“I want to be a doctor,” said Julie.
“I want to be a writer,” said Tim.
“I want to be an economist,” said Larry.
“I want to find dinosaurs and giant apes and forgotten peoples and evidence of aliens landing on the planet in younger days,” said Montgomery.
“Write something shorter in the text box that makes more sense,” said their teacher, unscrewing the lid on her third thermos of ‘tea’ that morning.
So Montgomery wrote ADVENTURER on his what-I-want-to-be sheet, and he received a B- for it.
***
When Montgomery was seventeen, a passing hurricane kept his family grounded on vacation. Into the storm shelters they all went, and as the wind whined and wailed and roared outside he gazed hungrily at the sheets of rain that tore and ate at the forests beyond the reach of the emergency lights.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “I will find my dinosaur.”
“That’s nice,” said his mother. “Now pass me the can-opener.”
“We’re all going to die,” said his father.
And Montgomery was right and his father was wrong; for everyone lived until the very damp dawn of the next day, when Montgomery prowled the surf and the wreckage and the foliage for hours and hours and hours and at last – triumph of triumphs – he pulled aside a half-fallen tree and was eyeball to eyeball with the beady red-ringed and brown-eyed stare of a dinosaur, crouched protectively over its nest.
“Hello!” he said.
“AIIIYK!” the seagull said. And it bit him.
***
When Montgomery was twenty-one, he spent his summer hitching illicit rides on cargo ships carrying containers of anything to anywhere for anyone. It was cheap, even if it was a bit lonely and most of what he saw was empty blue.
“Somewhere out there, or maybe in here,” he told the crew he negotiated and bribed and wheedled with, “is a giant ape, unknown to the world.”
“Yuh,” they said, counting the money. “Yah. Yep. Uh-hm. Yes.”
So Montgomery took this as permission and scanned the horizon with binoculars and prowled the decks with powerful microphones and tapped on every wall for secret compartments and poured over shipping manifests and once or twice cracked a container open for a quick peek inside.
He found furniture. He found timber. He found metals. He found plastic shaped into funny little animals. He found more water than he could ever have imagined in a million lifetimes. And at last, as he stumbled back to his berth exhausted and empty-handed, he pulled open the door and there before him, rising up to the ceiling and staring back at him with the calm gaze of those who have every right to exist, was a great hairy ape the magnitude of which he’d never seen; stooped, broad-shouldered, heavy of gut and impossibly bipedal.
“Gracious god,” said Montgomery.
“Wrong room,” said the able-seaman, and slugged him amidships.
***
When Montgomery was thirty-six he spent the last of his grant on a mad dash to the wilds of Papua New Guinea, where he annoyed many people by talking to them very loudly and slowly instead of using any form of interpretation. This approach, the final step of his self-published ‘Montgomery Method,’ did not produce results.
“I was so sure,” he sighed, “that it was maybe this time. Oh well, perhaps the next.”
So Montgomery went home on an economy flight that stopped over for sixty hours in a place called Burnside, where he was turfed out to make his own way for the time being.
“Is there a hotel you could recommend?” he asked the flight attendant.
“Eh,” she replied.
From street to street he wandered, but the only places he could find were murderously wealthy, with entire lobbies and carpets designed entirely to warn prospective guests of the price ranges at work within their walls.
“Needs must,” he muttered. He thought far back to his childhood, and the wise things his mother and father had taught him. He girded his loins. He consulted a map. He even – god forbid – asked directions.
And so it was that he found a hidden place unseen by human eyes in many years, cobwebbed, abandoned, and forgotten. A place to rest, and more besides. This was what he had sought and failed to find in New Guinea – in Egypt, in the Andes, in the Rockies, among the shallow waters of Greece and in the burning deserts of central Australia.
Montgomery’s subsequent paper, On the Rise and Fall of the Burnside YMCA: an Archaeological Microstudy of a Vanished People, was surprisingly well-received. He still got in a lot of trouble about the grant money, though.
***
When Montgomery was fifty-five, he spoke with conspiracy theorists and alternate historians and people with little divining rods. He read self-published books. He analyzed ancient folktales. He read the interpretations of old petroglyphs, and then reinterpretations of those, and reinterpretations of THOSE.
He also looked at many blurry photos of things in the sky that looked like trashcan lids.
Finally he left his home without notice in the dead of summer and stepped off the plane into a flat dry heat that smelt like burnt lightning. He hired a car, he hired a driver, and they slept in shifts as they went for miles and miles and miles off the road, into the dust and the crags of the badlands, into sunlight so hard it hurt.
After a week they found nothing and turned around and as Montgomery stepped out of the car with a full bladder, town nearly back in sight, his urine washed the dust from an innocuous-looking stone and revealed something that he’d been looking for without knowing for half a lifetime.
The meteorite was small and crushed and old, very old. And of course it was contaminated by lots and lots of human DNA. But it was still laden with little funny things that could’ve been maybe trace fossils left by bacteria or maybe traces of extraterrestrial sugars or maybe not, and that stirred up the whole damned panspermia debate in astronomy all the hell over again.
***
When Montgomery was seventy-seven, one of his organs protested unexpectedly and took the rest of him on a short and eventful if well-trodden journey, and he entered the most mysterious land of all. His funeral was a little muddled – which his family agreed he would’ve wanted – and the burial happened more by luck than design. In the milling mob, some few of his old classmates found each other.
“Bit of a surprise,” said Julie.
“Him going first?” asked Tim.
“No, it taking so long.”
“Well, he got plenty of exercise,” said Larry.
“Not much of that for the rest of us – least of all an economist,” said Julie. “How’d you stay so trim?”
“Oh, I gave up on that after undergrad. Went into forestry. I climbed more than I walked for thirty years. At least a doctor gets to sit still now and then, eh?”
“Flunked medical school, got into politics, still a sitting senator,” said Julie. “But yes, I do get to sit all I like. Sometimes more than I’d like.”
“I should be writing this down,” said Tim.
“What, you going to use us as material?”
“No, no, as affirmations. Had a nervous breakdown halfway through my second novel, got into psych work. Don’t have the biggest degree but it helps the community, you know?”
“Yeah,” said Julie.
“Yeah,” said Larry. “Never know where life’ll take you, huh?”
“Seems so,” said Tim.
They watched the funeral some more. One of Montgomery’s grandchildren had found the headstone and was trying to get it to stand up straight as two aunts directed him.
“You know,” said Tim, “I have the feeling it all mostly worked out for him like he planned.”
“Yeah,” said Larry.
“Yeah,” said Julie. “Do you think HE knew?”
“Oh who the hell could say for sure,” said Tim.
The tombstone fell over again.
“Lunch?” asked Larry.
“They hired a food truck,” said Tim.
“Good,” said Julie. “My feet hurt. Let’s go for it.”
So they did.