The Lost Book of Wonders

by Chad Brecher

  Desponsamus te mare — we wed thee, Sea!

  Founded in the fifth century by settlers fleeing for their lives, Venice took comfort in the surrounding sea and waterways as a barrier to certain death from the encroaching barbarians in the North. These ancestors pounded long poles into the solid substance of the marshes, the layer of caranto — the hard clay foundation — and over the centuries constructed an elaborate city of watery tributaries and bridges. Every Ascension Day, the Doge would commemorate the bond Venice had to the sea by throwing a wreath into the waters to celebrate this “marriage.” Venice, for better or for worse, was linked inextricably to the water.

  Of course, it was precisely this connection to the sea that enabled Venice to become the world’s supreme maritime power in the fourteenth century. Every Italian school kid had this engrained in his little skull since grade school. Pietro was no different. But the days of Venetian dominance had long passed, replaced by the ascendancy of tourism as the lifeblood of the city. Tourists filled the piazzas, restaurants, museums, and music halls. Venice was romantic, a dreamlike, magical, seemingly impossible city, but Pietro knew better. There was an undersurface to the city, and it was rotting. As the gondoliers sang, navigating through the narrow canals with couples in tow, the boats rode ever so higher each year against the historic palaces.

  The water was rising, and the city was sinking.

  Pietro was only ten when a storm surge from the Adriatic slammed into the sea walls and flooded the city. Even then, he was used to the daily ebb and flow of the tide and even the winds that periodically buffeted Venice: the Bora from the northeast and the Sirocco from the Sahara. But that storm was monumental and left the city a soggy mess, flooding stores and churches and creating a toxic cocktail of raw sewage and dead pigeons.

  Since then, the populace, at least that portion of the population that did not leave permanently for the mainland, learned to live with periodic flooding, particularly during the winter months. The raised wooden walkways, or passerelles, would routinely be laid out and tourist and local alike would navigate the city like rats in a maze. If nothing was done, Venice would inevitably be lost to the sea like a modern-day Atlantis.

  Engineering school in Sienna prepared Pietro well for his job with the Magistrato Alle Acque, or Venice Water Authority. His seniority had elevated him to a supervisory role in the defense of the city. It seemed like yesterday that the Consorzio Venezia Nuova (CVN) was created in 1984. The CVN was an amalgamation of Italian engineering and construction firms united by the common goal of rescuing Venice from the sea. But nothing was simple in Italy. There was plenty of bureaucracy and everybody wanted a piece. Fortunately for Pietro, the Venice Water Authority was granted the lead.

  Pietro walked down the emptied canal, examining the exposed foundations of the buildings. The stone walls were cracked, eroded, and covered in a thick green-black slime. The decay was more advanced than Pietro thought. Much had lain hidden beneath the murky waters. Out of sight, out of mind, Pietro thought with a shake of the head.

  “Why is Venice sinking?” the fat politician in an Armani suit had asked Pietro years before as he sat next to his bleach-blond “secretary.”

  How best to explain it? Pietro wondered. “It’s complicated, Signore. You see, the city of Venice is sinking approximately 0.5 millimeters each year. The sediment that the city was built on is subsiding. It is also an issue of plate tectonics.”

  The politician’s eyebrows rose with bewilderment. His secretary tilted the notebook she had been taking notes on and showed it the politician, uncertain as to the spelling. The politician shrugged.

  “You see, the whole earth is changing. Slowly, no doubt…but changing. Land masses are gradually moving. Italy is being driven under the Alps. But, who are we fooling, Signore? Much of what is happening is from our own hand. We’ve extracted groundwater without any regard for what impact this will have on the composition of the land, we are destroying the salt marshes that flush toxins out of our city at an alarming rate, and we are melting the polar ice caps, elevating the global level of the sea. If nothing is done, Venice will be lost.”

  The politician rubbed his bald head and tightened his belt. “I have two more questions, Signor Zeno. What do we need to do to fix this and how much will it cost?”

  Progress had been made. MOSE offered hope. Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico was an ambitious project to protect the city from the Adriatic Sea. Consisting of moveable steel barriers, these floodgates were envisioned to serve as a protective barrier shielding the three inlets into the Venetian lagoon. During times of storm surges, air could be pumped into the gates, which would slowly rise from a horizontal position on the floor of the Adriatic until they were standing upright, rising out of the sea like a steel sea wall. Pietro liked to call it Project Moses. The gates would part the Adriatic Sea.

  Unfortunately, everything in Italy took longer than it should and needed more money than planned. The completion date of MOSE was still uncertain. Until then, Pietro was left to dreg the canals and evaluate the local impact of the tributaries on the surrounding buildings. It was not a glorious job, but it was a necessity.

  With the tide at its lowest, a temporary barrier had been erected, damming a segment of the serpentine channels. High-powered pumps worked overtime to displace the water into a catch basin. This week he was working on an unnamed canal off Rio di Si San Zulian beyond the Piazza San Marco. Due to the proximity to the lagoon, as far as he could determine, it had never been dredged in the past. Technology is a wonderful thing, he sighed as he struggled to free his boot from the mud.

  Pietro looked around. He felt like he was in a large trench. Ancient buildings loomed above him. It was eerily quiet, the only sound being that of the squish of his footsteps. The canal was removed from the typical tourist locations, an area beyond the edge of the maps provided for free by the Venice Tourism Agency. Tomorrow the refuse team would come and begin a lengthy process of hauling away centuries of junk that had collected on the floor of the canal. He had a lot of work still to do.

  Pietro withdrew a clipboard and examined the foundation of a fifteenth century building. The stone exterior crumbled upon touch, sending white flakes onto the ground. He jotted down the findings on his paper and backed up, attempting to gain a view of the building at street level. As he did this, the heel of his boot struck a hard object. He attempted to regain his balance but overcompensated and went flailing onto his back with a splat.

  “Perfetto,” Pietro muttered as he stared up at the sky, the cigarette hanging precariously from his lips.

  He slowly pulled himself up and wiped the mud off his palms with his shirt. Where did the clipboard go? he thought as he examined the floor of the drained canal. A dull silvery object caught his attention. Pietro squatted and pushed aside centuries of mud, revealing a metal chest. He stared at for a moment with curiosity. Pietro pulled a water bottle from his coat and cleaned off the chest as best he could, revealing elaborate gold engravings and a large tricolor crest. The chest was less than a meter in length and had a latch with a lock that had decayed. Pietro tugged at the lid, which initially resisted before suddenly releasing with a sucking sound. The lid flipped backward and Pietro peered inside.

  “What do we have here?” he asked aloud before he realized it. His heart was racing.

  2

  NYC

  “You sure you can’t come, Alex?” April asked as she dropped the notebook into the trashcan and pushed it down with the ball of her hand.

  Alexander Stone glanced up from the golden crucifix long enough to watch April walk towards the door, precariously balancing a stack of books on her outstretched arms and a loose leather satchel across her shoulder.

  Alex returned his gaze to the back of the cross, finding a series of hatch marks etched into the metal. Flipping through the pages of the catalogue, he stopped at the section on French crucifixes and rubbed his eyes.

  “I would love to come, but I really can’t. I have
so much more work to do. Graham’s been breathing down my neck for weeks to finish organizing this exhibit,” Alex replied, running his hands through his light brown hair. He pushed the metal chair away from the workbench with a screech. The exhibit “The Passion of the Cross” was scheduled to open in September. He had thousands of crosses from museums and private collections all around the world to categorize and create a running narrative about.

  April paused in the doorway and pushed out her lower lip in disappointment. Alex knew that the disappointment was not feigned. Ever since Alex’s lips had semi-accidentally found April’s last New Year’s Eve in a drunken haze, the what-ifs floated awkwardly around their shared workspace. April was smart, attractive, and caring. However, a relationship would only be a distraction from his work and would inevitably poison their friendship. Besides, he had been down that road before. A week at April’s family’s vacation home in Maine was enticing, but an opportunity to make extra money tonight was even more alluring. It was tough living on a graduate student’s salary in New York City and even a catering job was welcome.

  “You know, Graham is an ass. He doesn’t appreciate one-tenth of the work you do for him. He jets around the world giving lectures and having fancy dinners and leaves you here to do all the work. He doesn’t even credit you ninety percent of the time. He’s getting props for your ideas,” April added as she dropped the books one by one into the book return.

  Alex shrugged and watched as April twirled around. “Last chance…” she offered. Alex sighed, shook his head reluctantly, and gave a half-hearted wave. April frowned and slipped out of the room, allowing the door to snap shut. Alex could hear her footsteps on the concrete floor trail away as he looked around the coffin-sized research room hidden away in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  He suddenly felt very lonely.

  When he was granted the Carrington Fellowship under the tutelage of Dr. Kenneth Graham to run concurrent with his graduate schooling at Columbia University, he was in a select club. After all, few had come before him. Those who had completed the coveted fellowship went on to become leaders in the field of antiquities with several occupying high positions at respected universities and at least two serving as presidents of the Society for Antiquities.

  Yet, for such a prestigious fellowship, the facilities were far from grandiose. Instead of a sophisticated research library with bookcases of leather-bound volumes, mahogany ladders, and plush chairs, he was confined to a tiny, windowless room nestled between a utility closet and the kitchen in basement of the museum. The office was adorned with a strangely out-of-place periodic table hanging on the wall, two ancient wooden drafting tables, a broken pencil sharpener fastened to the wall, and a file-cabinet that was filled with an endless assortment of research notes on the use of the color green in Nicolas Poussin’s works from 1637-1647.

  April, to her credit, had attempted to improve the working environment, relocating an ancient cathode ray tube to the warehouse, hanging up a travel poster of the Greek isles, and even purchasing a small refrigerator that they tucked away in the corner and used to house bottles of water, yogurt, and the occasional beer. After complaining loudly about the lack of Internet access in their office, two computers miraculously appeared after one weekend, a donation from an anonymous patron. The office was slowly becoming a workable environment.

  Despite the relatively frugal accommodations, it was hard for Alex to complain. Above their heads was one of the greatest museum collections in the world and they had unparalleled access to the research archives and collections. The price to be paid was working with Dr. Kenneth Graham.

  A leading medievalist, Dr. Graham was an obnoxious, self-centered twit. Born in Ohio, he somehow developed a British accent while studying at Oxford and gained greatest fame for his seminal work on religious cults in the Middle Ages. This work was enough to land him a tenured position at Columbia University. Although he was never able to replicate the success of his initial research, Alex was amazed to see how long Graham could ride this wave of early achievement in academia. As he became more interested in the lifestyle of a globetrotting lecturer, Graham began to rely more and more heavily upon underpaid research assistants and graduate students to continue his intellectual pursuits. April was right. Kenneth Graham certainly had pushed the limits of ethical conduct over the past two years. Alex had been forewarned about Graham’s penchant for abusing interns, but was willing to put up with it for the opportunity to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Alex stared at the cross resting on the table. Constructed out of gold, the crucifix was framed by a silver rim with an ornateness that suggested that it was the property of a Parisian aristocrat in the eighteenth century. He laid the cross upon a white sheet of paper and withdrew a digital camera from his bag and snapped a photo. On a small index card he jotted down a description of the cross, including the likely year of creation, country of origin, and source of acquisition. Just two hundred and eighty five more, Alex moaned internally, depositing the cross within a protective case.

  When he had made the decision years ago to pursue a career in antiquities, he had envisioned a Hollywood existence — a world of Indiana Jones and Alan Quartermain. In this world he would travel through deserts and jungles, discover ancient tombs and lost artifacts, dodge poisoned blow darts and evade elaborate booby traps. Instead, his life was reduced to an oppressive monotony — endless hours of kneeling in dried-out riverbeds brushing dirt from pottery fragments, flipping through mildewed archives in the deep recesses of libraries, and, most painfully, preparing lectures for Graham to deliver to colleagues who had long ago abandoned any hope of intrigue and adventures in their careers.

  Yet, it was still his one true love. He was so committed to the study of antiquities that romantic relationships and friendships had inevitably suffered through the years. In college, he would spend his weekend nights holed up in the library and his weekdays filling out paperwork for school-sponsored archeological digs in places like Crete, Petra, and Nemrut Dagh. He studied foreign languages in order to read the original texts, becoming well versed in Latin, Greek, and French. Lately, he had begun to focus more on medieval studies, influenced by Norman Cohn’s book on millennial groups in the Middle Ages, The Pursuit of the Millennium. The truth was that his appreciation for antiquity spanned time and place.

  He could remember the sense of awe he felt when he first wandered through the Egyptian Gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. Then, he was enthralled with the mummies and could stare for hours at the gleaming armor of medieval knights. He dreamed of being accidentally locked in the museum late at night and left to explore the passageways, push aside the beautiful death masks of the sarcophagi, and look inside. The museum was a magical place filled with wondrous items and glimpses into ancient cultures long since gone but not forgotten. It was more than just a voyeuristic thrill at peering into the inner workings of societies that had passed into history. He did not wish to be a mere student of antiquity. He wanted more than anything to impact the field, to discover artifacts that had been lost to history, to provide a fresh view of past civilizations. Much had been discovered through the centuries, but this was only the surface. There was much more that remained untouched and undisturbed. As modern society chugged on, tearing up the ground and paving it over with asphalt, it was a race against time to reclaim the past.

  Time! Alex thought, abruptly snapping himself out of his daydream. He tilted his wrist to reveal his watch. The gala was to start shortly. He had planned to go up early in order to leisurely stroll through the exhibit before the guests arrived. He looked back over his shoulder and spotted his tuxedo hanging from a misshapen pipe protruding from the wall.

  Even great archeologists started from the ground floor, Alex told himself with a smile. Sometimes, even the basement.

  3

  The immense banner announcing “Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The Recovery of Mesopotamian Antiquities” hung stiffly from the
façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, flanked by two huge sets of Corinthian columns. Ellie walked down Fifth Avenue clutching a thin jacket against her black evening gown. It was an unseasonably cool March night and a series of stiff breezes sent the two American flags in front of the museum flapping wildly. Behind her, taxi cabs zipped by with periodic screeching and the blare of horns.

  Ellie found the first step and carefully climbed the stone staircase towards the entrance. Her legs felt wobbly and several times she nearly lost her footing before reaching the top of the staircase.

  I’m drunk, she thought with a mix of embarrassment and annoyance. She could not face this night of all nights without the help of the two martinis she had downed at the lobby bar of the W Hotel around the corner from her apartment. It didn’t help that she had not eaten anything all day — just a touch of nerves, she had told herself. Add in the two-inch heels and the loose evening gown, it was a miracle she hadn’t tumbled down the stairs and ended up face down on the concrete.

  As she stepped onto the top platform and approached the three tall doors that greeted visitors to the museum, she could feel her legs grow heavy and the breath escape her body as if a fist had unexpectedly been driven into her abdomen. Her legs quivered as her eyes settled on a large placard resting on an oversized easel beside the far doorway.

  In Memoriam

  Dr. Gordon Russell

  A Life Remembered

  Gordon stared back at her.

  This is all too soon, she moaned internally, feeling her heart race. She instinctively ran the tip of her thumb against her index finger and found the sensation dulled, as if her hand were covered with a glove.

  Gordon looked much younger than when she had known him. In the photo, he seemed filled with life. He was dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts and stood beside a large Babylonian statue. A giant smile ran across his face. This Gordon had yet to write Excavating Ur. He had not helped unearth ancient settlements in Nippur, had not formed MART, and most importantly, had not met Ellie. He had so much potential…so much life, and Ellie had taken this life away. For what? She could feel the tears begin to well up. A piece of a bloody tablet, now incinerated into a billion pieces. She pushed her hands into the oversized bag she held over her shoulder, withdrew a tissue, and dabbed at her eyes, taking care not to smear her black mascara. She fought the tears, feeling her face tighten. Her fingers found an errant strand of blond hair set free by the wind and flicked it aside. She turned away from the placard. It should have been me, she thought.