One night coming home late I was mugged, but it was a random mugging, the kind of thing that happens at two in the morning in the entrance to my building. The mugger was incoherent, but he had a knife, and took my wallet. He didn’t threaten more than that, or force his way upstairs to ransack my apartment, looking for a Suolucidiri relic that provided an uncanny model for the construction and contestation of competing notions of the truth and crime.
Wearing surgical gloves I continued to unroll the scroll, but the Q and L story was left unfinished. What remained were just clumps of letters that didn’t seem to form words anymore, at least not any I could find a translation for. Unless the remainder was written in another language, though the alphabet was the same, the writing no longer made any syntactical sense. I held the cylindrical case up to my eye as if it were a pirate’s spyglass, then tossed it on the table. My neighbor’s cat, who came in via the fire escape, played with the cylinder, found interesting smells in the decades-old leather. She sniffed it from end to end, batted it off the table, reached a long paw into the case, but it rolled under the couch. She was desperate for this new toy, so I moved the couch to retrieve it. Under the couch were dust bunnies the size of Mars, loose change, chewed pencils, subway tokens.
[Money] only made its way into certain sectors and certain regions, and continued to disturb others. It was a novelty more because of what it brought with it than what it was itself. What did it actually bring? Sharp variations in prices of essential foodstuffs; incomprehensible relationships in which man no longer recognized either himself, his customs, or his ancient values. His work became a commodity, himself a “thing.”
Fernand Braudel
The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979
MONEY WAS RUNNING OUT . THERE was no institution or foundation that would fund work translating a stolen artifact. Necessities had to be balanced: rent, food, electricity, telephone, how long could each remain unpaid? Subway ads that ran headlines like Need Cash? or Is Debt Your Middle Name? beckoned. I wrote 1-800 numbers in the margins of papers but didn’t make the calls.
I began to construct imaginary Suolucidiri relics, made from all kinds of junk salvaged from dump sites near the Gowanus Canal: a god made of bathroom tile (though the Suolocidiris weren’t idol worshippers), a weapon made of orange insulating wire and rusted box-cutter blades, a funerary ornament from soles of Nikes hot-glued to a diamond-shaped piece of sheetrock. More exact might be a simurgh, the phoenix-like bird, made of gaskets, dead batteries stripped of their plastic coating, horns and claws made of dental picks and bent nails. My neighbor Alyssa, the astrologist, who had a habit of knocking on my door from time to time to borrow things, asked if she could photograph this ersatz simurgh. The idea of recycled, reinvented deities made of yogurt containers and electrical wire intrigued her. She didn’t actually ask, but just appeared, camera in hand. I saw no reason to object, sure Alyssa, go right ahead.
There was a story Ruth had told me about a wealthy Mexico City doctor, a Dr. Saenz, who, one afternoon in 1966 received a phone call suggesting that if he flew to the town of Villahermosa in Tabasco, good news lay in store for him. He was interested, and he was fearless, no reservations tugged at his sleeves, no thoughts that anonymous calls directing you here or there might not be in his best interest. He followed the anonymous caller’s instructions to the letter. When he reached Villahermosa, he was met by two men who marched him to a small private plane, and off he flew once again. Although the plane’s navigational equipment was deliberately concealed from him, Dr. Saenz sensed they were flying farther south toward the Guatemala border, and he was correct. Landing on what could only have been a makeshift jungle airstrip, they were met by a group of local men who immediately offered Saenz a series of objects they claimed had been dug up recently. A man holding a rough wooden box was particularly persuasive, and Saenz opened it to discover a codex the man explained he had unearthed in a nearby cave. Most Mayan books, all but three, had been burned by the conquistators, so this was a spectacular find. Saenz snapped it up, but serious questions remained. When had the codex been hidden in the cave? 1532? 1962? The location of the cave was and remained unknown, so the authenticity of the Saenz Codex is still questionable.
You are free to imagine the contents of the last codex, the pages of symbols and drawings, the last evidence, like the last phone book, encyclopedia, catalogue of science, philosophy, religion, and pornography. A whole forbidden world in one book that may or may not be decipherable. Possible secrets: how to heal, cure, travel to other planets, etc. How to do everything that we aren’t.
Once removed from its context in the site, whether a grave or a temple, it’s impossible to know the meaning or use of the stolen object, Ruth had explained, as if I didn’t know. She stole from sites, too, at least once. The thing’s history is then erased, broken off, too much time between death and the present to follow any story, it could have been a doorstop or a cigarette case. Suppose you’re offered a jade mask that you know was probably made to replace the head of a ruler who had lost his own in battles. When his body was discovered, his subjects buried him with jade replacement parts and five or six adolescent boy sacrifices, sealed alive in the tomb, that was the practice, and when dug up hundreds of years later, their skeletons were just by him, along with incised bones, obsidian flake blades, jade beads and stingray spines used for ritual bloodletting, or so you’re told. Without actually traveling to the site and comparing chisel marks, footprints, depressions left in the dirt, you can’t prove these things came from that particular place. Match between site and object can’t be declared beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The object scuttles around the boundaries of its meaning: had it been used in ritual sacrifice or was it a can opener with a face? The mundane and the sacred jumbled together with no way out of the maze of connotation, no way to organize them into hierarchies, and the divine was often tied to the treacherous. I was busy constructing my own personal version of the Saenz Codex. Ruth would be the first one to taunt me, to ridicule the hot-glue gun and imaginary gods. I pushed my artifacts aside.
Sitting at my kitchen table circling jobs I had no qualifications for, finally led to an interview for a position writing voice-over scripts for a series of science programs: this is what happens when you mix thermite with liquid nitrogen, this is how the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, these are the invertebrates that live in a range of underwater volcanoes in a section of the Pacific as big as New York State. I’d been late to the interview at a small company run by a woman whose desk and Steenbeck editing machine were one and the same L-shaped surface overflowing with reels and coffee cups. She, herself, was a flowering plant with jagged petals of rusty blonde hair and black-framed glasses, a perennial producer of projects, perhaps only a fraction of which ever got off the ground. In describing them to me, one sentence, half finished, led to the next, and so on. The principle behind the series was that any naturally occurring phenomenon, could be taken apart and explained in terms of its smallest parts: molecules, atoms, quarks. Protons, photons, futons, electrons, neutrons, wontons. Her partner, who handled the technical side of the company, produced special effects for commercials: the glow on Eveready batteries, the twinkle on Mr. Clean’s earring. He was fed up with television ads and wanted to do something other than enhance or propel animated objects to make them more enticing to prospective consumers. Can you blame him? she asked me, though she didn’t expect an answer. She inquired about my work in eastern Iran. In the words eastern Iran, she confessed, she heard only American hostages. It was an impossible jump cut. I told her the truth. I had been nowhere near