by Rob Swigart
He spiraled down floor after floor, treading light, though already he could hear people moving, the clatter of dishes, one short bark from the apartment on four belonging to the older lady he spoke to on the street but seldom saw inside the building. The dog was small, a spaniel, almost blind, called Ulysses.
The air was thick, humid. Dawn bleached the sky a milky white. He heard the nightjar once more, chrrr, the clap of wings, and saw it streak away to the east.
The park was not yet open but he went in anyway. Trees were gray-green against the dead sky. He walked the paths. Broad-canopied lindens met overhead, and he hurried through the tunnel they made. Elsewhere there were catalpa trees. The caterpillar of the catalpa sphinx moth fed on these exclusively. Why did he think of the caterpillar just now? This year there were not so many, and the trees were thick with large leaves and vulgar white flowers.
What had he seen, really, floating in the darkness? He was no longer sure. It was just a tablet smashed millennia ago. It was about Dimme, that much was certain. But the pieces were scattered all over the civilized world. Why?
Not words: he couldn’t read the text in the vision. It wasn’t like that anyway: reading Sumerian or Akkadian was not really reading, it was decoding, sitting with dictionaries and sign lists puzzling out the grammar, and always difficulties of interpretation, ambiguities. Surely the tablet was harmless, simply an account of a myth, a list of incantations. The scattering of the pieces was accidental: people carried them away for other reasons— to prop up the leg of a table, perhaps, or as a souvenir.
“Wishful thinking?” he muttered, hurrying down a path. He jogged up a short flight of concrete stairs and through a grassy field, chin sunk to his chest. Millennia ago someone didn’t want the world to know what was written on the tablet. It must have had a terrible power. He knew this without knowing how he knew. He knew this without believing. He may have been a man of God, but he was a Jesuit, after all.
His breathing was shallow and fast. He was just an old man full of fears and superstitions. Why had he written Fréderique before he really knew anything?
Perhaps he should not have sent it? Or perhaps he should have been more emphatic, and demanded Frédo warn the world.
No, that way lay madness. It was just a tablet.
Fear flickered black at the edges of his narrowing vision. Someone was following him, he could hear footsteps, he was sure of it, but when he looked back the path was empty. That was always the way of it; the fears were feeding themselves. There was nothing behind him, nothing ahead of him; he was alone in the park.
The fear was Dimme, Lamaštu, ghost, demon, specter: Satan.
Superstition. “Partez! Begone,” he cried aloud.
By the time he reached the street he was close to running. Even this early people were out: delivery trucks, three bakery workers in white uniforms riding together on Velib rental bikes, an idling taxi at the stand. It was an ordinary, if unseasonably warm, spring morning, humid, yes, and close, with low, thick clouds overhead, but ordinary. Except that spring was early this year.
He stopped at the curb, breathing hard, hands on his hips. Imagination. Nothing real. Night thoughts, that’s all. He was tired. Stop in a café, catch the Metro to Cardinal Lemoine, walk to the Collège. If his vision reflected reality, he would assemble the tablet this coming day. If it was all an illusion, that would be the end of it.
Please, Lord, let it be an illusion, a dream, even a nightmare. But there was no turning back; dream or real, he could not stop.
First, though, there was a café on the next corner where he was known. He needed some time before the Collège opened to calm this peculiar nervous tremor.
At the Collège
At nine-seventeen that morning Brother Usem had rushed to the elevator at the Collège de France, scarcely acknowledging the security guard’s usual cheery greeting. He swept through the antechamber to the Salle Botta without a glance at the balding, inoffensive functionary whose name he kept forgetting. The man never failed to say good morning. Throughout the day he stuck his head through the door at inappropriate times. The rest of the time he sat at a desk near the outer door shuffling through stacks of forms with apparently feigned concentration. Usem had no idea what the man did with the papers. He never filed them or put them in folders or sent them somewhere. Usem never saw him sign one or make a mark. He had no curiosity about it, and never asked.
Every morning he came to this long, dusty room filled with drawers and went to work. Every afternoon he hurried out, acknowledging the man with the slightest of nods. The papers sat on the desk in two neat piles. The man would be holding one close to his glasses. He would then place it carefully on one of the two stacks on the otherwise empty desk. Perhaps he merely moved them from one to the other and back again.
Usem plugged in his computer and set to work. He pulled open drawers and felt through shards of fired clay without looking; he would remember the fragments through touch alone. His vision of the assembled tablet remained vivid. He could almost read the text. Almost. “Dimme, daughter of the great god An” on the upper left fragment of the obverse was the only completely clear text, but he knew the tablet contained an ancient prophecy, the oldest written document of its kind. And without understanding how, Usem knew the prophecy was true, and very dangerous.
Toward ten o’clock his computer signaled an incoming message with a large attachment. He glanced at the subject line: the Society of Jesus would like him to comment on the attached sound file.
What did he know about recordings? There was nothing in the message about the contents, some kind of music, probably. He had no interest in music. It could wait. This document was far more important. Excitement and fear hummed together inside him. He hadn’t felt this intense since the day he was accepted into the Society.
The pieces seemed to seek his hand as he rummaged through one drawer after another. He already had the triangle with Dimme’s name. Soon he had collected an oblong, a square, another corner. He placed them carefully on the table a few centimeters apart so he would have room to insert other fragments. The outside edges were nearly complete, assembled like any jigsaw puzzle, the easy pieces with straight edges first. He could make out the beginnings and ends of some of the lines, but there was too little text to make sense. He worked for an hour, and another. He vaguely heard the man in the outer room leave for lunch. The text was in two columns and covered both sides, sixty-four lines in all.
Could this be the legendary Tablet of Destinies?
Nonsense, there was no such thing. The god Enlil held the Tablet of Destinies and ruled the universe.
Nonsense. The word echoed in his head. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense!
Most of the center was still a blank. He felt around in the drawers, finding a piece here, another there. He had the sensation of damp clay resting in his left palm, a reed stylus in his right hand. He was looking at the blank surface. He placed the tip against the clay and pressed a sequence of signs, translating this passage easily: Dimme, Daughter of the Great god An.
He could almost hear what was going through the man’s head as he wrote, as if he were an eavesdropper. Did the scribe know this tablet was dangerous? Was he taking direction from someone else or having a vision? Why did he write it? Was he the one who smashed it and scattered it among the cities?
The tablet was half assembled. He thought he should contact Frédo, tell him it was just as he said, his vision was right. He dialed the number clumsily, but when it went to voicemail he mashed the off button with a brief, “Bon dieu.”
Those were the only two words Usem had uttered all morning, and he jumped at the sound.
The functionary, who had apparently returned from lunch, poked his head through the door to ask if everything was all right. Usem waved vaguely and the man backed away. Eccentric scholars, he seemed to say; they talked to themselves. What they did was none of his business. Retirement was coming up and he didn’t want trouble.
Usem forgot abou
t the phone call. He rushed from the table to the drawers and back. Assembly was slow, but time raced by. When the tablet was three quarters assembled and the general tenor of its contents incontrovertible, he briefly considered calling Frédéric again but decided to send another email instead, asking for a meeting at his apartment.
After writing it he leaned back. It was stifling up here under the eaves. March should not be this hot; the air should not oppress like this. He glanced over the message, pressed Send, and swiped his hand over his forehead. It came away damp. He rubbed his hand absently on his pants, looking down at the tablet.
Voices in the outer room rose in anger, followed by the scraping of furniture on the floor. This was peculiar. He listened for a moment but the sounds stopped, so he went back to work. The dispute, whatever it was, had nothing to do with him. There were only ten to fifteen fragments of the puzzle left to find. Maybe he would get lucky and find a large block. Don’t be silly, he told himself, dismissing the idea. His fingers remembered small pieces, he had seen only small pieces in his vision, and besides, someone had deliberately smashed the tablet. He still had a couple of dozen drawers to go through. Patience.
His hands had cramped into frozen hooks, but he couldn’t stop. He straightened his fingers against his legs and went back to work. Finding new pieces took longer the closer he got to finishing, but when he found one he slotted it into place, and then, suddenly, he knew the tablet was as complete as it could be. There was still a word or two missing at the end of a line, probably lost forever. He should be able to fill them in from the context.
Again he wiped his forehead. He still had to decipher all the signs, put them into Roman letters, puzzle out the sentences, and clarify their meanings. Translating Sumerian was not an exact science, but a quick read-through of the first side confirmed his worst fears.
This tablet was a letter for him, for Usem Izri, S. J., an obscure scholar of ancient languages. It was a message. It told him what he must do next. That was the reason he had the vision. He was meant to find this text, and act upon it.
He ran a fingertip over the incised signs, leaping the gaps between pieces. The words connected, the lines were complete.
He fetched a large glassine envelope from the supply cabinet and carefully slid the pieces inside. Though they were loose, the envelope was snug enough to keep them in place; he could make out the signs through the translucent paper. He turned it over and found he could read the back as well. Tomorrow he would have to bring a camera, photograph it. No, he should contact someone, a professional.
But he could not. No one could know about this tablet, not until he had read it carefully, deciphered its true meaning. Panic was pulling his stomach into his throat. He shouldn’t have written to Frédéric. What if someone saw the email, or Frédo talked about it? Word of this tablet would get out. The foundations of the Church would shake! The world would change. Better, perhaps, not to have a photograph, not yet.
He opened the email from the Society and read the request again. With a nervous shrug he pressed PLAY.
A girl’s voice began: “Dimme dumu munuš Ana.” Her voice was slow and stilted. She continued in the same flat monotone, but the shock of her words had raised the hair on Usem’s neck: Dimme, daughter of the great god An. Whoever she was, this girl was reciting the tablet!
He looked up in alarm. Something had happened. The sounds from the antechamber had stopped. He canceled the playback and went to the door.
With his ear against it he could hear only the rush of his own blood. Without thinking he turned the handle and cracked the door open just enough to peer into the outer room. “Are you all right?” he called in a croaking whisper. He cleared his throat and repeated the question. There was no reply. He pushed on the door. It moved a few centimeters and stopped.
Past the edge, he could see the end of the functionary’s desk. Someone had moved it against the door and trapped him inside. He pushed again, but the desk did not budge. The gap was small, only a few centimeters. He could see almost nothing in the other room. He threw himself at the door, and the desk jittered away just enough to reveal one end of the meager brown sofa against the right hand wall.
He shoved again and moved the desk another fraction. He could see more of the sofa, but nothing else.
Once more he threw himself against the door. Though he was a frail old man, the desk suddenly gave way, the door flew open, and he tumbled onto the floor.
He looked up at the antique file cabinet in the corner behind the desk’s usual place. The functionary’s chair and the hard wooden visitor chair were pushed against the wall.
The room was empty. There were no hiding places.
Guilt for not knowing the functionary’s name swept through Usem, layered over his increasing panic. He listened to his own rapid breath, with his eyes closed. It was heavy and rasping.
Gradually his breath slowed, and his fragmentary thoughts coalesced into a series of unanswerable questions. Who had been shouting? What had they said? Why hadn’t he paid attention?
The empty room scared him. The man had left for lunch, and then come back. Someone had tried to trap Usem, and either taken the functionary by force or frightened him away.
The obsessively stacked and straightened papers were scattered on the floor around him. Usem examined the nearest without touching it. The papers must have slid off the desk when they moved it. On the floor like this they were so unexpected he thought touching them might destroy evidence, though he couldn’t say what the crime might be.
The page was filled with narrow ruled lines containing dates and names hand-written in a fussy, miniscule script. Nothing was sequential. The names and dates were either random or reflected a logic Usem could not decipher.
At the end of each row was a series of four boxes, some checked, others blank. There was no label to identify what the boxes meant. The ink was blue. The earliest date he could find was sixteen years before. He forgot about contaminating evidence and picked up another sheet filled with more dates and random, meaningless names. All the pages were the same. Were they records of visitors, phone calls, donors, correspondents, government officials? If he scanned them all would he find his own name, the date of his arrival, the days he appeared, or the days he didn’t, for the past six months?
Usem gathered them and replaced them on the desk. They would be out of order, but there was nothing he could do without knowing what they meant. His hands were shaking. He didn’t try to move the heavy desk back into place.
In that precise moment he knew that whatever had happened here concerned the tablet. Had the functionary been spying on him? Had he come into the room yesterday and seen what Usem was doing, and called someone, someone who had now removed him?
It didn’t matter. Whether they were after him or just the tablet, he had to leave.
Usem stuffed his laptop into his bag, scooped the glassine envelope filled with fragments into a pocket, and raced for the elevator.
Before he could push the button the numbers above the door started rising. He raced to the stairwell at the opposite end of the corridor. He waited behind the exit door, breathing heavily. He heard the elevator door open, voices, footsteps moving toward the Salle Botta. The wooden floor creaked. The shoes, he could imagine the shoes, thick-soled, heavy boots, really. So they had gotten rid of the functionary.
He couldn’t wait. He ran as noiselessly as possible down the stairs. When he had one floor left, he realized there would certainly be others waiting at the entrance. While he dithered, the stairwell door opened three floors above and a group started down, making a great racket. The sound paused at each floor.
He burst out of the stairwell and rushed down a carpeted hallway lined with office doors. He was reaching for one at random when the fire alarm began buzzing.
They had missed him, but knew he was still inside. Triggering the alarm would flush everyone from the building before they discovered there was no fire. Whoever they were, they would catch him o
n the way out.
The office door was locked. He was reaching for the next when a woman came out of an office and without a glance in his direction hurried away toward the elevator. He managed to catch her office door before it closed. The lock clicked behind him. Moments later a man shouted, “Was there a man on this floor just now?” He thought it could possibly be the same one he had heard earlier arguing with the functionary.
He held his breath.
“I’ve been here all day, haven’t seen anyone,” the woman answered.
“You’ll have to use the stairs,” the voice told her. “Fire alarm, elevators don’t work.”
“Of course, how silly.”
Carpet muffled the sound of footsteps. Usem waited until he heard the stairwell door close again. After another two minutes of silence he carefully opened the door and glanced both ways. The corridor was empty.
He had to get out of the building. Firemen would soon begin a search. He had to assume that whoever was after him would be among them.
He couldn’t go down, they would be waiting. He looked around for emergency instructions. They told him to take the stairs to the ground floor. Arrows showed a number of exits, but he would still have to go through the lobby.
He went up again. Someone had moved the desk out of the way. The workroom was a mess; they had looked quickly and carelessly. Drawers were pulled open. He sighed. The tablet seemed to be growing hotter by the minute. He had to hide it somewhere. They would probably come back here to search more carefully. He couldn’t take it with him and he couldn’t leave it. Could he hide it in the functionary’s desk! What was he thinking?
The fire alarm continued to blare. He could hear shouting from the street below. When he looked out the narrow window he saw fire trucks and a swiftly growing crowd gathering on the other side of Cardinal Lemoine.