12.21

Patrick had been obsessed with an exhibit on letters written to Mount Wilson Observatory about the existence of extraterrestrial life. He said the letters reminded him that there were ways to see the skies other than through the eyepiece of a telescope. As they read them together in the darkened space, Patrick’s voice never far from her ear, one letter drew Chel in too, The exact words the woman wrote about her experiences in another world had always stayed with Chel: I have seen all sorts of moons and stars and openings….

At the door to the MJT, Chel pressed a buzzer above a sign that read: RING ONLY ONCE. The door swung open and before her stood an auburn-haired man in his forties, wearing a black cardigan and rumpled khakis. Chel had met Andrew Fisher, the museum’s eccentric manager, when she came here the first time. Even the plastic shield he wore over his face couldn’t disguise the gentle intelligence in his eyes.

“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 indigena. 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 Peten,” he said.

“Doing what?”

He glanced at Victor. “Training the Guatemalan army.”

Those were words no indigena 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 indigenas blamed them for instigating the civil war that had taken her father’s life.

“Colton is a great admirer of the indigenas, ” 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.”