“This is incredible!” I wish I had checked the website count to see how viral it had gone.
“This is your old school, right?” Alex says, pointing to the email address.
“This is me! I registered that email address to look official. Can you believe I started an email on the Isle of Huracan and within days it came back to you, one of like twelve people who lives there? I mean, what are the chances?”
“Wow, that is quite a coincidence,” he says, looking a little freaked. I resist the temptation to use Bolon’s line, Coincidence is merely a fleeting glimpse of wholeness.
I see Thomas walking toward us, cradling his hand. “That still really painful?” I ask. He just nods. Being hurt has put him in a black mood.
We stand up and get in line to board. I’m glad when he has to go to the back of the plane. Alex and I are up front, near business class.
After we take off and get settled, I pull out my laptop to read more about the Tzolk’in. Alex leans in to read along.
“So I made big progress on the conversion of numbers to notes,” Alex says.
“Really?”
“Aye, they’re lousy with fractals and harmonics.”
I try to recall what a fractal is. I sort of remember it’s a small piece of something that looks like the whole but just in case, I ask a question that doesn’t immediately show my stupidity, “Like what’s an example?”
“Well, take the Tzolk’in, it’s a cycle of 260 days—that’s a fractal of the 26,000-year cycle of precession. And the Long Count Calendar, the one that ends in 2012, is a cycle of 5,200 days, and then there’s another calendar that’s fifty-two years. This goes on and on between the twenty calendars. The numbers 13, 20, 52, 260, and 144 all seem to be important.”
For the first time I am more stunned by his brain than by his looks. Both of our arms are on the edge of the shared armrest, with just millimeters between us. As I feel the warmth coming off his skin and seeping into mine, I imagine my vibrating atoms jumping over to bump into his.
“That’s amazing,” I say, a little too gushy like some kind of fan girl.
“There’s something really beautiful about all of these cycles of time nested in one another. These guys were such elegant mathematicians, thousands of bloody years ago!”
Elegant is one of those buzzwords that computer and math people use. For Dad it’s the highest compliment he could get, that his code was elegant.
“So how does music fit in?”
“Well, I wrote a little music algorithm app that converts sets of numbers into notes.”
“Are you like a closet genius?” I ask.
“If I were a genius, I wouldn’t be hidin’ it in a closet.” He shrugs. “It’s just math.”
“Just math—”
“Hey—you’re no slouch. How long did it take you to make that website? Or write that Mayan birthday converter?”
“That’s just HTML and JavaScript.”
“Aye, well, then we’re a good team aren’t we?” he says as he nudges me with his elbow.
I carry all these touches around with me; I can still feel the time he sandwiched my hand between his in the library, still feel his hand on my shoulder, still sense the warmth from his back on the castle wall after he’d stepped away from it. Even this nudge I’ll catalog and save.
He pulls a thumb drive from his pocket. “Reckon you’d like to see it?”
I slip the computer onto his tray table. As he installs it he says, “Okay, today is 12 Chicchan—perfect because twelve is the pulse of understanding and Chicchan is all about human evolution and forward movement, aye?”
“Isn’t that amazing? I mean, that’s exactly what we’re doing this minute—trying to understand this human evolution puzzle!”
“It’s bloody cool is what it is,” he says, his face full of excitement. “Okay, now let’s plug the long count number into the music algorithm app and I’ll play you the tones of the day. Today is 12.19.17.8.5 in the Long Count.”
“Those numbers seem so random.”
“They are random by themselves, but each number is in relation to another—like this first number in the string, I take that as a fraction of the total it could be, which is 144,000 days. That’s all built into the algorithm, though.”
“God, you have really done your homework on this thing!”
“I set piano as default,” he says as he clicks the play button. “But we can change it to whatever instrument we want.”
A beautiful string of notes plays.
“That sounds … I don’t know …”
“Haunting?” Alex says, finishing my thought.
“Yes! It’s both beautiful and eerie at the same time.”
“So if sound really has something to do with changing DNA, we just have to figure out how to get kids to hear the daily tone,” Alex says.
I lay my head back for a moment to think.
“Ringtone?”
“Pardon me?” Alex says.
“What if there was a way to subscribe to a cell service that changes your ringtone to the Tzolk’in tune of the day?”
“Right! We could make a widget! Every time the phone rings the tone plays and the daylord and bar-and-dot number come up.”
“And like a daily astrology download, there would be a sentence describing what that day means!”
“We could easily do this, Caity. Seriously.”
“Hey, have you heard about the ringtone kids are using now that’s in the hertz range that only people under twenty can hear?” I ask.
“Yeah! That’s the mosquito tone that was developed for shopkeepers to blast so kids wouldn’t loiter.”
“Exactly. But kids have hijacked it to use in school, so teachers can’t hear their phones ring. So if we wanted to keep it quiet, we could just translate your tones into mosquito hertz level,” I say.
I am overwhelmed with what feels like a déjà-vu, but isn’t. It’s not exactly as if I’ve seen this before, it’s as if I feel like I am exactly where I need to be.
“As soon as we get back I can start on that,” he says. “I’ve an idea on how to do it but I’ll have to do a bit of research first.”
Before long, the food service and movie start. When the flight attendants darken the cabin and give everyone pillows and blankets, I pretend to fall asleep and slowly lower my head until it is resting on Alex’s shoulder. I expect it to stiffen as my cheekbone touches it but there’s no resistance, he just shifts a little to make it more comfortable for me. I can feel each skin cell in contact with his shirt. Before I know it, I really am asleep.
By the time I wake up, Alex is sleeping. I carefully pull out my sketchbook, trying not to disturb him. I want to draw that peacock room that I dreamed about yesterday, before I forget all the details.
Well into the sketching, I realize that Alex has woken up and is watching me. “Reckon you can draw me?” he asks, stretching as well as he can in the veal pen we’re confined to.
I look at him as if I’m considering it. “I don’t know, maybe,” I say, as if I had never sketched him before. Turning to a clean sheet of paper, I’m nervous that my complete adoration for him will ooze out in the drawing. But I realize this will give me an excuse to really look at him for an extended amount of time.
Things to take note of: (1) There is not one ridge on his nose. It’s as if it’s been sculpted rather than grown. (2) His eyelashes are freakishly long, like a doll’s. (3) The channel between his lip and nose is exquisite and it is extremely, extremely hard not to lean over and put my lips to it.
I take my time sketching, because we’ve got a lot of it, and it turns out to be one of the best portraits I’ve ever done. Of course, it’s the best subject matter I’ve ever had, too.
When we land in Chile, I am blown away by the Santiago airport. I was expecting something small and rustic, but it’s massive and modern and really clean. Boarding our last three-hour flight, I’m feeling both anxious and weary; I want to take a long shower and sleep i
n an actual bed for awhile.
Alex closes his eyes and I open up the CD again so I can get a better grasp on what I’m going to say. I spend the whole three-hour flight absorbed in the calendar. The more I read, the more I understand that there is some sort of strange power in this system.
The captain starts talking in Spanish so I look out the window. The island is in the distance and as we get closer, we see what it is famous for. At first they just look like dots, but then they come into view—hundreds of those big carved heads. I get goose bumps on my arms; this is just something I never thought I’d see in person. Pulling out my sketchbook and pen to take it down, I start to commit what I see to the page.
My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Lea, was the one who first told me about Easter Island. She was kind of a hippie and really into stuff like this. She used to show us weird movies from the seventies like Chariots of the Gods and this other one about how much your soul weighs after you die until she got in trouble for it because some parents thought it was pagan. She had a bouquet of different feathers in a jar on her desk and wore long jangly skirts that looked like they could be used for belly dancing. The very first day of class she made us write this quote eleven times:
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder —Sockman
The eleven times thing worked because I have always remembered it. I don’t know who Sockman is and I never really thought about what the quote meant, but now, as I see the island in the distance, it seems to make sense. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
Alex motions to the back of the plane with his head. “Thomas is knocked out again,” he says.
“Poor guy,” I say, looking back over my shoulder. As I see him—face slack, head cocked, mouth slightly open—a wave of nausea passes through me.
That is not Thomas.
No … no, no, no!” I say. “This can’t be—”
“What?” Alex asks. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, hell no!”
I look back again. How did I not see it?
“Caity, what is the matter with you?”
“That’s not Thomas!” I hiss.
“Well, then who on earth would it be, mate?”
I cover my face with my hands. “No. No. No. No.”
“Caity, you’re scaring me,” Alex says. “What is wrong with you?”
I tell him the whole story, everything Thomas told me. He turns white.
“Bloody hell!” Alex says, looking back. “I’ve known that man all my life.”
“Well, that’s not him, that’s Donald!”
Alex gets up. “I’m going to check it out.”
I watch as he walks back through the tiny aisle, slowly like a cat creeping up on a bird. He stops right by Thomas and takes a good long look at his sleeping face. Then he picks up the customs form sitting on his tray table, reads it and sets it back down.
“What did it say?” I ask when he returns.
“It has Thomas’ name on it, but surely Donald just took his passport.”
“What do we do?”
“We don’t have many options at this point, mate. We need to just be on high alert, keep him within our sights at all times.”
“But you have to share a room with him—doesn’t that freak you out?”
“Nae, it’ll give me a chance to keep an eye on him for you,” he says. “Besides he’s an old man and I’m a strapping young lad!”
He is trying to sound brave but I can hear a tinge of fear in his voice. All I can think about is what Barend Schlacter said to me in my room. I try to push the thought from my mind but it keeps popping up again, like a dandelion through concrete. The only bright spot is that those books had not been translated, which probably means he’s not totally connected to the Fraternitas. Yet.
For the rest of the flight, both of us keep looking back at the man with Thomas’ passport.
The Mataveri airport is what I expected the Santiago airport to look like: very small and pretty sketchy. While we wait for our luggage, I find a quiet spot and call my parents. After traveling all this way you’d think it would be a totally different day or something, but it’s only a five-hour time difference between here and Scotland.
Time is so weird.
We have a short and pleasant conversation in which I totally and completely lie to my loving and trusting parents. Nice.
It’s early evening by the time we check into the hotel, so before we head up to our rooms, we have an awkward dinner at the hotel restaurant; I’m glad that Donald is hurt because he doesn’t seem to notice that no one is talking or making eye contact. When I see him move his hand and wince, something brilliant occurs to me.
“Thomas, they probably have a doctor they can call. Do you want to get some antibiotics or something?” I ask.
He looks down at the hand, which is so swollen from travel and infection that the skin bulges on either side of the gauze wrapping and says, “Aye, s’pose I should have someone take a look.”
Before he even finishes the sentence, I’m out of my chair and on my way to the front desk where a man sits picking his nails with a staple remover. He’s small and nervous—has the look of someone who is just about to be asked a question that he does not know the answer to.
I point to Thomas and tell him that my friend is really hurt and needs to see a doctor who can prescribe very strong painkillers. “Oh, and Thomas is very macho,” I add. “He probably won’t want to ask for painkillers himself, so please just tell the doctor he must insist.”
The man nods nervously and says, “Of course,” and makes a call, speaking quickly in Spanish. After he hangs up he holds up one hand and says, “Five minute.”
“And he has pain medicine?”
“Si, si.”
“Thank you! Gracias! Muchas gracias.”
I walk back to the table. “They might have a doctor they can call,” I say casually to Donald before ordering dessert to hold them there longer. As I’m picking at some weird cake that I ordered, the doctor appears.
“Come with me?” he says to Donald. I’m glad he’s wearing a white coat and is carrying one of those old-school doctor cases—Donald might not go if he didn’t look totally legit.
As soon as they disappear into a room by the front desk, I lean over to Alex. “Okay, here’s the deal,” I say. “Donald is going to get some really strong painkillers. We need to get him totally drugged up so he can’t do anything but sleep.”
“How?”
“Put it in something he eats, I guess? Oh, I know! Order room service first thing in the morning and slip a few of the pills in his tea. Did you see how much sugar he just put in his tea? I don’t think he’d taste anything.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know—maybe double the dosage? I mean, we don’t want to kill the guy, just put him in a stupor.”
“Aye,” Alex says, clearly—and for good reason—nervous about drugging an imposter he has to share a room with.
When Donald returns to the table, he’s gripping his upper arm. “Antibiotics shot,” he says. “Biggest bloody needle I’ve ever seen.”
“Did he give you anything for the pain?” I ask.
“Aye. Not going to take it until bedtime though, the doctor said it will make me drowsy.”
I resist the urge to look at Alex.
“Well, I’m going to head up,” I say.
“Wait, lass,” Donald says. “What are your plans for tomorrow?”
“First I’m going to sleep in as long as humanly possible. Then have some lunch, look around, and find a good place to do my talk tomorrow night.”
“Night?” he asks.
“Yeah. It’s scheduled for 5:00 at night,” I casually reply. For once it feels good to lie to a scumbag instead of my parents. “Meet here for late lunch? Say, oneish?”
“Aye,” they say in unison.
I walk to my room on autopilot, so wiped out from the travel and the Donald thing. I barely muster the energ
y to set the alarm before I sink into bed, wondering how on earth I am going to get through tomorrow.
————
The curtains on the sliding glass door in my room are open so the first rays of the sun blast me full force. I get up to close them, but once I look outside the sunrise mesmerizes me in that weird way that you can get hypnotized by something completely ordinary, like a sprinkler.
I open the door and walk out on the small balcony. Waves are lapping the shore and the sun is peeking over the ocean. As more of the sun is revealed, I am filled with an amazing sensation. I don’t think I can explain exactly what it is, but it’s most like a feeling I had as a young child when I would fall asleep on my dad, with my ear on his chest so I could both feel and hear his heartbeat. Total comfort, total warmth, total love.
I remember a conversation I had with Dr. Slaton about how there’s a sudden surge of magnetic energy when the sun rises, something about the solar wind changing the Earth’s field as it turns to see the morning sun. I suppose that’s what I’m feeling.
I instantly want to call Justine. I try her cell phone and after just two rings she picks up.
“Your phone works!” I say, happy it’s as clear as if she were in the next room.
“Caity! How was your trip? How are you?”
“Great!” I say, not wanting to lay the Donald stuff on her. “I’m on Easter Island watching the sun rise over the ocean and it’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry. But what are you doing up? How was your trip?” I ask.
“Oh my God, do you know how far this place is from San Francisco? It feels like we’ve been traveling for a week!”
“I know, me too. But you’re there? You’re fine? What are you doing?”
“Yep, we’re fine. We’re actually at Machu Picchu right now.”
“Really?”
“Yep, and when the sun rose this morning it came through this hole in the wall of the Temple of the Sun and lined up with a groove in a huge rock. It’s like some adventure movie or something, it was so cool.”
“That’s amazing!”
The Daykeeper's Grimoire Page 24
