Creation Lake

Sadie’s employers—a shadowy private security firm looking to infiltrate Le Moulin—have told her that Bruno was Pascal’s mentor. From the emails between Bruno and Pascal, she hopes to glean additional information about Le Moulin’s activities. Six months ago, earth-moving equipment was sabotaged at the site of a planned industrial reservoir. Le Moulin was suspected of the crime, but there was insufficient proof for charges. She is disappointed that the emails seem to focus on the differences between the Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens rather than Le Moulin’s possible involvement in the sabotage. Bruno seems to feel that the Neanderthals were the superior species and that Homo sapiens propelled the world toward agriculture, organized society, and money, all evils in Bruno’s eyes.

Sadie is staying in the Guyenne Valley, where Le Moulin is based, to investigate Bruno and Le Moulinards. She is staying with Lucien, whose family owns an ancient stone home with a leaky roof. She does not mind the house’s rustic character. It is the perfect base for her operations, and it has a long driveway, ensuring that no one can sneak up and surprise Sadie. She feels secure there.

The house is in the middle of a dense forest, and its lack of signage makes it difficult to locate. Sadie struggles to find it even with the aid of Lucien’s directions. The place, once she finds it, strikes her as dismal, but it will work for her purposes. She decides to ignore the decay, the leaking roof, the rats, and the other “rustic” features. Lucien is her boyfriend, or so he thinks. Their relationship is part of her current assignment. He and Pascal are old friends, and he suggested introducing Pascal to Sadie (or so he thought; this introduction had been Sadie’s idea) so that she (an out-of-work graduate student, as Lucien thinks) can translate his group’s book into English.

Sadie thinks more about the emails. She wishes that they contained information pertinent to her own investigation, but they at least reveal something about Bruno. He speaks in a way that strikes her as erudite, although she has little respect for erudition. She recently quit the rhetoric PhD program she’d been enrolled in at the University of California, Berkeley, and she still harbors a marked dislike for academic types.

The drive from Marseille took eight hours, and Sadie stopped periodically to sample local wines. She also stole several large packages of terrines, small French tins of preserved meats that she likens to cat food. Stealing, she reflects, sharpens the mind and helps the thief remain focused and goal oriented. She does not see a problem with it.

Bruno communicated primarily with Pascal via email, although everyone in Le Moulin had access to the account. Someone had taken issue with Bruno’s supposition that Neanderthals used tobacco. They pointed out that it’s a new-world plant, and Bruno scoffed at this suggestion and asserted that there is much about early migration patterns that is yet to be understood: It was entirely possible that tobacco had made it to Europe via a route not known to modern researchers.

Sadie feels that she is a better driver when slightly drunk. Like stealing, driving under the influence helps her maintain a sharp focus. On the way to Lucien’s, she stopped at an abandoned inn to urinate in the woods. She took note of a pair of discarded orange panties among the many truck tracks in the parking lot’s muddy surface. She reflects that this is the real Europe: not fancy cafés or macarons but trucking, sex work, and quasi-legal immigrants from places like Moldova and Macedonia.

In one email, Bruno brings up the universality of mythical creatures like Bigfoot. The creature is known by other names (like the Himalayan Yeti) in different parts of the world, but most regions have a legend of a Neanderthal-like creature that still walks the earth. Bruno posits that Neanderthals do still walk the earth: They live on in our minds and our cultures.

Sadie stops in Bouliere, the nearest town, for additional supplies on her way to Lucien’s. She notices evidence of the region’s shift toward industrialized agriculture, a state-led effort to revitalize an area that has long suffered from emigration and brain drain. It is precisely this transition that Le Moulin is fighting: They do not believe that monocrop agriculture is a sustainable practice, and they particularly resent the draining of underground water tables to support it.

So far, gaining information about Le Moulin has been easy for Sadie. She began a relationship with Lucien by approaching him in a bar. She determined Bruno’s email address and guessed his password from several posts he made on an online messaging board. From the emails, Sadie has already gleaned that Bruno is fascinated with early man’s use of fire and that he has tried to adopt what he feels are Neanderthals’ useful habits, including sleeping for more than 12 out of every 24 hours.

Sadie’s first date with Lucien went perfectly. She was able to manipulate him into thinking that he had made the first move, and she could see that falling in love with a stranger fit his self-image. She has observed this behavior in many other people: Most individuals have an idea of who they are and how their life should turn out. She knows that if she can fit herself into that story, she can get them to believe that she is part of their destiny.

Lucien and Sadie soon move in together. He wants to get married, and Sadie agrees. He does not ask many questions, a fact for which Sadie is deeply grateful. She claims to be from Priest Valley, California, a place chosen for a name that she (accurately) calculates will be attractive to the nominally Catholic French and that can be located on a map but does not actually have inhabitants. She claims to be employed as a dog walker, a hard-to-verify occupation that would put her in the far-flung neighborhoods that she often frequents as part of her investigation. She is pleased when Lucien introduces her to Pascal, and she hopes to complete her work before the marriage paperwork has been filed.

Bruno posits that the genetic predisposition toward substance use disorders that was present in Neanderthals might have been useful: It shows an orientation toward joy. Sadie is not sure what she thinks of this postulation. She herself drinks because she enjoys drinking, although she knows that there are some for whom alcohol consumption becomes problematic. She reads more of Bruno’s email correspondence and reflects further on Pascal. She knows that he has modeled himself, in part, after the French theorist Guy Debord, a man whom she scathingly characterizes as whiny and “dickish,” a privileged malcontent whose critiques of Western society, she thinks, were rooted in his discomfort with his own inherited wealth. Pascal, too, has inherited enough money that he does not need to work. Sadie finds his critiques of Western society similarly inauthentic and even petulant.

Sadie recalls an earlier investigation, one in which she’d had to lead a scruffy young animal activist toward acts of actual terrorism to get closer to the actual target of her work, another (more important) activist. She also used the promise of romance to manipulate that man, and she reflects now that her ordinary looks work to her advantage in this line of work: She is not beautiful, but she is appealing. She is comfortable and familiar, easy to fall for because she is attainable.

Guy Debord was part of a 1960s-era revolutionary movement that sought to overthrow the status quo and remake society along radical leftist lines. Pascal and Bruno, too, were part of this movement, and their work in the area around Guyenne evidences both their revolutionary zeal and their ideological extremism. Pascal is distinctly anti-civilization, and after he moved to Guyenne, a whole host of mysterious crimes occurred, each interfering in some way with the region’s transition from small farms to industrialized agriculture.

The animal activist had indeed helped Sadie lead the FBI to a more senior activist in his group, a woman named Nancy. Unfortunately, their trial had not resulted in convictions for any but the most minor of charges because the boy’s lawyer argued that Sadie had entrapped him, and the jury believed him. This resulted in Sadie’s dismissal from the FBI and propelled her toward a career in Europe’s private security sector. Because she spoke English, French, German, and Spanish fluently, she was a desirable agent in that market.

Sadie was hired to investigate Pascal and Le Moulin. Lucien was only part of her project, and she maintained an emotional distance from him while feigning care and concern. She recalls a train journey that the two took together: Lucien became nauseated because their seats faced the back of the vehicle. She herself remained unaffected. While on the train, she received a message telling her to investigate Paul Platon, a local official in Guyenne.

Sadie made a careful study of Platon, noting his personality traits (he was vain and had a temper) as well as his mistresses and the trips he took both for work and pleasure. Platon was never aware of her presence, but for months, Sadie stalked him everywhere.

During one trip to Marseille, she and Lucien took an expensive cab ride in which it was clear to Sadie (but not to naïve Lucien) that the cab driver was running up the meter on purpose. Lucien’s lack of awareness did not surprise Sadie at all.

Bruno posits in one email that depression, the gene for which was present in Neanderthals, was actually the engine for their creativity and abstract thinking. Unlike Homo sapiens, whom Bruno is sure just copied what they saw and painted it onto various cave walls, Neanderthals created actual art. In one cave, his daughter found an obsidian disc dated to the Neanderthal period. Bruno had refused to surrender this object to the authorities so that it could be displayed in a museum “for tourists.” The state, he reasoned, had no place in the world of science, and he and his daughter would enjoy the piece just as much as any tourist.

Sadie and Lucien are in Marseille because Lucien is working on a film. Sadie plays the role of the dutiful fiancé, including having some rather unpleasant sex with him. She reflects that the sex is unpleasant because she is not attracted to Lucien   . This, she knows, is all part of the job. While they are in Marseille, her employers instruct her to arrange an interaction between Platon and the Moulinards. This interaction should be dramatic and should result in a crime for which Pascal and the Moulinards can be charged. In Marseille, some local radicals attempt to drown a police officer. She reflects that this scenario could be repeated with Platon and the Moulinards somehow. Finally, a charge could be made to stick to the group, and their radical activities could be squashed once and for all.

In Marseille, Lucien’s cinematographer, Serge, shares his family history. His roots are in French Algeria, a former colony whose French population fled, en masse, after the Algerians successfully fought for their independence. His grandfather arrived in Marseille on a large boat full of refugees, all of whom were treated as stateless people by the Marseillais population. Depressed, he turned to radical politics and became a zealous right-wing nationalist.

In Marseille, Sadie goes to an exclusive beach club, and Serge comments that his ancestors would never have been allowed in, so tainted were they by the stigma of having been born in Africa. The club is full of overly tanned women with obviously fake breasts. Sadie happily takes note of how natural her own implants look. She is pleased that no one can tell that she has had work done.