12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  Chel hadn’t really processed how deep his competitive streak ran until the night after she won the American Society of Linguistics’ most prestigious award. They’d gotten to the bottom of a second bottle of Sangiovese at their favorite Italian restaurant, and Patrick tilted his glass toward her.

  “To you,” he’d said. “For picking the right specialty.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” he’d said, downing a long sip of wine. “I’m just happy epigraphy is well appreciated.”

  He did his best to behave every time another of her articles was accepted or she received another award, but it was forced cheer. Eventually, Chel limited what she told him about work to the few frustrations she had with her job: students not doing their work or the politics of the Getty board. She shared every bad thing that happened and none of the good; it was easier. But with each little omission, Chel felt the distance growing between them.

  Patrick again shifted the star pattern on the planetarium ceiling. “I’ve been seeing someone,” he said.

  Chel looked up. “You have?”

  “Yeah. For a couple of months. Her name is Martha.”

  “Is it real?”

  “I think so. I’ve been staying at her place. She was anxious about me seeing you tonight, but she understood the urgency. Pretty weird excuse to get together with your ex in the middle of the night.”

  “I didn’t know anyone under sixty was named Martha.”

  “She’s plenty south of sixty, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “So she’s a child. Even better.”

  “She’s thirty-five, and a successful theater director. And she wants to get married.”

  Chel was astounded that he was thinking of marriage so soon after their breakup. “At least you’re not in the same field.”

  Patrick looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that you’ll never have to worry about … work disagreements.”

  “You think that was our problem?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “The problem wasn’t me competing with you, Chel,” he said slowly. “Until you realize you’ve long surpassed whatever expectations your father might have had for you, you’ll never be happy. Or be able to make anyone else happy.”

  Chel turned back to the codex images. “We should focus.”

  PATRICK FINALLY STOPPED the projector ten minutes later, breaking the silence of the enormous room. “This matches all of the constraints,” he said, pointing up. “All eighteen.”

  “You’re sure?” Chel asked. “This is it?”

  “This is it,” he said. “Between 15.5 and 16.1 degrees north and 900 to 970 A.D. We can’t know exactly where it falls, but we can apply the mean values. So we’re basically talking about fifteen and a half degrees north and 935 A.D. I told you I’d figure it out.”

  This was the same sky above Paktul as he had written the codex. The exact same. Chel had plenty of occasion to feel genuine awe in her work, but this feeling of transcending time and space was unique, and she sensed them getting closer to what they needed.

  “Near the southern part of the Petén, just like you thought,” Patrick said, rolling up his sleeves. He spread out a map of the Maya region on a desk beside the star projector. The map was positional, with latitude lines marking each half-degree change. “It’s not Tikal or Uaxactun or Piedras Negras; those are in the seventeen-degree range. So we’re looking at something farther south.”

  He traced an invisible line between the degree markers. The location of each of the known major Maya cities in the southeast Petén was marked, but Patrick’s invisible line didn’t intersect with any of them, or with any of the minor ones either.

  Now something was bothering Chel.

  “Is there another computer I can use?” she asked.

  Patrick pointed toward a small office in the back of the planetarium.

  At the monitor, she found her way to Google Earth and a digital map showing contemporary villages in Guatemala. There were no latitude markings. So Chel pulled up another map online that had detailed latitude lines, then toggled between them until she found what she was searching for.

  15.8 degrees north ran within fifty miles of where she was born.

  CHEL’S ONLY MEMORY from her childhood in Kiaqix was of riding on her father’s shoulders. It was early evening in the dry season, and Alvar had finished working for the day, so he took her to settle a claim with a neighbor over a chicken missing from their coop. From her perch, Chel watched as young girls brought pails of cornmeal from the mill back to their mothers, to be used for dinner tortillas and breakfast drinks. Whistle music came from the houses, and a drum was played; Alvar danced to it as he walked, and Chel felt the sandpaper of his beard on her legs.

  She’d been back to her homeland several times since her mother took her from Kiaqix, and each time she fell more in love with the communal bonfires where stories of the ancestors were still told, the labor-sharing on the milpas at harvest time, the gifts from the beekeepers, and the villagers’ spirited volleyball and soccer games.

  Kiaqix was hundreds of miles from any of the big cities, the highways, or the ruins, and reaching it wasn’t easy. You could take a small plane to a landing strip five miles east. But there was only one car in the village of two thousand people, so you’d likely be going those last five miles on foot. Factor in the rainy season, which made the one road into town treacherous, and you were dealing with one complicated journey.

  More, Chel’s mother refused to return to Guatemala and always begged Chel not to either. Ha’ana believed that as long as the ladinos controlled the country, the Manu family would never be safe. With tensions high and violence erupting again, Ha’ana’s anxiety had only increased.

  “What is it?” Patrick asked from the doorway. Behind him, the planetarium was pitch-dark, as if the world ended here, in this tiny office.

  She showed him the map she’d pulled up online. He leaned over her to better see the screen, and instinctively Chel put her hand on the cuff of his shirt, feeling the fabric at her fingertips. Whatever was lost between them, the feel of him was so familiar. “Are there any major ruins on that latitude?” he asked.

  Chel shook her head.

  “But Kiaqix is a small village,” Patrick said. “You said the scribe is talking about a city of tens of thousands.”

  He was right: Kiaqix was a no-man’s-land for the ancients. No artifacts had been discovered there from the classic era, and the nearest ruins were two hundred miles away.

  Then again, Chel thought, staring at the map, the circumstances described in the codex were eerily similar to the stories she knew: the oral history of a king destroying his own city. “The Original Trio,” she reminded Patrick. “Kiaqix was supposedly founded when three city-dwellers escaped to the jungle.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe there was a lost city. That it was a legend.”

  “There’s no evidence either way,” Chel whispered. “All we have are the oral history and the people who say they saw the ruins but couldn’t prove it.”

  Remembering now, Patrick said, “Your uncle, right?”

  “My father’s cousin.”

  More than three decades ago, Chiam Manu left Kiaqix and went into the jungle for more than a week. When he returned, he claimed to have found Kiaqix’s lost city, from which the oral history claimed their ancestors came. But Chiam brought nothing back and would tell no one in which direction the lost city lay. Few believed him; most ridiculed Chiam and called him a liar. When he was murdered by the army weeks later, the truth died with him.

  “What about Volcy?” Patrick continued. “You think it’s possible he’s from Kiaqix?”

  Chel took a breath. “Everything he said about his village could be said of Kiaqix, I guess. And also about three hundred other villages across the Petén.”

  Patrick put his hand on top of hers and leaned closer. Chel smelled traces of the sandalwood soap h
e always used. “How does this book land in your lap in the middle of all this? It’s one hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  Chel turned back to the computer screen. There was no word in Qu’iche for coincidence, and it wasn’t only a problem of translation. When events happened together and pointed in a single direction, her people used a different word. It was the same word Chel’s father used in his final letter from prison, when he sensed his death was near: ch’umilal.

  Fate.

  12.19.19.17.14

  DECEMBER 15, 2012

  NINETEEN

  JUST AFTER SIX A.M., WHILE DAVIES AND THANE REVIEWED every detail of their plan for a final time, Stanton stepped out onto the empty boardwalk to join a conference call with government officials in L.A., Atlanta, D.C., and around the country. The sun was inching toward the coastline and hadn’t started cooking the ocean air, so in his thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, he was underdressed for the chill lingering on the Walk. The only sound competing with the lapping of the waves was an invisible helicopter churning somewhere in the distance.

  Tuning out a procedural roll call, Stanton glimpsed a small circle of men sitting in sun chairs right near the shore, all wearing eye shields. At first he couldn’t imagine who was brazen enough to meet right now in violation of the curfew. Then Stanton realized they were sitting in exactly the same spot as the Venice Beach men’s AA meeting always did. They often congregated at dawn, and, however surprising, it was a strange comfort to Stanton to know that some appointments couldn’t be missed.

  “The utilities can’t keep up with the demands or the outages,” a FEMA deputy was saying on the phone now. “No electricity means no potable water.”

  Los Angeles had been on the brink of an energy crisis for decades. Now, with half of the city suffering from anxiety-related sleeplessness, lights and televisions and computers ran twenty-four hours a day. Blackouts spread. Water consumption had skyrocketed. Taps could run dry within a week.

  “What are we doing about bodies?” Stanton broke in, out of turn. “Houses across the city could have decaying corpses inside them.”

  “We have to take them to a central location,” somebody replied. He didn’t recognize the voice—there were so many bureaucrats involved in every decision now.

  “We could be talking about thousands in a few days,” Stanton said. There were more than eight thousand known victims of VFI citywide. “You don’t have the equipment for that kind of biohazard, and there’d be no way to ensure the safety of the workers.”

  “Well, we have to do something,” Cavanagh cut in, “and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m starting to think that means telling people they have to douse the bodies with acid or lye and let them dissolve in bathtubs.”

  Stanton’s boss was taking the call from the recession-shuttered post office in East L.A. that had been turned into a CDC command center. From the tone of Cavanagh’s voice, Stanton could feel the toll all this was exacting on her. Already, forty-two CDC investigators and nurses were infected with VFI, and he knew Cavanagh well enough to know that she blamed herself. She’d personally selected many of them to come out from Atlanta to help manage the outbreak.

  As the call broke up, Stanton sensed an opening and asked his boss to stay on the line. One way or another, he, Davies, and Thane were going to test the antibodies in the next twenty-four hours. Their plans were in place. But if he could convince Cavanagh that it was the right thing, they’d have access to a much larger sample group and they’d be acting within the law.

  “Emily, the quarantine seal is breaking,” he said. “Soon they’re going to be having this conversation about dead bodies and bathtubs in every city in America. We need to discuss treatment options.”

  “Gabe, we talked about this.”

  “But I have to tell you again. We could have an experimental antibody therapy available soon if we start immediately. In a day or two.” He glanced back over his shoulder at his condo, not wanting to imagine Cavanagh’s reaction if she knew about the antibodies being created inside as they spoke. But he knew that if they could get them to work and could prove it, she’d have no choice but to come around.

  The helicopter circled somewhere even closer behind Stanton, getting louder. “I’ll discuss it with the director,” Cavanagh said finally. “Maybe he can get the White House to issue an executive order and suspend normal FDA protocols.”

  “FDA’ll drag their feet. They always do.”

  “We all want the same thing, Gabe.”

  Stanton hung up, frustrated by the resignation in her voice. She’d left him with little choice. Before he got back inside, his phone rang.

  He picked up. “Did you find anything?”

  “Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu.”

  “I know. Did you find something more?”

  “Sorry. Yes. We did. It could be … useful. It’s good.”

  It was nice to hear someone sounding alive, even hopeful. “Good is good,” Stanton said. “What is it?”

  Listening to her story—the ancient city’s latitude line seemed to intersect with that of the village in which she’d been born?—Stanton didn’t know what to think. He had no choice but to trust her at this point: Everyone said she knew what she was doing. Yet every revelation of hers seemed more improbable than the last. Everything in her work and her life seemed to constantly circle back on itself.

  “You couldn’t tell if Volcy was from your village?” Stanton asked.

  “We knew he was from the Petén,” she said. “But not Kiaqix. And he was afraid—he wouldn’t say anything specific about where he was from.”

  “Is there any way for you to confirm this before we take it further?”

  “There are no phones in Kiaqix, but I talked to a cousin of mine. He lives in Guatemala City, but he goes back regularly to visit his father. I had him look at a picture on one of the news sites, and he recognized Volcy from the photo you released.”

  Now the helicopter buzzed directly overhead. Stanton glanced up and saw not one but two choppers. They were flying low and seemed to be headed directly for the beach. One was large and looked military. The other was smaller—four seats encased in a glass bubble. Seconds later they both dropped toward the ground in lockstep. It was one of the oddest sights Stanton had ever seen on the boardwalk, and that was saying a hell of a lot.

  The men from the AA meeting stood up and shielded their faces from the sand tornadoing up into the air. Finally both helicopters had landed about a hundred yards up the beach, and five men in camouflage carrying machine guns poured from the National Guard helicopter. They ran to the other chopper, pulled out a young pilot, a man in his sixties, and a redhead who couldn’t be more than thirty. The older man wore a blazer and slacks, as if headed to a business meeting. The redhead was still wearing her sunglasses and screaming as they were cuffed and arrested. Stanton watched in disbelief: L.A.’s wealthiest were trying to flee the quarantine.

  “Dr. Stanton?”

  He refocused. “So we need to find out when the last time people in your village saw Volcy and in what direction he might have headed from there to find this … lost city,” Stanton told Chel. A jungle Atlantis as the source of VFI was hardly the answer he’d been hoping for. But it was what they had.

  “Like I said, no phones. And mail can take weeks to get there. We’re really talking about the middle of the jungle.”

  “Then we’ll send a plane in,” he said.

  “I thought the Guatemalans weren’t cooperating.”

  With thousands now infected here, it would be very difficult to convince anyone in the States, let alone Guatemala, that sending a team into the jungle in search of vanished ruins was the best move. “Figure out the location and we’ll make them do it,” he told her.

  “I’ll do everything I can,” she said.

  “I know you will, Chel.” He spoke her name as she had pronounced it to him when they first met—with a soft syllable, as if he was saying “shhhell.” It was the
first time he’d said it aloud. For a second he worried he’d screwed it up.

  All she said was, “I’ll call soon, Gabe.”

  Wind rolled in off the ocean, and the marine layer shielded the rising sun. By the time they hung up, the guardsmen had put the quarantine violators into the army helicopter and taken off. Only the small bubble chopper still sat on the sand. Two of the AA guys were peering inside the empty cockpit, probably trying to assess if they could get into the air again.

  As one of them reached a heavily inked arm through the window, Stanton was reminded of someone. He turned and hurried down the boardwalk. Metal gates on stores had been pried open and were curled up like old-fashioned sardine cans. Cars had never been allowed on the Walk, but now he had to navigate around abandoned junkers every few feet. A pickup truck had crashed through the brick wall, directly into a store. The lawn area between the pavement and the beach was strewn with dozens of yellow T-shirts with the logo VENICE, WHERE ART MEETS CRIME printed across them.

  Approaching the Freak Show, just off the walk, Stanton saw something moving out front. On the steps, a two-headed iguana jerked back and forth. The glass doors to the building had been smashed in by looters, and the animals had gotten out.

  The iguana scurried back up into the Freak Show building. Stanton followed.

  Inside, everything was destroyed.

  The room reeked of formaldehyde spilling out from broken preservation jars. A two-headed garter snake lay dead beneath an overturned pedestal. No trace of the other animals. Stanton ran to the small office in back. Neither Monster nor the Electric Lady was there. The laptop that his friend always had with him was smashed into pieces on the desk, and Monster’s windbreaker lay abandoned on the small cot.