12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  “The shape is identical to FFI,” Jiao said, surrendering her seat. “But you won’t believe the progression. It’s moving so much faster.”

  Stanton looked through the sights of the powerful electron microscope. Normal prion proteins were shaped like helices, like DNA, but here the helices had unwound and refolded into what looked like accordion fans.

  “How long’s it been since the baseline was taken?” Stanton asked.

  Jiao answered, “Only two hours.”

  The prions he was used to progressed over a course of months or longer. In investigating mad cow victims, he often had to go back three or four years to find the contaminated meat. But these proteins were changing faster than anything Stanton had ever seen. With the speed of a virus.

  “At this rate,” Jiao said, “it’ll take over the entire thalamus within a matter of days. And then only a few more days before brain death.”

  “The infection must have been recent,” Stanton said.

  Jiao nodded. “If it weren’t, he’d be dead already.”

  Stanton looked up at Davies. “We have to try the antibodies.”

  “Gabe …”

  “What antibodies?” Thane asked.

  It was their most recent attempt at a cure, Stanton explained. Humans couldn’t mount an “antibody” defense against foreign prions because the immune system confused them with the normal prion proteins in the brain. So the Prion Center team had “knocked out” these normal prions in mice (one of the side effects was making them unafraid of snakes) and then injected them with abnormal prions. The mice produced antibodies to the foreign prion, which could be harvested and theoretically used as a treatment. Stanton and his team hadn’t gotten it to work in a human yet, but it had shown considerable potential in a petri dish.

  Davies said, “Believe me, no one wants to tell the FDA to go screw themselves more than I do. But, Gabe, you don’t need another lawsuit.”

  Thane asked, “What lawsuit?”

  “We don’t need to go into this,” Stanton said.

  “It’s quite relevant,” Davies said. He turned to Thane. “He gave a victim of genetic prion disease an unapproved treatment.”

  “The family asked for antibody therapy,” Jiao interjected, “and then after he gave it, and the patient didn’t make it, they changed their minds.”

  Thane shook her head. “Gotta love patient families. The old hypocritic oath.”

  They were interrupted by another of the postdocs. Christian wasn’t wearing the earbuds through which he usually played hardcore rap at all hours—an undeniable sign of the heightened tension in the lab. “The cops called again,” he said. “They searched the Super 8 motel room where they picked up our John Doe, and they found a receipt from a Mexican restaurant. It’s right by the hotel.”

  “Where do they source their meat from?” Stanton asked.

  “Industrial farm in the San Joaquin. They put out about a million pounds of beef a year. They haven’t had any breaches, but they also do their own rendering.”

  Stanton glanced at his partner.

  “It’s possible,” Davies said.

  “Rendering?” Thane asked.

  “You know the toothpaste you use?” Davies said, all too delighted to discuss the nastier side of the meat business. “And the mouthwash you gargle with? How about the toys little children play with? They’re all made with the byproducts of rendered meat after animals have been slaughtered.”

  “Rendering was probably the original source of the mad cow outbreak,” Stanton explained. “Cows were fed remains of other cow brains.”

  “Cannibalism by force,” Thane said.

  Stanton turned back to his postdoc. “Which industrial supplier is it?”

  “Havermore Farms,” said Christian.

  Stanton sat up in his chair. “The Mexican restaurant sources from Havermore?”

  “Why? Do you know that name?” Thane asked.

  He reached for his phone. “They supply all the meat for the Los Angeles Unified School District.”

  HAVERMORE FARMS nestled in the valley of the San Emigdio Mountains, where the wind couldn’t carry its smell anywhere near civilization. It took Stanton and Davies an hour to get there in morning traffic, which left them two hours to prove that the mutated prion had come from here, before the L.A. public schools served Havermore Farms lunch meat to a million students.

  The doctors sped past the cow pens, where thousands of cattle were crowded together. These were the slaughter animals Stanton was worried about; they were being force-fed corn, and their diets were likely being supplemented with protein cakes from the other side of the facility, a potential source of the new strain of prion.

  They’d arranged to go directly to the rendering floor, where the protein cakes were made, the likeliest place for contamination. Stanton and Davies followed Mastras, the floor manager, past conveyor belts on which sat heads, and hooves that once belonged to pigs, cattle, and horses, and euthanized cats and dogs. Men wearing bandannas, goggles, and masks yelled to one another in Spanish while bulldozing skinned and defleshed carcasses into a large pit where cow limbs were mixed with pig jaws, hair, and bone. Only the traces of Vicks VapoRub they’d placed beneath their noses upon arrival kept the smell tolerable.

  “We’ve been open with the inspectors,” Mastras said. “They poke around, we give them feed logs, the whole thing. We’ve always come up clean.”

  “You mean the tiny fraction of samples the USDA tests has come up clean,” Davies said.

  “You know we’ll be screwed as soon as word gets out you guys are investigating us,” Mastras yelled over the bulldozers. He had red hair and pasty skin, and Stanton had taken an instant dislike to him. “It won’t even matter if it’s true or not.”

  “We’re not making anything public until we find the source,” said Davies. “CDC is keeping this all under wraps.”

  Stanton ran a quick calculation of the animal remains he could see scattered throughout the room. “This is a lot more than what you’re slaughtering here,” he said. “Are you rendering material from other farms?”

  “Some,” Mastras said. “But we don’t take any meat that’s still in the plastic from supermarkets, and we don’t grind up any flea collars with those insecticides either. The pound takes off the collars before dropping their animals off, or we don’t take them. Bosses insist, because they want the highest standards.”

  Davies said, “Or, as we call it, the law.”

  They arrived in front of a series of conveyor belts, on which carcasses of different animals came in off the trucks once they were skinned. All the belts were covered with indistinguishable organs, bloody skin, masses of mixed bones, and broken sets of teeth.

  Davies started with the belt on which the pig remains were carried inside. Using forceps and an X-Acto knife, he cut samples from the belt and dropped them into a specimen retrieval cup for the ELISA—enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay—a test they’d developed years ago for finding traces of mad cow. Stanton focused on the cattle remains, placing pieces of flesh on a plastic plate with twenty different holes, each of which contained a clear protein-infused liquid. If there was any mutated prion, the solution would turn dark green.

  Ten minutes later, after checking a dozen samples coming in on the conveyor belt, there was no change in any of the solutions. When Stanton repeated the process, the result was the same.

  “No reaction,” Davies said as he came back across the floor.

  Stanton turned to the floor manager. “Where are your trucks?”

  Out on the loading docks, they worked over every inch of the vehicles used to cart the remains in from the slaughterhouse. They swabbed and tested the bloodstained walls and floors of all twenty-two trucks.

  But swab after swab was negative, and when they got through all of them, the ELISA solutions stayed clear.

  Mastras was smiling now. He hopped out of the last truck and called upstairs to report that they could begin serving to LAUSD immediately.<
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  “I told you,” Mastras said. “We’ve always been clean.”

  Stanton prayed they hadn’t missed anything and chided himself for believing they’d find the answer so quickly. Rendering was only one of the dangerous ways man manipulated meat. They’d just have to widen their search for what made John Doe sick. With every passing hour, others could be infected.

  When Stanton stepped out of the truck, he saw that Mastras had left the loading dock and walked off down the road. He was staring at something in the distance. Stanton followed the manager until he had a clear look. Dust rose up in clouds beneath the tires of vans with antennas pointed in all directions.

  “Motherfucker,” Mastras said, looking back at Stanton.

  News crews were speeding toward them.

  SIX

  THE MASS OF PRESS CONGREGATED OUTSIDE PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL made Chel even more nervous than she already was. The doctor she’d spoken to on the phone told her the case was highly confidential, which suited her perfectly. Her motives here were complicated, and the less attention drawn to them the better. Still, it was clear some big news story had broken; in the parking lot there were news crews and cameras and reporters everywhere.

  She sat in her car, considering the odds that the press presence had anything to do with why she was here. If she went inside and there was a connection between the sick man and the book, she could end up in serious trouble. But if she didn’t, she might never know how it was possible that a sick indigenous man was repeating the Mayan word for codex a day after Gutierrez showed up with possibly the most important document in her people’s history. Her curiosity trumped her fear.

  Ten minutes later, Chel stood in the patient’s room on the sixth floor of the hospital with Dr. Thane, her curiosity forgotten. They hovered over the patient’s bed, watching a man who was suffering terribly, sweating and in obvious pain. How he had ended up here, Chel didn’t know, but to die in an unfamiliar place, far from home, was the worst of all fates.

  “We need to find out his name, how long he’s been in the States, and when he got sick,” Thane said. “And anything else you can tell us. Any detail could be important.”

  Chel looked back at John Doe. “Rajawxik chew …” he mumbled in Qu’iche.

  “Can we get him some water?” Chel asked Thane.

  Thane motioned at his IV. “He’s more hydrated than I am right now.”

  “He says he’s thirsty.”

  The doctor picked up the pitcher on John Doe’s tray table, filled it in the sink, and then poured water into his cup. He grabbed it in both hands and gulped it down.

  “It’s safe to get close to him?” Chel asked.

  “It’s not contagious that way,” Thane told her. “The disease spreads through tainted meat. The masks are so we don’t give him another infection while his defenses are down.”

  Chel adjusted the straps on her face mask and moved closer. It was unlikely the man worked in commerce; Maya who peddled their wares to tourists along the roads of Guatemala picked up some Spanish. He had no tattoos or piercings, so he wasn’t a shaman or a daykeeper. But his palms were callused, hardened across the base of each finger, with strips of cracked skin extending from the knuckle to the butt of the thumb. It was the sign of the machete, the hand tool indígenas used to clear land for farming. It was also what looters used to search the jungles for ruins.

  Was it possible she was looking at the man who discovered the codex? Thane said, “Okay, let’s start with his name.”

  “What is your family’s name, brother?” Chel asked him. “I am a Manu,” she said. “My given name is Chel. What do they call you?”

  “Rapapem Volcy,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Rapapem, meaning flight. Volcy was a common surname. From the inflection of his vowels, Chel believed he was from somewhere in the south Petén.

  “My family comes from El Petén,” she said. “Does yours?”

  Volcy said nothing. Chel tried asking a few different ways, but he’d gone silent.

  “What about when he came to the United States?” Thane asked.

  Chel translated and got a clearer answer. “Five suns ago.”

  Thane looked surprised. “Only five days ago?”

  Chel looked back at Volcy. “You came across the border through Mexico?”

  The man squirmed in his bed and didn’t answer. Instead, he closed his eyes. “Vooge,” he repeated again.

  “What about that?” Thane asked. “Vooge, is it? What does it mean? I looked it up with every spelling I could imagine and couldn’t find anything.”

  “It’s w-u-j,” Chel explained. “W is pronounced like a v.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the Qu’iche word we use to refer to the Popol Vuh, the holy creation epic of our people,” Chel said. “He knows he’s sick, and he probably wants the comfort the book gives him.”

  “So he wants us to bring one to him?”

  Chel reached into her bag, pulled out a tattered copy of the holy book, and set it on the nightstand. “Like a Christian might want a Bible.”

  No indígena would use only the word wuj—what the Maya called their ancient books—for the proper name of the Popol Vuh. But no one would question her here.

  “See if he can tell us anything about when he got sick,” Thane said. “Ask him if he remembers when he first had trouble sleeping.”

  As Chel translated the doctor’s questions into Qu’iche, Volcy opened his eyes a little. “In the jungle,” he said.

  Chel blinked, confused. “You were sick in the jungle?”

  He nodded.

  “You were sick when you came here, Volcy?”

  “For three suns before I came here, I had not slept.”

  “He was sick in Guatemala?” Thane asked. “You’re sure that’s what he said?”

  Chel nodded. “Why? What does that mean?”

  “It means I need to make some calls.”

  CHEL PUT A HAND on the crease between Volcy’s neck and shoulder. It was a technique her mother had used when Chel was a little girl, to calm her after a nightmare or a bad scrape; her grandmother had done the same for her mother. As Chel rubbed her hand back and forth, she felt the tension in Volcy’s body loosening. She didn’t know how long the doctor would be gone. This was her chance.

  “Tell me, brother,” she whispered. “Why did you come from El Petén?”

  Volcy spoke. “Che’qriqa’ ali Janotha.”

  Help me find Janotha.

  “Please,” he continued. “I have to get back to my wife and my daughter.”

  She leaned in. “You have a daughter?”

  “A newborn,” he said. “Sama. Now Janotha must care for her alone.”

  Chel knew that, but for a twist of fate, she could easily have been Janotha, waiting with a newborn in a palm-thatched house for a man to come home, watching his empty hammock hanging from the roof. Somewhere in Guatemala, Janotha was pressing corn into tortillas over a hearth and promising her infant daughter that her father would return to them soon.

  Volcy seemed to fade in and out, but Chel decided to press her advantage. “Do you know the ancient book, brother?”

  His eyes suddenly focused on her in a way they hadn’t before.

  “I have seen the wuj, brother,” Chel continued. “Can you tell me about it?”

  Volcy stared at her. “I did what any man does to help his family.”

  “What did you do to help your family?” she asked. “Sell the book?”

  “It was broken into pieces,” he whispered. “On the floor of the temple … dried up by a hundred thousand days.”

  So Chel had been right: The man lying here in front of her was the looter. Tensions in Guatemala had left indígenas like Volcy—manual laborers—with little option. Yet somehow, against all odds, he’d found a temple with a book that he understood would command a fortune in America. The amazing thing was that he had managed to bring it here himself.

  “Brother, you brought the b
ook to America to sell?”

  “Je’,” Volcy said. Yes.

  Chel glanced back over her shoulder to make sure she was still alone before asking, “Did you sell it to someone? Did you sell it to Hector Gutierrez?”

  Volcy said nothing.

  “Tell me this,” Chel said, trying a different tack. She put a finger to her cheek. “Did you sell it to a man with red ink on his cheek? Just above his beard?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you meet him here or in the Petén?”

  He pointed down at the floor, at this foreign land he would no doubt die in. Volcy found the tomb, looted the book, made his way here, and somehow hooked up with Gutierrez. Within a week, the book was sitting in Chel’s lab at the Getty.

  “Brother, where is this temple?” she asked. “There is so much good that could come to our people if you will tell me where the temple is.”

  Instead of answering, Volcy whipped his body toward his side table, his arms flailing at the pitcher of water. The phone and alarm clock crashed to the ground. He grabbed the top off the pitcher and poured the rest of the water into his mouth. Chel stumbled back and her chair fell to the floor.

  When Volcy finished drinking, Chel reached for the end of his blanket and dried his face. She knew she had little time to get the answers she needed. He was calm again, so she pressed on. “Can you tell me where Janotha lives?” she asked. “What village are you and Janotha from? We can send word to your family and let them know you are here.” The temple couldn’t be far from his own home.

  Volcy looked confused. “Who will you send there?”

  “We have many from all over Guatemala in Fraternidad Maya. Someone will know the way to your village, I promise.”

  “Fraternidad?”

  “This is our church,” Chel said. “Where Maya here in Los Angeles worship.”

  Volcy’s eyes filled with distrust. “That is Spanish. You worship with ladinos?”

  “No,” Chel said. “Fraternidad is a safe place of worship for the indígenas.”