by Rodney Hall
‘A failure? How can you say that?’
‘For starters. I let my wife. Down. And I want to. Tell her now. In front of. Everybody. How sorry I am. That I ever went.’
The camera finds her.
Ryan resets the narrative tone with a summary of the story so far: enlistment, flying out through Syria, joining the squad on patrol, then, no sooner back in camp than being randomly picked for escort duty, driven across town, on the way putting up with this Brit asking endless questions, stopping off for him to take snaps of a historic mudbrick tower, the Brit arriving at the library, and the anticlimax of being refused entry. Returning to the vehicle . . . with the terrible consequences of that.
‘Let me assure you,’ Ryan concludes, ‘each week we show amazing stories. But, on the evidence here, yours goes beyond belief. Beyond amazing. It’s impossible to imagine how you’re alive to tell the tale. And was this ISIS? Or before ISIS?’
Adam cranks up a warning hand.
‘No one knows. Who. Is a terrorist. And who isn’t. We went there. In good faith.’ Choking on rocks of fresh air he reaches for the truth so often revisited in the silence of his active mind. ‘But how were we. Different? We showed no. Ar. Mercy while trashing. Their country. Trashing their homes. Hospitals blown sky high. That was the game. So who’s to say.’
‘Hospitals?’ Ryan takes his choice from the list with a twinge of satisfaction showing.
‘Thing is. In the end. This was our. War . . . but why?’
‘Ah yes. You’re reminding us of the notoriously absent weapons of mass destruction?’
‘Ex. Actly.’ He chokes a moment. ‘None of that stuff. Was there. In the first place. And I’ve ended up a . . .’
‘Really, there’s no way we can imagine how you feel about that. I’m sure the viewers at home would agree.’
‘So what was it. All for?’ Adam wags his head, fighting to breathe.
Images from the film clip logjam his mind. He is flotsam among so much that is beyond him. Swept downstream by a rush of emotion. The dark fluid flows. Shadows dance on the current. The chasm between two worlds opens to engulf him. There is no going back. Cry help! The sheer power between the floodgates. His lips are sewn together to gag him—stitches tearing free of delicate flesh as he struggles to form words. The wild idea he has been chasing down is suddenly there for the taking. He is back in control.
‘We were. Slap-bang in the. Safe zone. When we copped it. Ar. Right outside. Divisional HQ.’
Ryan adjusts: this is new.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Who’s to say. That missile wasn’t.’ Adam lunges to expel the words. ‘Ar. Friendly fire?’ There it is. The power is his.
Some instinct tells him to preserve the moment by leaving it at that. He commands the Contraption to carry him away. Item by item his wreckage is reassembled upright.
But still he explains as he goes, ‘Hit me. And I’ll hit. Back.’ And he stalks off-camera across the room, trailing unfastened garments. Remembering another point he planned to make, he adds, ‘And Saddam had. Nothing to do. With the twin towers.’
Ryan, the professional, turns this to his advantage. ‘Well, there you are, ladies and gentlemen. That took me off guard. The privilege of watching a piece of history! I think things became all too much in the end, the memories and the traumas. Well, thank you just the same, Adam. And welcome back from the dead. We pay tribute to your sacrifice. You’re a hero. It’s been a humbling experience to have you on the show.’
Time to wrap up.
‘Now, for those watching at home, it’s over to you. Have your say on Twitter. Share your thoughts, because I think you’ll agree we’ve been in the presence of courage on an unimaginable scale.’
The focus pulls back.
‘Cut.’
‘That was the bomb!’
‘Relax, people.’
Adam, a tragic cripple propped in a black skeleton, diminished as the nurse covers his injuries, leans awkwardly against the door frame to the kitchen, staring around him defiantly. Already the fur-cased microphone on its pole is being angled out through the porch and away—a mobile mixing unit trundling in pursuit—padded steel suitcases are clipped shut and cables coiled.
‘Sorry,’ he says to Ryan. ‘Sorry I walked. Out on you. I was suddenly. Too full of. Rage to speak.’
Ryan reaches to shake his hand. With care he takes hold of it.
‘That was huge, mate. Some stories are long and some are short. Believe me, there’s an art in keeping it brief. You did well. More than that. Much more. And your exit was tremendous.’
Adam’s eyes are extinguished.
‘What about the. Amazing footage of. Them cutting me. Ar. Out of the wreckage . . .’
‘Icing on the cake!’
‘Who. Ar. Shot it and. Why?’
‘The brave new world of amateur reporting.’
The big camera, detached from its carriage, is borne aloft with the rest of the gear down the ramp to the OB van parked at the mouth of the garage.
Bridget frees herself from the sidelines. ‘That broke my heart,’ she says as she joins them.
Out there on social media Adam’s image—a scarred and partly deflated balloon cradled by black struts—goes viral. Seven million hits later he is famous.
6
MARIANNA
The stone pyramid fills the whole valley—seeming to sail sedately across the sky among stilled clouds—a structure of terraces of diminishing size. On each side a central staircase is flanked by stonewort-mottled serpents with fangs bared. Wormy roots in the sun-cracked fissures hold the foundations together even while splitting them apart (still the equation) while full-grown trees thrust out from crevices. Trailing beards of lichen stroke Marianna’s shoulders as she picks her way. A forbidden place. The causeway humps underfoot like a sleeping beast.
How does she dare?
Her European nose, trim fingernails, her lipstick and the provocation of bouncy blonde hair give her away. Heat-drugged, she throws back her head. Without her dark glasses—lost somewhere in the forest—glaring violet edges outline every detail. Her eyes feel naked and exposed. Too late to turn tail. She struggles against a supernatural body of humidity.
Also she is being watched.
A trunkless head weighing a couple of tonnes confronts her, carved eyeballs boggling from under the rim of a domed helmet. Blackened, embedded and blurred by weathering, broad nose and full lips shockingly reminiscent of Placido. Dribbles of congealed candle wax spill down the arched eyebrows as evidence of recent rituals—plus perishable offerings laid on two paving slabs—flowers among wizened fruit. So, there are believers who still come here. She prays for them to stay away until she has done what she hopes to do. This day she reserved for herself. There’s no going back to being the woman she was, a woman who paid her way in the arms of student partners by teaching an obsolescent skill, skirt a-swirl, gyrating around the same old expanse of loosened parquetry.
She takes a breather, using her hat as a fan, amused when a perky bird perches on the idol’s domed helmet—the warm curvature of light a shell under its twiggy feet—as if showing off a gigantic egg. Ridiculous. The queer humour of nature. She mops her perspiring neck and brow, lifts the blouse stuck to her sides and eases a bra strap. She stoops to pick scabs of dried mud from her jeans. She takes off her shoes and bangs them together before putting them back on. Better. Bracing her shoulders. The truth is that she needs to forgive herself if she’s to cauterize the guilt that haunts her.
Up she scrambles, emerging from the forest crown, dappled by jagged fragments of light.
The stairs are coated with volcanic ash. She counts them as she climbs. Memorizing numbers, the regular repeated rise, step-by-step, aches pleasantly as stored muscle-memory. Repetition is the essence, the mantra, the way. Exercise restores her faith. Well, of course,
she is fit. Time and space are on her side. A tiny figure, she levitates above the treetops to dreamwalk across a stupendous ocean of restless leaves.
Here the sun strikes the bastion, raw as brass on brass, throwing off coruscations at the verge of pain. The sky a torrent of honeyed heat, loud with insects and their swooping predators. On the first broad sill, supported by carved monkey skulls, she finds herself looking out over an in-turned courtyard, pavements encompassing the whole complex. The scale is overwhelming. Symmetrical platforms unfold on either side like a celestial card trick while separate towers of a citadel, softened and dimmed by moss, rise beyond.
Already she can sense mathematics, made finite, clicking into place. Sublime. Statues stand here and there, waiting to be inhabited by old gods. Obedient to the pattern of the dance she abandons all other sense of purpose. Marianna. She has the weird feeling that she might, if she chose, fly the whole way to the top. Then at the corner she comes face to face with a second bodiless head half-buried in debris. This one tilts toward the meaningless sky, serenely snubbing the forested world below—the swamps, the silver mines and a raked sweep of cactus farms in the middle distance, the world of roads and road traffic connected to the farthest reaches of eternity—stone eyes intent on space. And stone ears hearing space. Parted lips embody the moment of an utterance that never comes. One elephantine cheek curves under her hand, flesh-warm and comfortable. Marianna, unseen by anyone and on tiptoe, places her mouth against the overhang of his lower lip and kisses him. The past falls away. Age no longer tyrant.
The law will never find me.
She is guardian of the moment and guardian of the monument. That’s how eminent her status is, all doubts being swallowed by trackless aeons of ceremonial rustling and the dumbstruck heat behind and below. Up she goes, even while the giddy verticality causes her to question, briefly, her nerve. Earthbound treetops sink by the whispering millions. She controls her fear. Quieting her heart. Here the shadowed wall is incised with carved figures. Tall, flat and robed—with implacable large-nosed profiles—they wear feathered crowns and carry flails. A remote cry hangs in the air. A cry from afar. Clouds stream away, bound for Mexico, leaving her fixed where her shadow is. A moment stretched to the limit. Did she utter the cry herself . . . somehow being both there and here?
The cycles of return fascinate those who stand outside time. So it is with Marianna Gluck. She will never, now, grow old.
She has put it all behind her: her hotel room on the outskirts of a fortified city built by buccaneers, the non-existent ‘best meal Belize can offer’, a wooden ottoman lopsided under its canopy of bougainvillaea, gods occupying the ceiba tree and her own empty clothes hanging in the wardrobe. She recollects sundial-spokes of shadow cast by the shutters. Also a scratchy television in the empty foyer tuned to the CNN news, on which Otto Pérez Molina, President of Guatemala, was announcing his intention to lead a delegation of international dignitaries to some ancient shrine in his forgotten country in honour of astronomers a thousand years dead. She will not be among them.
Glad she needn’t flatter anyone’s political importance, she makes her own way and takes her own chances. Even the choice of continent was serendipitous: suggested by an obscure book—written by a long-forgotten archaeologist and out of print since 1928—accidentally opening at the Mayan prediction that the world will end this very year in the twelfth month on the twelfth day at the twelfth hour (which turned out, then, to be the day after tomorrow!). Well, Marianna chose the most obscure temple she could find. And here she is—hey presto!—on the doorstep of the sinning sorrowing world’s last day.
No less.
She takes a breather, sheltered by an angular shadow eight hundred years old. She likes it here. She props her back against the rampart while taking out The Maya Calendar—a New Theory of Summation and dipping into it. Professor Shilling advises that stepped pyramids are self-referential, both in terms of function and history, being mathematical demonstrations based on enormously long units of time such as the Great Cycle of 144,000 days (400 years, give or take a week). And, as if this were not impressive enough, he tops it with the information that the ambitious priestly architects even conceived of a time unit lasting 2,880,000 days (8,000 years!). She likes him for providing exclamation marks to verify his amazement.
So far so good. Marianna tries the mental exercise of grasping an eight-thousand-year unit, which, as she happens to know, is roughly the age of the world’s oldest cities, Ur, Sumer, Babylon. Also Harappa and the temples on Malta.
Consistent with the proportions of the building itself, the decorative sculptures are almost entirely concerned with numerics and the calendar, documenting the stages of construction. Somewhere within the basic time-frame of 144,000 days, apparently, this particular site was abandoned. Here is a mystery. Why, we may ask, abandoned? Theories vary from earthquakes to invasion, from over-cultivation and the exhaustion of the soil, to a drying up of water supplies, but no authority, to the best of my knowledge, has considered the possibility I set forth here: that, given the finite cycle of festivals, the completion of a Mayan temple—as a demonstration of mathematical principles in stone—might itself have been the sole purpose of the enterprise! In which case, once the cycle came to its end with the last slab set in place at the top, the temple would have been no longer relevant. Why should it not, then, have been ritually abandoned?
I announce this theory in full knowledge of the dispute that must certainly ensue among my fellow scholars. Such objections as might be advanced against it, I point out, will almost certainly arise from the presuppositions of pragmatic Western sensibilities and prejudices. We, in the modern world, think of buildings in terms of the function they serve: that they are only left to fall into disrepair when this function fails by being somehow subverted or thrown over. But what if, here in the Yucatan hinterland, the function was simply ‘completion’? What if each temple replicates a cycle of time—defined by the process of being built!—so that, once complete, society had no further use for it? What if the builders abandoned the temple for no other reason than that the time measured by the logic of the structure had run its course? Such, indeed, is my theory.
Marianna shuts Joshua Shilling’s book and holds it. Eyes closed. Heart pierced by some reminder of childhood. Being a true disciple, she can see for herself. She can feel the quintessential truth in these stone stairs, their equal angles and towering steepness. The sheer scale an utterance. With the oceanic sky beyond and the glare of the day inescapable.
Safely stowing the professor away, she hoists the pack on her back. Determined to count every footstep, she will miss nothing. Unless there has been some mistake, the cycles of 13 and 20—those curiously incompatible numbers—should define her ascent and confirm his authority. To measure is to understand. Doesn’t this underpin the workings of culture? A world assessed and reportable? Her body knows, adjusting to the experience. She no longer climbs with the simple aim of reaching the top. Every step has meaning. There will be markers indicating the units of measurement. As she knows, the first of the five terraces was fifty-two steps from the base. That’s one for each week of a year (and 5 x 52 = 260, which is 13 times 20, voilà!). Stage by stage the historic scale is confirmed by massive platforms. The calculus of gigantism.
She suspects that the futility of power—obvious in other cultures—goes unnoticed in our own.
Now she pauses systematically at each thirteenth, assuring herself the number must be intrinsically sacred. The repetitions, as she feels the lift of ancient stone, provide a scale for the continuum. She thinks it through. The barest truth of the number 13 being that it excludes rhythm. Yes, because 13 cannot be divided into regular parts . . . and rhythm depends on short units. Okay, she’s getting somewhere with this. The exclusion of rhythm equals an embodiment of stillness. Hence 13 is impersonal also. Yes, as all perfection must be.
A bewildering mass of graduated masonry looms ahe
ad while the rest plunges behind her. Unprotected and already too high, hands planted on knees as pistons, she drives herself on. She toys with the idea that if any one of these chiselled blocks could be extracted—just one—the whole building would surely collapse. By extrapolated logic each hour too, in some sense, carries the weight of centuries. After all, the end of the world is at hand.
She has read that the Mayan divisions of the year—Pop, Zip, Xul, etcetera—vary in length. Not strictly months, the shortest lasts only five days. Well, if the end of the world fails her when she reaches the altar, there’ll be time to decide what to do. Of course she can return the way she has come, counting backwards, undoing her steps . . . to this degree fulfilled. Failure will at least see her safely down on the track with its familiar sights—nothing more terrible than that—delivering her to the banana grove and the old woman sipping maté in the shade of her porch. Chased by evening shadows she will pick her way across the swamp to Placido waiting beside his car. Whether or not this satisfies some need in herself must be allowed to unfold in its own good time.
There are undoubtedly answers in among the riddles and prognostications of the sacred Book of Chilam Balam and the Popol Vuh if we could only decipher them.
So says the expert, addressing an indifferent populace, hell-bent on hastening its own end. She looks up. The towering staircase, toppling away from her, leans against a solid sky. She remembers Manfred as he was when she looked at him that last time. The police must surely be on to her case by now? They’ll trace her easily enough by scouring the internet . . . at least as far as Trinidad (that’s a simple matter of airline tickets) . . . but what about the local bus she caught? Cunning. And then the boat from there to here? They’re not mind-readers. Of course, she’d had to show her passport to the Belize dockside authorities but they still register arrivals in a handwritten ledger. Next came the tortuous bumpy ride by share taxi, rattling along like a cart full of loose bottles into the confusion of a nameless market square. Followed by her disappearance under the canopy of jungle. And now her isolation on this old ruin. Nevertheless, obstinate fears warn her to expect a helicopter at any minute, arriving from nowhere to airlift her into the arms of Interpol. Too late, of course, if the Mayans were right about the end of the world!