The culprit seems clear, Bruno said, but human history, the story of us, was still a great riddle. Examinations of the past, of dirt and DNA, could show us new ideas of where the entire project on earth might have headed. Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?
I pictured a driver’s helmeted tuck-and-roll from a Top Fuel dragster, his car in flames, his body in a flameproof suit, rolling and rolling in that interminable few seconds before the emergency crew comes running, crimson flags signal TRACK HAZARD, and track workers blast foam-up fire retardant.
But if it was all of us on planet Earth inside this shiny, driverless car, then what would we be exiting, besides reality? What would we tumble into, if not a void?
I AM A BETTER DRIVER after a few drinks, more focused.
Instead of trying to read my phone or put on lipstick, after several glasses of these regional wines I faced forward and held the wheel with both hands. Drink lulled me into doing only what I was supposed to: drive the car.
Except that I decided toll roads were going to put me to sleep, so I opted for a scenic route on secondary roads. I got lost winding through the Massif Central and its gear-grinding turns.
Sure, I was reckless with the clutch. But it’s hard for me to feel that rental cars have value. This one, a small hatchback Škoda, cost eight euros a day. (They had given me a lump sum as travel budget, and so I’d chosen economy.) How did these companies make money? They had brand-new cars. You barely had to pay for them. And they didn’t inspect the car before you drove it out of the parking structure.
The Škoda was “clean diesel,” an oxymoron that was a metaphor for something, but I didn’t know what.
Clean diesel, clean coal. Add the word “clean” and boom—it’s clean.
My navigation was off, and the scenic route took me way too scenically over a summit. “Oh, come on,” I said out loud as useless vistas, pink-hued Roman ruins and high-walled castles on jagged peaks, reared up left and right.
I passed a tower on a cliff, its top edges eaten away like a sugar cone, at that point when the ice cream is gone, and the child is contractually obliged to take bites of its tasteless container. “God damn it,” I said.
These breathtaking vistas were unappealing because they confirmed I was lost. I wanted only an indication by this point that I was headed northwest, toward the city of Boulière, which Lucien had depicted as a cluster of crooked, dirty streets populated by ugly people in crappy cars, and a good place to stop at Carrefour or Leader Price, to stock up before arriving at the Dubois family estate. I saw no signs for Boulière. I was in remote forested highlands. I pulled off at the top of a summit, into an unpaved lot adjacent to a building, some kind of mountain inn, hoping for directions.
The inn was closed. It looked not to have been open in quite a while. Its windows were boarded. There was graffiti along its exterior walls, names and symbols fuzzed out in spray paint, writing that reflected no skill, added no beauty. This kind of graffiti, common enough in Europe, seems like little more than uglification. Certain crimes are natural enough, even serious ones. Murder is understandable when you think about it. It’s human to want to annihilate your enemy, or to demonstrate to the world: this is how angry I am right now, even if you might later regret killing a person. But to spray-paint an inscrutable sloppy symbol on the outside of a building? Why?
It had just rained up here. The air was damp and warm and close, like human breath. The lot was crisscrossed with patterned ruts from truck tires. The rain had left enormous puddles that were the tint of milk chocolate, their surface silk-screened in sky. There were no trucks. Just ruts. A mist hung in the branches of the low trees beyond the lot, as if a cloud had descended on this mountain and left its ragged parts among the woods.
It felt like a place of aftermath, where something had happened.
I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.
This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping and excited by the promise of the cookies, the ritual reward of a Saturday’s outing with their mother. That is a conception of Europe cherished by certain Parisians and as imaginary as the pastoral scenes in the frescoes on the walls of the posh café.
The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.” These men will ignore weight regulations on their loads, and safety inspections on their brakes. They will text someone at home in their ethno-national language, listen to pop music in English, and get their needs met locally, in empty lots on mountain passes.
The only mystery is where they find the women for these occasions, but even that isn’t so hard to imagine. A girl or woman fallen on hard times, not French, and without EU documents, stuck in a rural outpost, picking her way out to the main road in impractical high-heeled shoes of flesh-biting imitation leather, aloe in her purse for rapid-fire hand jobs. She had left her underwear in these woods. Big deal. Her world is full of disposability. The panties hanging on a bush in front of my face are a package of three for five euros at Carrefour. They are like Kleenex. You sweat or leak or bleed into them and then toss them on a bush, or in the trash, or you flush them and clog the plumbing, someone else’s plumbing, ideally.
I had been drinking, as I said. And I had to go. I was “making beer,” as an unshaven Moldovan truck driver might put it. A foaming reservoir filled its makeshift banks on the ground over which I squatted, and then it overflowed those banks, streaming like advance troops sent downhill on a scouting mission. I was still peeing and watching my pee make its way down the hill when I heard footsteps.
I startled. Was someone here?
I AM TOUCHED BY YOUR QUESTION, Bruno told them, of why it is that we are alone here on earth, the only remaining human species. How did we go from multiple and thriving branches to measly H. sapiens, who faces no competitors, a lone runner on an existential racetrack, running and running, having somehow lapped the competition to arrive at species monopoly?
It is, to say the least, doctrinal to take at face value this idea that it is only us who occupy the earth, we runners on our lonely track, which we share with no other survivors, of all the populations of different strains of human who once thrived.
And I have been as guilty as anyone, Bruno said, of upholding this doctrine, of assuming that we are alone, and that there is no one else. And yet, just as we are so certain that it’s only us here, to the point of wondering, as you are, why this has come to be the case, I would point out to you that every culture in the world has its legends concerning the continued existence of other human strains, stories that sustain various versions of a universal fantasy, that we are not alone.
There’s the legend of Sasquatch, for instance, in the Pacific Northwestern mountain ranges of the United States and British Columbia, sometimes known as Bigfoot.
There’s the “Soviet” Sasquatch of the Himalayas, sometimes referred to as the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti.
There is the tall and hirsute humanoid consistently if rarely spotted over centuries in the mountains of Nepal, known of as the “mungo.” In Gansu, they have the Bear Man. In Nanshan, the Man-Beast, with pleasing features and an agile gate.
In the Gobi Desert there’s the Almas, or “Mongolian Bigfoot,” a leggy and furred creature who is a fierce fighter and can run like the wind, and whose habitat maps to the same remote roaming area as Przewalski’s horse.
Bruno went into a discussion of mid-twentieth-century Soviet cryptozoology scholars, who had worked without glory or compensation on this subject for decades, compiling oral histories concerning “wild men.” The Soviet anthropologist Boris Nevsky, a specialist on revolts in medieval France, had come to suspect that peasant uprisings had been driven by peoples of Neanderthal heritage. Nevsky had hoped to research still-existent strains of these people in the Pyrenees mountains but was not granted a travel visa. Stuck in the Soviet Union, he was appointed to head the Commission to Study Relic Hominids, and redirected his field work to Central Asia, specifically the Pamir Mountains and Himalayas, where, for thirty years, he traveled and recorded sightings.
While Dr. Nevsky had at first allowed that the stories he heard on his travels, of fantastical sightings of wild men (and wild women as well), might be mythic, Nevsky could not deny that the details of the sightings—the pronounced and heavy ridged brow, teeth as large as a camel’s, a sound these people made that was like the squeal of a rabbit at its moment of slaughter—were almost identical, in region after region.
Bruno said that the farther Dr. Nevsky traveled, the more convinced he became that these stories could not all have the same details by chance alone. In conducting his field research, Nevsky little by little lost his capacity to keep the stories of wild people within the territory of culture, of myth. The stories broke their corral, and the Wild Man, for Dr. Nevsky, became real.
From what I know, Bruno said, Nevsky’s papers remain in the archives of Moscow State University, and thanks to Vladimir Kreshnev, who has catalogued them, and the research done since by subsequent cryptozoologists, we are compelled to cease resting on our laurels and assuming our own monopoly on human life.
Yes, take your sigh, Bruno wrote. Bigfoot? he asked rhetorically. Real??? he jeered in repeated question marks.
I feel your skepticism, he told them. My own is voluminous, I assure you. Who knows if these Soviet cryptozoologists I speak of are not clinically insane. Who is to say that their “research” isn’t hallucinatory, clownish, and faked?
But whether in Central Asia, or in the dark and wild heights of the Pyrenees, or here in the Guyenne Valley, in secret rock shelters—whether atavistically Neanderthal or some other strain of hominin, somehow living undetected on the margins of the modern world—such wild people already do very much exist. They do live. Guess where? That’s right. In our minds, and in our culture, on account of these endless legends of a Sasquatch or snowman that we spin and dream of, hope for, and fear.
You can’t get through your own childhood, Bruno wrote, without encountering a hairy, solitary, running man, or part-man part-beast, a creature that legend suggests might lurk in any woods you cross.
Every culture has wild regions, wild lands, whether forest or desert or steppe. Every wild land contains some wild person, human or humanoid of unknown origin, who lives separate from the rest, separate from the built world, the social world. I have come upon no culture without such a legend, of a man who lives in nature, whose life is formed of secrecy, of a vow never to join us.
Perhaps these legends, Bruno surmised, are meant to establish what is possible. To prove that somehow, someone—not us—has managed to evade the dominant reality (that we ourselves have failed to evade).
Perhaps it comforts us that there are stories—even if we don’t believe them—that we H. sapiens are not alone. The breadcrumb trail of cryptozoology becomes a site of resistance to Big Science, and to crushing pessimism, this lore as a place where people can say, but… but… but are you sure?
THE PERSON I HEARD IN THE WOODS turned out to be me. I had stepped on some kind of crinkly food wrapper that made a noise.
