12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  “Don’t worry. You’re protected for now. But there’s something I need you to keep for me, Dr. Manu. Just till it’s safe.” He held out the bag.

  Chel looked at the door again and said, “You know I can’t do that.”

  “You have vaults at the Getty. Put it there for a few days. No one will notice.”

  Chel knew she should just tell him to get rid of whatever the hell it was. She also knew that whatever was in that bag had to be of great value or he wouldn’t risk bringing it to her. Gutierrez was not a man to be trusted, but he was a nimble purveyor of antiquities, and he knew her weakness for the artifacts of her people.

  Chel quickly ushered him out. “Come with me.”

  A few stray worshippers glanced at them as she led him down to the church’s lower level. They pushed through the glass doors engraved with angels at the entrance and into the mausoleum, where niches in the walls contained the ashes of thousands of the city’s Catholics. Chel chose one of the sitting rooms, where stone benches lined gleaming white walls engraved with names and dates, a tidy bibliography of death.

  Finally Chel sealed them inside. “Show me.”

  From inside his bag, Gutierrez pulled a one-foot-square wooden box wrapped in a sheath of plastic. When he began to unwrap it, the room filled with the sharp, unmistakable odor of bat guano—the smell of something that recently came from an ancient tomb. “It needs proper preservation before it deteriorates any more,” Gutierrez said as he removed the cover of the box.

  At first, Chel assumed she was staring at some kind of paper packing material, but then she leaned in and realized the paper was actually broken yellowed bark pages, floating loosely inside the box. The pages were covered with writing—words and even entire sentences in the language of her ancestors. The ancient Maya script used hieroglyphic-like symbols called “glyphs,” and here were hundreds of them inscribed on the fragments, along with detailed pictures of gods in ornate costumes.

  “A codex?” Chel said. “Come on. Don’t be absurd.”

  Maya codices were the written histories of her ancestors, painted by a royal scribe working for a king. Chel had heard people use the word rare to describe blue diamonds or Gutenberg Bibles, but this was what rare really meant: Only four ancient Maya books had survived into modernity. So how could Gutierrez think for a minute she would believe he had come into possession of a new one?

  “There hasn’t been a new codex discovered in thirty years,” Chel told him.

  The man peeled off his jacket. “Until now.”

  She stared into the small box once more. As a graduate student, Chel had had the rare opportunity to see an original codex, so she knew exactly what it was supposed to look and feel like. Deep in a vault in Germany, armed guards had watched her as she turned the pages of the Dresden Codex, its images and words transporting her back a thousand years in a breathtaking flash. It was the defining experience that had inspired her to focus her graduate studies on the language and writing of her ancestors.

  “Obviously it’s a fake,” she told him, resisting the urge to keep looking. These days, more than half of the artifacts she was offered by even the most legitimate dealers were forged. The bat-guano smell was even forgeable. “And, for the record, when you sold me that turtle-shell vessel, I didn’t know it was looted. You misled me with the paperwork. So don’t try to tell the police otherwise.”

  The truth was more complex. In her work as the curator of Maya antiquities for the Getty Museum, every item Chel purchased had to be officially documented and traced back to its origin. All of which she’d done properly for the turtle-shell vessel Gutierrez had sold her, but, unfortunately, weeks after the purchase, she’d found a problem in the chain of possession. Chel knew the risks of not revealing her discovery to the museum but couldn’t bring herself to part with the incredible piece of history, so she’d kept it and said nothing. To her, the larger scandal was that her people’s whole heritage was for sale on the black market, and any artifacts she didn’t buy disappeared into the homes of collectors forever.

  “Please,” Gutierrez said, ignoring her claim about the pottery he’d sold her. “Just keep it for me for a few days.”

  Chel decided to settle this. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves and tweezers.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Finding something that’ll prove to you that this thing was forged.”

  The plastic covering was still damp from his palms, and Chel tensed at the feeling of his sweat. Gutierrez pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing two fingers deep into his eyes. Above the bat guano she could smell his body odor. But when Chel’s fingers dipped inside the box and started handling the chipped pages of tree bark, everything else in the room fell away. Her first thought was that the glyphs were too old. Ancient Maya history was divided into two periods: the “classic,” encompassing the rise and efflorescence of the civilization, from around A.D. 200 to 900; and the “post-classic,” spanning its decline until the arrival of the Spanish around 1500. The style and content of written Mayan language had evolved over time as a result of external influences, and writing from each period looked distinct.

  Chel continued searching the box. There had never been so much as a single piece of bark paper with writing discovered from the classic; all four of the known Maya codices were from hundreds of years later. They only knew what classic writing looked like from inscriptions at the ruins. But the language on these pages appeared to Chel to have been written somewhere between the time of A.D 800 to 900, making the book an utter impossibility: If it were real, it would be the most valuable artifact in the history of Mesoamerican studies.

  Her eyes scanned the lines, searching for a mistake—a glyph improperly drawn, a picture of a god without the right headdress, a date out of sequence. She couldn’t find any. The black and red ink was correctly faded. The blue ink held its color, just as real Maya blue did. The paper was weathered as if it had been inside a cave for a thousand years. The bark was brittle.

  Even more impressive, the writing felt fluent. The glyph combinations made intuitive sense, as did the pictograms. The glyphs appeared to have been written in an early version of “classic Ch’olan,” as expected in a codex like this. But what Chel couldn’t take her eyes off of were the phonetic “complements” on the glyphs that helped a reader identify their meaning. They were written in Qu’iche.

  The known post-classic codices with their Mexican influences were written in Yucatec and Ch’olan Mayan. But Chel had long imagined that a classic book from Guatemala might well have been written with complements in the dialect her mother and father had grown up speaking. The presence of those here represented a deep and nuanced understanding of the history and language on the part of the forger.

  Chel couldn’t believe the sophistication, and she suspected that many of even her smartest colleagues would have been fooled.

  Then a sequence of glyphs stopped her cold.

  On one of the largest bark-paper pieces Chel had seen in the box, three pictograms were written in sequence to form a sentence fragment: Water, made to shoot from stone.

  Chel blinked, confused. The writer could only be describing a fountain. Yet no forger in the world could have written about a fountain, because until recently no scholar knew the classic Maya used them in their cities. It had been less than a month since an archaeologist from Penn State figured out that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish hadn’t introduced pressurized aqueducts to the New World; the Maya built them centuries before Europeans arrived.

  A codex like this could never have been forged in less than a month. So it couldn’t have been forged at all.

  Chel looked up at Gutierrez in disbelief. “Where did you get this?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  The obvious answer was that it had been looted from a tomb in the Maya ruins, stolen like so much else from her ancestors’ graves. “Who else knows about it?” Chel pressed.


  “Only my source,” Gutierrez said. “But now you understand its value?”

  If she was right, there could be more information about Maya history on these pages than in all the known ruins combined. The Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four ancient Maya books, would fetch ten million dollars at auction—and the pages in front of her would put the Dresden to shame.

  “Are you going to sell it?” she asked Gutierrez.

  “When the time is right.”

  Even if she’d had the kind of money he would demand, the time would probably never be right for Chel. She couldn’t buy it legally, because it had obviously been stolen, and the work it would take to properly reconstruct and decipher a codex would make it impossible to hide for long. If a looted codex were ever discovered in her possession, she’d lose her job and could face criminal charges.

  “Why should I hold it for you?” Chel asked.

  Gutierrez said, “To give me time to figure out how to make papers so it can be sold to an American museum—I hope yours. And because if ICE finds this now, neither of us will ever see it again.”

  Chel knew he was right about ICE: If they confiscated the book, they’d repatriate it to the Guatemalan government, which didn’t have the expertise or infrastructure to properly display and study a codex. The Grolier Fragment, found in Mexico, had been rotting in a vault there since the eighties.

  Gutierrez packed the book back in its box. Chel already felt impatient to touch it again. The bark paper was disintegrating and needed preservation. More than that, the world needed to know what these pages said, because they testified to the history of her people. And the history of her people was disappearing.

  THREE

  EAST L.A. PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL: BARS GUARDED THE WINDOWS, and the typical crowd of smokers always seen around run-down hospitals stood outside puffing away. The front entrance was closed due to a leak in the lobby ceiling, so security shuffled visitors and patients alike into the hospital through the ER.

  Inside, Stanton was hit by overlapping smells: alcohol, dirt, blood, urine, vomit, solvent, air freshener, and tobacco. On chairs around the waiting room sat dozens of suffering people waiting their turn. Stanton rarely spent time in facilities like this one: When a hospital deals with gang violence on a daily basis, there’s not much demand for a prion specialist to give academic lectures.

  A clearly stressed-out nurse, sitting behind a bulletproof glass window, agreed to page Thane as Stanton joined a group of visitors gathered around a TV mounted on the wall. An airplane was being pulled from the ocean by a Coast Guard salvage vessel. Rescue boats and helicopters circled the remains of Aero Globale flight 126, which had crashed off the coast of Baja California on its way from L.A. to Mexico City. Seventy-two passengers and eight crew members had died.

  This is the way things can end, Stanton thought. No matter how many times life forced him to realize it, the thought still took him by surprise. You exercised and ate well, got yearly physicals, worked hard 24/7 and never complained about it, and then one day you just got on the wrong plane.

  “Dr. Stanton?”

  The first thing he noticed about the tall black woman in scrubs standing behind him was how broad her shoulders were. She was in her early thirties, with cropped hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, giving her a kind of rugby-player-turned-hipster look.

  “I’m Michaela Thane.”

  “Gabriel Stanton,” he said, shaking her hand.

  Thane glanced up at the television. “Terrible, huh?”

  “Do they know what happened?”

  “They’re saying human error,” she said, leading him out of the ER. “Or as we say here—CTFL. Call the fucking lawyers.”

  “Speaking of which, I assume you called County Health?” Stanton asked her as they headed toward the elevators.

  Thane repeatedly pressed an elevator button that refused to light up. “They promised to send someone.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.”

  She mimed taking a huge gasp of air in as they waited. Stanton smiled. She was his type of resident.

  Finally the car arrived. Thane hit the button for six. When her scrub sleeve pulled back, Stanton saw a bald eagle with a scroll between the bird’s wings tattooed on her triceps.

  “You’re Army?” he asked her.

  “Five Hundred Sixty-fifth Medical Company, at your service.”

  “Out of Fort Polk?”

  “Yeah,” Thane said. “You know the battalion?”

  “My father was Forty-sixth Engineers. We lived at Fort Polk for three years. You served before residency?”

  “Did ROTC for med school and they pulled me over there after internship,” she said. “Two tours near Kabul doing helicopter retrievals. I was O-Three by the end.”

  Stanton was impressed. Airlifting soldiers from the front lines was about the most dangerous army medical assignment there was.

  “How many cases of FFI have you seen before?” Thane asked. The elevator finally started to ascend.

  “Seven,” Stanton told her.

  “All of them died?”

  “Yes. All of them. Has genetics come back yet?”

  “Should be soon. But I did manage to find out how the patient got here. LAPD arrested him at a Super 8 motel a few blocks away, after he assaulted some other guests. Cops brought him here when they realized he was sick.”

  “After a week of insomnia, we’re lucky he didn’t do a lot worse.”

  Even following the loss of a single night of sleep, deterioration of cognitive function was like a blood-alcohol level of 0.1 and could cause hallucinations, delirium, and wild mood swings. After weeks of progressively worse insomnia, FFI drove its victims to suicidal thinking. But most of the victims Stanton had seen simply succumbed from the devastation insomnia wreaked on their bodies.

  “Dr. Thane, was it you who came up with the idea of testing the amylase levels?” They had arrived on the sixth floor.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Putting FFI on the differential diagnosis list isn’t something most residents would’ve considered.”

  Thane shrugged. “Saw a homeless guy in the ER this morning who’d eaten eight bags of banana chips to make his potassium so high that we’d have to admit him. Spend a little more time in East L.A. You’ll see we have to consider just about everything.”

  Stanton noticed that every staff member smiled or nodded or waved at Thane as they approached the nerve center of the floor. The reception area looked as if it hadn’t been updated in decades, complete with ancient computers. Nurses and interns scribbled notes in fading plastic binders. Orderlies finished their rounds, clearing scratched trays from patients’ rooms.

  A security guard was posted outside room 621. He was middle-aged, with dark skin and a crew cut, and wore a pink mask over his face.

  “Everything all right in there?” Thane asked.

  “He’s not moving too much right now,” the guard said, closing his book of crossword puzzles. “Couple of short outbursts, but for the most part pretty quiet.”

  “This is Mariano,” Thane said. “Mariano, this is Dr. Stanton. He’ll be working the John Doe with us.”

  Mariano’s dark-brown eyes, the only part of his face visible above the mask, were trained on Stanton. “He’s been flailing around for most of the past three days. Gets pretty loud in there. He’s still saying vooge vooge vooge over and over.”

  “Saying what?” Stanton asked.

  “Sounds like vooge to me. Hell if I know what it means.”

  “I typed it in on Google and got nothing that made sense in any language,” Thane said.

  Mariano pulled the strings of his mask firmly behind his ears. “Hey, Doc, if you’re the expert, can I ask you a question about this?”

  Stanton glanced at Thane. “Of course.”

  “What this guy has,” the guard said. “It’s not contagious, is it?”

  “No, don’t worry,” Stanton said, following Thane into the room.

  �
�He’s got like six kids, I think,” Thane whispered once they were out of earshot. “He’s always talking about how he doesn’t want to pass on anything from here. I’ve never seen him without a mask.”

  Stanton pulled a fresh mask from a dispenser on the wall and fastened it to his face. “We should be following his lead,” he said, handing another mask to Thane. “Insomnia compromises the immune system, so we have to avoid infecting John Doe with a cold or anything else he won’t be able to fight off. Everyone needs masks and gloves when they go in. Post a sign on the door.”

  Stanton had seen worse patient rooms, but not in the United States. Room 621 contained two metal beds, cracked night tables, two orange chairs, and curtains with worn edges. Dispensers of Purell clung loosely to the wall, and there was water damage on the ceiling. Lying in the bed closest to the window was their John Doe: about five-foot-six, thin, with dark skin and long black hair that draped over his shoulders. His head was covered with tiny stickers, from which wires extended toward an EEG machine, measuring brain waves. The patient’s gown clung to him like damp tissue paper, and he was groaning softly.

  The doctors watched the patient tossing and turning. Stanton noted John Doe’s eye movements, the strange, staccato breathing, and the involuntary tremor in his hands. In Austria, Stanton had treated a woman with FFI who’d had to be chained to her bed because her tremor was so bad. By that time, her children were overcome by grief and helplessness and by the knowledge they might someday die the same way. It had been hard to watch.

  Thane bent down to flip the pillow beneath John Doe’s head. “How long can you live without sleeping?” she asked.

  “Twenty days max of total insomnia,” Stanton said.

  Even most doctors knew virtually nothing about sleep. Medical schools spent less than one day out of four years on it, and Stanton himself had learned what he knew only through his FFI cases. Part of it was that no one knew why humans needed sleep in the first place: Its function and importance were as mysterious as the existence of prions. Some experts believed sleep recharged the brain, assisted in the healing of wounds, and aided in metabolism. Some suggested it protected animals against the dangers of night or that sleep was an energy-conservation technique. But no one had ever been able to explain why not sleeping killed Stanton’s FFI patients.