“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 firs
t 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 scientific 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 profile 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.”
12.21: A Novel Page 12
