Waking the Moon

Although I hadn’t seen much of Dr. Dvorkin since Dylan arrived. He had greeted Dylan when we finally made it back to the museum. He seemed pleased enough to see him, and didn’t appear to have taken note of the fact that neither of us had been in to work for some days, not to mention that Dylan was supposed to be staying in Dr. Dvorkin’s guest room, rather than my bed.

“Your mother is well?” Dr. Dyorkin asked absently. He was even more preoccupied than he normally was. The phone in his office kept ringing, and his comments to whoever was on the other line were unusually terse. “Please give her my best, will you? Now then—”

He sighed and touched his brow with a handkerchief, and we followed him down the hall. “Katherine, I’ll be out again all day. If you need me, talk to Laurie—”

“Has Dr. Dvorkin ever met your mother?” I asked, as Dylan and I stared after him.

“I don’t know. He and my grandfather were good friends, I know that.”

I glanced sideways at Dylan. He was wearing baggy khaki trousers and a white oxford cloth shirt, the sleeves rolled up loosely to expose smoothly muscled forearms and bony wrists, his tousled hair slipping from its ponytail. He leaned on the curved banister, staring rather mournfully down at Dr. Dvorkin’s retreating figure. I wondered if Dylan knew about the Benandanti—it struck me that he should be a legacy of theirs, if anyone was. The thought was dispiriting, almost frightening, and I pushed it aside.

“Hey,” I said, and turned away. “You got work to do.”

“See you at lunch?”

I nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Au revoir, kiddo.”

Summer was usually a slow time of year, despite the annual onslaught of tourists. While I’d been playing hooky with Dylan, only a few messages had come in on my machine—the usual inquiries for photos and videodiscs, a message from Jack Rogers, a few intelligently worded calls from Baby Joe in New York.

“Uh, yeah, hija, what the fuck you doing? Call me.”

“Jeez, hija, it’s Thursday. Where the fuck are you?”

There were several more variations on this theme. I played them back and grinned, wondering how Baby Joe would react when he learned I was fooling around with an intern. But the idea of telling him about Dylan himself, and Dylan’s parentage, was just a little too much to contemplate. So I didn’t call Baby Joe back right away. I figured I’d wait a couple of days, until I’d caught up with everything else.

It wasn’t just me: that summer, everything was slightly skewed. The weather was strange—had been strange, for months and months, which made Dylan’s comments about his mother even more unsettling. After a long and terrible winter, with its earthquakes and blizzards and record cold, there came a terrible spring—floods and mudslides, more earthquakes in places with unpronounceable names, unexpected volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that dumped a fine layer of ash into the atmosphere. That did not bode well for the coming winter, though scientists seemed to think we might be graced with a cooler summer.

But then summer came, and by the second week of July we were experiencing a record heat wave—a record even for D.C., which is really saying something. The temperature stayed up around a hundred, and scarcely dropped in the evening, when the streets and sidewalks would be covered with immense cockroaches and water bugs trying, like everyone else, to find some respite from the heat. At first the brownouts came weekly, then every few days; but I soon got used to hearing shouted curses and shrieks from odd corners of the museum, whenever the power cut and the computer network crashed.

Elsewhere it was worse. In the Midwest a drought ravaged crops. A biblical plague of locusts swept from Missouri to the Dakota Badlands, leaving dust and mounds of hollow carapaces in their wake. More flash fires devoured the West Coast, where people were still trying to rebuild from the earthquake. On the Baja Peninsula an outbreak of rodent-borne hantavirus caused a temporary quarantine to be set up. Up in Acadia National Park a devastating fire swept across Mount Desert, brought on by the hot weather and a careless hiker’s match. In the Pacific Northwest a full-scale war broke out between loggers and environmentalists, with tree-spikers getting picked off with AK-47s and logging trucks blown up in the middle of Route 687. The locusts were blamed for at least one major airplane crash; in D.C., cockroaches literally smothered a child sleeping on a front porch swing.

“Jesus,” I said when this last news item came over NPR, and switched stations.

There was the usual talk of apocalypse, of the coming millennium and the failure of schools, and god only knew what was going on in the Middle East. So yes, it was strange and disturbing and even frightening, but it was also so much business as usual—you know, Texas Cult Claims Entire Town. Bus Crashes in New Delhi, Thousands Die.

And I just didn’t care, I just didn’t want to think about it. I just didn’t want to think about anything but Dylan. I bought some boric acid and a new fire extinguisher at Hechinger’s, and laid in a case of decent chardonnay from the Mayflower. I stopped reading the front section of the Post, and started hanging out with Dylan at Tower Records and flipping through Pulse.

It was harder for me to ignore that something odd was going on in the museum, something that took up a great deal of Dr. Dvorkin’s time. I saw him leaving his office at odd hours, always with a strained expression, often heavily laden with sheaves of papers, manila folders, even wooden boxes. When I went down to Laurie’s desk to ask her about it, she only shrugged.

“I don’t know, Katherine. It might be another one of those Native American things—”

I groaned. Like a number of museums across the country, we’d come under fire for having sacred objects in our collections. There’d been a few lawsuits, a few out-of-court settlements, a lot of unhappy-making press, and one of our Native American galleries closed for renovation when its permanent collection of kachina dolls turned out to be not so permanent after all. “Am I supposed to be doing something? Like, not talking to the press? Or talking to the press?”

Laurie jabbed at her computer with a paper clip. “Too late. Somebody from the Post was in already—oh, but you were out sick, weren’t you? Well, anyway, there’s supposed to be some big story coming out soon.”

“More Indian stuff?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so—I think it’s something bigger than that. Something with Turkey, maybe.”

“Turkey?”

“The country, Katherine.” Laurie tossed the paper clip into a corner and looked at me suspiciously. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You still look a little out of it—”

I gestured feebly. “Nothing. A sinus infection. What’s going on with Turkey?”

“I’m not sure. Robert hasn’t told me, but everyone down in Paleo is having a cow. I think Robert’s just trying to get some damage control going.”

I tapped a handful of papers against my palm. “Guess I chose the wrong week to be out, huh?”

“Or the right one.” The phone buzzed and she turned away. “See you later, Katherine. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

I walked slowly back to my office. I wasn’t terribly concerned about whatever might be happening in Paleolithic Europe, except insofar as it might cause me actually to think about my job instead of Dylan.

But whatever storm was brewing, it wasn’t ready to break quite yet. The rest of that week was quiet— unusually quiet, even for the curatorial wing of the Museum of Natural History in mid-July. Dylan and I played hooky, coming in late, leaving early—the sort of thing that gives civil servants a bad name. I barely pretended to work. Instead I walked around in a Technicolor haze, feeling as though I’d somehow wandered from the world I knew into the Bombay Film Board’s version of my life, the Mall outside magically transformed into an exotic festival complete with fireworks and sloe-eyed boys and girls, Hindi puppet shows, and little stalls selling bird cages and fighting kites and puri. The heat wasn’t so bad, if you didn’t actually have to move. Dylan and I took three-hour lunches, and I found that Jack Rogers had been as good as his word: Pink Pelican beer was now being sold at all Aditi food kiosks. I arranged to use up some of the million or so vacation days I’d accrued over the last eight years, and basically did what everyone else in D.C. did that summer: not a damn thing.

Dylan did get some work done. He cataloged photos for the Larkin Archive and