12.21

by Dustin Thomason

  “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  STANTON WAS SURPRISED to find no one standing outside Volcy’s room. Mariano, the security guard, was nowhere to be seen, and no replacement had arrived. Every guard in the building must have been called down to control the crowd from the freeway accident.

  Inside, Stanton and Chel found nothing but an empty bed.

  “Did they move him?” Chel asked.

  Stanton flipped on the lights and scanned the room. Seconds later they heard a hissing coming from behind the bathroom door. He put his ear to it. “Volcy?” The hissing was high-pitched and sounded like a leak, but there was no answer.

  Turning the doorknob, Stanton found it unlocked. Then he saw Volcy. He was facedown on the ground in a pool of water. The sink was still running.

  “Masam … ahrana … Janotha …” Volcy mumbled.

  Stanton dropped to the ground and touched the patient’s shoulder. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  No answer.

  He pulled the man’s arm around his neck to lift him up. Stanton could feel how distended Volcy’s body was; the man’s arms, legs, and torso all looked like they had been pumped too full of air. Like they were desperate to be punctured. The skin was cold.

  “Get the care team!” Stanton yelled to Chel.

  She seemed paralyzed.

  “Go!”

  Chel darted, and Stanton turned back to the patient. “I need you to hold on to me, Volcy.” Stanton tried to get him back to the bed, where they could put him on a ventilator. “Come on,” he grunted, “stay with me.”

  By the time the rest of the medical team got there, Volcy was barely breathing. He had ingested so much water that it was overloading his heart, and he was close to cardiac arrest. Two nurses and an anesthesiologist joined Stanton at the bedside, and they began to inject drugs. They covered Volcy’s face with an oxygen mask, but it was a losing battle. Three minutes later, Volcy’s heart stopped.

  The anesthesiologist applied a series of electric pulses, each stronger than the last. The defibrillator paddles left scorch marks as the patient’s body arched up. Stanton began chest compressions, something he hadn’t done since his residency. He threw his weight down from his shoulders and delivered a series of rapid pulses to Volcy’s chest, just above the sternum. The body rose and fell with each, one, two, three, four …

  Finally the anesthesiologist grabbed Stanton’s arm and urged him back from the bed. She said the words: “Time of death twelve twenty-six P.M.”

  MORE AMBULANCES SCREAMED from the 101 freeway toward the ER. Stanton tried to block out the sounds while he and Thane watched the orderly team lifting Volcy’s corpse into the body bag.

  “He’s been sweating for a week straight, right?” Thane said. “He must have been dehydrated.”

  Stanton looked down at the blue, bloated corpse. “This didn’t come from his kidneys. It came from his brain.”

  Thane looked confused. “You mean like a polydipsia?”

  Stanton nodded. Patients with psychogenic polydipsia were driven to drink excessively: Sinks had to be disabled, toilets drained. In the worst cases, like this one, the heart failed due to fluid overload. Stanton had never seen an FFI patient do it before, but he was angry at himself for not considering the possibility.

  “I thought that was a symptom of schizophrenia.” Thane was rummaging through the man’s chart, trying to grasp what had happened.

  “After a week without sleep, he might as well have had schizophrenia.”

  As the orderlies zipped the body bag, Stanton imagined Volcy’s horrific last minutes. Schizophrenia caused abnormalities in the perception of reality; FFI patients exhibited many of the same symptoms. Stanton had often wondered if sleep was all that kept healthy people out of insane asylums.

  “What happened to Dr. Manu?” Thane asked.

  “She was here a minute ago.”

  “Guess you can’t blame her for freaking when she saw this.”

  “She was the last person to talk to him,” Stanton said. “We need her to write down everything he said as precisely as possible. Track her down.”

  The orderlies lifted Volcy’s body onto the gurney and wheeled it out. After the corpse was prepared, Stanton would meet the pathologists down in the morgue for the autopsy.

  “I should’ve been here,” Thane said. “I got pulled down to the ER. They’re sending way too many critical patients here from that accident. It looks like an Afghan fucking field clinic down there now.”

  “Nothing you could’ve done,” Stanton said, pulling off his glasses.

  “Some asshole falls asleep in his SUV on the freeway, and the rest of our patients suffer,” Thane said.

  He walked to the window, moved the curtain aside, and gazed down below. A siren blared as yet another ambulance pulled into the ER bay. “The driver that caused the crash fell asleep at the wheel?” he asked.

  Thane shrugged. “That’s what the cops said.”

  Stanton focused on the flashing lights below.

  EIGHT

  IT WAS PAINFUL FOR HECTOR GUTIERREZ TO LIE TO HIS WIFE about the trouble he was in and even more painful to think that, if he got caught, their little boy probably wouldn’t even recognize him by the time his father got out of prison. Hector thanked God he’d already emptied the storage unit before the cops had raided it. But he was sure his house was next. His source at ICE who’d tipped him off (and been paid handsomely for doing so) said they’d been gathering evidence against him for months. If they found everything, Hector could face up to ten years.

  Maria wasn’t working on Monday, so he couldn’t move the goods out of the house until the next day. Instead, he took Ernesto to Six Flags, where the two of them hurtled around on old roller coasters. It made Hector happy that his son had a blast, but he was convinced someone was following them, tracking them through the park. There were shadows in the funnel-cake lines and lingering faces at the arcade. He sweated anxiously all day, despite the fact that winter had finally come to L.A. By the time they got back home, he’d soaked through his shirt and socks.

  That night, he cranked up the air-conditioning and watched an hour of sitcoms with Maria, desperately trying to figure out how to tell her what was going on. By two A.M., she’d already been asleep for hours, blissfully unaware, while Hector was still wide awake in front of the TV and covered in sweat. Not since his teenage love affair with cocaine had he felt so on edge. His ears stung with every noise: the hum of the cable box, the teeth-clenching sound Ernesto made when he slept, the cars out on 94th Street, each of which sounded like it was coming for him.

  Past three, Hector climbed into bed. His mouth was dry, and he could barely keep his eyes open. But still he couldn’t sleep, and every turn of the clock was another reminder of how little night was left—he had a huge day of moving everything out of the house ahead of him. Finally he woke his wife in a last-ditch effort to tire himself out.

  Even after the most electric sex they’d had in months, he couldn’t sleep. Hector lay naked next to Maria for almost two hours, soaking through the sheets, flesh and fabric glued together by sweat. He rapped his head against the mattress. Then he got up and surfed the Internet, where he found pills from Canada that promised sleep within ten minutes. But of course you had to call during regular business hours.

  Soon came the chirping of birds, and behind the shades Hector saw the first rays of a new day. He lay awake for another hour. When he got up, he cut himself shaving. His hands were shaking from exhaustion. Fortunately, after downing oatmeal and coffee in the kitchen, he experienced a surge of energy. When he stepped outside to catch the bus, the breeze was a balm.

  By seven A.M., he was at a garage near LAX, where he picked up the green Ford Explorer with fake plates he used when he needed to covertly transport antiquities. When he was sure Maria and Ernesto had left, he returned to the house to cart the rest of the items he had hidden in his home to the new facility he’d rented in West Hollywood that nobody knew
about.

  The sweating was bad again by the time he reached Our Lady of the Angels, where he had found Chel Manu. But he’d managed to hide his suffering and to convince her to take the codex. Either she’d find a way to pay, or she was the perfect solution to his problem. If he got pulled in, she was a far bigger fish for ICE. There was no one they’d rather make an example of than a curator. He’d get full immunity if he testified against her.

  Following his visit to the church, Hector tried to focus on the traffic speeding by. The neon billboards on the 101 appeared dull to him, as if someone had bled the colors out. The regular noises of the car and its engine were hammers on his eardrums. He spent the rest of the day checking places he frequently did business with buyers and sellers. Paying bribes to motel clerks and body shop mechanics and strip club bouncers. Trying to get rid of any evidence ICE could use against him.

  Halfway home that night, Hector panicked when he saw a black Lincoln in his rearview. By the time he got back to Inglewood and parked several blocks from the house, he’d gone back and forth a dozen times in his mind on whether the car had been following him.

  Maria was watching him from the window when he walked up the driveway. She started yammering and wouldn’t let him get a word in. It’d been almost thirty-six hours since Hector had last slept, and she could see it in his eyes. She immediately gave him a glass of red wine, turned the stereo to classical music, and lit candles. Her mother was an insomniac, and she’d learned all the tricks.

  Yet at two A.M., Hector lay awake next to her in their bed, reflecting on his life. Each hour became a referendum: At three, he judged himself a good father; at four, a bad husband.

  Finally he nestled against Maria again, stroking her breasts. But when she put her hand between his legs, Hector couldn’t get an erection. Even when she straddled him, nothing happened. Every part of Hector’s body was betraying him, all the things he never thought to doubt. He apologized to Maria, then, with his hands shaking, his eyes blurry, and his breathing labored, he went out to the stoop and sat alone in the chilly night. When he saw the first planes swooping in from overhead, signaling another dawn without sleep, Hector felt something else he hadn’t in years: the urge to cry.

  He heard a voice coming from somewhere behind him. Who the hell was in his house at five o’clock in the morning? Hector stormed back into the kitchen. It took him a second to process who in the hell the man standing there was.

  It was the birdman. The birdman was at Hector’s dinner table.

  “What are you doing in my house?” Hector demanded. “Get out!”

  The birdman stood up, and before the man could respond, Hector threw a quick blow across his chin, knocking him onto the floor.

  Maria ran into the room. “What did you do?” she screamed. “Why did you hit him?”

  When Hector pointed at the birdman to try to explain, nothing made sense. The crumpled person on the floor was Ernesto, looking back at him in shock.

  “Papa,” the boy cried.

  Hector felt as if he might vomit. Long ago he’d sworn to Maria he’d never take his anger out on her or their son the way his father had on him. She started flailing at him. He wasn’t even thinking as he threw his wife to the floor.

  The last time Maria Gutierrez saw her husband, he was running down the street toward the Ford Explorer.

  NINE

  EVERY CORNER OF THE PRESBYTERIAN ER WAS FILLED WITH TRAUMA patients. Stanton hurried through the aftermath of the highway accident. Bumping into techs. Knocking over crash carts. Frantically searching for the man who caused this. Car accidents were common in FFI case reports; in one German case, it was the first sign that the insomnia had become complete. From a witness’s perspective it appeared the driver had fallen asleep on the autobahn.

  Stanton ripped back curtain after curtain in the overwhelmed ER, behind which he saw unsupervised surgical residents performing operations they had no business attempting and nurses making medical decisions alone because there weren’t enough doctors. The one thing he didn’t see was anyone who could tell him who caused the accident and whether the person had been brought here.

  Stanton stopped and scanned the room. Two paramedics stood across the bay, conscripted into service because the hospital was so understaffed.

  He ran over. They were squeezing oxygen through a patient’s mask. “Were you guys on the scene? Who caused the accident?”

  “Latino guy,” one of them said.

  “Where is he? Here?”

  “Look for a John Doe.”

  Stanton studied the patient board. Another John Doe? Even if there was no ID on the driver, they should’ve tracked his car already.

  Near the bottom of the board, he found an unnamed patient. He darted back toward curtain 14. Tore it open. There was a flurry of motion inside—doctors yelling orders and moaning coming from the bloody, writhing man.

  “I have to talk to him.” Stanton flashed his CDC ID.

  They looked confused but gave him room to approach.

  He leaned close to the man’s ear. “Sir, have you had trouble sleeping?”

  No answer.

  “Have you been sick, sir?”

  The monitors beeped loudly. “His pressure’s falling,” warned one of the nurses.

  An ER doc pushed Stanton out of the way. Injected the man’s IV with more drugs. They all watched the monitor. Pressure continued to drop as the man’s heart slowed.

  “Crash cart!” yelled the other doctor.

  “Sir!” Stanton called out from behind them. “What is your name?”

  “Ernesto had his face,” the driver groaned finally. “I didn’t mean to hit him.…”

  “Please,” Stanton said, “your name!”

  The driver’s eyes flickered. “I thought Ernesto was the birdman. The birdman did this to me.”

  These words sent a shiver through Stanton that he couldn’t explain. “The birdman,” he pressed. “Who is the birdman?”

  A long sigh came from the driver’s throat, then the familiar sequence followed: flatline, yelling, crash cart, paddles, injections, more yelling. Then silence. And time of death.

  CHEL SAT IN HER OFFICE at the Getty, smoking her pack’s last cigarette. She’d never watched a man die before. After seeing Volcy expire on the table, she’d fled without a word to the doctors. For hours, she’d ignored phone calls from the hospital, including two from Stanton. She just stared numbly at her computer screen, refreshing the relevant sites again and again.

  The CDC knew Volcy was a vegetarian, but the press was still focusing their coverage on how his disease probably came from tainted meat. The blogosphere was on fire with headlines about the Long Count and nutty theories about how it couldn’t be a coincidence that some new strain similar to mad cow had appeared only a week before 12/21.

  There was a quiet knock on her office door, followed by Rolando Chacon popping his head inside. “Got a minute?”

  She waved him in. He’d listened without judgment as she told him about the hospital, including how she’d lied to the doctors about Volcy’s reasons for coming to the States.

  “You okay?” Rolando asked, taking the seat in front of her.

  She shrugged.

  “Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “What is it?”

  “The C-14 dating came back: 930 plus or minus 150. Exactly what we thought. Middle of the terminal classic.”

  Chel should have been ecstatic. This was the proof they’d been waiting for. Everything she’d learned and understood about her work had come together, and the codex could be a portal to immense understanding. Still, she felt nothing.

  “Great,” she told Ronaldo without emotion.

  “I’m also moving forward with the reconstruction,” he said. “But there’s a problem.” He passed Chel a piece of paper, on which he’d drawn two symbols:

  In ancient Mayan, they were pronounced chit and unen. “A father, and a male child of the father
,” Chel said absently. “A father and his son.”

  “But that’s not how the scribe is using it.” Rolando handed her another page. “That’s a rough translation of the second paragraph.”

  The father and his son is not noble by birth, and so there is much the father and his son will never fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much the father and his son does not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.

  “So it has to be one thing he’s referring to,” Rolando said. “One noble. One king. Something like that. Whatever it is, the pair of symbols appears all over the manuscript.”

  Chel studied the glyphs again. Scribes commonly used word pairings in new ways for stylistic flourish, so it was likely this one was using the pair to signify something other than the literal translation.

  “Could it have something to do with noble titles being passed down from fathers to their sons?” Rolando asked. “Patrilinearity?”

  Chel doubted it but was having trouble focusing. “Let me think about it.”

  Rolando tapped on her desk. “I know you don’t want to hear this, and I understand your concerns, really. But this is really a syntax question, and Victor’s the best there is. He could be very helpful with this, and I think you have to put your personal issues aside.”

  “You and I can figure it out,” Chel said.

  “Until we know what this is, it’ll be difficult to make much more progress. On the first page alone the combination appears ten times after the first paragraph. On some of the later pages it shows up two dozen times.”

  “I’ll work on it,” Chel told him. “Thanks,” she added.

  Rolando retreated into the lab, and Chel went back to her laptop. Checking the Los Angeles Times site, she found newly posted articles about Volcy and Presbyterian. But something else caught her attention: photographs of cars piled up atop one another on the 101 freeway, and people being pulled from the wreckage.

  In the middle of it all was a green SUV.