I was trying to decipher the tenses. I took another stab at it. “Rikki said I might be meeting her soon. In Palenque.”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I’m looking forward to meeting Rikki’s mother.”
I thought this was subtle, but apparently not. He made a little motion with his hands, as though to brush away my words. Then he got to his feet and walked quickly toward the door of the passageway and stood there for a few minutes. When he came back, he said, “We can go now.”
I got the message. We gathered up our packs, re-strapped everything, and headed back out into the jungle. I looked behind me just as we went out into the night. The coati had vanished.
Poor Rikki was waiting for us, wet and shivering but loyally marking out the spot. It can’t have been any fun hanging around alone that way, especially with the deluge going on and only a pocket-size penlight for a weapon. “You’re some guy,” I said and patted him on the shoulder.
Back in the death chamber, we set up the tripod and lanterns and off-camera flashes, just like the night before. The first glyph I’d photographed and drawn had been so faint that I hadn’t really had a chance to absorb it, except as a technician. This one was quite clear, however, and I spent some time just looking at it before going to work. I’m no handwriting expert, but I was positive my first impression was right—neither the professional scribe nor the amateur cartoonist had done this particular glyph. It seemed to be in another hand entirely; the brush lines were thinner, and the proportions were different. It was larger, for example, than the official glyphs, but smaller than the teddy bears. And it seemed to have been placed to catch the eye, as though all the other painting had been done first and this one was added as an afterthought.
“Jan,” I asked casually, “is this one of the glyphs that has been translated?”
He paused over the tripod, as though considering whether or not this information might ruin me as an accomplice, then said, “It has.”
“What does it mean?”
He paused again, this time looking at Rikki, who was clearly dying for me to know, then gave an exasperated sigh. “It has several meanings. It is a very common glyph—you find it almost everywhere, including in some month names, some god names, and in a lot of the iconography. Nothing mysterious.”
I waited.
“The most common meaning seems to be k’in, which refers to the sun,” he added reluctantly. “Also, time in general. And k’in is the name for day. So you can see this is a very mundane sort of glyph, really.”
Which is why, I thought, we just army-crawled thirty yards to get to this chamber. Which is why we are hiking around in the middle of the jungle at night and poor Rikki is probably going to die of pneumonia.
“I see,” I said. “Thank you, Jan.”
I went back to my camera. He went back to his light stand.
In less than two hours I was done. I’d taken another two rolls of film, one up close and one with the glyph in context, and at the end of the evening, I handed Jan the sketchbook with six new drawings in it, one of them pretty damn good. He seemed pleased with the night’s work, though I was suddenly exhausted. We hadn’t had a shower for two days, and our tents were going to be soaked. It was close to 11:00 p.m., and we still had the hike up the shaft and the long trudge back to our camp. This was nothing new in my line of work, but I’d been spoiled, maybe, by the rest in the passageway with Jan’s cozy pipe. I could hardly stagger around.
Jan caught it. “Steady on,” he said, more kindly than I’d ever heard him. Maybe he was starting to get used to me.
Chapter Five
It took me six days to figure out an interesting fact, which was that not every photograph I took was equally important to my boss. In fact, three-quarters of my work seemed entirely extraneous. After a while, I could tell pretty easily when we were just shooting and when it was a very big deal. The same old glyph—the four-petaled k’in symbol—night after night, but never the same reaction out of our leader.
I also noticed another thing. He spent a lot of time writing things down, usually in the morning before Rikki and I crawled out of our tents to cook breakfast. He wrote in a large, bound journal, often with an open book beside him, which he would study from time to time before writing some more. I know this because I was studying him through the open flap of my tent as I lay in my sleeping sheet with one arm crooked behind my head.
It was the strange similarity between him and Stefan that fascinated me. Once I made the connection, I could not shake the thought that there was something I could learn about my brother if I just watched Jan long enough. Jan was older, of course, and weighted down by cares probably having to do with his mysterious marriage and who knows what else, while Stefan was, in contrast, less burdened by worldly matters, or at least less burdened than he’d been for so many years after Djed died, finally letting that grief slip from him. They also did not resemble each other physically. Stefan looked like a male version of me, tall and slenderly built, his prodigious nervous energy masked, like mine, beneath an air of studious calm, while Jan came across as the Dutchman he was, slow-moving and rock solid. In spite of his old demons, Stefan had managed to retain his sweet, abstracted smile—at least he still had it the last time I saw him—while Jan seemed sunk beyond where happiness could reach. But in some important way—maybe in the focused way they tackled life, or how they were both at home with silence—they shared some common ground that, on first blush, you wouldn’t think to look for.
As it turned out, Bruno was dead wrong about Stefan’s drug dealing, or, for that matter, all other aspects of his alleged debauchery. I was wrong, too. I figured my brother must have found shelter in one of his pothead friend’s garages when he got kicked out. Instead, he was quietly taken in by one of the priests at St. Silvan’s, Fr. Anthony, yet another postwar immigrant, the very guy who’d baptized both of us and who apparently understood everything there was to know about our family without having to be told. Priest or not, he was streetwise enough not to flaunt what he was doing in front of my parents. He made sure Stefan ate, slept in an actual bed, found a night-shift job at a grocery store stocking shelves, and got enrolled at the local public high school, from which, by some miracle, he actually graduated on time.
I learned all this when I caught up with Stefan a few years later in Nepal. My leaving Chicago was preordained. Not only had my brother advised me to get the hell out as soon as I possibly could, I’d also managed to embroil myself in an increasingly dicey liaison, my first venture into the dangerous thickets of erotic love, during my senior year at St. Silvan’s. Alexander was his name. Urgent were his hands. Perilous was my lot. It was time to flee.
Over the years, I’d gotten sporadic postcards from Stefan, sent not to the house but directly to St. Silvan’s and mysteriously passed on to me, who never figured out the identity of our cagey postman, Fr. Anthony. I knew that for the past three years, Stefan had been living in Kathmandu, but I assumed—thanks in part to Bruno’s self-confident, made-up accounts of what Stefan was up to—that he’d probably been hanging out somewhere my tata had never heard of: on the infamous Jochen Tole, aka Freak Street, just another pilgrim on the long and winding hippie trail. As it turned out, he was taking care of terminal TB patients at a hospice run by—you guessed it—Catholics. Or one Catholic, at least: a Yoda-like priest from India called Fr. John.
At first, though Stefan seemed happily shocked to see me, we were a little shy with one another. It had been so ridiculously long. And we had both changed. I was no longer the little girl who’d sobbed into his T-shirt during that final, agonizing farewell. And after years of nothing but dal bhat and endless cups of chai, he himself was almost unrecognizable. Clothed in your typical Newari villager garb—loose white pants, loose white shirt, woven skull cap,