Jayce left the crowded meeting room, took coffee in his mug patterned with Hopi petroglyphs out to the patio, and sat on a low flagstone wall with native desert shrubs behind, hoping without much hope that his favorite dark-roasted Brazilian beans and the lucent blue sky would help calm him down, out of sight of the others. To nurse his grievance with this plunderer.

It had been bad enough at the overseas conference in December, when he’d first encountered the man over the fossils he’d been so wanting to see during the much-anticipated field trip to the German museum. (He still carried the museum brochure in his pocket as a cheat sheet. Jurassic fossils they had been.) After the condescension he had been subjected to, the battering by Beaky Nose’s insolent display of erudition and one-upmanship, Jayce had had to go to ridiculous lengths to keep out of the man’s way the whole rest of the meeting. The workshops and poster sessions, the annual address and dinner — all had been spoiled by the testy presence of the more senior paleontologist. By Jayce feeling obliged to skulk around in undistinguished groups of graduate students or fossil enthusiasts, to slip furtively out the nearest exit whenever the boor came near. He’d skipped promising sessions and receptions, and finally — disastrously for his career, no doubt — had simply fled. Taking refuge at one of the famous Christmas markets, which had been recommended in the conference packet, where he’d drowned his sorrows in mulled wine (followed by rather decent bratwurst grilled over beech wood, and giant rounds of chocolate gingerbread) instead of networking as he had wanted with colleagues, making new contacts and friends.

But there’d be no getting away from him this time. The group was much smaller, only a couple dozen scholars besides Jayce. And the raider from overseas had already begun to spoil everything he cared about — even his footing with the woman he loved more than all the shells and other traces of the past which thrilled his soul, the woman to whom he could now only stammer out his affection in wary phrases less intelligible than some of the fossil fragments he chanced on.

“Professor Doctor” was how he’d heard the fellow introduce himself to her over her display table of southwestern fossils and moss agate chunks, brought to the meeting from her shop in Jayce’s trustworthy old camper van. Bowing over her hand as if to kiss it in an irritating old world way.  Inwardly fuming, Jayce had stood helplessly by, watching them both. In turn she’d handed her card to the double-barreled pompous ass, saying “Joelle.” (Jayce savored that revelation like a slow sweet on his tongue, a Werther’s caramel, hard outside but filled with soft sweetness. Another name he kept losing somewhere, despite how close they were, how much he needed her.)

She quite adored those spiral shells (he’d shot a glance at the descriptive tags under the most impressive — ammonites). For many years he had been scouring the San Juan and Chama Basins for her (locations also mentioned on the tags), pleased to provide especially fine specimens for her to sell or keep at home on the wide windowsill behind her reading chair. As he had written in an email to a college friend when he first met Joelle (he checked the message frequently), he cooked for her often, intriguing types and colors of heritage beans cooked in the antique stoneware bean pot of his grandmother’s, flavored with earthy chile pods and a bay leaf or two, combined sometimes with sauteed Swiss chard and toasted piñons, at other times with pork loin marinated with cumin and smoked paprika and then deeply browned.

On their first date they’d ridden horses into Pacheco Canyon, with orange mezcal sours in a thermos carried along. They’d kissed like fallen angels — though he didn’t write that to his friend — and found themselves entwined at the foot of a stately tribal elder cottonwood in almost unendurably lovely fall light.  

But now his names were going, and that man with his hawk beak was here. She had invited him along to dinner with them that evening in Santa Fe, where most of the group was staying, where Joelle lived on the west side of the river. She and the foreigner talked animatedly in the language Jayce had once been fluent in, while he, the silent third party, moodily picked at his blue corn enchiladas, mostly just drinking the Dos Equis XX Amber (name lost, his only suggestion “that dark beer”) which, after shooting him a funny look, Joelle had told the server was what he wanted. Though she knew nothing of his loss, not yet, not if he could help it, since that would mean losing her too, Jayce was immensely grateful for the kindergarten teacher she’d once been, and the words she came up with and offered as a matter of course.

But then the invasive Professor Doctor started needling and quizzing him, showing him up in front of his friend and lover. And she was edgy too, not standing up for Jayce at all after naming the beer. She was flirting flamboyantly in that bright way she had, enjoying the man’s seemingly endless knowledge of fossils — their esoteric names pronounced in his sultry accent further attracting her, binding her in their spell.

Jayce laid down a twenty-dollar bill for his uneaten enchilada, for what was left of the warm beer, and silently got up and left. Left them to it. He didn’t have the energy to fight the words, which he was literally lost for. He knew he didn’t stand a chance of keeping her; love too was fading fast.

*

So much of everything had gone. Once he had known by heart entire classifications of fossils.  The four main groups based on the way they formed: impression, mineralized, organic, trace. Processes, sites, composition — resin, wood, etc. — layered sedimentary formations.

He’d lost by name (though not by longing to possess in other ways) a universe of fossil shells. Cephalopods, ammonites, opalized pipi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks, Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk. Once he could almost tell the alphabet, starting with ammonite, brachiopod, conch or cockle . . .

And now, what now?  

He had no names, not anymore, but he did have the swirly things themselves, the fine infinite things preserved.  He had his love of all of them, their feel under his fingers, their earthy or salty smell, their grainy taste when he couldn’t resist touching his tongue lightly to them, his instinctive kinship, knowing precisely what they were — if not what to call them.

Shells were his favorites, as they were hers too. Joelle’s. He spent one summer in his late teens studying northeastern Arizona’s petrified wood.  They both loved petrified wood slices — polished or rough. He loved the moss agates given a cabinet of their own in her magical shop, and the gigantic Ordovician fossil crinoid plate from Morocco which she’d taken on faith and sold almost at once. He was equally intrigued by starfish fossils, fossil footprints, fossil salamanders in amber.

He’d been drawn by petroglyphs since childhood, and other glyphs too — thinking that the symbolic images in stone, on canyon walls, in a complex of caves in France, Spain, Australia, India, Russia, Namibia, Indonesia, Argentina, and the United States, were after all kinds of fossilized languages, fossilized names.

Now it was that, the thought of the records of human life in rock, which led him to a solution, a way forward through the anomia he’d been diagnosed with — nominal aphasia (he had a brochure with the terms) — this past November, just a month before the trip to the ill-omened international conference. The terrifying inability (because of something neurological, in his case) to remember names — clearly not good at all for someone who lived to identify fossils. And maybe even more importantly, name people. Students and colleagues. University staff. Neighbors. And above all, her. His indispensable Joelle.

He had envisioned that there’d be only a blank where love had been. Only it wasn’t like that, not really. Love was still fully there, only you had no way of saying so. Even your lover’s name vanished along with the others, though he’d happened a day or two ago upon Venus — goddess of love. Or in fossil circles, saltwater clams. The Belgian fossil bivalve Venus casina, a fossil shell from the Pliocene Age. And then,Venus again.  They said the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, the world’s oldest ceramic figurine, was found to be made from fragments of rocks and tiny fossils, not mammoth bones as previously believed — crafted from a single piece of loess, windblown sediment. This was the stuff of Jayce’s dreams, of both their dreams. He wanted to tell her, his own Venus, his perilous Joelle. He longed so much to share the wonder of this, of the still — touch wood, always — present world. Not to have her gone from him for even a moment of senseless jealousy and fear, much less for good.

*

The wait was days (eons!) too long, but she was there, silhouetted in the moonlit darkness of the late spring night sometime after midnight, wanting to be let in. Into his little house in Bernalillo, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Closer to work, the University, than to his love — but maybe not for long. Who knew what might come when he dared call into the silence, knew what to call?

He felt her in his arms. Her skin, the tawny length of her against the length of him, her warmth, her scent of piñon, western pine, the purling chuckle she had always given as her lips felt his forming her name, before the myriad endearments which followed. Her name not lost to him, despite the terror of it all, and what else might still disappear, taken from him by foreign invaders or his own mind. Her name tattooed yesterday afternoon in royal blue, in indigo, the blue of murex shells, a kind of fossil blue, against all loss, against that fatal namelessness, in the soft, hidden crook of his elbow. And in the other, too — to be doubly sure not to lose it.