12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  Suddenly John Doe’s bloodshot eyes went wide. “Vooge, vooge, vooge!” he moaned, more loudly than before.

  At the monitor, Stanton studied the patient’s brain activity like a musician looking at sheet music he’d played a thousand times. The four stages of normal sleep ran in ninety-minute cycles, each with characteristic patterns, and, as expected, there was no evidence of any of them. No stage-one or -two slow-wave sleep, no REM, nothing. The machine confirmed what Stanton already knew from instinct and experience: This was no meth addiction.

  “Vooge, vooge, vooge!”

  “So what do you think?” asked Thane.

  Stanton met her eyes. “This could be the first case of FFI in U.S. history.”

  Though she’d been proven right, Thane didn’t look satisfied. “He’s going to the hundredth floor, isn’t he?”

  “Probably.”

  “There’s nothing we can do for him?”

  It was the question Stanton had been asking for a decade. Before prions were discovered, scientists believed that food-borne diseases came from bacteria, viruses, or fungi and replicated themselves with DNA or RNA. Yet prions had neither: They were made of pure protein and they “replicated” by causing other nearby proteins to mutate their shape as well. All of which meant that none of the conventional cures for bacteria or viruses worked on prions. Not antibiotics or antivirals or anything else.

  “I read about pentosan and quinacrine,” Thane said. “What about those?”

  “Quinacrine is toxic to the liver,” Stanton explained. “And we can’t get pentosan into the brain without doing even more damage.” There were some highly experimental treatments, he told her, but none that were ready for human testing and none that were FDA approved.

  But there were ways they could make John Doe more comfortable before the inevitable happened. “Where are the temperature controls?” Stanton asked.

  “They’re all central, down in the basement,” Thane said.

  He scanned the wall, started pulling back curtains and moving furniture. “Call down there and tell them to turn up the air-conditioning on this floor. We need to get the temperature in this room down as low as it’ll go.”

  “You’ll freeze every other patient on the floor.”

  “That’s what blankets are for. Let’s get fresh sheets and gowns for him too. He’ll keep sweating through them, so tell the nurses we need new ones every hour.”

  Thane hurried out, and Stanton flipped off all the lights and shut the door. He pulled the curtain over the window, preventing any outside light from spilling in, then picked up a towel and tossed it over the EEG monitor, extinguishing its light.

  The thalamus—a tiny collection of neurons in the midsection of the brain—was the body’s “sleep shield.” When it was time for sleep, it shut off “waking” signals from the outside world, like noise and light. In every FFI patient he’d treated, Stanton had seen the horrific effects of destroying this part of the brain. Nothing could be shut off or even tamped down, making victims painfully sensitive to light and sound. So while working with Clara, his Austrian patient, Stanton learned to relieve her distress in a small way by turning her room into a kind of cave.

  He gently put a hand on John Doe’s shoulder. “Habla español?”

  “Tinimit vooge. Tinimit vooge.”

  There would be no getting through to him without a translator, so Stanton began his physical exam. John Doe’s pulse was bounding, his nervous system firing on all cylinders. His breathing was coarse through his mouth, his bowels had ground digestion to a halt, and his tongue was swollen. All further confirmation of FFI.

  Thane reappeared, fastening a new mask over her mouth and nose. In her gloved hand she held a printout in Stanton’s direction. “Genetics just came back.”

  They’d extracted DNA from John Doe’s blood and mapped out chromosome 20, where the FFI mutation always occurred. This should be the final proof.

  When Stanton scanned the results, he saw a normal DNA sequence staring back at him. “There must’ve been a mistake in the lab,” he said, glancing at Thane. He could only imagine what the lab in this place looked like and how frequently there were mix-ups. “Tell them to run it again.”

  “Why?”

  He handed it back to her. “Because there’s no mutation here.”

  “They ran it twice. They knew how important it was,” Thane said as she studied the results. “I know the geneticist, and she doesn’t screw things up.”

  Was it possible Stanton had misjudged the clinical signs? How was there no mutation? In every case of FFI he had seen, a DNA mutation caused prions in the thalamus to transform and then cause symptoms.

  “Could it be something other than FFI?” asked Thane.

  John Doe opened his eyes again, and Stanton caught a glimpse of the pinprick pupils. There’d been no doubt in his mind that this was a case of FFI. All the signs were there. Progressing faster than usual, but there.

  “Vooge, vooge, vooge!” the man yelled again.

  “We have to find a way to communicate with him,” Stanton said.

  “We’ve got a team from the translator service coming in that can identify almost every American language, Central and South,” said Thane. “When we know what he’s speaking, we’ll bring in someone fluent.”

  “Get them in here now.”

  Thane said, “If he doesn’t have the genetic mutation, he can’t have FFI, right?”

  Stanton glanced up at her, his mind racing with new possibilities. “Right.”

  “So it’s not prion disease?”

  “It is. But if there’s no mutation, he must have gotten it another way.”

  “What other way?”

  For decades, doctors knew of a rare genetic prion affliction called CJD—Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Then, suddenly, dozens of people who’d all eaten from the same meat supply in Britain came down with symptoms identical to CJD, giving mad cow its proper name—variant CJD. The only difference was that one came from a genetic mutation and the other from contaminated meat. And that one destroyed entire economies and food-supply standards forever. It stood to reason that something similar was happening here with FFI.

  “He must have eaten tainted meat,” Stanton said.

  John Doe thrashed around, rattling the handrails. Stanton had so many questions: What was the patient saying? Where had he come from? What work did he do?

  “Jesus,” Thane said. “You mean a new prion strain that mimics the symptoms of FFI? How do you know it’s from meat?”

  “Vooge, vooge, vooge …”

  “Because it’s the only other way to get prion disease.”

  And if Stanton was right—if this new cousin of FFI was being carried through meat—they had to trace it back to wherever it came from and figure out how it got into the food supply. Most of all, they had to make sure there weren’t other people out there who were already sick.

  John Doe was full-on yelling now. “Vooge, vooge, vooge!”

  “What do we do?” Thane called out over him.

  Stanton pulled out his phone and dialed a number in Atlanta known to fewer than fifty people in the world. The operator picked up on the first ring. “Centers for Disease Control. This is the secure emergency line.”

  FOUR

  THE WORN LEATHER COUCH IN CHEL’S STUDY WAS PILED HIGH WITH old academic articles and back issues of Journal of Mayan Linguistics. Her drafting table and desk chair were covered with a broken PC, immigration forms, mortgage applications, and other paperwork for members of Fraternidad. The only space not hidden by books overflowing from the shelves was a small patch on the Oriental rug. That’s where Chel had been for the last hour, on the floor, staring at the box in front of her.

  She’d gotten a glimpse of the marvels inside—the glyphs that would tell some incredible story of the ancients, the artistry used in representing the gods. Chel had devoted her career to Mayan epigraphy—the study of ancient inscriptions—and she wanted so badly to remove the plastic casing on
ce more and to look at the glyphs again, to photograph them, to dig beyond what she’d already seen. But the image of a former colleague languishing in an Italian courtroom under the scrutiny of news cameras had been in Chel’s mind since she’d watched Gutierrez drive away from the church. The Getty’s previous curator of antiquities, who used to work just down the hall from Chel, had become embroiled in a legal battle when she was accused by Italian officials of acquiring illegally excavated artifacts for her collection.

  Chel knew that both the Getty and ICE would make an even bigger example of her if they discovered what she’d done. To forge paperwork after the fact, as she’d done with Gutierrez’s turtle shell, was one thing. A codex was different. There wasn’t a museum board in the world that would believe she hadn’t known what she was doing when she accepted it at the church.

  Chel gently picked up the box again. It weighed no more than five pounds. How had it even survived? In the mid-sixteenth century, inquisitors for the Catholic Church tried to rid the Maya of pagan influences and presided over an auto-da-fé, a massive bonfire where thousands of sacred Maya books, artworks, and inscriptions were destroyed. Until today, Chel and everyone else in her field believed only four codices had been saved. The Grolier Fragment marked the cycles of Venus; the Madrid Codex referred to omens about crops; and the Paris Codex was a guide to rituals and New Year ceremonies. Chel’s revered Dresden Codex—oldest of the known Maya books, dating to sometime around A.D. 1200—contained astrology, histories of kings, and predictions of the harvest. Yet even the Dresden didn’t come from the classic era of Maya civilization. How could this volume have been preserved for so long?

  The doorbell rang.

  It was after eight. Could it be Gutierrez already, back to collect his treasure? Why had she not opened the box? Then again, what if it was ICE? What if the dealer had already been arrested? Had ICE been watching when he came to the church?

  Chel picked up the box and hurried to the study closet. No one knew about the cubbyhole she’d discovered there, full of stacks of some previous tenant’s 1920s L.A. memorabilia. She buried the codex beneath a collection of black-and-white photographs of Wolfskill Farm—what Westwood was called before the First World War.

  The doorbell rang again as she went to answer it.

  Chel breathed a sigh of relief when she peeked through the window to see her mother standing in the entryway.

  “Want me to stand here all night?” Ha’ana asked as Chel opened the door. She stood just over five feet tall and wore a knee-length navy cotton dress, one of many acquired from the company at which she’d been a seamstress since they’d been in America. Even with her silver hair and several extra pounds, Ha’ana still had a radiance about her.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?”

  Ha’ana held canvas bags up in the air. “Cooking you dinner, remember? Now, will you make me stand out here in the cold or will you invite an old woman in?”

  In the day’s turmoil, Chel had forgotten all about their dinner plans.

  “This place used to be a lot cleaner,” Ha’ana said as she stepped inside and saw the state of the house. “When Patrick was here.”

  Patrick. Chel had dated him for almost a year and Ha’ana wouldn’t let it go. The reasons they’d broken up were more complicated than Chel ever felt like getting into with Ha’ana. But her mother was right: Since he moved out four months ago, Chel’s house near the UCLA campus had come to feel like little more than a stopover between her offices at the university and the Getty. After exhausting days, she often came home, undressed, and fell asleep watching the Discovery Channel.

  “Are you going to help me?” Ha’ana called from the kitchen.

  Chel joined her and helped unload the groceries. Difficulties with her back had made physical activity more challenging for Ha’ana recently, and even though the last thing Chel wanted was to sit for a meal, she’d never been good at saying no to her mother.

  Dinner was a four-cheese and spinach lasagna concoction with an excess of garlic. Growing up, Chel usually couldn’t get Ha’ana to cook Maya food—she’d been stuffed with macaroni and sandwiches on white bread. These days her mother watched the Food Network nonstop, and her continental cooking had improved. As they ate, Chel stared at her and listened to her chat about her day at the factory. But Chel’s mind was always in the other room with the codex. Ordinarily she would’ve been attentive to her mother. But not tonight.

  “Are you all right?”

  Chel looked up from her plate to see Ha’ana studying her. “I’m fine, Mom.” She doused her lasagna with red pepper. “So … I’m excited you’re coming to class next week.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m not going to be able to next week. Sorry.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a job too, Chel.”

  Ha’ana had hardly missed a day’s work in thirty years. “If you told your boss what you were doing, they’d want you to go. I can talk to her if you want.”

  “I’m working a double shift that day.”

  “Look, I’ve been telling the class all about the village’s oral history, and I think it would be fascinating for them to hear from someone who actually lived in Kiaqix.”

  “Yes,” Ha’ana said. “Someone must tell them all about our incredible Original Trio.” The irony in her voice was hard to miss.

  Beya Kiaqix, the tiny hamlet where both women were born, was rife with myth, particularly the legend of its origins. The story went that a noble man and his two wives had fled their ancient city, under the rule of a despotic king, and had founded the village. More than fifty generations of Chel’s ancestors had since lived in the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw, in the El Petén region of Guatemala.

  Chel and her mother were among the very few who’d left. By the time Chel was two years old, Guatemala was at the height of La Revolución, the longest and bloodiest civil war in Central American history. Afraid for her daughter’s life and for her own, Ha’ana had taken them out of Kiaqix—as the villagers called it—and never looked back. Thirty-three years ago they arrived in America, and she found a job and quickly taught herself English. By the time Chel was four, Ha’ana had her green card; soon they were both citizens.

  “You lived in Kiaqix too,” Ha’ana went on as she took another bite. “You know the myths. You don’t need me.”

  Since she was a child, Chel had watched her mother do everything she could to avoid talking about her past. Even if it could have been proven that every word of the oral history of their village was true, Ha’ana would find a way to ridicule it. Long ago, Chel had realized that it was her mother’s only way to escape the trauma of what had happened.

  Suddenly she wanted nothing so much as to run to the closet, retrieve the codex, and drop it in her mother’s lap. Even Ha’ana wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.

  “When was the last time you read a book written in Mayan?” Chel asked.

  “Why read a Mayan book when I spent all that time learning English? Besides, I haven’t heard of any good mysteries in Qu’iche lately.”

  “Mom, you know I’m not talking about a modern book. I’m talking about something written during the ancient era. Like the Popol Vuh.”

  Ha’ana rolled her eyes. “I actually saw a copy of the Popol Vuh at the bookstore the other day. They’re putting it with all that 12/21 nonsense. Loudmouth monkeys and flowery gods—that’s what you get in Mayan.”

  Chel shook her head. “Father wrote his letters in Qu’iche, Mom.”

  In 1979, two years after Chel was born, the Guatemalan army imprisoned her father for helping lead Kiaqix into rebellion. From jail, Alvar Manu secretly wrote a series of letters encouraging his village never to surrender. Ha’ana herself had smuggled out more than thirty entreaties into the hands of village leaders across El Petén, resulting in a doubling of the volunteer army in weeks. But the letters were also Chel’s father’s death warrant: When his jailers discovered him writing in his cell, he was executed without a trial.


  “Why do we always talk about this?” Ha’ana asked, standing to clear the plates.

  Chel felt frustrations toward her mother bubbling up. She loved her, and she would always be grateful for the opportunities Ha’ana had given her. But deep down, Chel also felt that her mother had abandoned their people, which was why Ha’ana hated to be reminded of it, and why showing her the codex in its current condition would be useless. Until Chel could figure out what it said, her mother would see the book as little more than disintegrating fragments of history she wanted to forget.

  “Leave the dishes,” Chel said, standing up.

  “They will only take a minute,” Ha’ana said. “Otherwise they’ll pile up like everything else in the house.”

  Chel took a breath. “I have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the museum.”

  “It’s nine o’clock, Chel. What kind of job is this?”

  “Thank you for dinner, Mom. But I really have to go.”

  “This would be an insult in Kiaqix,” Ha’ana said. “When a woman cooks for you, you don’t invite her to leave.”

  Ha’ana used their customs as a religion of convenience, invoking them to her advantage when she could, ridiculing them when they got in her way.

  “Well, then,” Chel said, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Kiaqix anymore.”

  OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, Chel had built a state-of-the-art Mesoamerican research facility at what was once California’s most traditional museum. When she had the time after hours, she liked to stroll through the empty galleries, set spectacularly high above Los Angeles. Walking past van Gogh’s Irises or Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier, she had fun imagining how John Paul Getty, the billionaire oilman who founded the museum, would have felt about exhibiting ceramic statues of kneeling Maya worshippers and Mesoamerican gods beside his beloved European artifacts.