The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  “You know he was one of my students once?” Dad says. “Charismatic. Intense and relaxed at the same time. Everyone was crazy about him, especially the women. An ordinary Chicago kid. Parents died when he was five, and he was raised by the same Irish-Catholic grandparents he got the blue eyes from.”

  “Wasn’t he planning to become a priest?” Morag asks.

  “Yes. And then he showed up here, full of sophisticated questions about the origin of language. I found him unnerving, to be honest.”

  I’m washing dishes by this point—offering to help has not occurred to either of them—and I can’t resist throwing a comment over my shoulder from the sink: “That’s because you have the atheist’s stupid prejudice that religious people are stupid.”

  Dad lets slip a smile. Quietly admitting both the prejudice and the fact that Quinn disproved it.

  “He was with you less than a year, right?” Morag says.

  “Yep. Disappeared at the end of the year and never came back. He went hiking with three friends in Mexico. They all disappeared on Popocatépetl.”

  Morag frowns—any reference she doesn’t get, she finds immensely irritating. For once, it’s me who can fill the information gap. “Second-highest volcano in Mexico. Nearly eighteen thousand feet. Not exactly a hike.”

  “No,” Dad says. “Quinn stumbled into a police station with frostbitten toes and a story so wacky they suspected him of killing the others. They held him for a month while they investigated. Found one of the bodies on the mountain, but they said it looked like a big avalanche, so they let him go. He wrote Anabasis as soon as he returned. The whole book in one day, allegedly. He claims it was dictated to him.”

  He makes a little spiral with his finger next to his head, indicating his opinion that Quinn is not playing with a full deck. Then gets up, eager to be starting his day. In a second he’ll want to say, You going to be all right today, then? and expect me to neutralize his guilt by saying, Sure, no problem, I’m doing just great. Then he’ll take Morag with him to their oh-so-urgent Akkadian translation work.

  To stall them, I ask how it’s going.

  “Difficult material,” he says evasively.

  “No standard reference books?”

  He picks a rogue pecan off the counter, pops it into his mouth. “Sure there are standard reference books. I wrote them. No use for this material. It’s old. Unusual. And then there’s the whole thing about the Phaistos fragment.”

  “No other clues on that?”

  Dad has started absentmindedly peeling the label off last night’s beer bottle. “We keep finding references to ‘the round objects,’ or at least that’s what we think they’re saying. Round something, anyway. It seems to be Disks they’re talking about.”

  “That reminds me—you never told me why you stopped in Boston in the first place. What was Derek Partridge wetting his pants about?”

  I aim this at Dad, but it’s Morag who answers—which kind of emphasizes that I’m way outside their loop.

  “He’s spent decades trying to track down a complete copy of one particular book. Geographika—it was written around 230 BCE by a Greek mathematician, Eratosthenes. A kind of compendium of all knowledge about the world and its history.”

  Dad puts down the bottle and looks at me. “Derek’s the one who taught me that myths don’t just come from nowhere. And he thinks the Geographika could finally tell us what the historical truth is behind the idea of Atlantis. Supposedly no complete copy survived, but he thinks he knows where to find one. And not just any copy—the one that was owned by Cicero.”

  I’ve heard of Cicero, but some perverse instinct makes me want to play dumb. Maybe because it will help drag them both back to a normal level.

  “Scissor who?”

  “Cicero,” Morag says. “Marcus Tullius Cicero. Major Roman statesman, but don’t sweat the details. He went into a kind of voluntary exile from Rome for a couple of years, and in 79 BCE he ended up on the island of Rhodes.”

  Dad butts in: “It was like Princeton or something. A colony of Greek philosophers arguing about, well, everything. Is the soul immortal? Do numbers exist, or are they just in your head? How do volcanoes work?”

  “So Cicero was, like, a rich tourist?”

  “He was exactly a rich tourist. Romans were suckers for Greek art. He wrote to a friend back in Rome, bragging about buying up all the best stuff from a guy named Posidonius, who among other things had a copy of the Geographika. Now here’s where it really gets interesting. He also mentioned that Posidonius had a collection of diskoi for sale.”

  “Phaistos diskoi? You’re kidding.”

  “Derek thinks that’s exactly what he’s talking about,” Dad says. “It’s why he contacted me.”

  “We spent years scrabbling in the dirt in Greece, and all this time there’s a whole pile of Disks gathering dust in a basement in Rome?”

  “That’s where the trail goes cold. Partridge found the letter in the Biblioteca Angelica. One of the oldest libraries in Rome. He’s convinced the book is there too, and maybe more information about the Disks.”

  They glance at each other. It could be just impatience—time to go—but I sense something more; plus, he’s never really answered my question about the Akkadian texts.

  “You’ve found something out already, haven’t you? Something in the translation?”

  Dad looks at Morag, then at the table. Morag winces, bites her lower lip. “Aye.”

  “Jesus, M. Spit it out.”

  “The tablets, at least what we’ve translated so far. They, uh. We’re not sure, but—”

  She looks at Dad again, as if hoping he’ll intervene. No chance: still examining the table.

  “The thing of it is—they agree with Quinn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s his story. The one he tells in Anabasis. What the Akkadian scribes say is: the ‘gods’ were beings who visited us because they considered us ready, in some way—ready to become immortal.”

  She twists her lips apologetically. “I know, I know. I’m just telling you what the cuneiform says.”

  “Go on.”

  “The Akkadians say the gods taught them the divine language in order to foster their development. ‘In order to make us,’ it says at one point. Or maybe ‘in order to complete us.’ And then it says: ‘But we were wicked, so we defied the gods, and invented languages of our own. Instead of reaching closer to the divine, we got further and further away from it.’ ”

  “They say the gods punished them,” Dad adds. “And one day, when humanity is ready again, they’ll return. ‘For their purpose is to raise us up to be with them, among them, immortal.’ Sounds just like Anabasis.”

  “But what you’re saying is impossible. Isn’t it? This was written thousands of years ago, and nobody knew about it until now—or until Jimmy and Lorna found the library at Babel. And Quinn had already written Anabasis before that. So how could he have known this story ahead of time. Or am I missing something?”

  Morag gets up. “You’re not missing anything, D. Or, more likely, we’re all missing something. Yummy breakfast by the way. Thanks.”

  Dad gets up too, and finds his jacket. They both head out, on their way to the university. I’m left alone in the house again.

  Amazing, above all, how ordinary things are. Outside, the buses keep running on Fifteenth Avenue. The planes keep roaring too low overhead as they lumber into Sea-Tac. The joggers keep jogging in the park. People leave the same old flyers on the doorstep, offering yard service, house painting, salvation.

  Even when the news comes in from New Zealand, it’s like everyone’s too busy to spare it more than a worried glance.

  Mount Ruapehu is right in the center of the North Island. A dozen kids, mostly in their teens and tweens, straggle out of the forest at the point of collapse. When I switch on the TV, one of the people right there in the frame is a teenage girl carrying a baby. Her face is hollow, mud-smeared. “We lost track of the adults nea
r Mangawhero Falls?” she says. “They were marching uphill really quick, and wouldn’t listen to us, and we couldn’t keep up?” A grim-looking man with a microphone is interviewing her at what looks like a ranger’s station. Later he confides to the camera, “Twenty-three bodies have been recovered so far, in circumstances very similar to the Uyuni incident.”

  They switch to sports news after that. When I go online it’s the same, mainly: What a terrible thing, people are saying—and then they get right back to the latest stock market story or celebrity puppy adoption. Sure, the CDC is onto it, or claims to be. Sure, some minor office in the depths of the World Health Organization has epidemiologists and demographers test-driving their latest computer models to no effect. Otherwise, it’s like the first indications of civil war in a distant country. It’s there in the news, but mostly people are ignoring it.

  Me, I don’t get why people aren’t more frightened. I hunker down at Mom’s desk again, listen to loud music. Out on the Wild Wild Web, I soon find myself some company, even if it’s not the best for my self-esteem. Right now, the only people who agree with me that there’s something to worry about are conspiracy theorists, mouth-breathers, trolls. A blogger named Epocalyps—who probably has five assault rifles, a big investment in canned goods, a network of spider-holes in north Idaho—thinks it’s all mass kidnappings. Two or three others are feeding each other’s desire for a new pandemic, as if the prospect of a third of the world population dying horribly is kind of sexy. (It’s a virus mutated from bats, or maybe cats. Invades the brain, drives you nuts, makes you wander off. Kind of like Ebola. Or do we mean Marburg?) From there it’s all downhill: the mass hypnosis theory, the secret government program theory, the alien abduction theory, the good ol’ possessed-by-demons theory.

  Can’t swallow either the fanged-demons-from-hell theory or the fanged-greenbloods-from-another-planet theory? Then Julius Quinn is about the only game in town.

  CHAPTER 9

  GRIEVING IS A PROCESS

  Over the next few days I get an hour’s sleep here, twenty minutes there: I’d love to do ten hours, but seem to have lost the knack. Nobody tells me how haggard and ill I look, because I don’t: some hidden reserve of adrenaline is keeping me in a state that’s like the reverse of hibernation. During the night, I piece together tiny filaments of evidence for a connection between the disappearances and the Seraphim; during the day I see my friends, hang out, put on a show of normal that most people swallow.

  I figure out right away that people think they know what grief is, even if they’ve never really experienced it. What they expect is a kind of dull, wounded sadness, a faraway look, tension and distraction mixed with just the occasional ability to laugh at something briefly. So that’s what I give them—it keeps the questions at bay. But the fact is, none of them can relate to my experience on the Torre Sur, much less to the bizarre way I truly feel, so no one knows what to say. People I actually like, people I feel a little bit close to, end awkward silences by saying half-assed things like Wow, I’m so sorry, Daniel, or It really sucks about the accident. Adults, God help them, say even dorkier, more clueless things, like Grieving is a process—then give me awkward, one-armed hugs. As if they want to do the right thing, but without risking infection.

  I introduce everyone to Morag. She gets on with them way better than I’d expected. With Kit especially: they jabber at each other in Russian, make each other laugh, seem compatible in a way I hadn’t thought possible. But Morag herself has taken such a deep plunge into the Akkadian translations that she doesn’t need any of us really—doesn’t even want me to play tour guide. She goes with me for coffee a couple of mornings; because I’m eager to show off the real Seattle, I take her to the serious independent cafés—Espresso Vivace, Victrola. She likes it; in fact, it’s obvious from the way she interrogates the baristas about the structure of a good crema, or the acidity balance in Sumatran Mandheling, that given more time she’ll become a full-bore Seattle coffee snob. But more time is something she doesn’t have now. Hike tomorrow? Maybe next week. Take the kayaks out? You know I hate water.

  Even when I drag her down to Pike Place, show her troll-caught sockeye flying through the air like ingots of wet steel, she’s only half there. I buy her cinnamon mini-donuts to eat while enjoying the view of Puget Sound. “It’s beautiful,” she says vaguely, pointing across the water to the mountains, then falls silent again, looks at her phone. She’s running late. She has arranged, again, to spend the day with Dad at the ISOC library.

  At least I can find some comfort in the Eisler miracle. First thing off the plane, highly paid butchers in blue hospital scrubs split Rosko open like a hog on a slab and spend eighteen hours using laser-guided diamond drills to do fancy stuff to his spine; he now has, in addition to the bolts in his right leg, half a dozen custom-fabricated slivers of titanium holding his lower sacrum together.

  The surgery’s supposed to be followed by weeks in the hospital and months of physical therapy. But Rosko is Rosko. He confounds the surgeons, astonishes the doctors, amazes the physical therapists. A couple of days after they stitch him up—by way of what’s supposed to be a brief experiment—two orderlies pick him up like he’s antique glass and deposit him gently in a wheelchair. A short test-drive, that’s all they have in mind, then back to bed. One of them pushes him around the corridors, asks him every three yards whether he’s OK, then leaves him in his room while she goes to find a different pillow. Five minutes later, the therapist comes by and discovers him doing reversed-hand chin-ups on the door frame.

  “How did you even get up there?” I ask him. I’m sitting in a sunny corner window, with a view out over Elliott Bay to the jagged white underbite of the Olympics.

  “Not really a problem. Left leg holds my weight. So I wheeled myself over, balanced on it, and jumped. A good workout too—the frame’s only an inch thick, so you’re forced to use your fingertips.”

  He looks at mine a bit guiltily. They’ve been unwrapped at last—a mass of blisters and scars.

  “What did the PT say?”

  “ ‘Get down from there immediately, Mr. Eisler. What on earth do you think you are doing?’ Like I’m eight years old and risking a major time-out. I said to her: Hey, sorry, but the parts of my body that still work are getting seriously bored.”

  He’s already had visits from carloads of people, mostly adoring girls. He could try for sympathy by going on about how he nearly died. But he lacks even a shred of self-pity, so instead he’s been spinning pretty yarns about how Mr. Daniel “Superhero” Calder, through feats of incredible skill and bravery, saved his life. I plan my visits solo. That way it’s less embarrassing. That way, I’m free to talk to him about what’s bugging me.

  “The disappearances, Rosko.”

  “What really happened on the climb, Rosko.”

  “What really happened to the Colberts.”

  He tries to be nice about it but won’t take it seriously. Says I’m just showing how stressed I am.

  “It’s weird, though, the way they left like that, without waiting to see Dad and Morag, or leaving a message or anything. I’ve tried to contact them. They don’t answer emails or texts, and they’re not updating anything online.”

  “Your dad say anything about them?”

  “Clueless. Doesn’t know them. Says Mom’s company hired them once for advertising work. Which I already knew.”

  He shrugs. “They’re videographers. Probably went straight from Paris to shooting a documentary in Svalbard, or Madagascar. I’m sure they fall off the map for weeks. Why do you want to contact them anyway?”

  I can’t keep the irritation out of my voice. “To ask them what they saw. But when I call their studio, I just get Sophie sounding all perky—‘Please leave a message, back to you as soon as possible’—like she just stepped out to the grocery store. I don’t believe it. I got their address in Seattle, down in the south end halfway to the airport. I managed to get into the building, just walked in after someone else.�
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  “Nobody there?”

  “Nobody. And a fat layer of dust on the door handle.”

  “Wait a second. You said, ‘When I call their studio.’ How many times have you called?”

  “Two or three times.”

  This is a small lie that just kind of slips out. The truth: five or six or seven times.

  “So you actually rode halfway to the airport just to play detective at their studio?”

  “Something’s not right—I needed to find out what. You think I’m being ridiculous, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Daniel. But you’re taking this way too seriously. You tell me all this vague spooky stuff about the climb, none of which I remember, and you seem, uh, a little obsessed.”

  “I have to understand what happened, that’s all. I’d be doing better if you could come up with any more memories.”

  He looks exasperated. “The shrinks have been in, Daniel, given me the full workout, and there’s no evidence I’m suffering from amnesia, PTSD, or anything else except broken bones. I simply don’t have any more memories.”

  “Something—something happened up there that you’ve forgotten. I swear.”

  “What happened up there is your mother died, and then you nearly died at least twice yourself. What you’re experiencing is shock.”

  “You’re saying I’m inventing this stuff?”

  “I don’t know. But you need to stop worrying about everything so much. I think your emotions are playing tricks on you.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just—just dig. Start with the Colberts. Find out whatever you can about them.”