12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  Early in his career, Stanton had become one of the world’s experts on mad cow, and when the CDC founded the National Prion Center, he was the natural choice to head it. Back then it had seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime, and he was thrilled to make the move to California; never before had there been a dedicated research center for the study of prions and prion diseases in the United States. With Stanton’s leadership, the center was created to diagnose, study, and eventually fight the most mysterious infectious agents on earth.

  Only it never happened. By the end of the decade, the beef industry had launched a successful campaign to show that just one person living in the United States had ever been diagnosed with mad cow. Grants for Stanton’s lab became smaller, and, with fewer cases in England as well, the public quickly lost interest. The worst part was they still couldn’t cure a single prion disease; years of testing various drugs and other therapies had produced one false hope after the next. Yet Stanton had always been as stubborn as he was optimistic and had never given up on the possibility that answers were just one experiment away.

  Moving on to the next animal cage, he found another snake and another tiny mouse merely bored by its predator. Through this experiment, Stanton and his team were exploring a role for prions in controlling “innate instincts,” including fear. Mice didn’t have to be taught to be afraid of the rustling of the grass signaling a predator’s approach—terror was programmed into their genes. But after their prions were genetically “knocked out” in an earlier experiment, the mice began acting aggressively and irrationally. So Stanton and his staff started directly testing the effects of deleting prions on the animals’ most fundamental fears.

  Stanton’s cellphone vibrated in the pocket of his white coat. “Hello?”

  “Is this Dr. Stanton?” It was a female voice he didn’t recognize, but it had to be a doctor or a nurse; only a health professional wouldn’t apologize first for calling before eight in the morning.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “My name’s Michaela Thane,” she said. “Third-year resident at East L.A. Presbyterian Hospital. CDC gave me your number. We believe we have a case of prion disease here.”

  Stanton smiled, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and said, “Okay,” as he moved on to the third animal cage. Inside, another mouse pawed its predator’s tail. The snake seemed almost befuddled by this reversal of nature.

  “ ‘Okay?’ ” Thane asked. “That’s it?”

  “Send over the samples to my office and my team will look at them,” he said. “A Dr. Davies will call you back with the results.”

  “Which will be when? A week? Maybe I wasn’t being clear, Doctor. Sometimes I talk too fast for people. We think we have a case of prion disease here.”

  “I understand that’s what you believe,” Stanton said. “What about the genetic tests? Have they come back?”

  “No, but—”

  “Listen, Dr.… Thane? We get thousands of calls a year,” Stanton interrupted, “and only a handful turn out to be prion disease. If the genetic tests are positive, call us back.”

  “Doctor, the symptoms are highly consistent with a diagnosis of—”

  “Let me guess. Your patient is having trouble walking.”

  “No.”

  “Memory loss?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Stanton tapped on the glass of one of the cages, curious to see if either of the animals would react. Neither acknowledged him. “Then what’s your presumptive symptom, Doctor?” he asked Thane.

  “Dementia and hallucinations, erratic behavior, tremor, and sweating. And a terrible case of insomnia.”

  “Insomnia?”

  “We thought it was alcohol withdrawal when he was admitted,” Thane said. “But there was no folate deficiency to indicate alcoholism, so I ran more tests, and I believe it could be fatal familial insomnia.”

  Now she had Stanton’s attention.

  “When was he admitted?”

  “Three days ago.”

  FFI was a strange and rapidly progressing condition that arose because of a mutated gene. Passed down from parent to child, it was one of the few prion diseases that was strictly genetic. Stanton had seen half a dozen cases in his career. Most FFI patients first came in for medical attention because they were sweating constantly and having trouble falling asleep at night. Within months, their insomnia was total. Patients became impotent, experienced panic attacks, had difficulty walking. Caught between a hallucinatory waking state and panic-inducing alertness, nearly all FFI patients died after a few weeks of total sleeplessness, and there was nothing Stanton or any other doctor could do to help them.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he told Thane. “Worldwide incidence of FFI is one in thirty-three million.”

  “What else could cause complete insomnia?” Thane asked.

  “A misdiagnosed methamphetamine addiction.”

  “This is East L.A. I get the pleasure of smelling meth-breath every day. This guy’s tox screen was negative.”

  “FFI affects fewer than forty families in the world,” Stanton said, moving down the line of cages. “And if there was a family history, you would’ve told me already.”

  “Actually, we haven’t been able to talk to him, because we can’t understand him. He looks Latino or possibly indigenous. Central or South American maybe. We’re working on it with the translator service. ’Course, most days here, that’s one guy with a GED and a stack of remaindered dictionaries.”

  Stanton peered through the glass of the next cage. This snake was still, and there was a tiny gray tail hanging out of its mouth. In the next twenty-four hours, when the other snakes got hungry, it would happen in every cage in the room. Even after years in the lab, Stanton didn’t enjoy dwelling on his role in the death of these mice.

  “Who brought the patient in?” he asked.

  “Ambulance, according to the admission report, but I can’t find a record of what service it was.”

  This was consistent with everything Stanton knew about Presbyterian Hospital, one of the most overcrowded and debt-ridden facilities in East L.A. “How old is the patient?” Stanton asked.

  “Early thirties probably. I know that’s unusual, but I read your paper on age aberrations in prion diseases, and I thought maybe this could be one.”

  Thane was doing her job right, but her diligence didn’t change the facts. “I’m sure when genetics comes back, it will clear all this up quickly,” he told her. “Feel free to call Dr. Davies later with any further questions.”

  “Wait, Doctor. Hold on. Don’t hang up.”

  Stanton had to admire her insistence; he was a pain in the ass when he was a resident too. “Yes?”

  “There was a study last year on amylase levels, how they’re markers for sleep debt.”

  “I’m aware of the study. And?”

  “With my patient it was three hundred units per milliliter, which suggests he hasn’t slept in more than a week.”

  Stanton stood up from the cage. A week without sleep?

  “Have there been seizures?”

  “There’s some evidence on his brain scan,” Thane said.

  “And what do the patient’s pupils look like?”

  “Pinpricks.”

  “What happens in reaction to light?”

  “Unresponsive.”

  A week of insomnia. Sweating. Seizures.

  Pinprick pupils.

  Of the few conditions that could cause that combination of symptoms, the others were even rarer than FFI. Stanton peeled off his gloves, his mice forgotten. “Don’t let anyone in the room until I get there.”

  TWO

  AS USUAL, CHEL MANU ARRIVED AT OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS—mother church for Los Angeles’s four million Catholics—just as services were ending. The journey from her office at the Getty Museum to the cathedral downtown took almost an hour during rush hour, but she relished making it every week. Most of the time she was cooped up at her research lab a
t the Getty or in lecture halls at UCLA, and this was her chance to leave the west side, get on the freeway, and drive. Even the traffic, bane of L.A., didn’t bother her. The trip to the church was a kind of meditative break, the one time she could turn off all the noise: her research, her budget, her colleagues, her faculty committees, her mother. She’d have a smoke (or two), turn up the alt-rock of KCRW, and zone out a little. She always pulled off the exit ramp wishing she could just keep driving.

  Outside the enormous cathedral, she dashed out the end of her second cigarette, flicking it into a trash can beneath the strange, androgynous statue of the Virgin guarding the entrance. Then she pushed open the heavy bronze doors. Inside, Chel took in the familiar sights and sensations: sweet incense in the air, chanting from the sanctuary, and the largest collection of alabaster windows in the world, casting earth-toned light across the faces of the community of Maya immigrants gathered in the pews. These men and women were directly descended from the ancient people who ruled Central America for nearly a thousand years, who built the most advanced pre-Columbian civilization in the New World. They were also Chel’s friends.

  At the pulpit, beneath five golden frames representing the phases of Jesus’s life, stood Maraka, the elderly bearded “daykeeper.” He waved a censer back and forth.

  “Tewichim,” he chanted in Qu’iche, the branch of the Mayan language spoken by more than a million indígenas in Guatemala. “Tewchuninaq ub’antajik q’ukumatz, ajyo’l k’aslemal.”

  Blessed is the plumed serpent, giver of life.

  Maraka turned to face eastward, then took a long drink of baalché, the milky-white sacred combination of tree bark, cinnamon, and honey. When he finished, he motioned to the crowd, and the church filled with chants again, one of the many ancient traditions that the archbishop let them practice here once or twice a week, as long as some of the indígenas continued to attend regular Catholic Mass as well.

  Chel made her way down the side of the nave, trying not to draw attention, though at least one man saw her and waved enthusiastically. He’d asked her out half a dozen times since she’d helped him with an immigration form last month. She had lied and told him she was seeing someone. At five-foot-two, she might not look like most women in Los Angeles, but many here thought she was beautiful.

  Beside the incense altar, Chel waited for the service to end. She looked out at the mix of congregants, including more than two dozen white faces. Until recently, there were only sixty members of Fraternidad. The group met here on Tuesday mornings to honor the gods and traditions of their ancestors in a steady stream of immigrants from all over the Maya region, including Chel’s own Guatemala.

  But then the apocalypse groupies had started to show up. The press called them “2012ers,” and some seemed to believe that attending Maya ceremonies would exempt them from the end of the world, which they believed was less than two weeks away. Many other 2012ers didn’t bother to come here at all—they just preached ideas about the end of the “Long Count” calendar cycle from their own pulpits. Some argued that the oceans would flood, earthquakes would rip open fault lines, and the magnetic poles would switch. Some claimed it would bring a return to a more basic existence, banishing the excesses of technology. Still others believed that it would usher in a “fifth age” of man and wipe away the entire “fourth race,” all the humans who now walked the earth.

  Serious Maya experts, including Chel, found the idea of an apocalypse on December 21 ridiculous. It was true that one of her ancestors’ signal achievements was a complex calendar system, and 2012ers were right when they claimed that according to the more than five-thousand-year-old Long Count, human history has consisted of four ages. But there was no credible reason to believe that the end of the thirteenth cycle of the Long Count would be different from any other calendar turn. Just a few months before, archaeologists had uncovered a new tomb in Xultun, Guatemala, with wall paintings that again indicated the calendar was meant to continue long past December 21. Of course, that hadn’t stopped 2012ers from using ancient Maya wisdom to sell T-shirts and conference tickets or from making Chel’s people the butt of jokes on late-night TV.

  “Chel?”

  She turned to find Maraka behind her. She hadn’t even noticed that the ceremony had ended and people were filing out of their seats.

  The daykeeper put a hand on her shoulder. He was almost eighty now, and his once-black hair had gone entirely white. “Welcome,” he said. “The office is ready. Of course, we’d all love to see you at an actual service again one of these weeks.”

  Chel shrugged. “I’ll try to make it to one soon, I promise. I’ve just been very busy, Daykeeper.”

  Maraka smiled. “Of course you are, Chel. In Lak’ech.”

  I am you, and you are me.

  Chel bowed her head toward him. It was a tradition that had fallen into disuse even in Guatemala, but many of the elders still appreciated it, and it felt like the least she could do given her own dwindling interest in prayer.

  “In Lak’ech,” she repeated quietly before begging off to the back of the church.

  Outside the priest’s office Chel used every week, the Larakams were first in line. She had heard that Vicente, the husband, was taken in by a bottom feeder in the moneylending business who preyed on people like them: newly arrived, unable to believe that what might be ahead could be worse than what they’d left behind in Guatemala. Chel wondered if his wife, Ina, who impressed her as an intelligent woman, had known better. Ina wore a floor-length skirt and a cotton huipil with intricate zigzag patterns. She still dressed in the traditional way, and the traditional role of wife in their culture would be to support her husband no matter how bad his judgment.

  “Thank you for seeing us,” she said quietly.

  Vicente slowly explained that he had signed a contract at exorbitant interest in order to rent a one-room apartment in Echo Park, and now he had to pay out more than he earned working as a landscaper. He had the haggard look of someone with the weight of the world on him. Ina stood quietly by his side, but her eyes implored Chel. An unspoken message passed between the two women, and now Chel understood what it had cost Vicente to come to her and ask for help.

  Silently, he gave Chel the papers he’d signed, and as she read the fine print she felt the familiar anger blooming inside her. Vicente and Ina were only two in a vast sea of immigrants from Guatemala trying to navigate this overwhelming new country, and there were many willing to take advantage. Still, on the whole, it was the Maya way to be too trusting. Five hundred years of oppression hadn’t managed to instill even survival-level cynicism in most of Chel’s people, and it cost them.

  Fortunately for the Larakams, her contacts were extensive, particularly in the areas of legal aid. She wrote down the name of a lawyer and was about to call in the next person when Ina reached into her bag and handed Chel a plastic container.

  “Pepian,” she said. “My daughter and I made it for you.”

  Chel’s freezer was already full of the sweet-tasting chicken dish she was always gifted by Fraternidad members, but she took it anyway. It made her happy to think about Ina and her young daughter cooking it together and to know that this community had a future in L.A. Chel’s own mother, who’d grown up in a small village in Guatemala, was probably spending the morning in communion with Good Morning America over a bowl of Special K.

  “Let me know what happens,” Chel said as she handed Vicente back their papers, “and next time don’t get involved with anyone whose face you see on bus-stop benches. That doesn’t make them famous. Not good famous, anyway. Come to me instead.”

  Vicente took his wife’s hand and smiled tightly as they departed.

  So it went for the next hour. Chel explained a vaccination program to a pregnant woman, weighed in on a credit-card dispute for the junior daykeeper, and dealt with a landlord complaint against an old friend of her mother’s.

  Once her last visitor left, Chel leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, thinking about
a ceramic vase she’d been working on at the Getty, the inside of which contained some of the first physical residues of ancient tobacco ever discovered. No wonder it was proving so damn hard for her to quit smoking. People had been doing it for millennia.

  A persistent knocking pulled her back to reality.

  Chel stood up, surprised by the man she saw standing in the doorway. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, and he belonged to such a different world from the indígenas who worshipped at Fraternidad services that it startled her to see him.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked as Hector Gutierrez stepped inside.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  The few times she’d met him, Gutierrez had seemed reasonably well put together. Now there were shadows under his eyes and a tired pinch in his stare. His head was covered with sweat, and he dabbed anxiously at it with a handkerchief. Chel had never seen him unshaven before. His beard crept up toward the port-wine stain beneath his left temple. In his hand, she noticed, was a black duffel bag.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I called your office.”

  Chel reminded herself to make sure no one in her lab ever gave out that information again.

  “I have something you need to see,” he continued.

  She glanced down at the duffel bag, wary. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I need your help. They found the old storage unit where I kept my inventory.”

  Chel looked to the doorway to make sure no one was listening. They could mean only one thing: He’d been busted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for policing illegal antiquities smuggling.

  “I’d already emptied the unit,” Gutierrez said. “But they raided it. It’s only a matter of time before they come to my house.”

  Chel’s throat tightened as she thought of the turtle-shell vessel she’d bought from him more than a year ago. “And your records? Did they get those too?”