we think of time, of history, as a deep and long spike driving down into the center of the earth, into the earliest hominin life, Homo sapiens is right up near the surface, the mere head of this spike that goes a very, very long ways down. And how bitterly ironic, Bruno said, that H. tardissimus strolls in at the end of a gaping stretch—unfathomable to the mind, so much time, lived by an enormous variety of people. At the end of an endless saga, H. tardissimus, aka “Tardie,” arrives on the scene, only to destroy everything.
