Finding a Name

As an illustrator, my job was methodical. Witnesses would give their mental reconstructions to the authorities, who would then relay to me the intricacies, the outlines, the prominence of the space between the eyebrows. Then, I’d infer the specifics. What type of head should it be: broad and brachycephalic? Stretched and dolichocephalic? Or somewhere in the middle? And how does one measure the depth of the palpebral ligament? You wouldn’t think there’d be an intimacy to the upper eyelid, but it predetermines the stroke of the lashes, which suggests the wakefulness of the eyes, the feature that a distraught brother or a bewildered neighbor may be most likely to recognize.

I’d match each feature with its appropriate tool from my pencil box—woodless, chisel point, how sharp should it be? Would I need a blunted point for the eyebrows? And as I put pencil to paper, I’d get to organize the chaos that was the witnesses’ scattered memory into the most truthful version that I could reconstruct of the human. It worked every time.

Whenever I finished a sketch, I’d admire its formulaic combination. How can a mixed bag of cranial features construct this particular being? How does one get a symmetrical face by mixing an extended frontalis with a squared mentalis? How is it that the lacrimal gland can vary so much from person to person, and not just by the roundness of the eyelid, but the friendliness of the gaze?

I don’t know, and it’s never been my job to know. What I did then and what I do now is conception; it’s creation. But I don’t play Creator; I’m merely representing in tangible form the life that He's since taken. I help authorities give a name to the body that He already made. "Examine the evidence,” Clyde always liked to say. “Observe it, record it, interpret it.”

There was a routine to my art, and for sixteen years, this routine had done me well. Until Clyde gave me a proposal and a victim whose identity couldn't be solved by illustration.

Clyde and I were having lunch. He leaned over the table, his indented orbigularis occuli pushing into the skinny peaks of his eyebrows. His eyes had a unique combination of earnestness and intensity, and whenever he approached me with something, I could never say no.

“I have a new one for you, Betty,” he said. “This incident is different.”

“Why’s that?” I asked him. Weren’t the details of all crimes different, just like the varied ingredients of each face combine to make a unique soup?

He leaned forward, and with a swish of his pink hand over his chicken à la king, told me why it was so: “This time, all we know of the face,” he explained, “is in the skull.”

He left me at the table with his copy of The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine, a dog ear about three-quarters of the way through. I slipped my finger between the pages, glanced up at Clyde, already sauntering back to his office. I opened the book and landed on Chapter IX: “From Skull to Head: Restoration of Physiognomic Details.”

I don’t resent challenges. I resent inconsistency, especially with my work. A change in routine is apt to induce feelings of incompetence, which can spiral into self-loathing. I don't like feeling like a beginner. But Clyde was doing that thing that colleagues do when they’re obsessed with a daunting project: he was enticing me to solve the unsolvable.

I read the first two paragraphs on page 244. According to Krogman, the “dead skull is…the matrix of the living head." Until now, I had lived in the face, and though I was of course familiar with the skull, it had mostly been a scaffold to my preferred home.

Clyde knew how the bottom of page 244 would flatter me: “…the average identification specialist is not gifted in the necessary direction wherein art must supplement science.” But my drawings had already helped identify plenty of the missing and murdered. If this was Clyde’s way of saying that I wasn’t average, his way of validating what I’d known to be true for sixteen years—that science needs art, that I, the artist, am forensically necessary—then I guess he had me invested now.

But this book was about sculpting. I hadn’t sculpted a victim before. And I didn’t want to do it now.

I continued reading, my tray of cafeteria mush growing cold. On page 245: apparently, anatomists and physical anthropologists “pondered the relation” between peoples’ skulls and the historical portraits drawn by artists. They weren't sure if the artists had entirely gotten it right. Well, paintings of historical figures should be assessed for accuracy, shouldn’t they? Accuracy was why I was so bent on craniofacial precision. The closer I was to the real thing, the closer a mother was to saying, “Yes, that is my daughter as I remember her for every perfect hill and scoop of her countenance, before she was dumped in a reservoir out in the plains.” That was why I had the checklist; it was consistent, reliable. Even if it couldn't bring peace, it could bring justice.

And then, further down the page, Krogman began to ask a series of questions. “Were the portraits ‘true to life,’ so to speak?” Portraits were as true as any artist could get them. Ken Conoley worked with what he could to reconstruct Charles Whitman’s massacre atop that observation tower at UT in ’66. That particular drawing wasn’t so much about the face as it was a representation of Whitman’s strategic positioning. Nevertheless, the art was true enough that it all worked out.

And the next one: Did the artist “faithfully depict the cephalo-facial proportions and relationships of the deceased?”

Well, that was the goal, wasn’t it? The drawings were always as close as I could get them with the information I was given. Of course, there were limitations and, many argued, there was room for doubt: was Corazon Amurao, that petrified Filipino exchange student who saved her own life by hiding underneath a bunkbed, really able to recount every little facial intricacy so that he could draw the man who massacred her fellow nursing students? And yet, she remembered him with remarkable accuracy and described him in laudable detail, and it was because of Otis Rathel's drawing that they caught the son of a bitch.

But Krogman wasn’t talking about a situation where we had a victim; he was talking about skulls, and skulls alone.

And, also on page 245, the most tortuous suggestion of all: “Did the artist ‘cheat’ a bit here and there to flatter the subject?”

Until this particular day, I had liked to think that throughout my career and throughout all those hours of drawings, I had invested no energy in conflating the subject's appearance for my own artistic indulgence. Like I said, I don’t play Creator. I just take what I’m given, compartmentalize it into the varying intimacies of the face, select the tools, and do what I do.

But Krogman's questions provoked in me a professional, existential panic. Was there a way to reach that forensic goal, that satisfying poignancy when we discover someone’s exact identity, that was closer to truth than the method to which I’d dedicated myself for the last sixteen years?

Later, in my office on my drawing table, I found what would become my next genre of puzzle pieces—the skull that Clyde wanted me to sculpt.

I’d seen plenty of skulls before. Clyde and I had worked together for decades, and his entire office was surrounded with all varieties of heads. Prior to this day, I had never been particularly infatuated with any of them, save for maybe the teeth. The skull’s dentistry impacts the buccinator and the masseter—the chewing muscles. There’s always something personal about how a mouth processes food.

Next to the skull was a torn piece of my matte drawing paper, Clyde’s hurling hand scribbled across its surface: “Male. Native American. Twenty-five. Killed while hitchhiking.”

For a moment, I was tempted to disregard Krogman. If Clyde could determine the race and sex of the victim based off of bones alone, and if a skull could indicate the depths of a cheek and the contours of a jaw, then certainly I could use it to draw a portrait. Why divert from my preferred medium? Why muddle my routine, which had already worked plenty of times so far? Why become that eager newbie again, flipping through a textbook while intermittently constructing each exhaustive cranial bluff and plane?

But this time, there were no witnesses. No interviews, no anecdotes, no data on this man’s uniquely perfect identity, nothing with which I could illustrate history. And I couldn't possibly draw this man's face based on his skull alone. "As far as I’m concerned," Krogman wrote on page 253, "the skull-portrait approach is a fascinating exercise in historicity, but little else.”

And finally, there was Krogman's most anguishing assertion: “Portraitists too often aim at a flattering or idealistic likeness rather than a trait-for-trait veracity.”

I ran my index finger along the square of this man’s jawbone. On how many occasions had I possibly taken too much artistic agency in the face? And if I had, how many victims had I misrepresented, and maybe even misidentified? And how could I now, with nothing but this skull and the words on Clyde’s note as my compass, avoid the possible catastrophe of exaggerating the evidence?

If I didn't get it right, this victim would remain anonymous. His murder would never be solved; he would never be known. This faultless combination of craniofacial anatomy, reduced to nothing but the four characteristics in Clyde’s note and a skull.

“How could you tell that he was Indian?” I asked Clyde the next day.

“The visible onset of osteoporosis,” Clyde answered. In Chapter VII, Krogman had a method for identifying race based on bones, but he didn't cover the indigenous. “Commodity food,” Clyde elaborated. “Flour, sugar, oil.” I had heard about the diets forced on reservation people.

These bones were the only artifact of this man's mangled body, splayed out in a ditch beside a stretch of highway, the murderers speeding away from a human that they'd dismissed as an anonymous Indian drunk. Now, Clyde was asking me to help get him home.

I held the skull of the unidentified hitchhiker out in front of me. “You poor, nameless collection of pieces,” I said as I cupped the crown of his head in my stacked palms, my forearms framing his temporal bone.

“Let’s give you a face, so we can figure out your name.”

I pulled Krogman’s book toward me and flipped to the directions on page 258: “The Restoration of the Head from the Skull.” I rounded my shoulders, humbled my pride, and began.

***

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