EVERYONE WHO CAME IN PROXIMITY WITH ANY OF THE VICTIMS had to be contacted and quarantined. The CDC needed to make an announcement alerting the public, encouraging everyone in Los Angeles to wear masks. Flights had to be grounded, public events shut down. Almost no measure would be too extreme, Stanton believed, if they could prove that this disease with a one hundred percent fatality rate had become infectious.
Within minutes, the FAA had confi rmed that Joseph Zarrow, the pilot who brought down the Aero Globale flight, flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. leg four days earlier. Human error suddenly had new meaning. But the connections were still circumstantial, and before any real action would be taken, before they would cause the public to panic, Stanton needed scientific evidence that VFI spread from person to person through casual contact.
Shortly after five a.m., he stood gloved, gowned, and masked, working with his researchers beneath a protective hood in the lab. Stanton had woken his entire Prion Center team and summoned them in the middle of the night. He had just finished preparing the solution that he hoped would react with the prion, wherever it was hiding.
There were only a few ways an infectious agent could spread between humans via casual contact. Stanton suspected the vector was a fluid from the nose or mouth. He had to discover if it was transmitted by saliva, nasal mucus, or sputum from the lungs—and how VFI migrated from the brain into one of these organs.
With the test solution ready to go, he pipetted drops of secretion samples onto glass slides and added the reactant. Then, beginning with samples of Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s saliva, Stanton searched. He examined every slide, shifting them across left to right, up one half field of view, and finally right to left.
“Negative,” he told Davies.
They repeated the process with sputum. Coughed up from the throat and lungs, sputum transmitted a variety of illnesses, including life-threatening fungi like tuberculosis. But just like the saliva, the samples were completely negative.
“Like a common cold, then,” Davies said.
But as Stanton triple-checked every one of the slides he’d prepared from the nasal secretions, his anxiety grew. When he got to the last slide, he closed his eyes, confused. Like the others, the nasal secretions were all clear.
“How the hell is it spreading?” Davies said.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Jiao Chen said. “Our casual contact theory can’t be wrong.”
Stanton stood. “Neither can the slides.”
If they couldn’t prove how the prion spread, he wouldn’t be able to convince Atlanta that serious action must be taken to contain it. Was there a flaw in his logic connecting the men? If the prion was spreading through casual contact, it had to pass through a secretion. But the lab findings were unequivocal: None of the three they tested contained the protein.
The phone rang.
“It’s Cavanagh,” said Davies. “What do I tell her?”
The lab was tense as Stanton’s team of researchers waited for him to respond. They all wore masks over the lower half of their faces, but their eyes conveyed a mix of anxiety and exhaustion. They’d been working on little sleep since the day Volcy was diagnosed.
Jiao Chen removed her glasses and started to rub her eyes. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong with the preparations,” she said.
Besides Stanton, Jiao had slept the least of everyone here. And as she rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, something gnawed at him. Exhaustion subsumed his postdoc’s face as she slid her palms down her cheeks.
Stanton grabbed the phone. “Emily, it’s in the eyes.”
DISEASES THAT SPREAD through the eyes were so rare that even surgeons sometimes didn’t wear goggles when they operated. But when Stanton and his team sampled the lacrimal fluid—the fluid coating Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s eyes—they found prion concentrated almost as densely there as it was in the brain.
Contagion began when people with VFI touched their eyes. The prion got on their hands, then they shook someone else’s hand or touched a nearby surface. Humans naturally touched their faces more than a hundred times a day, and insomnia was sure to make things even worse: The more tired victims became, the more they yawned and rubbed their eyes. With victims awake around the clock, their eyes were almost never closed, and the disease had eight extra hours a day to spread. In the same way that common colds caused runny noses and then spread through mucus, and malaria caused drowsiness so more mosquitoes could feed on sleeping victims, VFI had built itself the perfect vector.
The CDC called everyone who could’ve come in contact with Volcy, Gutierrez, or Zarrow, and the results were harrowing. A stewardess, two copilots, and two passengers associated with Aero Globale, plus the proprietor of the Super 8 and three guests, were the first of the second wave.
By midday, they were using the word: epidemic.
The worst news came out of Presbyterian Hospital. Six nurses, two ER docs, and three orderlies had all been suffering from insomnia for the last two nights. A test for detecting prion in sheep’s blood, developed years before, turned out to be effective as a rough indicator for VFI before the onset of symptoms. Already they were getting multiple positive results.
Stanton was angry at himself for how long it’d taken him to realize the prion was infectious, and fearful that he might soon be counted among the victims as well. His own test results were pending, and he hadn’t had an opportunity to even try to sleep. He had permission to continue working until he knew for sure, as long as he wore a biohazard suit at all times.
Throngs of desperate people stood at the ER entrance when he returned to Presbyterian, fighting through the heat, discomfort, and bulkiness of his pressurized yellow suit. More than a hundred possible victims had already been identifi ed by symptoms, and the panic Cavanagh had predicted was unleashed after the CDC’s press conference. In normal times, one in three adults in America had insomnia. Thousands of panicked Angelenos were now flooding every hospital in the city, convinced they were sick.
“Sorry for the wait,” a CDC officer was telling eighty primary contacts in the emergency room. “The doctors are working as fast as they can, and you will all have your blood tests completed soon. In the meantime, please keep your eye shields and masks fastened, and be careful not to touch your eyes or your faces.”
Stanton made his way through the ER, trying not to obsess over the idea that he, Thane, and Chel Manu had all been exposed more directly to the disease than anyone waiting here.
“I don’t ever sleep,” an elderly man called out. “How will they know if I got it?”
“Make sure to tell the doctors everything you can about your normal sleeping patterns,” the CDC officer told the man. “And anything else they should know.”
“This place is festering,” a Latino woman carrying a baby said. “If we weren’t sick before, we’ll get sick here.”
“Keep your eye shields fastened,” the CDC man told her, “and don’t touch your eyes or anything else, and you’ll be safe.”
Eye shields were a crucial part of the containment effort. The CDC was encouraging people to wear masks as well. But Stanton believed eye shields and masks and education weren’t nearly enough. He’d sent a CDC-wide email recommending complete transparency with the public, as well as a home-isolation period of forty-eight hours, and making eye shields mandatory in L.A. schools until they could slow the spread.
He made his way to the makeshift CDC command center in the rear of the hospital. Health-department regulations were taped to every wall, covering peeling paint. More than thirty Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, administrators, and CDC nurses were packed into the conference room, and everyone wore masks and eye shields. Stanton was the only one in a biohazard suit, and everyone eyed him, knowing what possibility it suggested.
The highest-ranking doctors sat around a table in the middle of the room. Deputy CDC Director Cavanagh ran the meeting. Her long white hair was pulled back, and her blue eyes flashed brightly from behind her eye shield. Despite more than thirty years of service to CDC, the skin on her forehead was still smooth. Stanton sometimes imagined she’d simply ordered it not to wrinkle.
“We’ve got two hundred thousand more eye shields coming by morning,” Cavanagh said. Stanton squeezed into the seat next to her, an almost comical challenge in his bulky suit. “Trucked and flown in from all over.”
“And we can get another fifty thousand by the day after tomorrow,” someone behind them chimed in.
“We need four million,” Stanton said into the small microphone inside his helmet, wasting no time.
“Well, two hundred fifty thousand are available,” Cavanagh said. “That’s going to have to be enough. First priority will be to supply health-care workers, obviously. Next will be anyone with a connection to any of the infected, and the rest will go to the distribution centers and get doled out first-come-first-served. The last thing we need is to create a panic and cause people to leave en masse. Or this thing could burn across the country.”
Stanton piped up again. “We have to consider a quarantine.”
“What do you think we’re doing here?” Katherine Leeds from the viral division said. Leeds was a tiny woman, but she was tough. Over the years, she and Stanton had clashed many times. “We have a quarantine, and we’re coordinating them in other hospitals too.”
“I’m not talking about the hospitals,” Stanton said. He looked at the group. “I’m talking about the entire city.”
There was a low murmur throughout the room.
“Do you have any idea what ten million people will do when they find out the government is telling them they can’t leave?” Leeds said. “There’s a reason it’s never been done before.”
“There could be a thousand cases tomorrow,” Stanton said, unflinching. “And five thousand the day after. People’ll start to flee the city, and some will be sick. If we don’t stop the flow out of L.A., VFI will be in every city in the country by week’s end.”
“Even if it were feasible,” Leeds said, “it’s probably not constitutional.”
“We’re talking about a disease that spreads like a cold,” Stanton said, “but that’s as deadly as Ebola and that’s impossible to get rid of on fomites. It doesn’t die like a bacteria, and it can’t be destroyed like a virus.”
Whereas most pathogens were no longer contagious after twenty-four hours or less on “fomites”—hard and soft surfaces—prion could stay infectious indefinitely, and there was no known way to disinfect the surfaces. Earlier in the day, the same ELISA test with which Stanton and Davies found no prion at Havermore Farms yielded a very different result from the planes at LAX, Volcy’s hospital room, and Gutierrez’s house. Doorknobs, furniture, cockpit switches, seat cushions, and seat-belt buckles on the planes Zarrow had flown in the last week were all covered with prion.
“Every plane leaving L.A. could have passengers about to spread it around the world,” Stanton said.
“What about the highways out of town?” one of the other doctors said. “You want to shut those down too?”
Beneath the weight of Stanton’s suit, everyone in the room sounded far away. He had to imagine that his voice through the helmet didn’t exactly have a commanding effect. “We have to cut off the flow. We call in the California Guard and the army if we have to. I’m not saying it will be easy, but if we don’t act fast and decisively, we’ll pay the price.”
“There’ll be riots and hoarding and all the rest,” Leeds said. “It’ll be like Port-au-Prince in a couple of days.”
“We have to explain to people that it’s a precautionary measure and that they’ll be allowed to leave when we know how to stop the disease from spreading—”
“We need to be extremely careful with what we tell people,” Cavanagh cut in, “or there will be mass panic. It’s got huge liabilities, but so does allowing clusters of cases to develop in every city in America.”
She stood up. “Quarantine is a last option, but we certainly must consider it.”
The entire command center was stunned to hear her agree with Stanton. He was as surprised as anyone—despite the fact that she’d long been his champion at CDC, Cavanagh wasn’t usually one to consider drastic measures so quickly. She clearly understood what they were up against.
Once the meeting was adjourned, Stanton waited for her to finish giving division directors their assignments. He stood in front of a massive whiteboard depicting the spiderweb of connections between the patients showing symptoms, with Volcy in the middle. Volcy, Gutierrez, and Zarrow had red circles around their names, indicating they were deceased. The other hundred twenty-four names were arranged in four concentric rings.
Cavanagh approached him, and Stanton resumed his plea. “We have to do it now, Emily. Or it’ll spread.”
“I heard you, Gabe.”
“Good,” he said. “Then if that’s settled, how are we going to pursue a treatment? Once we have the quarantine in place, that must be our priority.”
They left the room and paused in the corridor outside the shuttered gift shop. Through the glass, Stanton could see boxes of candy bars, gum, and granola bars lining the counters and helium balloons losing gas.
“You’ve been looking for a cure for prion disease for how long?” Cavanagh asked.
“We’re making progress.”
“And how many patients have you cured?”
“People upstairs are dying, Emily.”
“Gabe, you’re already trying to sell me on the idea of quarantining a whole damn city. Don’t get sanctimonious on me too.”
“Containment’s essential,” he said. “But we need to explore possibilities for a cure, and we need the FDA to suspend its normal experimental protocols. We need to be able to test patients right away.”
“Are you talking about quinacrine and pentosan? You know the problems with them better than anyone.”
Quinacrine was an old treatment for prion disease that had now been shown to have little use. Pentosan was different: Derived from the wood of beech trees, it was once Stanton’s best hope. Unfortunately, the drug couldn’t pass the human blood–brain barrier, which protected neurons from dangerous chemicals. Stanton and his team had tried everything, from changing the drug’s physical structure to giving it through a shunt, but they had found no way to get pentosan into the brain without causing even more harm.
“Quinacrine won’t work,” Stanton said. “And the old problems with pentosan still exist.”
“So then what are we even talking about?” Cavanagh asked.
“We could start purifying antibodies.”
“After your lawsuit, Director Kanuth won’t hear anything about antibodies. Besides, you have absolutely no idea if they work in vivo, and we’re not using VFI victims as stage-one guinea pigs.”
“So that’s it for the people already sick?” Stanton asked. “That’s what we tell them and their families?”
“Don’t lecture me,” Cavanagh said. “I was there at the beginning of HIV when we were trying to shut down the bathhouses. From the first moment, there were researchers screaming about diverting money and resources to explore a cure, which is how we ended up razor-thin on containment, and more were infected. And how long did it take before they found something that could treat HIV? Fifteen years.”
Stanton was silent.
“Our priority right now is containment,” Cavanagh continued.
“Yours is educating the public about how to prevent the spread and figuring out how to destroy the prions once they’re outside the body. Once the number of cases stabilizes, we’ll talk more about a cure. Understand?”
From the look on her face, Stanton sensed that for now there would be no convincing his boss otherwise. “I understand,” he said.
When she spoke again, Cavanagh’s voice was calm. “Anything else on your mind I need to know, Gabe?”
“We need to get a team down to Guatemala now. With Ebola and hantavirus, we had teams in Africa in days to cut it off. Even if we get a quarantine here, it’ll be no use if we don’t shut it down at the original source. It’ll keep spreading around the world from there.”
“The Guatemalans don’t want any Americans who could have the disease entering their country. They won’t let us across the border. And I can hardly blame them, given that we still have no substantive proof it came from there.”
“We don’t even know what this thing is, Emily. Think about Marburg. We didn’t have any idea how to stop the virus until we found the original source. What if we could pinpoint where Volcy came from? If we can find these ruins where he was camped out? Then would they allow a team in there?”
“I have no idea.”
A voice came from behind them. “Deputy Cavanagh?” They turned to find a baby-faced administrator holding a folder labeled confidential.
They were the results of the blood for the patients in the original contact group.
Cavanagh grabbed the folder. “How many positives?” she asked.
“Nearly two hundred,” the administrator said.
Two hundred patients with VFI. More than had ever been diagnosed with mad cow, and they’d only known about VFI for forty-eight hours.
Cavanagh glanced up at Stanton, and flipped quickly to the final pages, toward the end of the alphabet. He realized she was searching for his name.
AT THE NORTH END OF THE GETTY CAMPUS, CHEL AND HER ATTORNEY sat in the main administrative office. They were across the table from senior members of the board, the museum’s head curator, and an agent from ICE. Everyone wore eye shields, per the latest CDC recommendations, and everyone had a copy of Chel’s official statement in front of them.
Dana McLean, head of one of the largest venture-capital funds in the country and chairman of the board of trustees, leaned back in her chair as she spoke. “Dr. Manu, we have to issue a formal suspension without pay pending further review. You’ll have to stop all museum-related activities until a final decision is made.”
“What about my staff?”
“They’ll be supervised by the curator, but if it’s found there was anyone else involved in the illegal activities, they’ll be put under review as well.”
“Dr. Manu,” one board member chimed in. “You claim Dr. Chacon had no idea what you were doing, but then why was he here with you on the night of the eleventh?”
Chel looked at her defense lawyer, Erin Billings. When Billings nodded for her to answer the question, Chel tried to maintain an even tone. “I never told Rolando what I was working on. I asked him to come in and answer some restoration questions for me. But he never saw the codex.”
With everything she’d confessed to in her statement, the group had no reason not to believe her. This was the one lie she felt good about.
“You should know that we’ll be looking back at all of your records for any other evidence of professional misconduct,” the ICE agent, Grayson Kisker, told her.
“She understands,” her attorney said.
“What will happen to the codex?” Chel asked.
“It’ll be returned to the Guatemalans,” McLean told her.
Kisker said, “But because the illegal transaction happened on American soil, we’ll be the ones filing criminal charges against you.”
Even after the CDC called to inform her that she’d tested negative for any prion in her blood, Chel had felt numb. The last day had been the most overwhelming mix of guilt and confusion and shock in her life. She knew she’d eventually be fired outright and that she’d lose her teaching position at UCLA as well.
But after everything she’d seen, she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Chel and Billings stood from the table. Chel tried to prepare herself to gather her things from her lab for the last time.
Then Kisker’s cell rang. He listened to someone on the other end of the line, a strange look creeping across his face.
“Yes,” he said, glancing at Chel. “I’m here with her now.” Slowly, he held his cellphone in her direction. His voice was almost shy. “My boss wants to talk to you.”
THE AFTERNOON SUN beat down on Chel as she descended the Getty garden walkway into the flowery jungle that sat at the lowest point of the museum grounds, below all the buildings, but still high above L.A.. Visitors said the views from the museum-on-the-mountain were better than the art itself, but Chel loved the gardens here most of all. Finding herself alone among the pink and red bougainvillea, she reached out to one of the papery flowers, rubbing it between her fingers. She needed a touchstone now.
She was listening to Dr. Stanton on her cellphone. “They haven’t found cases in Guatemala yet,” he said. “But if we can give them a more exact location for where Volcy came from, maybe we could send a team in.”
After talking to the director of ICE, Chel was told to call Stanton for further instructions. She was relieved to learn that he hadn’t been infected either. The glasses they each wore probably had given them some small amount of protection, he’d told her quickly, as if it weren’t important, before launching in.
“What do you know now about where it might be?”
“It has to be somewhere in the southern highlands,” Chel said. She reached out, ripped one of the pink bougainvillea flowers off its stem, and tossed it into the stream. She surprised herself with how roughly she did it.
“Which is how big an area?” Stanton asked.
“Several thousand square miles. But if the disease is already here, why does it matter where it started?”
“It’s like a cancer. Even if it’s metastasized, you remove the tumor at the original site so it doesn’t spread farther. We need to know what it is and how it started to have any chance of fighting it.”
“Something in the codex could tell us more,” she said. “We could find a glyph specific to a smaller area, or some geographic description. But we can’t know until the reconstruction is finished.”
“How long will that take?”
“The early pages are in poor condition, and the later ones are worse. Plus there are linguistic obstacles. Diffi cult glyphs and strange combinations—we’ve been doing everything we can to decipher them.”
“You better find a way to do it faster.”
Chel dropped onto a metal bench. It was dripping with dew or water from the sprinklers and she could feel it soaking through her pants, but she didn’t care. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why do you trust me with the codex after I lied to you?”
“I don’t,” Stanton said. “But ICE called in a team of experts who told them the best shot at quickly figuring out where the book came from was you.”
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, Chel was on the 405, headed for Culver City. It was the last place she wanted to go after everything that had happened, but she no longer had a choice. For now there’d be no criminal investigation, and the most important artifact in Maya history would stay in her lab. Whatever hesitations she’d had about involving Victor Granning, all that mattered now was doing whatever she could to help the doctors. She couldn’t let her personal issues get in the way.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard was one of the strangest institutions in L.A. Maybe in the world. Chel had been there once before, and after she’d oriented to the labyrinthine layout and its dark rooms, she was able to relax and let the museum work its wonders on her imagination. There were tiny sculptures that fit into the eye of a needle, a gallery of cosmonaut dogs sent into space by the Russians in the 1950s, an exhibit about cat’s cradles. Each one stranger than the last.
Just past the In-N-Out Burger on Venice Boulevard, Chel spotted the nondescript taupe building and pulled into a spot in front of the deceptively small storefront façade. The other time she’d come here, she was with her ex. Patrick had been obsessed with an exhibit on letters written to Mount Wilson Observatory about the existence of extraterrestrial life. He said the letters reminded him that there were ways to see the skies other than through the eyepiece of a telescope. As they read them together in the darkened space, Patrick’s voice never far from her ear, one letter drew Chel in too, The exact words the woman wrote about her experiences in another world had always stayed with Chel: I have seen all sorts of moons and stars and openings….
At the door to the MJT, Chel pressed a buzzer above a sign that read: RING ONLY ONCE. The door swung open and before her stood an auburn-haired man in his forties, wearing a black cardigan and rumpled khakis. Chel had met Andrew Fisher, the museum’s eccentric manager, when she came here the first time. Even the plastic shield he wore over his face couldn’t disguise the gentle intelligence in his eyes.
“Welcome back, Dr. Manu,” he said.
He remembered her?
“Thank you. I’m looking for Dr. Granning. Is he here?”
“Yes,” Fisher said as she stepped inside. “Chel, isn’t it? I’ve been working on some of Ebbinghaus’s memory techniques, which have proven useful. Let’s see. You work at the Getty, you’re too serious for your own good, and… you smoke too much.”
“Victor told you that?”
“He also told me you were the smartest woman he knows.”
“He doesn’t know many women.”
Fisher smiled. “He’s in back, working on his exhibit. Fascinating stuff.”
The MJT’s small, strange lobby smelled of turpentine and was lit with dark-red and black bulbs. The effect was disorienting after being in the bright light of day. There were bookshelves lining the walls, carrying obscure titles: Sonnabend’s Obliscence, magician Ricky Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, and a strange Renaissance volume entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The museum intentionally obscured the lines between fact and fiction. Part of the fun was trying to figure out which exhibits were real. Still, Chel was philosophically ambivalent about a place that inspired confusion and defied logic. Not to mention how uncomfortable she was with the exhibit her old mentor was putting up here.
Fisher led her down a maze of hallways, where a cacophony of animal sounds and human voices could be heard through scratchy speakers. Chel peered at the weird displays: Glass cases mounted on pedestals contained a diorama showing the life cycle of a stink ant. A tiny sculpture of Pope John Paul II stood in the eye of a needle, made visible by a huge magnifying glass.
Next they came around a corner and the maze opened up into a small room with a glass case containing some of the work of a seventeenth-century German scholar named Athanasius Kircher. Hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room was a bell wheel, which made an eerie chime as it turned. In the case were black-and-white drawings of subjects ranging from a sunflower with a cork stuck into the middle, to the Great Wall of China, to the Tower of Babel.
Fisher pointed at a sketch of Kircher. “He was the last of the great polymaths. He decoded Egyptian hieroglyphics. He invented the megaphone. He found worms in the blood of plague victims.” Fisher touched his plastic shield. “And these? Did you know he even suggested the public wear masks to protect themselves from disease?” He shook his head. “In our current obsession with overspecialization, everyone finds smaller and smaller niches, no one ever seeing beyond their own tiny corner of the intellectual spectrum. What a shame it is. How can true genius thrive when there’s so little opportunity for our minds to breathe?”
Chel said, “Sounds like a question only a genius could answer, Mr. Fisher.”
He smiled again, and ushered her down another warren of dark hallways. Finally they arrived at the back of the museum—a well-lit work area, where the exhibits were in varying stages of completion. Fisher led Chel through a narrow doorway, which led to the rearmost room in the building.
“You’re very popular today, Victor,” he said as they walked inside.
Chel was surprised to find that Victor wasn’t alone. He stood in the square work area with another man, who towered over him. The room was filled with hardware tools, panels of glass, unfinished pieces of shelving, and several wood display pedestals splayed out on the ground.
“Well,” Victor said, stepping around the mess on the floor, “if it isn’t my favorite indígena. Save her mother, of course.”
Chel studied her mentor as he walked toward her. He had once been very handsome, and even behind his eye shield she could see his brilliant blue eyes that hadn’t dimmed in seventy-five years. He wore a red short-sleeve polo buttoned to the top and tucked into a pair of slacks—the uniform he’d been sporting since his days at UCLA. His silver beard was neatly trimmed.
“Hi,” Chel said.
“Thank you, Andrew,” Victor said, glancing at the museum’s manager, who disappeared back into the hall without a word.
There was clear emotion on her mentor’s face when he returned his attention to Chel. She felt it too. She always would.
“Chel,” Victor said, “may I introduce Mr. Colton Shetter. Colton, this is Dr. Chel Manu, one of the world’s leading experts on the script, who, if I say so myself, learned everything she knows from me.”
Shetter had shoulder-length brown hair and several days of unkempt beard growth creeping up his cheeks toward the bottom of his eye shield. He wore a starched white shirt, a tie, black jeans, and shiny boots. With how tall he was, it added up to a strangely attractive combination. He had to be six-foot-six at least.
“Nice to meet you,” Chel said.
“What’s your specialty, Dr. Manu?” Shetter asked. He had a deep voice with a light southern accent. Florida, Chel guessed.
“Epigraphy,” she told him. “Do you work in the discipline?”
“I dabble a bit, I guess.”
“Is that how you two know each other?”
“I worked for ten years in the Petén,” he said.
“Doing what?”
He glanced at Victor. “Training the Guatemalan army.”
Those were words no indígena wanted to hear. Whatever appeal he had a moment before was gone. “Training them for what?” she asked.
“Urban combat and counterterrorism, mostly.”
“You’re with the CIA?”
“No, ma’am, nothing like that. Army Rangers showing the Guatemalans how to modernize their operation.”
Any help the U.S. government gave to the Guatemalan army was too much for Chel. In the fifties, the CIA had been responsible for bringing down the democratically elected government in order to install a puppet dictatorship. Many indígenas blamed them for instigating the civil war that had taken her father’s life.
“Colton is a great admirer of the indígenas, ” Victor said.
“I spent my leave time in Chajul and Nebaj with the villagers,” Shetter said. “Amazing people. They took me to the ruins at Tikal, and that’s where I met Victor.”
“But you live in Los Angeles now?”
“Sort of. Got a little cottage way up in the Verdugo Mountains.”
Chel had hiked up in the Verdugos a few times but remembered it mostly as a wildlife preserve. “People live up there?” she asked.
“A lucky few of us do,” said Shetter. “Reminds me of your highlands, actually. Speaking of which, I should be getting home.” He turned to Victor and pointed at his eye shield. “Keep that on. Please.”
“Thanks for coming by, Colton.”
Seconds later, the giant man was gone.
“What’s his deal?” Chel asked when she was alone with Victor.
Victor shrugged. “Oh, Colton simply has a lot of experience in dangerous situations. He’s out trying to make sure his friends are protecting themselves in these perilous times.”
“He’s right. This is serious.”
Chel studied Victor, searching for clues to his mental state. But if there was any sign of tension or pain, she didn’t see it.
“Yes, I know,” Victor said. “So… how’s Patrick doing in all this?”
“We’re not seeing each other anymore.”
“That’s too bad,” Victor said. “I liked him. And I suppose that means I am further and further away from godchildren.”
Victor’s old affection for her felt good, even after all they’d been through. “You should write your next book on the virtues of a one-track mind,” she told him.
He smiled. “Never mind that, then,” he said. He motioned for her to follow him. “I’m glad you’re here. You can finally see my exhibit.”
They doubled back into a dark gallery where the exhibit was being staged. It was still under construction, but a glass case covering the back wall was illuminated, and Chel walked toward the light, fearful of what she might find. Inside the case were four statues of men, each two feet tall, each constructed from a different material connected to Maya history: the first from chicken bones, the second out of dirt, the third from wood, and the last from kernels of corn. According to the Maya creation myth, there were three unsuccessful attempts by the gods to create mankind. The first race of men was made from the animals themselves, but they could not speak. The second was made from mud but could not walk, and the third race of men, made from wood, could not keep a proper calendar or worship their makers by name. It wasn’t until the fourth race of men, fashioned out of corn, that the gods were satisfied.
Studying the glass case, Chel noticed something. What was perhaps most interesting, and to her encouraging about Victor’s exhibit, was what he had chosen not to represent here: the fifth race of man. “So,” her mentor asked. “To what do I owe this great pleasure?”
CHEL COULDN’T HELP feeling that Victor Granning’s life had come to mirror the civilization to which he’d devoted his career: rise, fluorescence, collapse. By the time he was finished with graduate school at Harvard, he’d made breakthroughs on the use of syntax and grammar in ancient Maya writing. His academic books were celebrated and eventually made their way into the mainstream when The New York Times lauded him as the preeminent Mayanist in the world. After conquering the Ivy League, Victor migrated west to take the chair of UCLA’s department of Maya studies, where he helped launch the careers of many of the field’s next generation of scholars.
Including Chel. When she began her program at UCLA, Victor became her tutor. Chel could decipher glyphs faster than anyone in the department, even as a first-year. Victor taught her everything he knew about the ancient script. Soon she was more than just another of his mentees. Chel and her mother often spent holidays with Victor and his wife, Rose, at their clapboard house in Cheviot Hills. Chel’s first calls when she made tenure, and when she was appointed to the Getty, were to Victor. In the fifteen years since they’d met, he had been a constant source of encouragement, amusement, and, most recently, heartache.
Victor’s own collapse began in 2008, when Rose was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Spending every possible moment by her side, Victor began to search for answers. He couldn’t imagine life without Rose, and he became obsessed with Judaism in a way he hadn’t before: going to temple every day, keeping kosher and the Sabbath, wearing a yarmulke. But when Rose succumbed a year later, Victor turned against the religion; a God that had allowed her to suffer, he felt, couldn’t exist. If there was a higher power, it had to be something else entirely.
It was over the next nine months of mourning that Victor began to theorize about December 21, 2012. Undergraduates began buzzing about some offhand comments he’d made in class about the significance of the end of the Long Count cycle. At first, his students were fascinated, but they grew increasingly less attentive when Victor began using questionable sources that made unsubstantiated claims about Maya beliefs. Lecture time in linguistics classes was spent on the end of the thirteenth cycle and how some believed it would usher in a new era of mankind and a return to a simpler, more ascetic way of life. This was when a few students began to casually mention Victor’s classroom eccentricities to Chel. But at the time she didn’t yet realize how far off track he’d gone. Soon his lectures became diatribes about how cancer was caused by processed foods and how it was proof that humans needed to return to a more basic mode of living. Increasingly fearful of technology, he stopped using email for class-related information, forcing his students to come to office hours instead. Then he told them not to go on the Internet or drive cars and about how the Long Count would bring what the 2012ers called synchronicity—a consciousness of how all things in the world connected—leading to a spiritual renaissance. Chel tried to talk to him about other things, but every conversation veered quickly back to the absurd, and eventually she was at a loss for how to deal with it.
When Victor’s name showed up as the keynote speaker at the largest New Age convention in the country, and the press materials touted his UCLA connection, the administration reprimanded him. Then, in mid 2010, as June gloom shrouded the UCLA campus in mist, Victor called Chel at the Getty and asked her to come in to his office. There, he handed her a manually typed manuscript he’d been working on secretly for months. In large block letters, the title page read: Timewave 2012.
Chel turned to the introduction:
We live in a time of unparalleled technological change. We turn stem cells into any tissue we desire and our vaccines and panaceas will allow the average child born today to live longer than a century. But we also live in a time in which faceless drone operators fire missiles, and in which nuclear secrets steadily leak to oppressive regimes. Superhuman intelligences exist that we may soon be unable to control. The world financial crisis was accelerated by computer algorithms. We destroy our ecosystem with fossil fuels, and invisible carcinogens poison us.
In the late 1970s, philosopher Terence McKenna suggested that the most important points in scientifi c innovation could be graphed from the beginning of recorded history: the invention of the printing press; Galileo’s discovery that the sun was the center of the solar system; the harnessing of electricity; the discovery of DNA; the atom bomb; computers; the Internet. McKenna found that the rate of innovation was increasing and calculated the exact point when the slope of the line would become vertical. He believed that on that day—which he called Timewave Zero—technological progress would become infinite, and it would be impossible to control or to know what came next for civilization.
That day is December 21, 2012, the end of the thirteenth cycle of the five-thousand-year-old Maya Long Count, the day they predicted the earth would undergo a titanic transformation and the fourth race of man would be replaced. We do not yet know what the fifth race of man will be. But the upheavals we are seeing all over our world prove that a major transformation is coming. In the time left before 12/21, we must prepare ourselves for the change upon us.
“You can’t publish this,” Chel had told him.
“I’ve already shown it to a number of people, and they’re excited by it,” he said.
“What people—2012ers?”
Victor took a breath. “Smart people, Chel. Some have doctorates, and many have written books themselves.”
Chel could only imagine how revered he was in the 2012 community, especially when he stoked the fire of their misbegotten notions. Victor hadn’t done serious scholarship since his wife got sick—and this was his bid to be a star again.
But however much his newfound acolytes might have praised him for it, when he self-published Timewave 2012, the book was ridiculed, including in a scathing profi le in the Times. Among true scholars, it was worse: No one in the academy would ever take Victor seriously again. His grant money dried up, he was quietly forced from the university, and he lost his subsidized house.
Chel couldn’t abandon the man who’d given her so much. She let him stay with her in Westwood, and she gave him a research job at the Getty—albeit with conditions: no lectures to Luddites or 2012ers, and no railing against technology to her staff. If he kept those promises, he could use her libraries and be paid a small stipend to get him back on his feet.
For nearly a year, Victor spent his days assisting with whatever decipherment projects arose and his nights watching the History Channel. Someone even saw him using a computer at the Getty. He cobbled together enough money to rent an apartment. After Victor had visited with his grandchildren at the beginning of 2012, his son emailed Chel to say he was greatly relieved to have his father back.
Then, this past July, Victor was supposed to be working finishing an exhibit on post-classic ruins. Instead, he stole Chel’s UCLA ID and used it to get himself into the faculty library. He was caught trying to walk out with several rare books, all of which were related to the Long Count. Chel’s trust was fractured, and she’d told Victor he needed to find another job, which was what ultimately led him to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Since then they’d spoken only a few times, and the conversations had been strained. In the back of her mind, Chel had reassured herself that, sometime after December 22, they would put it behind them for good and try to begin again.
Only now, she couldn’t wait for that.
“I need your help,” she said, turning back from the exhibit. She knew how pleased he was to hear these words.
“I seriously doubt that,” Victor said. “But anything for you.”
“I have a syntax question,” Chel said, reaching into her bag. “And I need an answer immediately.”
“What’s the source?” Victor asked.
She took a breath as she pulled out her laptop. “A new codex has just been discovered,” she said, filled with a mix of pride and hesitation.
“From the classic.”
Her old mentor laughed. “You must think I’ve gone senile.”
Chel pulled up images of the first pages of the codex on the computer screen. In an instant, Victor’s face changed. He was one of the few people in the world who would immediately understand the significance of the images in front of him. Staring in awe, he never took his eyes off the computer as Chel explained everything that had happened.
“The Guatemalans don’t know about it,” she told him, “and we can’t have anyone else trying to get their hands on it either. I need to be able to trust you.”
Victor looked up at her. “Then you can, Chel.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, they stood together in Chel’s lab at the Getty on the same side of the examining table. Victor marveled at the renderings of the gods, the new glyphs he’d never seen before, the old ones in novel combinations and unusual quantities. A part of Chel had been longing to show him the book since she laid eyes on it, and it was a thrill to encounter it again for the first time through his eyes.
Victor had instantly gravitated right toward what she’d brought him back to the Getty to see: the father–son glyph pair she and Rolando had had so much difficulty deciphering.
“I’ve never seen it as a couplet either,” Victor said. “And the number of times it appears as both subject and object is unprecedented.”
Together, they examined the paragraph where the pair first appeared:
The father and his son is not noble by birth, and so there is much the father and his son will never fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much the father and his son does not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.
“It appears more often as a subject,” Victor said. “So I think we have to focus on nouns that could have been used over and over again.”
“Right,” Chel said. “Which is why I went back to the other codices and searched for the most frequently used subjects. There are six: maize, water, underworld, gods, time, and king.”
Victor nodded. “Of those, the only ones that make sense are either gods or king.”
“There are a dozen references to a drought in the early pages and to the nobles waiting for the deities to bring water,” Chel said.
“But gods wouldn’t make sense. Not in the context of the father and son waiting for the gods to bring rain. The gods don’t wait for the gods to bring rain. The people do.”
“And I tried king, but it didn’t make sense either. Father and male child. Chit unen. Could it be some kind of indication of a ruling family? Maybe father is being used metaphorically to mean king, and he has a son who will succeed him.”
“There are pairings with husbands and wives to indicate a ruling king and his queen,” Victor said.
“But if we assume the father and son pairing indicates a ruling family, then this sequence would read: The king and his son are not noble by birth. That makes no sense either.”
Victor’s eyes lit up. “Mayan syntax is all about context, right?”
“Sure…”
“Every subject exists in relation to an object,” Victor said. “Every date in relation to a god, every king to his polity. We always talk of King K’awiil of Tikal, not simply of King K’awiil. We talk of a ballplayer and his ball as one. Of a man and his spirit animal. Neither word exists without the other. They mean one thing.”
“One idea,” Chel said, “not two.”
Victor started to pace around the lab. “Right. So what if these glyphs work the same way? What if the scribe doesn’t refer to a father and his son but to a single man with the properties of both?”
It dawned on Chel what he was saying. “You think the scribe’s referring to himself as having the spirit of his father inside him?”
“We use it in English to talk about how similar we are to our parents. You are your mother’s child. Or, in your case, your father’s child, I suppose. He’s referring to himself.”
“It means I,” she said, astonished.
“I’ve never seen it used this exact way,” Victor continued, “but I have seen grammatical constructions like this used to highlight a noble’s connection to a god.”
Chel felt like she was floating. All the other codices were written in the third person—the narrator a distant, detached player in the story he was describing.
This was completely different.
“I am not noble by birth,” Victor read, “and so there is much I do not fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much I do not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.”
A first-person narrative would be unique in the history of the discipline. There was no telling what could be learned from such an account. It could bridge a thousand-year gap and truly connect Chel’s people to the inner lives of their ancestors.
“Well,” Victor said, drawing a pen from his pocket as if it were a weapon. “I think it’s time to find out if this thing is worth all the trouble it’s caused.”
No rain has come to give us nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The fields of Kanuataba have been harvested and humiliated, and the deer and birds and jaguar guardians of the land have been pushed out. Hillsides have been ruined, insects swarm, and our soils are no longer fed by falling leaves. The animals and butterflies and plants given to us by the Holy Bearer have nowhere to go to continue their spirit lives. The animals bear no flesh for cooking.
I am not noble by birth, and so there is much I do not fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much I do not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king. But I do know Kanuataba was once home to the most majestic collection of ceiba trees, the great path to the underworld, in all of the highlands. The ceiba once grew denser than anywhere in the world, blessed by the gods, their trunks nearly touching. Now there are fewer than a dozen still standing in all of Kanuataba! Our holy lake has dried to nothing but dirt. The water made to shoot from stone shoots from the palace and temples no more. In the plazas, untouchables beg us to buy their useless, cracked pots and rotting vegetables, diluted spices for meats that only the nobles can afford. There are no agouti, kinkajou, deer, or tapir to season. The children of Kanuataba become hungrier with each change of the sun’s mighty journey across the sky.
Forgive me then, monkey scribe, whose ring I wear on my hand as the symbol of scribes past! Here in Kanuataba, I commence my record on the virgin bark paper I stole from the king. I have done little worth recording in the books of Kanuataba. I am the tutor to the king’s son, and I have painted forty-two books in the service of the court. But now I paint for the people, and the children of our children’s children, an honest account of what came in the time of King Jaguar Imix!
Two suns ago, following a night when the quarter moon hung low in the sky, twelve of the thirteen members of King Jaguar Imix’s royal council were convened. Jacomo, the royal dwarf, who is as lustful as he is small, was also present. I know dwarfs in the fields who love Kanuataba as much as any man of normal size. But this royal dwarf is something else, something terrible. Jacomo is a glutton, and I watched him chewing on the bark of a great tree and spitting vile liquid from his mouth back into the bowl in his lap. Lately I have seen him seduce women by promising crumbs from his beard, forcing them to pleasure him so that they may feed their hungry babes.
Of the thirteen council members, my friend Auxila, royal overseer of the stores and of zoology and agriculture, was the sole man not in attendance. Five suns ago, at our last meeting, Auxila angered the king, and it seemed most likely he was doing penance. Auxila is a good man, and as trade adviser to the king, he knows much of royal accounting, a burden I would never desire. To count a king’s purse is to know the limits of his power.
Galam, bearer of King Jaguar Imix’s decrees and daykeeper for ten turns of the Calendar Round, called the council to begin:
—By the word of Jaguar Imix, by the holy word, we commence this meeting in honor of the new sacred god, so named Akabalam. Akabalam is most powerful. Jaguar Imix decrees that we shall worship Akabalam forevermore.—
I am tutor to Prince Smoke Song, next ruler of Kanuataba, and I have memorized all the great books. Nowhere does a god named Akabalam appear in any of them. I asked the daykeeper:
—What form does the god Akabalam take?—
—When Jaguar Imix sees fit to explain more, Paktul, I will share it with the council. I cannot pretend to understand what his holiness knows about the world.—
Without explanation, then, we prayed and burned incense to this new god. I resolved to study the great books of Kanuataba and find the deity Akabalam on my own. To understand what god had revealed itself to his holiness, the king.
Galam the daykeeper spoke:
—I hereby declare the king’s intention to begin construction of a great new pyramid in the style of the lost civilization of Teotihuacan, which will someday be the place of his interment. The foundation will be laid in twenty days, less than a thousand paces from the palace. The viewing tower shall be built to face the highest point of the procession of the sun and will create a great holy triangle with the palace and the twin pyramid of red.—
My brothers each clapped twice to signify the glory of Jaguar Imix. But when my turn came to clap twice, I asked of Galam, holy messenger, whether the construction of a pyramid was most prudent when there has been no rain:
—The people of Kanuataba have nothing with which to nourish themselves, and even the mandatory laborers will starve as they carry the stones to the top. A temple in the plaza will require plaster that can-not be made without the burning of our most precious trees and plants to dehydrate the rock. Our flora diminishes by the day. The lake has dried up to nothing, and our reservoirs are dwindling.—
Then Jacomo the wanton dwarf spoke to me with anger:
—Be it understood, Paktul, that King Jaguar Imix has received a prophecy from the god Akabalam telling us to launch a star war, timed to the evening star, against distant kingdoms. We will bring back slaves and all their valuables. Our army has a new way to preserve food, salting its supplies more heavily than before, so that we may launch wars on lands even more distant. These cities are weakened by the great drought, and they cannot defend themselves against our mighty army. So now you understand why you dare not question the king!—
There would be no more argument. Jaguar Imix’s power emanates from his ability to communicate with the gods, and each member of the council enjoys rank according to their own abilities to summon the voices of these gods. This we call the hierarchy of divinity. If Jaguar Imix should hear the voice of a god decree that something is most true, and one of his minions should not hear this voice, he shall be considered a man who cannot speak with the gods. His rank in the hierarchy of divinity shall be lowered or stripped from him altogether.
But where will enough water and wood and plumage come from to build a pyramid thirty men high, as it is ordained?
His holiness claims the rain will come in five periods of thirteen days, when the evening star falls nearer to the moon. But will it?
Jaguar Imix would drink the entirety of the water stores if so much water could flow through him and sanctify him, for he believes that his sanctification is the route to our salvation. No royal king of Kanuataba divined by the gods can be evil—I have seen it myself on the stone inscriptions. But his holiness is incapable of admitting to fault. Jaguar Imix believes his power is as strong as the fear he can instill in the hearts of men.
How I wish I could still worship him as I did when I was a boy!
We of the council left the gallery and walked to the great steps atop the royal palace, where I stood and witnessed something to forever change what I believe.
The people outside the palace were chanting, and the blue-painted executioners were standing atop the south twin tower, beginning their rituals. The noise came and went, up and down, high and low. The voices of the royal executioners rose to a near-deafening pitch as the plaza came into my sights.
A small, aristocratic crowd stood at the base of the twin pyramid of white, along the north face, and clapping echoed throughout the plaza. The yellow, red, and gold paints that adorn the face of the great pyramid shimmered like the sun on a sea of blue, undulating as if the great beast that lives on the ocean floor had risen. The blue-painted men were at the top of the three hundred sixty-five steps, some holding censers bubbling with smoke.
The grand executioner spoke:
—This soul is commanded to the overworld by the Lord Akabalam!—
Akabalam, once more. The unknown god has demanded sacrifice again, this time in the form of a man’s soul!
When the grand executioner plunged his glistening flint knife into the man’s chest and ripped open his ribs, the man on the altar let out a wail that will forever ring in my ears. Through the cry that the man exhaled, the grand executioner reached into his body to pull out his heart. And the dying man’s words were heard by those of us above the fray, and they were an omen of things to come, as black as the end of the thirteenth cycle:
—Akabalam is falsehood!—
I knew whose voice it was. Auxila, my friend, trusted adviser to the king for three thousand suns, had been sacrificed. Ringing filled my ears. I watched his corpse go lifeless, and everywhere I saw omens in the clouds.
The gods called for such a sacrifi ce of a high noble not more than once in fifteen thousand suns. What chance was there the gods had ordained such a sacrifice five days after Auxila spoke out against the plans of the king?
Beyond the reaches of the noisy crowd I saw Auxila’s wife, Haniba, standing without tears and watching the executioners encircle the corpse once more, and my heart wept for her and for their children, Flamed Plume and One Butterfl y, who stood beside her, weeping.
The bloody priests brought Auxila’s corpse back into the recesses of the temple, an unusual handling of a body. It is honorable to throw it down the steps of the great pyramid, but they would not even do Auxila this small justice. They took the body from sight, and I knew they would not emerge again until the blackest of night, as the evening star reached the perfect angle with the temple.
Atop the steps of the royal palace, the perch from which I took in this madness, I felt a hand grasp the back of my knee. I turned and found the dwarf Jacomo, who had crept up beside me, chewing on the same mangled bark piece and smiling.
He spoke:
—Exalted is the name of Jaguar Imix, holy ruler of Kanuataba, whose wisdom guides us through this life. Do you exalt him, Paktul?—
I wanted so much to strike the dwarf right there, but I am not a man of violence. I merely echoed his praise:
—Exalted is the name of Jaguar Imix, holy ruler of Kanuataba, whose wisdom guides us through this life.—
Not until I returned to this cave to begin painting the pages of this secret book did I let go of the scream inside me. It was a scream for none but the gods to hear.
What am I to understand of a god who’d come with no blessings, who would ordain a temple we cannot build and command the death of a man most loyal to the king! Who is this mighty and mysterious new god called Akabalam?