Nicolau has dragged his wife, Annika, to an archaeological dig, hoping to find some inspiration for his creative work. She’s not happy with the location, and she feels he’s wasting time. He proceeds into the pit where the dig will take place, and speaks with the head laborer:
In various places, trenches pierced the pit floor. Nicolau pointed at one. “You’ve dug up other bodies here?”
“Yes. Lots of people got caught here in the eruption. It was maybe a plaza or market, maybe the roof top garden of a rich family.” He shrugged. “We’re not sure what’s under any dig; when we started to find the bodies, we realized what we had, and stopped work.”
“Stopped? Why? You seem to have made a number of holes first.”
“Those were dug since. Rich people like yourself.”
“Oh. Tourists, you mean.”
“People like digging up dead bodies.”
“Right.” Great. Whatever remained of his hope of nding some inspiration in excavating the past, some way to acquire a little fire to ignite the performance tonight, drifted away. The argument with Annika had already begun to poke holes in the ramparts he’d erected around those dreams. Now, to find that he wasn’t going to actually participate in a dig, but rather an orchestrated tourist show…