Life Before Man Read Free

more exotic modern lizards, not to mention mammalian variations such as the rumps of mandrills. Those bizarre tendencies must have developed from somewhere.
    Lesje knows she’s regressing. She’s been doing that a lot lately. This is a daydream left over from her childhood and early adolescence, shelved some time ago in favor of other speculations. Men replaced dinosaurs, true, in her head as in geological time; but thinking about men has become too unrewarding. Anyway, that part of her life is settled for the time being. Settled, as in: the fault settled. Right now
men
means William. William regards them both as settled. He sees no reason why anything should ever change. Neither does Lesje, when she considers it. Except that she can no longer daydream about William, even when she tries; nor can she remember what the daydreams were like when she did have them. A daydream about William is somehow a contradiction in terms. She doesn’t attach much importance to this fact.
    In prehistory there are no men, no other human beings, unless it’s the occasional lone watcher like herself, tourist or refugee, hunched in his private fern with his binoculars, minding his own business.
    The phone rings and Lesje jumps. Her eyes spring open, the hand holding her coffee mug flies into the air, fending off. She’s one of those people unduly startled by sudden noises, she tells her friends. She sees herself as a timorous person, a herbivore. She jumps when people come up behind her and when the subway guard blows his whistle, even when she knows the people are there or the whistle will be blown. Some of her friends find this endearing but she’s aware that others find it merely irritating.
    But she doesn’t like being irritating, so she tries to control herself even when nobody else is with her. She puts her coffee mug down on the table – she’ll wipe the spill up later – and goes to answer the phone. She doesn’t know who she expects it to be, who she wants it to be. She realizes that these are two different things.
    By the time she picks up the phone the line is already open. The hum on the phone is the city’s hum, reverberating outside the plate glass, amplified by the cement cliffs that face her and in which she herself lives. A cliff dweller, cliff hanger. The fourteenth level.
    Lesje holds the phone for a minute, listening to the hum as if to a voice. Then she puts it down. Not William in any case. He’s never phoned her without having something to say, some pragmatic message. I’m coming over. Meet me at. I can’t make it at. Let’s go to. And later, when they’d moved in together, I’ll be back at. And lately, I won’t be back until. Lesje considers it a sign of the maturity of the relationship that his absences do not disturb her. She knows he’s working on an important project. Sewage disposal.She respects his work. They’ve always promised to give each other a lot of room.
    This is the third time. Twice last week and now. This morning she mentioned it, just as a piece of conversation, to the girls at work, women at work, flashing her teeth in a quick smile to show she wasn’t worried about it, then covering her mouth immediately with her hand. She thinks of her teeth as too large for her face: they make her look skeletal, hungry.
    Elizabeth Schoenhof was there, in the cafeteria where they always went at ten-thirty if they weren’t working too hard. She’s from Special Projects. Lesje sees a fair amount of her because fossils are one of the more popular museum features and Elizabeth likes to work them in. This time she’d come over to their table to say she needed a little of Lesje’s material for a display-case series. She wanted to juxtapose some of the small items from Canadiana with natural objects from the same geographical regions.
Artifact and Environment
, she was calling it. She could use some stuffed animals to go with the pioneer axes and traps, and a few fossil bones for atmosphere.
    “This is