Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

I am linked, he said, to ancient people not as a vague and baggy “idea” but as little pieces of string examined under an electron microscope. We have material proof, Bruno said, of transmigration, of the way in which everyone who came before us left a mark on our genome, adding to the story of our ancestry and evolution. Spirit travels, he said, from the dead for centuries, for millennia, into the living. Each of us inherits code, blueprints, a set of instructions—call it what you want—from those who came before us, all the way back into the deepest sediments of time. These codes, Bruno said, are genetic lice, which crawl from ancestors to descendent; they travel from the many to the one, right on through human history. How do they make their way? They take a transmigrational highway, he said. The lice had helped him understand this.