by Richard Farr
“What we found, beneath the ruins of an immense stepped tower, or ziggurat, is a collection of very old clay tablets. They do seem to confirm that Babylon, or Babilani, is the source of the story in Genesis. And yes, there was a strangely, uh, anomalous find.”
“Perhaps you could review the story, for any of our viewers who are less than diligent in their daily Bible reading?” the interviewer chortles. “It says that God gave us one language, yes? But then we built a great tower, and were punished?”
A grin takes over Dad’s face. I can tell he’s just given in to the temptation to say something deliberately outrageous. I actually like him at moments like this, feel a little warmth toward him, feel his spirit hasn’t been wholly destroyed by years of fruitless work on the enigma of the Disks.
“Genesis, chapter eleven. We came down, into the plain of Shinar, and said, ‘Hot damn, let’s show off how clever we are!’ So we built ourselves a fine city, and put a bodacious skyscraper in the middle. And yea verily, we did the whole thing in mirrored glass, and installed high-speed elevators, and AC, and an underground garage with valet parking. And this skyscraper was so tall that it reached all the way up to heaven and”—he stabs his finger at the ceiling—“poked God in the butt.”
The interviewer has his mouth open like a stranded fish. He’s horrified by the casually irreverent tone, probably already fielding in his mind angry calls from the easily offended. He makes a gesture, as if about to speak, but he’s too slow, and Dad cheerfully makes it worse.
“Oh yes. The Creator of Heaven and Earth, author of all things visible and et cetera, gave us a magnificent gift. The English mystic John Dee called it the Angelic Tongue, because it was supposedly what the angels spoke when they were hanging out at the watercooler, or meeting with God in the celestial conference room. But this ultimate communications app brought out the worst in us. We became arrogant, and built this great tower, and the Creator was so cheesed off with us that he said, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done. Screw you!’ So he destroyed the tower and put the angelic language through the shredder. ‘Confused our tongues,’ as the Bible has it.”
In terror for the safety of their broadcasting license, they bleep out the word screw. A mistake. It leaves the impression that he used a different obscenity, even more terrifying to the average broadcaster. The one that rhymes with duck.
“So,” the interviewer says, pink in the cheeks and trying to get things back on track before he loses his job, “after the so-called confusion of tongues, we were just ‘babbling,’ and couldn’t understand each other?”
“You’ve got it. One language, good—we can even communicate with God. Many languages, total bummer—we can’t even communicate with each other.”
It’s almost as if they’ve forgotten Morag’s there. But I’m watching her body language closely, see a couple of subtle shifts in the chair, know she’s about to pounce. “It seems to me—” she says, and the interviewer turns to her as if surprised she can speak.
I’d be nervous on TV—probably look awkward and stupid from fear of looking awkward and stupid. That sort of worry would never occur to Morag, and she speaks exactly as she always does. With a clipped precision. Fast. And always with a kind of amusement, an ironic edge, as if the world is too crazy to quite take seriously.
“Babel’s a story about parenting gone wrong, isn’t it? Actually, I think religion’s a story about parenting gone wrong. The gods create us, protect us, then try to keep us amused with cool toys like reason and language. But we don’t want to be the gods’ pets. We want to live our own lives. So we act out, and they punish our disobedience. Which doesn’t work, so they go for the big guns. They leave us: that’s the Babel story. Or they murder most of us: that’s the Flood story. And the amazing twist is that, like all abused and abandoned children, we’re convinced the whole thing’s our fault!”
“I think—”
“Spooky, isn’t it, the way some of those ideas keep on coming up all over the world in different forms? As if it’s a memory of something. And in every culture, the take-home is the same. After we’re punished, are we sullen and rebellious? No! On the contrary. We feel wicked for having been so bad. We go on and on and on about how unworthy we are, how absolutely right it is for us to be slaughtered, how right it is, at least, for God to pull the linguistic plug and excommunicate us.”
“Excommunicate,” the interviewer says uncomfortably. “I see.” You can tell he’s never before thought about what the word literally means. “And, uh, Professor Calder, what’s so new that you have unearthed?”
Dad’s itching to tell a big story. But he resists the impulse, plays it down. “The texts we have found are extremely old—they predate the city of Babylon itself by as much as a thousand years. Some of them are roughly consistent with the Genesis version of Babel—and some are not. Most of them, we’ve not even translated yet.”
“You said we?”
Dad makes a melodramatic gesture in the direction of Morag. The interviewer looks mildly astonished, smiles condescendingly, addresses her in a tone so patronizing it oozes like a buttered English muffin. Even though he’s seated, and not tall, he contrives to look as if he’s peering down at her, actually chuckles in a disbelieving sort of way. “You, Ms. Chen, are actually helping to translate these texts?”
Morag doesn’t shrug, doesn’t offer up a nervous laugh or do any kind of simpery, self-deprecating routine. She’s picked up on his tone; there’s a little internal struggle, reflected in her expression, as she realizes that she doesn’t know how to respond without either playing up to his expectations or sounding rude. She opts for saying, a bit defensively, “It’s not that difficult.”
N’hut THUT duffucult.
“But when did you learn—er—surely mastery of Akkadian is a rather unusual skill for a teenager?”
“Bill and I—Professor Calder and I—share an unusual ability to learn languages fast. We’re both Babblers, as people say. Some people at the University of Washington are studying the possibility that it’s a genetic mutation. But anyway, I’ve been working on Akkadian for a few months. I still only know ten percent of what he knows, but—”
“Twenty percent,” Dad interrupts.
She gives an impish half smile. “Aye, twenty percent is probably about right. Anyways, enough to help speed things up a bit.”
He turns back to Dad again. “From your use of the word mythology, I take it you don’t take the details seriously? That human beings started with a single language, for instance.”
“The word mythos is simply Greek for story, and some stories are true. But no, I don’t take it seriously in a literal sense. My view is that there simply is no such thing as the supernatural—that the very idea of the supernatural is a confusion. But does that mean I dismiss mythology? No! The great myths and religious stories are barely legible traces of something. Something that was real, in the distant past. We just don’t know what.”
“Do we have any examples, though—I mean of myths that were based on something real?”
Morag steps in again, rubbing her hands enthusiastically. “Sure we do. For centuries, everyone said Homer’s heroes were mythical. Helen of Troy, Achilles, the Trojan War, all that lovely stuff that was too romantic to believe. Then Heinrich Schliemann went to Asia Minor, figured out where Troy must have been, and stuck a spade in the ground.”
“I wonder—”
“Then there’s Noah’s flood. Six thousand years ago, when the Mediterranean broke into the Black Sea, it delivered water into the Black Sea basin at a rate of ten, fifteen cubic miles a day, virtually overnight. Flooded thousands of square miles.”
“Yes I see—”
“And my favorite example is the unicorn, which—”
The interviewer finally manages to interrupt. “So you’re saying these stories are just distorted versions of real events?”
Morag has learned her lessons at Dad’s knee very well: “I’m just saying they don’t come out of nowhere.�
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“What about this fragment of material that’s not in Akkadian, or Babylonian, or any of the known languages of the region? Apparently it looks exactly like something you studied in Greece? But surely it’s unlikely that—”
Dad lets out a short, barking laugh. “I’ve been studying these objects called the Phaistos Disks on Crete for years. I already worked out that they’re not originally from Crete. But finding a fragment of one in Iraq? If you’d asked me a few months ago, I’d have said, no, it’s not unlikely, it’s stone-cold impossible.”
“That’s our big incentive for translating the Akkadian tablets as soon as possible,” Morag says. “Maybe the tablets will tell the story, explain it to us. Whatever we find, this is going to rewrite the early history of civilization. We don’t know what’s true, not yet. But what this shows us is that our current picture is hopelessly wrong.”
And the way she finishes turns the tables on him: it’s as if she’s the one talking down to a child. She leans over, taps him on the knee, says, “Isn’t that exciting!”
He draws his knee out of the way, sits up straight, and tries to look composed, serious. “All right. So you have this potentially epoch-making discovery, and for now you two are the sole guardian of its secrets. But I understand that some people are already pressuring you to publish?”
He reaches down, produces a red book from under his chair, and waves it in a vaguely threatening way. “Julius Quinn, for example.”
The volume he’s holding up is Quinn’s Anabasis. Just a book—in the way that the Bible is just a book. Anabasis is something people don’t so much read as learn, chant, pray to, stroke, venerate. Translated into over two hundred languages, it has sold in the tens of millions. It’s free on the web, and you can buy copies of it dirt cheap, everywhere: from vendors on street corners, from airport stalls, from the glossy piles next to the discounted winter jackets at Costco.
“Ah yes,” Dad says. “Julius Quinn. He’s everywhere these days.”
The interviewer flips through his notes. “He has said that any materials from Babel are ‘the common heritage of mankind—’ ”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“ ‘—and an essential step on our common stairway to the infinite.’ ”
“Whatever that means,” Morag drawls sarcastically.
Dad tries for a slightly more conciliatory tone: “If I understand him, he means that we can only return to our true nature as gods by forgetting our own languages and relearning the divine, original language—and hey, maybe this discovery will tell us something about it.”
“Indeed, indeed. In fact he says, if I’m not mistaken”—the interviewer finds a Post-it note, opens the book to a marked passage—“ ‘Six thousand languages are not a cultural achievement, but the symptom of a disease—and the measure of our distance from the pure minds of the Architects.’ ”
He shrugs, can’t resist doing something with his eyebrows to convey the idea that what he’s just said, on Quinn’s behalf, is the equivalent of believing the earth is flat and balanced on a gerbil. Then he deploys a small, sharp weapon. “One of your own former students, I believe?”
Ouch. The personal connection is still a sore spot, and it’s nothing as simple as ordinary professional rivalry. It’s been clear for a long time now that Quinn has much, much bigger ambitions than a job at a university.
Dad brushes aside the personal question as best he can. “Julius Quinn came to study with me several years ago. He was an excellent student, and he has a very thorough understanding of ancient history. Also, apparently, a rather overactive imagination. At least that would be my diagnosis when someone has a personal encounter with supernatural beings during a hiking vacation.”
“This book of his, Anabasis, has persuaded a lot of people to believe in the literal truth of, well, a kind of ancient Mesopotamian religion, is it not?”
“Anabasis means ‘ascent.’ The Greek historian Xenophon used the word to mean ‘invasion,’ because he was in the Army of the Ten Thousand and the Greeks had to ascend from the coast into the mountains in order to invade Mesopotamia. But it’s Plato’s meaning Quinn has in mind. Plato says we humans are half-blind cave-creatures, that everything we think of as real is just shadows on the wall, that what we need to do is get out of the cave—ascend from our dark ignorance into the light of knowledge.”
“Sounds a lot like the Christian idea of heaven to me,” the interviewer says.
“Aye,” Morag cuts in. “You die. You leave your body lying on the floor like an old sweater. Then your soul walks right into the executive elevator and it’s P for Paradise. Quinn’s version does leave out the clouds, the harps, and the eternal boredom. Plus he doesn’t believe in the soul, not in any traditional sense. He thinks that to be freed from our physical selves is to become pure intelligences. We don’t get to be with God, or the gods, or the Architects, as he calls them. When we slip out of our bodies, we become divine.”
“Quinn and I agree on one thing,” Dad says. “We think all the stories that flowed out of that region, three thousand years ago, are based on real events of some kind. Quinn just takes them more literally than I do. I believe something was going on that we don’t understand. He believes there really were, or are, multiple, uh, Architects.”
Morag shakes her head. “Nutty as the inside of a squirrel.”
When the clip ends, I’m left looking at a blurry still of the interviewer’s shoulder, with Dad and Morag just visible as smudges in the background.
I look at that image for a long time.
This is my family, now: two atheist supernerds with a thing about ancient religious mythology.
Mom loved me for who I am. Even when it turned out I had problems with reading. Even when I poured extra time into math, because I was desperate to please her, and got crap grades anyway. Dad just pretends not to notice my deficiencies. Or tries to pretend, which he’s not good at. He has the common weakness of fathers—he wants to feel close to me, wants to understand me, and wants the easy road to that result, which is me being more like him than I am.
He did get an excellent consolation prize: Morag. And they have a task to share that I can’t help with. All I have is bad dreams.
Oh, yeah. And I’m hallucinating her voice. Which strongly suggests I’m losing it.
I don’t hear my mother’s voice now. But I do know what she would say.
Don’t just sit there feeling sorry for yourself, Daniel.
Get up. Move.
Do something.
Might as well: the toast and coffee never showed. Maybe I should at least wash. So I drag myself into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, shrug off the hospital gown.
I’m a sight, naked.
CHAPTER 6
THE ANSWERING SILENCE
Hair like a toilet brush. Eyes like a pair of empty gray day packs. Both hands heavily bandaged so that just the tips of some fingers are showing. Chest mottled with bruises and scrapes. Left thigh divided by a shallow, irregular cut. Right knee—revealed only when I unwind the compression bandage—the shape and color of an eggplant that’s well beyond sell-by.
There’s also a bruise running from my left ear down to the inside of my collarbone. I feel all over again the whiplike impact of Mom’s arm, and my hand goes unbidden to the space. In my mind’s eye I manage the impossible: snatching her wrist, twisting as her body falls past, grabbing at her harness with my other hand and, by a heroic, cartoonish effort of strength and skill, saving her.
I expect—again—to feel grief. Or rather: I expect to feel a massively magnified version of something familiar, like sad or upset. Aching in my chest; bawling my eyes out; acute sense of all-over psychic pain. But, again, it’s not like that. I feel terrible, but it’s almost—how can I even put it? People say, My heart has been ripped out. A bit like that. An unendurable hollowness. Physically, I feel as if I am made of putty, and someone has used a long, thin knife to cut a hole right through my body cavity, a
hole so big you could pass a suitcase through it. It’s an injury so massive, so hideous, that I should be a corpse; instead, I’m standing here in front of the mirror, stubbornly breathing.
And then there’s the other thing. What I saw, or thought I saw, or didn’t quite see, and the shadow it left behind. Like I’ve lost something, and can’t remember what.
Practicalities. I have a sudden and urgent need to focus on practicalities. So I clean my teeth: it’s impossible with one hand, awkward and uncomfortable with the other. Then I stare at the shower, decide it’s too difficult, and wipe myself over with a damp washcloth. Then the toilet: trying to bend my damaged knee makes it feel like a bag of ground glass, so I’m forced to slump down onto the seat sideways, with one leg out straight and my hand on a rail. Afterward, it’s a ten-minute challenge to get into jeans, five more to do them up. I add a geriatric pair of trail shoes, one of Dad’s old Ts—“This Message Brought to You by Photons”—and a frayed Seattle Sounders hoodie.
Rosko’s in a larger room on the same floor, hidden in a maze of tubes and machines. A metal cage supports the pins in his leg. His left hand lies inert in his mother’s lap like an aborted fetus.
A fizzing current of guilt goes through me, seeing him there. Irrational, sure, but it doesn’t care that it’s irrational, goes on fizzing anyway:
If Rosko and I had not become friends—
If I had not begged Mom to bring him and his parents to Patagonia—
If I had not agreed to be last one on the rope—
Gabi looks up in surprise, and smiles, breaking my train of thought. “Daniel! You are not even supposed to be up.”
“I’ve got bruises, Gabi. Bruises and a couple of cuts. If Rosko had my injuries, he’d be doing wind sprints in the parking lot by now. I’m fine. I was thinking, if I sit with him a bit, maybe you and Stefan could go for a walk, get lunch or something.”