her and frighten her true mother away. She broke free and raced down the labyrinthine hallways. Security found her curled in the fetal position, eyes squeezed shut, in a corner of the lab where they kept the caged bats, rats, beagles and monkeys. 

“Tranquilize it,” the ophthalmologist ordered.

At that point, Doctor Grey echoed the child’s “no.” She fell to her knees and gathered Chaya to herself, awkwardly stroking her until they both relaxed. 

Mom brought her home, stomped about the kitchen fixing hot chocolate with marshmallows, then read I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Chaya’s favorite. Mom was a great hooter and good at all animal noises. Her wolf howls were her best maternal talent.

That night, Chaya rested securely in Mom’s bed, spooned into the curve of her body. She fell asleep before her true mother’s hum could arise within.

---

As Chaya advanced in school, she earned good grades—nothing exceptional, but she never failed. Socially, she kept to herself. Autism was suggested, but Mom knew better. To mitigate the child’s isolation, Mom demanded that Chaya participate in a sport. She settled on running. Mom attended all her meets and watched her thunder down the tracks, broad chest thrust out, sturdy legs pumping, bronze hair billowing behind in a cloud of gold.

One day, Mom asked, “You’re such a fast runner. How do you do it?”

“I smell the race.” Chaya glanced at Mom, performing for her: “I feel the test through my whole body, like a drum, like great pain. That intense.” She didn’t reveal that running triggered memories of running across cold hard ground, danger at her heels. Those little windows in her mind snapped open. She saw nothing on either side or beyond the brief glimpse, no context, no story; just a gash in time.

She reached her 13th birthday during the Covid pandemic, which validated and even sanctified her natural solitude, made of it a social virtue like drinking from a paper straw. Her body became a curiosity, mysterious, growing into both secret power and vulnerability. Beyond the common changes of puberty Chaya noticed with dismay her brow becoming more protuberant and her chest broader. Her muscular legs failed to stretch out into long feminine tapers. In truth, she was built very much like Mom. Sturdy. Peasant stock. A babushka-wearing potato eater.

After a birthday dinner of fried chicken and coleslaw, she gathered her courage and asked once more, “Who are my biological parents?” 

As if she hadn’t heard, Mom put a cake on the table and began to light the candles. Clumsy as always, she kept burning her fingers. Finally she looked up impatiently and said, “I don’t know.” But she introduced new information: “You were born in India. I adopted you there and brought you here. Now blow out the candles before the cake is incinerated. Here, I’ll help.” She leaned down and blasted the flames, leaving only one candle burning. 

Chaya looked at the solitary flame, sputtering and dripping, growing smaller. “I have a right to know who I am.” 

Mom sighed, deeply aggrieved, blew out the remaining candle and indicated the blue velvet sofa. They both sat down, Mom jarring the furniture as she plopped. Chaya snuggled expectantly, defensively behind a barrier of white furry pillows. “Well,” Mom began. She looked at her daughter, her love compromised by the reflexive neutrality of a scientist. She adjusted her glasses, majestically cleared her throat and dropped the atomic bomb. “There is no one like you in the whole world, Chaya, and there hasn’t been for about 40,000 years.” She took a deep breath as if about to swan dive, and proclaimed, “I am your true mother because I created you. It was in a laboratory in India. You see, my darling child, you are historic. You are the first human clone.” 

Clone. The ground on which Chaya stood to view herself and the world shifted irrevocably. Mom kept blinking. Chaya wanted to glue her lids down, staple her big mouth shut. It was minutes before she trusted herself to speak. Then she said, “I’m cold.”

Mom draped the furry wolf-colored sofa throw about her shoulders and they sat together in silence. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Rain fell from the eaves in stage whispers. A car sloshed by in the wet street. At last, Mom gathered herself into professional efficiency and asked, “Do you have any questions, Chaya?”

“Only about a million. Starting with—who am I? Or rather, who was I? Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile? Joan of Arc? Lizzie Borden?” Her voice pleased her with its sharpness. Her green eyes, however, betrayed her fear.

Mom shifted position, reached out to touch the wolf throw, but withdrew as if it might nip. She looked at the subject/child and said, “You are known in clinical circles as the Lady of La Chapelle. Your DNA comes from a fragment of bone found in a cave in central France. The 150,000-year-old skeleton is that of a young Neanderthal woman, lovingly, ritually buried in a fetal position. Cause of death unknown.”

Chaya closed her eyes. Neanderthal. That was the atomic of Mom’s bombshell news. Its light bleached the world as she knew it. Her interior hum became a pervasive chant. “Aummmm.” She instinctively, cautiously touched her brow.

With a pathetic eagerness for endorsement, Mom said, “You are a gift from the dawn.” She must have rehearsed that line a hundred times anticipating this moment, it was so poetic, the delivery so smooth. Mom’s arms lurched out to hug her, as her Big Reveal script must have suggested. 

With the savagery of a sudden cramp, Chaya hissed, “Don’t touch me.”

---

From then on, Chaya spoke to Mom in grunts and monosyllables. She refused to go to the lab for checkups. She eyed her image in the mirror with a mixture of curiosity and loathing. Alienation overwhelmed her. She wrote rather floridly in her diary, “I am like a doomed bird in the rain forest. I am the final individual of an exotic avian species singing out my heart in the morning dew and hearing no answering song, sunrise to sunrise.” She recognized the melodrama and burnished it with, “I am trapped out of my time and I can’t find my true mother anymore because the presence inside me is not her, but me.”

She pondered the mystery of soul and wondered if she had one or if souls even existed. She wrote, “If my original self had a soul, was my original soul summoned back out of retirement to active duty, or did my cloned body get a new soul? Where do I begin and my original self end? Or is it seamless?” 

Like most people, Chaya had an image of Neanderthals as hairy knuckle-draggers, a chromosomal whisker away from gorillas. She feigned disinterest but listened intently when Mom tried to engage her with nightly dinner table dissertations on the revolutionary breakthroughs in Neanderthal research. “The discoveries of the last 20 years, along with the newest dating techniques indicate that in all probability, Neanderthals roamed the Eurasian continent, surviving ice ages where the polar ice cap crept as far south as Paris, before Paris was Paris, of course, no poodles, no croissants, not even frozen ones. The ice cap then gradually retreated, causing sea levels to rise as much as 65 feet. Global warming? We haven’t seen anything yet. And the Neanderthals survived it all. You adapted. You even adapted to the arrival of the flood of migrants from Africa about 40,000 years ago, the Homo sapiens.  For about 10,000 years, your people and mine coexisted. We traded together, shared skills. We had children together. And then for some reason, your people, the Neanderthals, vanished. No one knows why, but in this age of Covid, a virus comes to mind.”

“Maybe you killed us.” 

Mom put down her fork and quietly said, “Maybe we loved you to death. Most of us have Neanderthal DNA. We carry you in our blood.” 

Chaya impudently responded, “I do not wish to be carried,” and stomped away, very much like Mom. She slammed the door and blasted inchoate music. 

After that, Chaya became even more reclusive, staying in her room for days, neglecting to shower. Her only contact with the world outside was through remote school. She read everything she could find online about Neanderthals but shared nothing with Mom. She hated her.

When the pandemic began to abate, Mom announced, “For your graduation, since there will be no big ceremony, I’ve made reservations for a trip to Yellowstone National Park. We’ve been so cooped up, I think it will do both of us good to get outdoors in nature for a while.”

“Like I’m some kind of wild animal?”

“I’m afraid you smell like one. You’ll have to shower.”

“Early Homo sapiens smelled worse.” Chaya felt smug and angry. “Your stink was one of your primitive defenses. Most predators wouldn’t go within 10 feet of you. I’m surprised we hooked up with you at all.”

---

In the oxygen-laden air of Yellowstone, Chaya found herself happier than she had ever been. Even her hair and teeth felt happy. It started on their first night in the park, walking back to their cabin from dinner at the lodge. It was dark but not completely inky. Suddenly from the trees a huge form, blacker than the gathering night, whooshed solemnly overhead, disturbing the air. She and Mom looked at each other, unguarded, ambushed by wonder. “An owl,” Chaya whispered reverently.

“But it didn’t call your name,” Mom said. They laughed spontaneously, recalling Chaya’s favorite bedtime story, and ran the rest of the way to the cabin, Mom shrieking as she crushed twigs, scattered gravel. They collapsed on the porch steps, Mom’s awkward hulk heaving for breath. 

Chaya felt herself softening and perceived it as danger. “The owl just didn’t recognize me.” Unable to resist a bit of spite, she added, “After all, it’s been 150,000 years, give or take a century.” 

They sat at a great distance, though only a perilous few inches apart. As the moon rose above the trees, wolves began to howl. The eerie choir flooded the night with mystery and hunger. A chill crept over Chaya. “I wish I knew what the wolves were saying.”

Mom said, “Their vocalizations are like a GPS tracking system. The wolf points its nose at the moon when it howls so the high pitch is projected upwards and carries farther. It’s all about acoustics. A wolf’s howl can be heard by other wolves 10 miles away in open terrain. It’s how they find each other.” Mom was a spoiler of magic, throwing buckets of science on the vast wonders of existence. She stood up, raised her face to the starry sky and began to howl, reaching all the insane high notes, touching the fear. Then her glasses fell off, and Chaya had to cast about for them with her owl eyes.

---

Chaya rose early, just at sunrise, and let herself out of the cabin while Mom slept. The evening before she had spotted a darkness in the cliff face and assumed it might be a cave. There was no trail as she climbed toward it, grasping at trees and rocks, knowing instinctively how to do it. The cave proved to be small and shallow. She shrugged, sat down in the shale and waited for inspiration, for something, for a whisper of who she once was. Nothing came to her until she glanced at her hands, dirty and scratched from the climb, nails broken, a bit of blood on the knuckles. She stared in recognition, as if they were estranged family she did not wish to welcome, who carried a contagion of shared time and forgotten deeds. They were her hands. Hers then and hers now. She cried out in utter frustration and rage, curled them into fists and might have punched the stones of the cave, but that’s when she heard Mom hooting and howling, “Chayaaa.” She sat still a moment, wiped her hands on her jeans, took a deep breath, stood up and waved. 

Over breakfast, Mom scolded, “What were you thinking? There are wolves, bears, snakes.”

Calmly, as she swallowed a bite of bran muffin, Chaya said, “I just wanted to try out a cave. I once lived in one, didn’t I?”

“Perhaps under hypnosis or chemical probe, you can remember your previous existence. It would be interesting to know what your cloned brain holds in its convolutions. There may be valuable knowledge that could benefit humanity. And it might be rewarding for you to know about your previous life and your biological parents. Whether you had a husband or children.”

“I told you, I will never set foot in that lab again. I am not an experiment. I am me.” 

---

A few months later, Mom said, “Remember how you climbed to the cave in Yellowstone? I’d like to suggest another trip, this time to France. Paris and then La Chapelle-aux-Saints and the cave where your bones were found.”

Chaya had already secretly researched the area online. The town had a small but important Neanderthal museum where the skeleton of a man, perhaps a brother, son, husband, father, rested under glass for all to ogle. “I’m not ready for that.”

“Well then, you pick a place.”

Chaya had a plan and knew exactly where she wanted to go. In photographs and videos, Antarctica looked perfect. A pristine white world, splendid, desolate, and most of all, unpeopled. It called to her like the song of the wolf, hungry and sharp of tooth. She wrote in her journal, “I could die there in peace where no one will find my bones and exhibit them under glass. No one will extract my DNA and make yet another me.”

---

At Ushuaia, at the very tip of South America, where the Andes plunge gloriously into the sea, they boarded their cruise ship, a converted Russian icebreaker, unglamorous but reassuring as it plowed through the Straits of Magellan in the dark of night.

They awoke in the morning to brilliant light streaming into the cabin window. Outside, huge icebergs gleamed in the truest, clearest blue they had ever seen. On some bergs, penguins played, sliding into the sea and climbing back up to slide again. On one, a great seal basked, probably digesting his penguin-over-easy breakfast. Beyond the icebergs, Antarctica rose up in towering white volcanic peaks. 

Most of the passengers on the cruise were seasoned tourists who wanted to add another continent to their travel badges. They’d been everywhere else. After breakfast, they assembled on deck for their Zodiac assignments, all bundled in their red expedition parkas and high rubber boots. Although the day was sunny, the forecast was not good. The captain advised them not to wander far and to heed the horn calling them back to the Zodiacs. “You may not have much time. A storm will be moving in later, but I know you’re anxious to set foot on Antarctica, so let’s get started.”

As Chaya and Mom motored ashore, a huge mottled seal swam beside their Zodiac, popping up its head, surveying them with large enchanting eyes. Chaya imagined that the animal was a guardian spirit sent to welcome her, until the Zodiac operator warned everyone to keep their hands away from the edges, that it was a vicious leopard seal surveying the menu. The seal disappeared as they approached the shore.

Under a sky growing pale with clouds, they waded in frigid water to a beach strewn with driftwood and the bleached skeleton of a whale. To their left, a colony of penguins squawked and waddled about on a filthy hill. The small crowd of cruisers surged toward them, cameras and phones at the ready, Mom stomping in the lead. The last thing Chaya heard as she crept away was Mom shouting, “Whew, they stink.” 

When she was at a small distance, the sky darkened, the wind picked up, and snow swirled from low gathering clouds. Horns blared their warning and people scurried back to the waiting Zodiacs. 

A head count would reveal one missing. Mom would be frantic, demanding assistance. Chaya kept going, shielded now by thickly falling snow. She turned briefly and saw dimly in the distance the lights of the searchers, and heard them call her name. She felt as though she was reenacting the disappearance of the last Neanderthal on Earth and almost cried out in sorrow and terror. She stumbled, falling to her knees, knowing suddenly that this was how she had died before, and at this exact age, caught by winter. Panicked, she pulled her plaid scarf from her face in order to breathe. The cold air burned her lungs. That’s when she heard a piercing howl, terrible in its grief, as it carried above the wind, dominating the land and the storm with its searing lamentation. Only two creatures could howl like that: a wolf and Mom. And there were no wolves on the Antarctic continent.

Mom would have lost her glasses on that last howl. Chaya stood up, raised her face to the unseen moon, and howled an answering call. She and Mom kept howling as she walked toward the lights.