Year Zero

J
ERUSALEM

T
he wound was their path.

Nathan Lee Swift sat strapped in the belly of the cargo helicopter with a dozen assorted archangels, looking down upon what little remained. The earthquake was visible mostly by what was no longer visible. Cities and villages had simply vanished in puffs of dust. Even his ruins were gone. The map had gone blank.

The air was hot. It was summer. There was no horizon. The sands stretched into haze. He felt chained to the giant beside him, his former professor David Ochs. He had not wanted to leave, now he didn’t want to come back. Not like this.

Due south from the U.S. Army base in Turkey, they flew parallel to the rift system. Like an immense raft drifting from shore, Africa was shearing loose of Eurasia. It was nothing new in the larger scheme of things. Satellite photos barely registered the latest geological breach. Even from the helicopter’s scratched Plexiglas windows, the devastation appeared strangely faint. The earth had pulled open and sealed shut.

Nathan Lee searched for his bearings. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been down there, somewhere, sifting away at ancient Aleppo, homing in on the end of his field research. Now the ruins were gone, and his dissertation with them. Only love—or lust—had spared him from the disaster. If not for Lydia Ochs visiting his tent one Arabian night five months ago, he might have died in the sands. As it was, the professor’s younger sister had accidentally saved him with her fertile womb.

She had come to Aleppo with her brother, unannounced, during the winter break between semesters. The professor was checking up on his graduate students, anchoring his grants, a day or two here, then on to the next, and she was just along for the ride. Nathan Lee had never seen her before in his life. He was a catch-and-release, he figured. A desert conquest. Her Himalayan climber in the sands. But then he’d gotten her letter. Back in Missouri, she was five-months pregnant. Now she was ten-days married, and all his new in-laws were proclaiming he’d been miraculously spared. Miraculous seemed a strong term for what owed less to the hand of God than to a Wonderbra, a full moon, and a bottle of old nouveaux Beaujolais. But he did not correct the record.

He was still dazed by the sudden change. The wedding band glittered on his brown fist like some strange growth. Twenty-five seemed so young. He still had his fortune to find, and his name to make, and the far edges of the world to see…and see again. It wasn’t that his mirror was empty. He saw an earnest young man in there with John Lennon spectacles and durable shoulders and a bit of hair on his chest. But he lacked form. He felt as if his molecules were still coming together.

Maybe it was a function of working the sands in near solitude for the last two years. But it seemed like his footprints were gone the minute he left them, and his shadow kept shifting shape. There was something about burying his gypsy parents on opposite sides of the planet—his mother in Kenya, his mountaineer father in Kansas, of all places—that stole his sense of direction. He could go anywhere. He could be anyone. And what he was now was at square one with his doctoral work, up to his eyeballs in student loans, and with a baby on the way.

He could have resented the pregnancy. But he was an anthropologist. He had his superstitions. And there was no denying that the child had already saved him once. The name was almost too good to be true. Lydia had chosen it. Grace.

“Tell me, my friends,” a voice interrupted. It was the demolitions engineer from Baghdad. He wore a silver hard hat. “What brings two American anthropologists racing to a disaster zone? And with body bags for your only luggage. Allow me to guess, forensic scientists?”

Roped to bolts in the floor, five cases of body bags occupied the aisle. There were twenty to a case. The economy models were white vinyl with no handles. They cost fourteen dollars each. The body bags had sped their journey in unforeseen ways. Their tale of a mission of mercy had become a small legend. Ochs had seen to that. Air freight for the shipment had been waived. They’d been boosted to first class as a courtesy. TWA had delayed its Heathrow-Athens flight so the two Americans could make the connection. A flight attendant with very long legs had sat on Nathan Lee’s armrest for an hour. She had always wanted to do good works. They were so brave. So humanitarian.
It’s what we do,
Ochs had told her.

“We’re archaeologists,” Ochs answered the engineer. His shoulders and arms and Falstaffian belly looked ready to burst his T-shirt. It said
Razorbacks
with the size, XXXL. People in this part of the world tended to identify the giant with the World Wrestling Federation. His voice carried above the engine roar. “George Washington University. My field is Biblical archaeology up to and including the Hadrianic era.”

It was one of those lies that were the truth by omission. Until last semester, Professor Ochs had held a distinguished chair at George Washington. Then his past had caught up with him. One of his boy toys had filed a grades-for-sex lawsuit. Already freighted by rumors of smuggled artifacts, Ochs had sunk like a rock. Thus Jerusalem, with his newly minted brother-in-law for company. Nathan Lee kept thinking he’d gotten over the worst of his queasiness. But he hadn’t. He didn’t belong here, not this way, on this mission. It felt like he was like being pulled under by a drowning victim.

“Biblical archaeology….” The engineer pounced at the clue. “Project Year Zero,” he said. “The search for Jesus Christ.”

Ochs replied evenly. “We are connected. But you misconceive us. Year Zero is founded on scrupulous scholarship. It grew out of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. The Smithsonian and Gates Foundation commissioned a detailed review and collection of artifacts and organic material dating back two thousand years.”

“Organic material.” The engineer was no fool.

“Pollen samples. Textiles. Bone. Mummified tissue.” Ochs shrugged.

“Bone and flesh,” said the engineer. “I perfectly understand.”

“Targeting the year zero was entirely arbitrary, a sop to the Western calendar.”

“A chance selection,” the engineer smiled indulgently. “The Holy Lands at the beginning of the Christian era.” Like other Levantine Muslims, he was bemused. The Crusades had never really quit. Now the West fought with trowels and picks.

“The date appealed to the public imagination,” said Ochs. “And to funding agencies. Stripped of all its controversy and superstition, we are simply gathering evidence of a place in time. Unfortunately people’s imagination ran off with it. Now we have this nonsense about a man-hunt for the historical Jesus.”

“Nonsense?” The engineer feigned surprise.

“Consider. True believers reject ‘the bones of Christ’ as a contradiction in terms. If his body rose into heaven, there can be no remains. And nonbelievers don’t care.”

In fact, for all his and Lydia’s sophistication, the Ochs clan sprang from Pentecostal roots, snakes, tongues, and all. Nathan Lee hadn’t known the depth of it. It was no wonder an abortion had been out of the question. The Missouri wedding had been like something out of the Civil War, all lace, black broadcloth, and raw bones.

“Which are you then, sir?” asked the engineer. “The believer who doesn’t believe, or the nonbeliever who doesn’t care?”

Ochs evaded him. “Ask my student here. He claims Jesus is a sausage.”

The engineer’s black eyebrows rose into the brim of his hardhat.

In Arabic, Nathan Lee said, “My tongue runs away from me sometimes.”

“A sausage, though! What an image.”

“A human skin,” Ochs supplied, “stuffed with myths and prophecy.”

The engineer enjoyed that. “And yet you dedicate yourself to Year Zero?”

“The professor borrows me now and then,” Nathan Lee said. “My doctoral focus is seventh-century northern Syria. I’m exploring the disappearance of Roman families from the so-called Dead Cities. They were prosperous and deeply rooted here. Their villas had mosaic floors and windows that looked out onto the oases. Then suddenly one day they were gone.”

“Was there a war?” asked the engineer.

“There are no signs of violence, no layers of ash.”

The engineer gestured at the landscape beneath them. “An earthquake, perhaps.”

“The villas were left standing. Herders use them to shelter their goats.”

“What happened then?”

“Some small thing, probably. A gap in their rhythm. Maybe a crop went wrong. Or an irrigation canal ruptured, or they had a cold winter or a dry summer. Maybe insects came. Or a rat with a flea with some exotic flu. Civilizations are such fragile things.”

Someone across the aisle called out, “Damascus,” and they all looked out the windows. It was no different from Halab and Hims and other cities along the way. From this height, except for the outer ring of refugee camps, Nathan Lee would have guessed the city had been extinct for centuries. It resembled a thousand other Levantine
tels,
one more gray pile of history and dust.
“Allah irrahamhum,”
one of the Iraqi physicians declared.
May God be compassionate to them.

They left the sight behind. The engineer resumed. “Why come at this time, when the catastrophe is so fresh?” he asked. “And why Jerusalem?”

Nathan Lee shifted his eyes away. Ochs answered. “The awful truth is,” he solemnly confessed, “opportunity. With the city turned inside out, the past lies bared. In a sense, we’re here to conduct an autopsy.”

“You intend to go into the remains?” the engineer asked. “It will be very dangerous. The aftershocks. The outbreak of disease. It’s been over seven days. By now, the dogs will all be rabid. It won’t be safe until the engineers have leveled it.”

“Precisely why we’re racing to get there,” said Ochs, “before you accomplish your work.”

The engineer took it as a compliment. “Of course,” he said. “And the body bags?”

“Our small gift,” said Ochs.

“But you mustn’t feel guilty,” the engineer said to Nathan Lee.

“Guilty?”

“It is written on your face.”

“Never mind him,” Ochs said to the engineer.

But the engineer was a compassionate soul, and now he liked Nathan Lee. He gestured at the other passengers. “Each of us bears a special talent. Some go to feed the people, some to heal, some to handle the dead. I go to complete the destruction with bulldozers and plastique so that the rebuilding may begin. And you are here to find meaning in the bones. Be strong, young man. It takes great love to make sense of God’s revenge.”

Nathan Lee wasn’t sure how to respond. “Thank you,” he said.

N
EARING
I
SRAEL, THE FLYING CHANGED
. Wild thermals prowled above the desert sands. The pilots tried in vain to evade the worst of it. Their blades chopped at the thermals. The thermals chopped right back at them. The helicopter shuddered and bucked, pitching savagely. Far below, spontaneous whirlwinds leapt about, writing wild, cryptic letters in the sand.

They dodged to the side, the pilots searching for a slipstream through the thermals. No dice. When the thermals weren’t hurling them sunward, they were plunging into troughs and crawling for altitude. Strapped tight, the passengers suffered their brutal entry into the Holy Lands. Ochs vomited on the floor. Nathan Lee offered no sympathy. They didn’t belong here. This was the professor’s idea. Soon the floor was slick with last suppers.

Nathan Lee pressed the wire rims onto the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. He thought of Grace. His seasickness ebbed. Who would she take after? Honey-haired Lydia for looks, he prayed. He saw himself as a plain man. His face was thin, his eyes were narrow. He still could not reckon why Lydia had chosen his tent that night. Maybe it had been the full moon, or she’d just wanted to add a nomad to her list. Even among the eccentrics camped out in the anthro department, Nathan Lee was notorious. He’d been known to hunt and butcher game with neolithic flints.

Nathan Lee did hope their daughter might acquire something from his side of the equation, a bit of pig iron to temper Lydia’s mercury. Or acid, as it were. The honeymoon was over. His hot-blooded desert lover had turned cold, and modern. She required 110 volts twenty-four hours a day, it turned out, for everything from her hair drier to her cellphone. Their wedding night had been invested in a discussion about money. She was going for her MBA. He was going for…Jerusalem.

At last they topped the Golan Heights and left behind the desert thermals. But as they entered the great, long trough of the Dead Sea Rift, Nathan Lee saw the destruction was only beginning. By this time every schoolchild knew from television that 800,000 megatons of energy had been released by the quake, 1,600 times more than all the nuclear explosions in war and peace combined. Tsunamis had erased the Gaza Strip. Like ancient Alexandria, Tel Aviv lay submerged beneath the Mediterranean. The Sea of Galilee had emptied, flooding the Jordan River. The floor of the Dead Sea had dropped fifty feet. Its waters reached halfway to the Gulf of Aqaba.

The cargo bay had no air conditioning. They steadily descended below sea level between raw limestone walls. To their right and left, roads and pathways terminated in midair. It was spring. The trees were budding green. Lambs bounded to their mothers. Finally they turned west and climbed out of the depths.