by M. G. Harris
“So . . . you’re saying that what I think is jumping to a conclusion . . . might be the right thing to do?”
“Data comes in through all your senses,” he repeats, this time even more solemnly. “Some senses that you perhaps aren’t aware of.” Then he leans forward, whispering, “Ignore nothing!”
I peer at him closely, watching his expression change from secrecy to determination. He seems to stare out through the foliage of the orange trees, past the clean stone of the graves and even beyond the glistening, whitewashed walls of the church.
I follow his gaze but I can’t see anything special. Yet it strikes me then – with a strange rush of what I guess I’d have to call intuition – that this is a moment I’m going to remember for a very long time. Elements of the memory become solid, each piece falling into place: chinks of blue sky behind dark green leaves, the faint scent of oranges, the sharp blades of grass beneath my feet.
Ignore nothing.
It’s as though I can almost grasp what he’s saying. Somehow it’s still just out of reach.
Then I speak. “Can I ask you something?”
“You may.”
I pick my words carefully. If he’s talking about me to Montoyo then there’s a chance that anything I say might be reported.
“Montoyo once asked me to find out whatever I could about the Bracelet of Itzamna. He reckoned that my dad stole it when he visited Ek Naab.”
Vigores wags a finger. “That’s incorrect. I gave it to him.”
I knew my dad was no thief, but it’s a huge relief to hear it from Vigores’s own lips.
“Why?”
Very simply he says, “Because he asked me for it.”
“What – you gave the Bracelet to him, just like that? Did you know what it can do?”
Vigores nods. “Indeed I do know, and did then too. It’s a highly dangerous object.”
“You told him that, yeah?”
“Naturally. I warned him that operating the Bracelet can cause you to materialize inside a rock. A painful way to die, I’m certain.”
I gasp. “It can do what?”
“The Bracelet of Itzamna is thought to be a time-travel device, Josh, as I’m sure you know. What travels in time, however, must also travel in space.”
“Why?”
“Because the earth flies through space. And spins on its axis – constant motion. Wherever you are on the earth at a given point in time, if you are to travel to the same place but at a different point in time, you must also shift in space.”
I consider this. “So the Bracelet is also a teleport device?”
“Correct.”
Dad jumped in space – but not time.
I ask, “Have . . . have you ever used it?”
Silently he nods. “But I’ve also seen what can happen when the Bracelet is used without . . . due care.” It sounds like he was going to say something else but stopped himself.
“You’ve actually used it? What happened?”
There’s a deep sigh. “Yes. I was lucky – I survived. I was a young man. It happened soon after I first came across the Bracelet of Itzamna.”
I interrupt. “You found the Bracelet? That’s news to me. . .”
Why didn’t Montoyo tell me any of this?
He hesitates, like he doesn’t want to admit something. “I did.”
“Where?”
“In a place called Izapa.”
Again I gasp. “Izapa, near Mount Tacana? Was it anywhere near the Temple of the Inscriptions – where Itzamna copied. . .?”
“The ancient Erinsi writings that became the four Books of Itzamna? Yes, Josh, I found the Bracelet not far from that temple.”
I lean back. “Wow! I mean – sorry – I never thought of you as a Tomb Raider type.”
Drily Vigores says, “It wasn’t a tomb.”
I guess he’s never heard of the computer game. . .
“The Bracelet that I gave your father – it’s broken,” Vigores tells me. There’s no doubt whatsoever in his voice. “Or more strictly, the Bracelet is incomplete. It lacks the crystal that – presumably – controls the time circuit. Without that, there’s no way to know where the Bracelet will send you. The chances are you’d end up in outer space and die.”
“And my dad knew this?”
Vigores nods. “He did. He wanted to find a way to repair it. I tried to tell him that the crystal has never been found. Still. . .” Vigores seems to be searching for the words. “Your father . . . he insisted.”
I fall silent, wondering. If Dad knew that using the Bracelet might kill him, why did he use it anyway and end up on the slopes of a volcano?
Vigores breaks across my thoughts. “You’re thinking about your father again, yes? The Bracelet of Itzamna and why he wanted it, whether the Bracelet sealed his fate.”
“Yes,” I tell him slowly, “sealed his fate . . . I think it did. My dad lost his memory after using it. He ended up on Mount Orizaba. And later. . .”
“Later he sacrificed himself to save you,” Vigores says firmly. His tone becomes sharp. “So don’t you think you should visit your father’s grave now? To pay your respects?”
With that, he stands up and makes to shake my hand goodbye.
There’s one final question I’m itching to ask.
“You showed him how to use the Bracelet. Didn’t you?”
Vigores looks sad. “Yes. As a precaution – so that he didn’t activate it by accident.”
I’d do anything to ask how to use the Bracelet of Itzamna. But I can’t think of a single way to do that . . . without giving the game away that I actually have it.
The Bracelet can be activated by accident.
One wrong move and I could suffocate in the vacuum of space.
Benicio is waiting for me when I finally leave my father’s grave. The old man is nowhere to be seen. I get the feeling that Benicio wants to ask me about my talk with Vigores. Maybe because I’ve just been visiting my dead father, he lets me be.
I’m lost in thought all the way back. About the Bracelet. About my dad. Could it be that Ixchel was right, telling me that maybe I shouldn’t meddle with the way things turned out? Perhaps that cemetery is where he’s meant to be.
Yet, that doesn’t make any sense. Ever since it happened, I’ve had the feeling that there is a reason why Dad made the effort to leave me the Bracelet. It’s like he was asking me to fix it, to come back in time to rescue him. What else could he have meant by those last words – “This isn’t over”?
Then there’s Vigores. I’m so disoriented after meeting him. Not for the first time – he has this way of getting to me, every time we meet. I’ve never hung on to someone’s words the way I do with his. I can only understand half of what he says. The other half, though, seems to worm its way deep inside. Words that just tick over, quietly. One day maybe they’ll make sense.
As we’re approaching the elevator in the thatched-roof restaurant where we had breakfast, overlooking the pools and the gardens decorated with banana palms, pink oleander and purple bougainvillea flowers, Benicio gets a call on his mobile.
“Your friend is awake now,” he tells me. “Feeling much better, too.”
I want to be with Tyler all the way from the beginning of his first visit to Ek Naab. So I go back to the aircraft hangar to pick him up. Benicio leaves me there and gets back to his own work.
Montoyo is with Tyler in the medical room. He’s trying to act like we’re the focus of his attention. But after only a few seconds his phone goes and he stands quietly in the corner, talking. Tyler is dressed in some clean jeans and one of Benicio’s T-shirts. Poor old Benicio – he’s always having to hand over his clothes. Tyler looks about a thousand times better than he did the last time I saw him awake. He even manages a broad smile.
“Hey, man,” he says.
“You all right then?”
“Right as rain,” he grins. I know he’s fibbing. When I was shot in the leg last December I was in pain for days, even aft
er Susannah St John stitched me up.
Susannah. Where is she now, I wonder? Back in Tlacotalpan? Or did Montoyo let her stay in Ek Naab? I decide to ask him.
“How is Susannah St John?”
Montoyo’s just put his phone away. “Susannah St John,” he repeats, very slowly.
“Who is Susannah St John?” Tyler asks.
“She’s the old lady I met in Mexico last time I was here,” I tell Tyler. “Last December. The one who sent the postcards . . . remember?”
Tyler nodded. It had been a crazy few hours, I recall. Phoning Tyler at all hours of the day as Ixchel and I travelled through Mexico by bus. Getting him to read out the coded messages on the backs of a bunch of postcards that kept arriving at my house. With his help we’d deciphered a code that the mysterious letter-writer Arcadio told Susannah St John to send me. Susannah must have wondered what kind of strange message she was carrying – since Arcadio had her wait over forty years before she mailed those postcards.
Montoyo says, “Well, Josh, why don’t you ever write her a letter? Then you’d know.”
“I’m not much of a letter-writer.”
“On the contrary, you’re a tremendous correspondent. What else is a blog?”
“But letters . . . to, well, someone older like Susannah, you know, with all the ‘I hope you are well’ and ‘I have been keeping very well myself’ and all that. . .” I wrinkle my nose. “I can’t be bothered, honestly.”
“I’m sure she’d be grateful even for something written in that strange text language you youngsters use,” Montoyo comments.
“Do you write to her?”
“No,” he admits. “But I use the telephone. She’s well. Back in Tlacotalpan, most of the time.”
“Why did you let her come here? Why tell her about us?”
Montoyo smiles briefly. “It’s nice to hear you say ‘us’ when you talk about Ek Naab.”
I hadn’t even noticed, but he’s right . . . I think of myself as part of Ek Naab.
“I told her, Josh, because, well. . .” He pauses. “Because she already knew!”
I say nothing. Ixchel and I had tried hard not to talk about Ek Naab in Susannah’s presence. I guess we hadn’t been careful enough. Then my mother arrived in Mexico after the avalanche and my father’s death. . . At that point, I have to admit, the beans had to spill. Yet Susannah had taken it all in her stride – and Montoyo let her.
Meanwhile, even though in a couple of years I’ll be on the ruling Executive, I still have to be escorted around. I don’t understand Montoyo.
We begin the tour. It feels so odd – wrong, almost – to be having such an interesting time with Tyler when Ixchel and my mum are going through something so nightmarish. Neither of us mentions them, and neither does Montoyo. I really want Tyler to enjoy his first day here. Looking back, I hadn’t really been able to enjoy my first sight of Ek Naab. The day before I’d arrived, I was in a car crash with my half-sister and saw her drown. So I understand how Tyler must feel as we get into the chair lift and swoop through the tunnels, zooming past pools of phosphorescent water, stalactites and stalagmites.
Just like me on my first day in Ek Naab, Tyler will be grateful for the distraction.
A short while later we stand on the steps of the chair-lift station as they lead into Ek Naab, looking out over the gleaming mixture of modern, Mayan and Spanish architecture.
Tyler gives a low, soft whistle. “Man, that is quality!”
Montoyo watches him with a wry smile. “We don’t get many visitors, as you know.” He pats Tyler on the back. “You have excellent taste, my boy.”
Montoyo walks us through the city, from the stone staircase down to the path that leads to the cenote, through the main town square where the daily market is in full flow, traders selling hot tortillas, fresh tropical fruit, dried chillies, warm bread, ice cream, clothes, paintings, today even books. We wander around, being given the spiel by Montoyo. Then he leads us back to the cenote – the ancient sacrificial sinkhole – the “dark water” for which Ek Naab is named.
After his initial whistling, Tyler actually doesn’t say very much. He looks around mostly in silence, asking a question now and again, and that’s all. Noticing how thoughtful Tyler has become, I take him aside slightly for a quiet word out of Montoyo’s earshot. Staring at the smooth surface of the water, I prod his arm.
“So . . . what do you reckon?”
Tyler turns to me. There’s a light in his eyes, but his expression is sad. He shakes his head. “I dunno, man. This is . . . it is like . . . so random. There’s this. There’s the world, and that superwave thing coming in 2012. The end of the world and whatnot. All these people here trying to stop it.” He raises a finger and slowly prods me back. “And then there’s you.”
I grin slightly, puzzled. “Yeah . . . I know . . . I told you all that.”
Tyler shrugs. “Seeing it, though, that’s different. It’s like . . . some impossible secret. Yeah. Something impossible. This is too much, Josh.”
“Too much, I know! It’s am-a-zing.”
Tyler looks down, shakes his head. He turns away from Montoyo, and speaking in a low voice says, “No. That’s not what I mean. This is too much for you to handle alone. This Montoyo guy is connected, man. This morning in the hospital, when you were out? Never off his mobile. People coming to see him. But you, you want to travel in time, change the past. You ever think about all the things you might affect?”
I take a step backwards. “What are you saying?”
Tyler can see he’s crossed me. He steps closer, whispers, “I’m on your side, Josh, you know that. But just think about it, yeah? Maybe you should hand the Bracelet over. . .” He cocks his head towards Montoyo. “Maybe he knows what he’s doing?”
Horrified, I whisper, “Did you tell him I have it?”
Emphatically, he shakes his head. “No way! I’m thinking about you. We’ve got real problems here and now – with the kidnap. Montoyo is busting a gut to save your mum and Ixchel. All I’m saying is. . .”
“Maybe I should trust him?” I glance over my shoulder at Montoyo. He’s on another phone call. Slowly I breathe out, releasing some of the tension. “OK. I’ll think about it.”
At that minute my UK mobile phone goes off. It vibrates against my left thigh. I pull the phone out, turn off the keypad lock. All I can do is stare.
It’s a text message.
Nothing so unusual there, perhaps. But the sender? On the phone screen flashes a name I typed into my phone during a fateful car journey down Highway 186 to Becan. The drive that led to my sister Camila’s death. Moments before the agent of the Sect turned up and started shooting at our car, Camila and I, we’d had a moment. A real connection, me with the sister I didn’t even know I had. Next time you feel like you’re missing our father, she’d told me, call me. Put my number in your phone. “Camila, Call Me!” or “Call Me! Camila!” Either way, it’s with a “C”.
The number of times I’d seen her name come up on my phone, when I’d been browsing through the Cs. I never had the heart to delete it. I even thought I’d seen it the night we went out with Camila’s husband, Saul, after it was all over and I’d found the codex. It seemed impossible to me then, that so much could be left of Camila except Camila herself. But that’s how it is when people die, as I’ve come to realize. The person is gone, yet you’re surrounded by all their stuff.
It’s so hard to accept that they’re not just a phone call away. That the phone will never ring again because of them – the telephone that rings, but who’s to answer? That’s what I told Camila about our dad, that exact thing. Now it looks as if I’m being haunted by her phone number.
It wasn’t easy to let go of Camila. Maybe it’s because I’d only known her for a few hours. Just didn’t seem fair that life could give you something amazing like her, only to snatch her away.
Yet staring my mobile phone, there’s no doubt – I don’t even need to pinch myself to see if I’m awake. Incredible, im
possible, and yet there it is, plain as day. My dead sister’s name.
Camila Call Me.
I’m still boggling at my phone when Montoyo finishes his call and interrupts us.
“We need to get on the Internet right away. Ixchel’s made another post.”
Hurriedly, he leads us beyond the church to a very narrow little lane. Decorative hanging baskets drip flowers from the apartment windows above. The lane is so narrow that it seems that petals might almost meet across the gap. Montoyo disappears into a doorway about ten metres down the alley. Tyler and I follow him to a second-floor apartment. It’s almost empty – three small rooms, a kitchen and two with hammocks. In one room there’s a shiny new laptop computer, the box and packaging strewn around the room.