[Point B]: Sadak, Gümüşhane Province, Turkey

While digging you touch a child’s foot, mud-absorbed. Leave it and continue.
This is a re-wombing of conquest. 12 years of gliding between uncles carrying
almond sweets. 1200 years of cracking the drupe to reveal the seed. 1200 lbs
of unblanched almond stoned to a fine powder. Compressed in the shape of
a clover. Processed and sold West 12 times its labor cost in a box decorated
with gold leaf calligraphy, a note in pencil taped to the lid: the grandchild is the
brain of the almond. Keep digging.

Dig towards a man digging in his field near the village of Sadak. When he
finds the bronze statue of the broad-shouldered Persian/Armenian goddess,
Anahita/Anahit, he sells it to a Greek. Spectators come down from the hills
to view “Aphrodite,” passing around a flat oval dish of amygdala, almond.
Crunching down on the unmistakably almond-shaped nob in the temporal
lobe responsible for processing 1200 memories a minute, retrieving from
each one 1200 versions of fear, 1200 subcategories of longing.

The Greek then sells Aphrodite to a Roman who sells her to the British
Museum. Curators finding it “wholly implausible” she be of any kind of
Middle Eastern descent.

Anahita’s head weighs 10 kilograms. Her hand, extended forward yet
disconnected from the bust, holds a fragment of drapery.