“But there’s another side? One that makes sense?”
“Surprisingly, yes. But first of all, I have to point out that my parents didn’t believe in Atlantis. They thought that an ancient civilization had to exist, but they didn’t give it a name or buy into Atlantis theories.”
Donny nods, as if to say he found this a reasonable approach.
“So, I did a pretty thorough search at the newspaper and again at the libraries when I had some time to kill in Chicago. There are modern-day researchers who have combed ancient documents and have come up with some remarkable material. And then there are those like my parents, who are diving, looking for artifacts under the sea.”
Amaryllis sees that Donny is back in this listening posture, head propped on hand, so she continues.
“Several writers have gone through the histories of cultures all over the world and discovered that nearly everyone has a memory of an ancient flood. It’s easy to just brush this aside as only myth, but most myths have some basis in fact. The Oera Linda Book from an ancient part of Holland recalls the fall of a huge Atlantic island. The Maya and Aztec peoples had stories that their ancestors were survivors of a disaster in the Atlantic Ocean. There are tales that the Phoenicians brought back shiploads of riches from the west—west of the rocks of Gibraltar. But they would never reveal their source. Even more amazing is that the Egyptians, who told the original tale of Atlantis to Plato, claimed the Europeans were mere children in the historical scheme of things. They had a king’s list that went back tens of thousands of years. Of course, today’s Egyptologists consider this all myth, but the Egyptians didn’t see it that way.”
She stops for breath and looks to see if Donny is following all this. So far, so good.
“It may be that the Egyptians even made their way to Atlantis. Archaeologists just found the remains of ocean-going vessels in Egyptian sites. Scholars used to think these ships were just religious symbols, but the latest finds show the boats actually were used in the sea.”
“As I recall, they thought Troy was a myth, too, until Heinrich Schliemann discovered it,” Donny says, his chocolate brown eyes melting into a far-away gaze.
“That’s exactly right. And they’ve done excavations deep in the Mediterranean near the Nile and discovered Cleopatra’s palace, another place that was considered to be just a dream. And after the tsunami of 2004, whole temples were discovered off the coast of India. They were impossible to date, but surely had to be ancient, pre-Ice Age, to be in water that deep.”
“But have they actually found something that might be considered Atlantis?” he asks. “What would make your parents go against the tide of historical thought and search for a place that’s considered a phantasm?”
“A great deal has been going on,” Amaryllis says, cutting off her speech to recite her dinner order to a tall, large-chested woman in a tank top and running shorts. She wonders if they hadn’t actually stopped at The Rack by accident. The waitress, who has hair bleached so white it looks like a billowy snow cap, copies everything down with elaborate care.
“Do they allow you to dress like that here?” Donny asks, his eyes bright. “With the air-conditioning on this high, you must be frozen.”
She smiles with a look of interest in her heavily made-up eyes.
“You should see what they wear over there,” she says, pointing her pen toward The Rack. “Whoo, boy.” She then leans down, pressing her body close to Donny and asks is they want free refills on their drinks. They decline and the server turns, swivels her head back and gives a broad wink to Donny.
Amaryllis throws up her hands.
“What is with it with you and this winking? Is it some kind of secret Southern code or something?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s nothing,” Donny says, as if he hadn’t even noticed. And maybe he doesn’t notice. With him, flirting is just set on automatic. Amaryllis, nonplussed, continues her story.
“So I was talking about the dives,” Amaryllis says, picking through the breadbasket. “Yeah, right. There have been many in the Caribbean, especially lately. There’s the famous Bimini Road that Wright was talking about, and the argument continues about whether it is a natural feature or not. One diver has found leveling stones under the rocks, which just wouldn’t be there if the road was a large chunk of fractured beach rock. Also, some divers have found other areas, possible breakwaters or quays that look to be manmade in the area. Some claim to have found fluted columns but the skeptics call it ballast ejected from ships.”
“Column-shaped ballast?”
“Sounds unlikely to me, also. But I’m trying to keep a level head about all this. The next thing that’s extremely interesting is a sonogram that a Cuban submarine is doing of the sea bottom in the area around Cuba, Miami and the Bahamas. They are using satellite-integrated ocean-bottom positioning systems, echo sounders and high-precision sonar. And I’m not sure what all that stuff is. They’ve claimed to have found an entire city with pyramids, roads, and everything. But no one has been able to get his or her hands on the report. With our poor relations with Cuba, communication is nonexistent.
“But there is an Englishman—they can travel freely to Cuba, you know—who has investigated some caves that have been submerged for thousands of years and inside he’s found writing. Deliberate, human writing. Not just squiggles and swirls.”
“Like the stuff your parents found?”
Amaryllis nods. She realizes she’s turning this into a monologue so hurries to a finish. She’s eager to discover what Donny thinks.
“Last of all, a satellite company has been taking NASA images of the area and employing a great deal of enhancement techniques. Some of it takes a good imagination to view, but I found one website that shows some pretty convincing undersea triangles in an area where you’d expect to find only flat sea bottom.”
“So what did your parents find that’s different?”
“Of what I saw, they found small artifacts that were obviously made by humans and not of the culture of the Carib Indians. The items in Freya’s cabinet were made by someone from a higher culture. The vases looked as fine as anything I’ve seen in an ancient Egyptian collection.”
Donny accepts his salad from the waitress, who places the salad before Donny with loving care and then plunks Amaryllis’ soup down without ceremony, sloshing a bit of it on the paper tablecloth.
“So you’re telling me the dolphins didn’t tell your parents all this?” He’s toying with her now, as he dribbles the dressing on the salad.
“No, and mermaids aren’t whispering to me in my sleep, either.” Or are they?
They eat for a while, both trying to absorb what Amaryllis has discovered in her research. She knows there is far more to do, but separating the real scholars from the wackos has not been easy. Most of the websites she found when she searched for “Atlantis” turned out to be past-life memory pages with New Age music and plenty of bad poetry.
“These writers, do they have footnotes?”
“And sources and everything.”
“How about your parents’ papers in the academic journals?”
“Can’t find them. I think they’ve been purged.”
Donny chews some more and pushes his plate away. He looks into her eyes with that soft-focused gaze that drew her into his embrace back in Chicago.
“So, you are in the middle of an honest-to-goodness controversy,” he says as he reaches across and grabs one of her hands. “But why are you in danger because of a fight over what could be just a fantasy?”
“It’s threatening somebody. Other academics, certainly. It’s like Sean said: they don’t want their own work invalidated.”
“But the heavies with the guns. Someone who’d kill your photographer. I don’t know any professors who would do that. The worst thing they ever did to me in law school was make me argue a case against evolution.” His lips curl up at the memory.
Amaryllis’ head snaps up just as their vixen waitress returns with the steaks
. She completely ignores the woman’s presence and stares into Donny’s eyes like a cat fascinated by a robin. He acts as if the server isn’t there.
“That’s it,” Amayllis says, excitement mounting in her voice. “Evolution. Don’t you get it?”
Donny shakes his head in puzzlement as the waitress twirls and shows off her behind like a model. He doesn’t seem to see the maneuver.
“Get what?”
“There wasn’t supposed to be a 10,000 BCE if you read the Bible literally.”
The gears are working, but it takes a few seconds before he lifts his head and lets out a hoot of a laugh. Heads turn in their direction, but he grabs Amaryllis’ hand again and pumps it up and down.
“Bible thumpers. We’re up against a holy war. Oh, man, if they could see this now in law school.”
Amaryllis pulls her hand back and starts to carve her meat.
“I think you forgot something, Donny. Some of those thumpers are survivalists. Don’t you remember the cults, the Jim Jones Kool-Aid suicides? Janet Reno and the Branch Davidians? These people are dangerous. They have guns and money.”
Donny continues to smile, humming “Lawyers, Guns and Money” while he gets down to the business of putting away a rare steak. That’s Donny’s way of driving her crazy, so she lets it slide, but she puts her head down as she wonders why she has not told him about the crystal.
#
While Donny runs off to a discount store to pick up Florida-weather clothing, Amaryllis checks into their modest hotel. She gets a room with two double beds and lets the bellman schlep her bag full of winter clothing into the room. She gets Donny on his cell phone.
“Yup,” he says. She hears plenty of background noise and figures he’s found a store already.
“Get me some things, too.”
“Aw, Amy, I’m no good at selecting women’s clothing. I have no idea what you like.”
“It’s simple, go to the sporting goods area and get some plain t-shirts and shorts, size medium. Just don’t buy blue. It looks awful on me.”
“I’ll bet everything looks beautiful on you.”
“You are shameless. We are in room 402.” She cuts the connection and puts her purse on the bed. Donny will be busy for a while and she’ll have a few minutes to play with the crystal. Maybe it will shed some light on what they are looking for. Or maybe it will send her upsetting images again. She reaches for it as if leaning over to pet a small kitten. She’s tender with the jewel, for it might bite.
Once again, she sits cross-legged on the bed and holds the orb in her hands, feeling a slight touch of static-like energy zap-ping her fingertips. This time, there is music in the back of her mind, a sound of children chanting. She thinks of whether Atlantis is real or if they are just looking for antique junk. The chanting becomes something like lute music, and the walls of her room change color, turning a russet red. She’s seeing through a gauze curtain.
She closes her eyes tightly and lets the music take her to a plain overlooking the ocean. She’s balanced against a tree and looking down at a harbor made of square blocks. There is a breakwater and then a long mooring area. Tethered there are tall ships, but not of European or American design. They have broad hulls and support several wide sails, parallel in placement and slightly angled to one side. On each sail she sees a cross intersected with three circles. She walks down to the harbor, not feeling the ground, but sensing the pristine quality of the air.
In the distance is a tower, black as obsidian. It’s smooth-sided and sits on an island of its own, forbidding and alone. She can’t keep her eyes off the tower, which throbs a low, pulsing note, and listens to children running by her. They are red-skinned and dressed in saffron-colored tunics. Oddly, there’s nothing old-fashioned about their clothing. She could imagine someone wearing it in Los Angeles today. But the parents who follow behind wear tall headdresses, topped with exotic feathers. Their clothing is elaborate, covered with netting and beads with the luster of pearls.
They speak a language she can’t understand, but they point to the tower and she sees a boat filled with people heading for the island. It is a religious ceremony, for the music begins again and she sees the children singing.
Then, overhead, a blimp-shaped object hovers into view. It’s so brilliant and the sun is so bright that she can’t make out whether it’s merely a stray balloon or a vehicle. She averts her eyes from the sky and gazes at a colonnade near the harbor. Its carvings are incised with images of waves, starfish, dolphins. On top is writing that reminds her of the slab in Freya’s cabinet.
She finally puts it together. Civilization. This is not a scene of ancient hunter-gatherer tribes. Yet she has no idea where this idyllic location could have been.
Your mother and father were here.
Amaryllis jumps. She hasn’t quite gotten the knack of staying calm when the darn thing talks to her. The images fade around her and she brushes stray hair off of her sweating forehead. Rustling sounds outside her hotel door remind her that she’s not ready to show this mystical object to Donny. With haste, she wraps the orb like a ceremonial object in the silk scarf and pops it back into her purse.
The lock clicks and Donny appears with bags from a nationwide discount chain.
“Ah, designer wear,” she chirps, trying not to sound as if she’s been communing with a parallel universe.
“Only the best for you, babe,” Donny says tossing a few bags in her direction. “I even found you a Cubs t-shirt.”
She smiles. Even after all this time, he remembers her lifelong addiction to the Chicago Cubs. As children, they used to hang out at the ballpark and snag bleacher tickets before Wrigley Field became too pricey.
“You’re the best.”
“That’s what I keep telling you.”
#
Donny is in the shower and Amaryllis lay in the scratchy motel bed mulling over their last few, absurd nights together. Just like the night of Freya’s dinner, they retired to privacy and began to exchange intimate kisses. They’d murmur things to each other as if they had been lovers for many years. Indeed, they were lovers of a sort—childhood sweethearts who never really got past the platonic stage of their affection. The encounters would become steam-heated, and once Amaryllis found herself nearly naked in the motel bed. But in the end, it was always the same.
He was Donny. She couldn’t. And he’d tell her to forget the past and embrace what was in front of her. Amaryllis still would shut down, gather her clothes tightly about her torso and retire, red with shame and confusion to the other double bed that she’d insisted on having when they registered.
The mood was thick with irritation, and she couldn’t make sense of her imprisoned libido. Any woman would have done cartwheels to have Donny, she could see that. But she just froze up. He’d asked her if it felt like incest, as if he were her blood brother, but she could only shake her head. She didn’t have any siblings, so how could she know? It was more of a sensation that if she got involved with him and fell in love, she’d lose herself. It certainly had been long enough since she had a real boyfriend, but, even in the sultry Florida weather, she couldn’t find a way to release her rigid self-control. Perhaps she’d been so busy toughening up during the last few years that she had forgotten that surrendering was not always a sign of weakness. Maybe.
Still, there’s a mission she’s destined to fulfill—the mission that started in Mexico. This stopover in Florida is too full of death and danger, slow-moving bureaucrats and little discovery. She can’t go back to L.A. empty-handed, and she won’t return to Chicago, where the oppressive force of family expectations and a nagging sense of peril from unseen enemies lurks.
As Donny is finishing in the shower, her cell phone blasts out its mechanical tones. She jumps out of bed to answer it, half expecting to hear from an impatient Wright. Instead, it’s Fiona. Her sweet Irish lilt sounds through the phone like a Celtic melody.
“Thank God, I found you,” Fiona says, sounding slightly out of breath. �
�Every time I tried before I couldn’t get a signal.”
“Well, we’re in Florida now, in a small town. We were in Miami before. There probably was too much interference.”
“It’s just that this man keeps ringing your home. Whenever I come over to water the plants and take in the post, your answering machine is blinkin’ like mad.”
“So, what does he say?”
“I’m here now, so I’ll play a message for you. I hope this works.” After a great deal of scratching and swearing, a hissing tape recording begins to play and a heavily accented voice cuts through the static.
“Amaryllis,” he says, each syllable stressed. “I have not gotten word from you since the accident. I called the newspaper, and they said you weren’t there—that you took a leave.”
Amaryllis’ hand flies to her throat. Gabriel. She still hasn’t contacted him. At first, there is a rush of guilt, but then reason reminds her that she’s been just a bit busy since returning from Mexico.
“I must tell you there is something peculiar going on in the Bahamas. It’s related to what we saw. I must go there with you. Please call me at this number…”
It is Gabriel’s good fortune that he has just enough message time to leave his full number. Then the machine cuts him off. Fiona is back on the line.
“He says the same thing every time, more or less.”
Amaryllis copies down the number and repeats it to Fiona. “Now, erase those messages,” she tells her friend. “All of them. We don’t know who is listening.”
“Amy?”
“Yes?”
“When are you coming back? Barney says you are out indefinitely.”
“I may be longer than I thought, Fiona. Hold down the fort for me, please?”
“Why don’t you just give it up? They’ll find the pictures. You don’t need to be risking your life with Garret’s killers hoofing after you.”
Amaryllis scratches her scalp. It sure would be pleasant to just abandon the search and go home. But she knows this is no longer an option for her.
Dateline: Atlantis Page 12