Waking the Moon

was lucky enough to have a fairly decent job and a nice place to live.

But I knew that my heart had gone to sleep at the Divine. When it woke nearly two decades later, I started to emerge from Ignoreland, just like everybody else. It was going to take a teenage riot to get me out of bed, but that’s just what I got.

CHAPTER 11 Ancient Voices

TO REACH THE ANTHROPOLOGY Department, you ascended a series of grand curving marble staircases, up through Plant Life and Vertebrates and Paleontology, past the enclaves of Man and the Higher Mammals, skirting the secret temples of Egyptology and the Ancient World and stopping short of Gems and Minerals and the breeding cells for the Living Coral Reef and the Insect Zoo. Each marble step held a shallow depression worn into the stone by more than a century of thoughtful treading by scientists and receptionists and cleaning personnel. Slender grooves showed where hundreds of fingers had absently traced the edge of the marble banisters; if you knew where to look you could see a faint rusty stain, like the shadow of a raven’s wing, that marked the exact spot where Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope had grappled during an argument concerning the use of the name Titanosaurus for an immense herbivore. The steps to Calvary or Mount Olympus could not have been more resonant with ancient secret power than those of the Museum of Natural History.

My office was on the south side of the building, overlooking the Mall. Each morning I walked down the long dim corridor, past Invertebrates and Arthropods and Ungulates (which had migrated here because of lack of space in Mammals), the Department of Worms (where department chief Vic Danhke had a sign on his door that read HEAD WORM), and so into the Department of Anthropology. The entire floor had a faint rainy scent, punctuated by occasional bursts of formaldehyde and the woodsy odor of the beetles Molly Merino used to clean the occasional shipment of tapir or wildebeest pelts. There were boxes and cartons and shelves everywhere, spiring up into the dark recesses of the ceiling, lit by dangling tubes of fluorescent lights and the occasional blinding nova of a halogen lamp trained upon a fragile human femur or mummy restoration-in-progress. Here and there the pale green light of a computer monitor glowed in the darkness, or you might glimpse the flickering opalescent lozenge of a laptop exiled with its curator to some dank corner.

Nothing looked as though it had been cleaned since at least the Bicentennial. An overzealous expedition by the building’s custodial crew had once resulted in the loss of a pipe used by the Yanomano to blow psychoactive residue into each other’s nostrils. Barry Hornick claimed his work on the Yanomano diorama was set back three weeks, and the entire South American Peoples division traced the late opening of their new gallery to this same housekeeping error. Since then, cleaning was done sporadically if at all. A rich yellowing patina covered everything, composed of bone dust and pollen and beeswax, varnish and plaster of Paris and the odorous cabbagey residue from the kim chee Robert Dvorkin bought at a little Korean place in Alexandria and ate every day for lunch. A fine silvery net of webs from the Insect Zoo’s runaway golden orb weavers hung from the rafters and kept the cockroach and silverfish population at bay. In the summer most office doors remained shut, not out of any burning need for privacy but because that was the only way to retain some slight breath of cool air from the museum’s balky central a/c system. The closed doors formed a kind of informal gallery of Gary Larson cartoons clipped from the Post, along with amusing postcards from colleagues in distant places (HAVING a GREAT TIME in CAIRO DIGGING UP some OLD FRIENDS! CHANUKAH GREETINGS from OLDUVAI GORGE!) and the occasional announcement of an honorary degree or new publication in Antiquities. In the fall, the doors flew open again so that the heat blasting from the museum’s ancient furnaces could find its way into cubbyholes full of carven masks and heaps of moldering newspapers and damp papier- mache replicas of Breton menhirs.

In contrast to all this nearly Victorian splendor and decay, my office was compact and bright and sterile as a hypodermic needle. A sleek steel display case held video monitors and television sets and the assorted VCRs and incidental equipment necessary for running the archival videodisc system. A network of multicolored cables connected these to computers and still more monitors and CD ROMs on my desk. The desk itself was a battered wooden contraption tunneled with pigeonholes and drawers in varying states of disorder. It looked as uncomfortable with its glittering satellites as a dowager aunt with her skinhead niece, but I liked it. It had been my first desk at the museum, and had traveled with me from my first little cubicle next to the Department of Worms to what would probably be its final home here. My window had an unobstructed view of the brick turrets of the Castle across the Mall. On sunny days the ghostly sound of calliope music echoed up from the ancient carousel outside the Arts and Industries Building, and sometimes stray balloons tapped plaintively against the glass before drifting off to float above the Tidal Basin and the Pentagon.

After so many years, my job had become more of a PR position than anything else. New technicians handled the eternal sorting and cleaning and labeling of photos in the ever-expanding Larkin Collection. None of the actual production was done in-house, and three years earlier the museum had cut a deal with Jack “Jolly” Rogers of Winesap Computers to write, manufacture, and distribute the accompanying software for the system. The videodiscs weren’t exactly best-selling items, but we almost managed to break even. And it was a nice tax write-off for everyone concerned, since the museum, of course, was an educational not-for-profit institution, and good PR for Winesap.

Jack liked me. He’d grown up in Yonkers, dropped out of high school in his junior year to play around with the earliest generations of personal computers, writing accountability programs for the mainframes at ConEd. He’d made his first million while still a teenager. We were the same age, and the yawning rift between our income brackets was bridged by a mutual distaste for Republican politics and a fondness for cheap beer and noisy proto- punk music. Once or twice a year he dropped in on one of his lobbying circuits of Capitol Hill, and we’d sit around my office with a smuggled six-pack of PBR to reminisce about seeing the Ramones and the Cramps in high school gyms and lament the failure of great unknown bands like the Shades (once of Trenton) and D.C.’s own Velvet Monkeys.

“Kids today, they don’t know what it was like.” Jack shook his head, his thinning blond hair slipping from its ponytail. He wore Doc Martens and white painter’s pants and a faded blue T-shirt depicting Officer Joe Bolton and the Three Stooges. “They rip off someone else’s riffs and go on MTV and jump around and—”

He made a rude noise, then consoled himself with a mouthful of chicken vindaloo. It was the last day of June and we were sitting in my office, gazing out the window at the crowds below. That morning, there’d been a Senate hearing, something to do with the Communicopia Bill. Jack had blown in and out of the Senate chambers, making the appropriate noises for C-SPAN and the national news, then ducked over here to check up on things. “Hey, this is pretty good curry, huh?”

I nodded, my eyes watering. “No lie.”

Outside on the Mall a month-long carnival was in progress: the Aditi, the Festival of India, sponsored by the Museum and the Indian government and SOMA Software (publisher of the fabulously successful GEOQUEST! and a division of Winesap Computers, Inc.). For weeks workmen shouting in Hindi and Urdu and English had been constructing stages and booths, staking out tent sites and laying wooden walkways across the trampled yellowing grass. Now most of the Mall, from the old west wing of the National Gallery of Art all the way down to the Museum of American History, had been transformed into an idealized Indian village, like something from a soundstage for Kim. Gaudy paisley pennants hung from booths selling wooden toys and puri, lime pickle and vegetable samosas and edible effigies of Durga with spun sugar skulls dangling from her neck. From a small tent echoed the eerie wavering cry of a bone flute, along with the shrill voices of children shouting in Hindi as they practiced their tumbling, clambering onto each other’s backs to form pyramids three- or four-high, then leaping off with outflung arms, graceful as flying squirrels. Even from here I could smell frying ghee and the overly sweet scents of jasmine incense and sandalwood, and hear an occasional burst of raga music from one of the wooden platform stages in front of the Hirshhorn’s sculpture garden.

“Quite a little show you got on down there.” Jack stood and crossed to the window, holding his paper plate and spooning yellow rice into his mouth. “We should be drinking Pink Pelican beer. You ever had that, Sweeney?