groaned beneath his weight. He put his hands behind his head and tried to close his eyes, which were laced with red streaks in a shattered glass pattern. “I’m really not interested in Erma Alred. I just wished she’d like me a little. The D in my name is starting to mean Discord, I think.”
“I’ve told her everything, so she won’t yell at you when you spill the news.”
“Good!” Porter said. “Whatever it is, I don’t think I can stand looking into her cold green eyes again. Albeit, they are kinda nice-”
“They’ve changed the date for dissertations. All papers are due on the fifth of May,” said Kinnard.
“I was baptized on that day,” Porter said.
“You and Alred will also argue your material on the fifth.”
The air chilled.
“But…you said…I have till…the twenty-first,” said Porter.
“They’ve moved it up,” Kinnard said without looking up.
“It says so in the schedule,” Porter continued, “I read it! I have five weeks!”
“I’m sorry, Porter.” Kinnard put his dark-rimmed glassed back on.
“That’s an implied contract! They can’t change it!”
Kinnard stood, the light gleaming off the top of his head. He kept his face hard. There was nothing he could do. There was no point in wasting breath and any more emotion over it.
Porter got to his feet, realizing he was wailing at the wrong person.
Kinnard walked him to the door. “You have a little more than two weeks. Don’t waste your time making formal complaints. They’ll only add to your ruin.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
April 21
10:36 p.m. PST
“Where’ve you been?” Porter said with his best smile. He had pistachio bits in his teeth, which he tried to clean away quickly with his tongue. The result was an unplanned comedic grin.
“Thought I’d find you at Bruno’s,” said Alred leaning against the library table. “You came to a place more conducive to study.”
The library overflowed with books. The volumes, piled high and jammed in the rows, waited under layers of dust for a new building to hold them. A maze of tight shelves, reaching for the ceiling, choked all four floors, promising students an adventure if they dared to enter.
The sun had disappeared and darkness spilled across Porter’s back from the large window overlooking the employee parking lot in the rear of the building. Cold air blew freely through the vents as if someone had turned it on to freeze the students out. Porter worked under the brightness of a florescent lamp. He had spread his books beneath the single light, pulled others from the shelves, opened them and started stacking. Only for a moment did Alred think the pages of one of the books might catch fire if it got too close to the light. Porter had scribbled his thoughts and flipped through indexes. According to Bruno, many of these books he’d either read or poked through before. That’s what made him a good scholar; he’d studied all or nearly all the books of his interest the library held.
Alred’d had enough of Stratford’s Michael H. Weiss Memorial Library a year ago when she’d lost herself among the stacks as a research assistant for Dr. Ulman. She loved working for the man, but disliked doing everyone else’s dirty jobs. That’s why she had put her trust in Dr. Masterson, before he’d betrayed her. The more she progressed with Ulman’s find, the more she disliked it. She wanted to throw up every time she saw Porter’s codex.
It wasn’t Porter’s anyway. He was hogging it.
No matter. Alred was good. She didn’t need the manuscript in her possession to succeed. She used it often enough and took adequate notes.
But she hated it anyway. The codex and everyone attached to it were ruining her life. She had to conquer the project.
Porter seemed to recreate his office wherever he went. From the many opened and discarded volumes, he had one book open before him, a number of his fingers stuck in the pages he’d passed.
“Since you didn’t show up,” Alred said, “I decided to ask Bruno about you. Then I read for a while.”
“Were we meeting there?” said Porter.
Alred smiled a little. “You’ll make a great absent-minded professor.”
“It is my highest aspiration,” Porter said with a growing grin as he leaned back a bit, shadow dribbling over his face as he pulled away from the only light in the room.
“5:00,” said Alred, checking her watch to see exactly how many hours ago that had been. She leveled him with a dry gaze.
Porter’s glow dulled. As if just remembering his small bag beside his book, he jumped, “Want some pistachios?”
“Food’s not allowed in the library. I thought Mormons were supposed to be perfect.”
“Ah. ‘A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid…Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.’”
“Shakespearean all of a sudden?”
“Matthew 5:14 and 16.” Pulling a legal pad from beneath two others, he flipped through the sheets and handed it to Alred.
“What am I looking at,” she said, examining a chart without lines.
“On the right side we have the English,” Porter said, interlocking his fingers as he relaxed.
“ This is English?!?” Alred squinted at the scribbled words.
Porter cocked his head to the left and wiggled a finger in his ear. “My second grade teacher said I was doomed if I didn’t practice better penmanship. Thank goodness for the personal computer! Anyway, I feel a little rushed.”
“This supposed to be Mayan?” she said, looking at logograms drawn in the middle column of the sheet.
Porter leaned forward, snatched the pad from her, and pointed at one Mayan glyph on the page. “What’s this?”
“I don’t know. You said this was supposed to be Mayan? Looks like a hand.”
“Right. How do you pronounce that?”
“If this is your best attempt at Mayan, I’d say this character is manik…pronounced keh.”
“Look at this letter,” Porter said, sliding his finger left to a more simple squiggle.
“Is that supposed to be a hand?” Alred said. “Let me guess. You pulled it off the codex.”
Porter shook his head. “It’s the Hebrew letter k. It is kaph, a hand. Tell me if I’m mistaken, but doesn’t the Yucatec Mayan kab have the same meaning?”
Alred looked up, scanning her memory. “It does, if I recall.”
“The West-Semitic word for hand or palm, represented by the image of a hand in ancient times, was also pronounced… kap. As far as our current study goes, these connections shouldn’t surprise us. There is a link between the Middle East and Mesoamerica. Both Dr. Albright and Dr. Peterson have publicly noted it.”
“I recently found a paper from a professor of the University of Calgary who supposes a connection between three letters of the Mayan calendar to the Hebrew alphabet,” said Alred.
Porter lifted a finger. “I have some of those here! The Hebrew lamed and the Mayan lamat. A similarity so obvious, one might suppose it to be complete fraud created by those desiring to prove relationships between the Old and New Worlds. Yet here it is, solid fact. Tell me it’s a coincidence.”
“But these correlations are not proven.” Alred pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat on it, looking around at the quiet library. Was anyone else here? Most of the lights had been turned off. She smelled moist carpets and shifted the points of her heels on the wood floor running from the window behind Porter to the stairway some thirty feet behind her. “Are they trying to conserve energy here?”
“These logographic systems sound too much alike to go unnoticed. Did you know the Chinese character for
