The day my wife left me, I found her in the middle of our living room, digging. Her trim archaeological tools were by her side--a trowel, a sieve, a plumb. The floor looked like a moat for a sand castle without the sand. She made two piles, one of rug, one of piping. The first looked like rainbow sheep clippings. The second looked like a tangled robot that collapsed.

I shuffled forward.

"Make a pot of coffee, will you?" she asked. Her tawny hair was speckled with white. I could still only see her back, not her face. Her T-shirt shined with sweat. She came up with a hunk of cracked concrete from the hole, and tossed it to the side.

"Sure, coffee," I said, sullen without knowing why.

I moved to the kitchen and poured the grounds into a filter. The grounds were only slightly less grainy than the dirt my wife sifted through.

None of the houses in our subdivision had basements. Architects never built basements any more, except maybe in Kansas where you needed cheap insurance for a tornado. If they'd built a basement in our house, I imagined that I wouldn't have had this problem, of my wife ruining things.

A quarter pot of coffee bubbled to life, and I took it off the burner, letting the Folgers drip and sizzle down. I opened our freezer door and dumped in a tray of ice cubes. I left the kitchen with the pot still dripping, sounding like a urinating hellhound. My wife submerged her head in the hole she built. She came up, panting for air, with something in her hands.

She held out a baby's smock.

"There's no reason to bring up the issue of children again," I said, crouching next to her.

Her eyes flushed. "This isn't a ruse. I found this."

I handed her the pot of coffee. She wrapped the baby blue smock around the rim, to prevent her hands from burning, and took a deep drink. The ice cubes had already dissipated.

"I was just hoping to sort things out," she said, setting the pot down. "Plumbing the depths."

I grew impatient with her. I'd settled this dilemma years ago.

"That's the reason we retired from archaeology. How many dollars will it take to repair this?" I pointed at the floor.

She shook her head. "It's not that. I'm sick of repairing. I feel like time's speeding up for me. It's not too long after you bury something that you have to dig it up again."

"You're the one doing the digging," I reminded her.

She threw her trowel in the hole, which was getting deeper. "I have to play the game. Let me."

"Dig?"

She nodded. "Anyway, it's not like we love each other anymore."

That much was true. So I sat on the ottoman and watched TV. The Cosby Show. My wife, after an hour, was immersed, rising to pull up buckets of bric-a-brac only occasionally. Nothing of importance, it seemed. In another hour, I couldn't even hear the clink-clink of her shovel. Twilight came and I fell asleep, the TV blaring quietly. I couldn't help but sleep; at my age, sleep was a thief that stole my waking hours from under me. When I woke again it was completely night and my wife sat on the other edge of the couch from me.

"I've gone deep," she said, and then she held out something. In the dim moonlight I thought it was maybe a teddy bear or rag doll. I reached out to touch it and felt cold, clammy flesh.

"A baby," I said.

"A fetus." I could barely see my wife in the darkness. "Just sprouting there, on the edge of the tunnel. I wiped the dirt off." Her arms sagged and retreated to her lap. "It's the baby we never had. I'm a lodestone for pain."

"I know," I said. "That's why I was drawn to you."

She stroked the baby's forehead. "Do you remember college, when you first proposed to me? Fifty years ago. The college by the sea, the California coast. I had no idea what would happen--we were dating only a couple of months. You took me to the sea cliffs and promised me everything."

"Everything?"

She shrugged in the darkness. "Well, a lot. A comfortable life. A life where I could have independence, yet completeness. Where we could both do our archaeology."

"Sure. I was three for three, wasn't I?"

She ignored me. "I didn't know how much of me is dying, until now. A spoonful a day."

I sighed. My stomach felt upset. "Is the adventure over?"

"No." She stood up. "And screw you. I'm an archaeologist, just like you. I'm supposed to dig up bones, scientifically. But I'm finding these bones are my own." She pointed to her gut with a free finger. "I've wanted to make this," she said. She clutched the baby--was it our baby?--tighter and moved to the hole, crawling inside.

"Your digging form is horrible," I called out after her. "Very messy."

We were both trained to dig. I thought of the bog men, our apprenticeship excavation forty five years ago. Ritual murders. The remains were in Denmark, preserved in the peat bogs for centuries. Each victim suffered but all my wife and I had to discover was dead tissue, dried blood, ornamental stone axes. Nothing breathed.

We participated in our own rituals, from an untold distance across time. We tried making love in our camp once, mosquitoes swarming around our tent. I couldn't come, though she wanted me to. The whole experience was a disaster. Bones in careful boxes were stacked at the edge of our sleeping bags.

I preferred the calmness of the graves themselves, where you didn't have to touch anyone really alive.

What did my wife see in me, then?

Wanting to think of these things no longer, I fell back to sleep.

Morning came quickly, and I awoke at dawn. My wife was nowhere to be seen or heard. I had no hunger, though I was thirsty. On a self imposed dare, I peeked in the pit.

I couldn't see the bottom, but there was dim light, and a rope ladder that led down. I took a deep breath, and decided to go. I lowered myself onto the ladder. As I moved down, the cold and brightness increased. After ten minutes or so (my body remembering again the physical exertion of a dig, long after I'd retired) I reached the end of the ladder. I stepped onto a platform, and I realized it was a set of stairs, with an oak banister.

I walked down the stairs. I was in my own house, exactly as above, except there was no hole in the center of the living room. Beyond the windows was only packed dirt. The light came from a wooden structure near the opposite wall. I squinted and realized it was a crib.

Moving towards it, looking down, I saw the baby curled up there, bright as flash fire. The baby was still dead, but unharmed.

"Jan?" I called out. No answer. I didn't expect one. Maybe she was already above me, closing the front door behind her with all our money, ready to start over again, even at her--our--age. I moved to the top of the stairs. The hole I crawled from was gone. Just the ceiling of our house, though it was not our house. It became my house, deep underground, me and the dead, bright baby. I tried the front door, but it was locked; it didn't even rattle.

I didn't weep. Justice wasn't always just.

In the kitchen, everything was in order--plenty of food, maybe for months. I checked the TV. It still worked, but only picked up one station. It showed one moving image, more or less repeating. A woman and a small child--maybe five or six years old, with dazzling blond hair--playing in a field of red poppies. They laughed, tumbling. They played. No impediment or shame separated them. There was shame in me, somewhere, but shame needed two: a box to put the bones, a pit to dig to keep the body. Even then, silence usually won in the end. The bog men couldn't express shame to me or my wife when we excavated them, no matter how much they suffered, or wanted to share that suffering.

I kept the TV on, though I recognized neither the mother or child. I checked on the baby. It was unmoved.

I moved to the kitchen to make coffee, for one.

Some day they'll find us.

This story originally appeared in Minnesota Monthly. Copyright 2001, Alan DeNiro. It may not be reproduced except for one-time personal use.