by M. G. Harris
We walk in silence through the town, stopping only to ask the occasional street vendor to point us towards the town hall. A frosty distance grows between us; by the time we reach the building I can hardly look at Ixchel. My mind is a jumble of all the thoughts and feelings that I can’t put into words, but that all start with the sense of betrayal that gets worse with every step we take.
Eventually I stop in the middle of the pavement on a side street. “Why would you string me along like this?”
“Like what?”
“Say you’ll time travel with me and then turn round and say that it’s a stupid idea. . .”
“Josh, can’t I say anything to you that isn’t strictly true? I have my own imagination, after all.”
“But don’t you understand anything about me?”
Ixchel looks puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Ixchel . . . like it or not, I’m a time traveller. A time traveller. You know? You can’t go putting ideas in my head. Because – once the idea is there – it’s there for good.”
“But it’s just an idea. . .?”
“If I have the idea to time travel, and it feels right, then – you know what? It can happen.”
Ixchel shrugs but says nothing. I detect a sharpening in her interest.
I stick both hands in the pockets of my jacket. “When you move your leg, it’s because before you moved it, you had the idea of moving. Like - when you get into university, it’s because you first had the idea to apply. See? Me and time travel: other people can dream about it – and nothing comes of it.”
“But you,” she says eventually and with a trace of bitterness. “You can actually do it.”
“Right. Even having the idea makes me wonder – is this it? Am I meant to time travel? Will some crucial event in history turn out to depend on me deciding to jump in time, right now?”
We stare at each other. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” I say, quietly.
“No.” She swallows and I notice tears in her eyes. “You’re not crazy. You’re right. Ever since I opened my mouth to say that stupid thing I’ve been regretting it.”
“Things happen for a reason, Ixchel.”
“But you don’t know the reason, do you?”
I shake my head and reach for her. “No.”
“How can you trust . . . if you don’t know the reason?”
I shrug. “Sometimes you have to go with your gut.”
Slowly, Ixchel’s arms go around me. I reach up to wipe away her tears. A couple of bystanders give us a glance but no more. We hold each other loosely, me stroking her hair with one hand and wondering what to say.
But finally, I know what she’s afraid of. The reason for me to time travel again; the truth of what I might become: Arcadio.
The name that’s haunted us both since we first saw his name on a letter to me. The mysterious time traveller who seems to be following me around in space and time. Arcadio is the reason that I even had a time-travel bracelet in the first place – his cryptic postcards led me to my lost father, who gave me the Bracelet of Itzamna.
Arcadio – who fell in love with an American nurse, Susannah St John, only to abandon her for one last, fateful time-jump. Then he disappeared without a trace. That was 1962.
Arcadio, who my father dreaded I might become. Ixchel’s worst fear about my future – that one day I’ll time travel, lose my memory and never return.
I don’t want to become Arcadio.
But what if things can only work out if I do?
Zsolt Bosch is dead. Died before either of us was born, in fact.
“Which explains why he didn’t come looking for you,” Ixchel says.
We find out after queuing up at the records office, where they send us to the registry of deaths. And there’s his name, on the list of deaths in 1992: “Don” Zsolt Bosch.
“He got to be a ‘Don’,” I say, impressed. “I guess people round here must have respected him.”
It turns out that there’s a memorial museum at the house that used to belong to Bosch. He donated it in his will, to be an exhibition centre dedicated to the local Lacandon people, descendants of the Maya who live in separate communities in the nearby rainforest. According to the pamphlet we pick up about the museum, Bosch lived among a local tribe of Lacandones for many years.
“Of course he did.” I can’t help smiling. “Bosch the famous anthropologist, living with the indigenous Mexicans. I bet he couldn’t resist.”
It’s hard to tell if Ixchel’s relieved to find out that Bosch is dead or not. Maybe it means that we’ll never get hold of Bosch’s time-travel bracelet. Perhaps it’s buried with him.
I’ve already made my own mind up: it’s no coincidence that we’re passing through San Cristobal. Part of my subconscious mind – or Ixchel’s – knew that if we came here, we’d look for any sign of Bosch. He promised us that when he was done with time-travelling, he’d retire to San Cristobal, in the twentieth century. He promised me that he’d leave me his bracelet.
I can’t let go of the idea that Bosch would only do that for a reason. He knew how dangerous time travel can be. He wouldn’t invite me to take another trip, not unless he knew that it was destined.
All these years I’ve felt like a pawn being moved in some kind of chess game, but I never knew whose hand moved me. For a long time I suspected that it was Montoyo. Then Arcadio, or even Blanco Vigores, Ek Naab’s mysterious blind guy who always seemed to me like a kind of prophet.
The 2012 plan has absorbed the lives of several individuals. But there’s never been any doubt about its main architect: Zsolt Bosch. The man who broke the plan and then tried to fix it.
Could it be that my puppetmaster is Bosch?
I don’t admit it to Ixchel; I barely admit it to myself. Yet, as we stroll through the bustling late afternoon streets of this old town, I can sense it. I’m giving myself over to whatever we find. If Bosch’s Bracelet is there, then I know I’m going to use it.
The house is a few streets away from the main plaza, in a quiet alley lined with houses painted in a series of shades of orange, interrupted with the odd one in blue. There’s a big double wooden door, heavy dark wood with fading varnish. A single door is cut into the main entrance, and a little Mayan girl, maybe nine years old, sits there.
“Entry is free,” she says, looking up at us with wide eyes. For a second she looks a tiny bit like Ixchel and I wonder about all those years when Ixchel was growing up, years when I didn’t know her and Benicio did.
We both give her a friendly smile and step over the threshold. The door leads to a small, neatly kept patio with a tiled fountain. Three walls are brilliant white; the fourth is a deep blue, the kind that little kids pick when they crayon the sky. The edges of the courtyard are lined with blue-and-white glazed pots filled with red geraniums.
“The geraniums,” Ixchel murmurs. “Who do they remind me of. . .?”
“Susannah St John,” I whisper. “The one from the parallel reality, where there was a nuclear war.”
When Bosch changed the timeline by writing the Books of Itzamna, he erased that future. Now only Ixchel and I can even remember the Susannah of that reality. Maybe that’s all existence really is – to exist in the minds of other people?
There’s a door marked “Office”, just off the entrance to the main part of the house. Through the doorway I can see a room, white walls hung with paintings of abstract art, tapestries and the occasional free-standing sculpture.
We can hear voices and footsteps from the room beyond, which sounds like a group of visitors. I knock on the door of the office and after a minute it opens. A slim, smooth-shaven young guy wearing trendy glasses opens it, holding a thin paperback between his finger and thumb.
In Spanish he asks, “Can I help you?”
“I need to speak to someone about Zsolt Bosch.”
He looks me up and down for a second. “Are you family?”
I think for a second. In a way, I am. Bosch’s son was the
first Bakab Ix, and I’m descended from him, even though it was almost two thousand years ago.
“Yes.”
The guy looks doubtful. “What’s your name?”
“Joshua Garcia.”
He’s definitely taken aback. “You are Joshua Garcia? Born in Oxford, England?”
“Why not?”
He looks at Ixchel. “And you – are you family too?”
“No,” she replies calmly. He stares at her for a minute until he realizes that Ixchel’s not going to volunteer anything else.
Then back at me: “You can prove this? You have a passport, something?”
“I have a student ID card.”
The guy seems a bit nonplussed.
“Why shouldn’t I be Joshua Garcia?”
“Well, friend, you look about sixteen, agreed?”
“I’m eighteen,” I lie. That’s what it says on my fake ID.
“Even so. Zsolt Bosch died in 1992. He mentioned Joshua Garcia in his will. His condition was – the object had to be collected in person. By someone who didn’t have to wait to be invited.”
My heart pounds heavily for a few seconds; I have to take a deep breath. “Right, well, that’s me.”
“Hmm.” He peers suspiciously into my eyes. “Mr Bosch couldn’t have known of your existence.”
“Obviously, he did.”
“We expected an older gentleman.”
It’s a struggle to contain my excitement. Bosch did it! He actually left me something. Could it be the Bracelet?
“Look, I’m Joshua Garcia. I’m here to collect what Bosch left me.”
The guy holds the door open a little more. There’s barely enough room to get past him into the tiny office. He invites us to take a seat. With an officious air, he rifles through a filing cabinet, pulls out a file and sits down opposite me with the file in his hands. He coughs, almost ceremoniously, and opens the file. Inside is an envelope, with my name handwritten on the front. There’s also another envelope. It’s not labelled, and is already open.
“There are some questions,” he says.
“Go for it.”
“Question one: what are the names of the four books?”
I assume Bosch is talking about his four books of inscriptions copied from the walls of a buried Erinsi temple; the Books of Itzamna. “They are Ix, Kan, Muluc and Cuauc.”
The guy’s eyes narrow but he says nothing. He clears his throat. “Question two: who were the first Bakabs?”
Drat. I should remember this. Bosch introduced me to them all, four young boys, the last day that I saw him. This one is going to be harder.
“Leaf Storm,” I begin, starting with Bosch’s own son. “Sky Wind, Swift Light, Fire Son.”
Almost triumphantly, he closes the file. “Wrong. You can leave now.”
I bite my tongue. How can I admit that I met Bosch himself nine months ago, if this guy reckons he’s been dead for almost twenty years?
“It’s Swift Wind,” I say firmly, focusing. “Sky . . . Sky Son. And Fire Light.”
The guy seems disappointed. He opens the file again. “Final question: who died helping me to reach San Cristobal?”
“Josh. . .” Ixchel reminds me, “think carefully . . . what would Bosch say?”
That’s a tricky one. To reach San Cristobal, Bosch needed the Bracelet of Itzamna. His warriors killed Marius Martineau, a leader of the Sect of Huracan who’d travelled in time to try to murder Bosch. And Bosch took Martineau’s Bracelet.
“Marius Martineau,” I say.
The guy lays down the file. Slowly, he holds out his hand. “Your ID card.”
After he’s looked it over and taken a photocopy, the guy picks up the envelope inscribed with my name. He looks faintly queasy. “Take it. Although I cannot understand how it can be you.”
“Bosch was a time traveller,” I tell him, very calmly. “And we met a while back.” I open the envelope and remove the only contents – a key. “Bosch left me his time-travel machine.”
The museum guy scowls. “There’s no need to be disrespectful.”
I hold up the key, grinning. “What does this open?”
“A safety deposit box at the bank on Insurgentes Street.”
We leave right away. The guy seemed so disappointed to be handing over the precious envelope, I half suspect he’ll change his mind. There’s just time to get to the bank before it closes.
The bank is in the centre of town, a fancy, ornate building. The safety deposit security check is a bit dodgy because they make me open my survival packs and get all worried when they find the Gerber multitool with all the sharp pointy bits. In the end they only let me through if I leave my jacket and everything I’m carrying with Ixchel.
Finally I’m on my own in a room with the safety deposit box. I open it to find another envelope containing a sheet of handwritten instructions, plus a short letter from Bosch. But the object that sets my heart pumping right away is the Bracelet of Itzamna. Trembling slightly, I push the Bracelet on to my arm and fasten it. I roll my sleeve down to cover the object, and pick up the letter.
I walk out of the room, feeling suddenly powerful and scarily conspicuous. As though it must be written all over my face.
Ixchel gives me a searching look and then whispers, “Bosch did it, didn’t he?”
Without a word, I take her hand and lead her towards the doors. By the time we leave the bank my skin is fizzing, tingling underneath the strange, arcane metallic surface of the relic. Reacting with some mysterious secretion of my own flesh, the Bracelet of Itzamna recognizes one of its owners.
It’s just past five in the afternoon but after over thirty-six hours on the go we’re ready to drop. We check into the first hotel we find and make straight for the room. We don’t even have the energy to eat in the restaurant, so we order club sandwiches, fries, pizza and Caesar salad to be brought to the room.
The hotel is a grand old Spanish building with a jungle-style garden in the central courtyard, and terracotta tiled floors. Our room is huge; there’s light wooden flooring and arched walls painted with a red trim. There are two beds covered in pristine white sheets; we kick off our shoes, throw ourselves on to the beds and lie there sighing with relief.
“I’ve been awake for nearly two days,” I groan. “And my legs ache like mad from riding the bike. . .”
“Think you’re the only one in pain? My muscles are going into shock.”
I roll over on to my side and look at Ixchel. “I’m glad you came. I hope you are too. Even though I’ve messed up.”
She smiles, very sweetly. “Of course I’m glad. It’s you and me against the world, isn’t that right?”
I reach across the gap between the beds and touch Ixchel’s fingers. “If I do it, Ixchel, if I use the Bracelet, I do want you to come with me. Don’t think I can do it alone.”
Ixchel’s gazes at me with her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes. Her fingers intertwine with mine. She tugs until I’m almost rolling off the edge of my bed. “You’re not alone, Josh. Never.”
“Do you mean it this time? Please don’t just be saying it.”
Ixchel shakes her head. “I’ve decided. You don’t get away from me that easy, Josh, Arcadio, or whoever you are.”
I’m about to slide off the bed to kiss her but there’s a knock at the door. It’s the food, presented with fancy stainless steel cover plates. We’re too hungry to do anything but attack the food solidly for several minutes.
Outside, it begins to rain, lightly at first, and then settles into the hard summer rain that keeps everything around here so dazzlingly green.
A helicopter flies low overhead, noisily shattering the medley of voices and traffic sounds. Ixchel and I poke our heads through the open window, glance up to see a black bubble of a helicopter above the zocalo – the town square. It circles a couple of times and then cruises off.
For one ghastly moment, the thought that it might be the NRO crosses my mind. But I keep the thought to myself. Ixchel and I
are managing to calm down quite nicely; I don’t want to risk another row.
But after a while, munching fries and drinking Mountain Dew, I get to thinking again and starting wondering: is Bosch my puppetmaster?
“Did you ever think that Bosch could be Arcadio? He had the blue eyes, like Susannah said.”
Ixchel frowns. “Bosch didn’t mention travelling to the twentieth century. I got the impression that he’d only been to the Mayan past.”
“He must have gone afterwards.”
“Bosch was already in his forties when we met him; too old to be Arcadio. Susannah described a younger man.”
Then Ixchel goes quiet. Tentatively I say, “You still think Arcadio is me.”
“Can you think of another answer?”
“Yes – how about Blanco Vigores? He’s all enigmatic about his past. No one knows for sure where he came from. No one remembers him being young. And Martineau got a time-travel bracelet from someone. Blanco’s missing. We know he went to that club that Marius Martineau was a member of, in New York. So, who else but Blanco?”
“It’s possible, I guess.”
“And he’s still missing from Ek Naab. He could be anywhere. Or anytime.”
Ixchel thinks for a moment. “Blanco Vigores knows about your life, that’s true. But how did he first learn about your life?”
“If he’s a time traveller, we might be meeting each other out of order. Maybe he first meets me when I’m grown up. Maybe I tell him stuff. Or maybe he meets my dad?”
“Stop, you’re giving me a headache. I told you, it’s not natural to play with time like this. We’re supposed to live and grow a day older each day.”
I grin. “We do – just that us time travellers don’t live life in order.”
“Listen to you. Us time travellers.”
I roll up my sleeve to reveal the Bracelet of Itzamna. “Look at it. Shiny new Crystal Key too, by the look of it. I reckon old Bosch might have sorted the technology out, finally.”