She hustles over to Wright’s office to get a game plan. She knows the daily budget meeting, when Wright and all the section editors get together to plan the next day’s stories, has ended. After conferring with his underlings, Wright will have an exact idea of how the story should flow.
As she draws near Sonia’s desk, she begins to shrink back anticipating a showdown, but even Sonia has had a change of heart after Amaryllis’ successful adventures. Sonia gives her a little wave of the hand and buzzes her right into the editor’s domain.
“I can’t write,” she says into the gloomy room. For some reason, Wright always keeps his lights dim. This time, his desk is so dark she almost can’t make him out. “I need to know how you are presenting this thing.”
Wright begins to chuckle and motions her over to the desk. Together, they go over the Sunday story, which will be an over-arching report that takes the reader to Mexico and the Caribbean and tells what the reporter and photographer have found. Next Monday’s paper will concentrate on the Committee and the lengths to which they went to suppress findings of the ancient civilization. Tuesday, she will sum up the various theories of Atlantis, from Plato to the current ideas of British writers who have been daring to challenge the establishment.
Wednesday, she’ll wrap the whole thing up with prognostication about the future of the research. She’ll draw in the findings of Knox and Thorgeld and then make a few guesses of her own about what artifacts and buildings are waiting to be discovered. She and Wright carefully sidestep the issue of Nav-Tech. He knows the deal the military made, because he is partly responsible for the compromise. He wasn’t about to have his best reporter face trial for trespassing on secret military property. Sometimes, the press isn’t open and dedicated to the peoples’ right to know. Sometimes, it’s just a business.
After the wrap-up, Amaryllis’ creative juices return. This time when she sits at the blinking cursor, her hands began working the keyboard at a touch. The first paragraph is intended to shock. She writes: “Planetary amnesia has ended, and the history of the world will change completely. A months-long Los Angeles Star investigation of sunken buildings and carvings shows that civilization did not start in the Tigris-Euphrates valley or even along the Nile. It began tens of thousands of years ago on sunken land stretching across the Atlantic Ocean and on drowned coastlines of such areas as Ireland, the British Isles, the Bahamas and much of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.”
That jump-starts Amaryllis, and she is off and running on her keyboard, clicking away at the keys, watching the story scroll up her screen. She gets up only to refill her coffee or visit the ladies’ room. She is in her rhythm and doesn’t let anything, from the loud chattering of her coworkers to the birthday party someone has set up for the food editor, disturb her focus. She just keeps typing until the office is nearly empty, and the sun is a mere rusty red memory in the west.
Then she puts in the grace notes. From napkin scribbles and old, waterlogged notebooks, she fills in quotations from heads of governments, archaeologists, people living in the areas she visited. And with a little sadness, she enters a few quotations from Gabriel about the need to keep the inheritance from the ancestors pure and untouched.
She pulls back, fingers numb, and scans her work. She has thrown together all four days’ stories in one go. And yet she knows she could write some more. What has been left out? She’s mentioned the many arguments for the location of Atlantis from Ignatius Donnelly’s imagined island in the middle of the ocean to psychic Edgar Cayce’s prediction of Atlantis rising in the area of Bimini. She’s mentioned the theories of Atlantis in the Mediterranean and the modern excavation of caves and underground anomalies in Cuba. She’s careful not to use the word “Atlantis” to describe what she has found. She doesn’t want her careful reporting to be dismissed as daydreaming about a myth. I think I got it all, even without Nav-Tech.
She burns a CD of her stories and then e-mails the copy to herself for access on her home computer. She’s astonished to see that her old story, the one she wrote before leaving for Chicago, still is sitting undisturbed in her story queue. Maybe all those safeguards aren’t necessary. She pauses a minute. Yes, they are. And she pushes the send button for her e-mail.
#
Wright is pacing the floor in his office, while Amaryllis and Barney watch from a safe distance. They both thought the boss would love the story—and indeed, he did, at first. Now, he has questions, lots of them. Most can’t be answered. Now, he’s at the thorniest problem.
“Did you get the head of the British Museum?”
“Sure I did. It’s in the story. They provided a canned quote, but that’s all I’m going to get out of them.”
“I mean about Pitch. His background, why he started the Committee, all that.”
“I really can’t be writing about him. I’m too close to the subject. It wouldn’t be right. Have another reporter do a sidebar.” She stands her ground and curls her fists at her side. She’s thinking again of Pitch’s smarmy face smirking underwater.
Barney steps in between the two, as if sheltering her from Wright’s fever pitch of fact checking.
“Mr. Wright,” he says as if quieting a baying hound. “Pitch did try to kill her. You can’t expect her to be objective about that.”
Wright knocks his forehead with a soft fist. “Of course. What am I thinking of? That’s Hagren’s turf.” He wheels on Amaryllis. “You will tell Hagren everything you know about Pitch.”
She is nodding her head as Barney steps in again.
“Look, she’s not exactly the best source for unbiased information. She’ll talk to Hagren, sure. But you’ve got to make sure we don’t get sued for libel, especially with Pitch’s trial coming up. He could easily get a mistrial if it turns out we’ve poisoned the public—and possible jury members—against Pitch.”
Wright sets his jaw in a hard line, but he knows when he’s been bested.
“Yeah, okay,” he mutters. “Amy, stick around for a few more minutes.”
Barney takes this as his sign to escape. He gives Amaryllis a thumbs-up and closes the door so it makes no sound at all. Wright never looks up but continues pacing. Finally, he looks into Amaryllis’ face.
“How do we keep this running?”
“How do we keep what running?”
“The findings. We need a series. We have to keep it alive month after month. It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever latched onto. We can’t just let it sink after the four-day set of stories.”
Oh boy, here it comes. She coughs and moves away from him, sitting down in the guest chair. She bites her lower lip and discovers that her lips have chapped from all the sun exposure in the Caribbean. She tries to imagine the brilliant turquoise of a Bahamian morning before she speaks.
“I’m not going to be here for that.”
Wright mumbles to himself. Something about a vacation. I better go right out and say it.
She holds up her left hand and shows him the luminous diamond on her ring finger. It’s the two-carat sparkler that Donny gave her in a tear-soaked goodbye at the Miami airport. “After the series runs and we nail down the after-effects, I’m going to leave the Star.”
Wright’s face turns an interesting shade of purple.
“Not the Times. You wouldn’t do that to us.” Wright says in a hushed, murderous tone. She realizes she better get the whole story out quickly before he explodes.
“No. I’d never do that. No, I’m moving back to Chicago. I’m marrying Donny.”
Wright’s face is at first quizzical, then comical. He finally decides on good humor and blurts out hearty congratulations. He walks over and gives her the best hug a father could give. He’s making the best of it, but she knows he’s stung to the quick.
“Look, I know you had no idea about Donny and me,” she starts.
“It goes all the way back to childhood, I know. And he did save your life.”
They both laugh. Then Amaryllis looks at the ground, and Wright stan
ds next to her shifting from one foot to another.
“I’ll help train someone to follow the stories as they develop,” she offers.
“There’s no replacement for you and you know that.” He drops his head and waves her away with a hand that’s lost all its strength. “Go finish up with Barney. We need to pick out the best of Garret’s photos.”
She leaves him staring out the window again. Surely thinking of Priscilla, the other girl he lost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: AWAKENING
She stands at the quay, watching as the crew loads a ship with vases, rugs, gold, and a chest full of scrolls. She looks at the sail, luffing in the changing breeze, bordered in crimson and marked in the middle with the cross and concentric circles. A hand touches hers, and she looks up to see a man like Donny dressed in the clothing of the ancient land. With a start, she regards her own clothing and sees she wears an identical tunic made of rich sage linen.
They look out to sea, and notice the other ships that have gone on ahead. The fleet is leaving, she knows, carrying the goods to the Hall of Knowledge. They bear due West, and the sails are marked with simple hatch marks and crosses for different lands in the various parts of the Americas. But where the Hall is remains a mystery. She wishes she could read the writing, but stands apart from the bustle of the crowd, a foreigner, unschooled in their ways.
She wakes and stretches, giving one tender look at Donny sleeping next to her. She kisses the nape of his neck, but he is so soundly asleep he doesn’t move. She loves the smell of him: toasty and a tinged with a bit of spice. She’s gotten used to those crystal-generated dreams by now, and they no longer fill her with dread. She’s learning from them. Amaryllis’ parents knew somehow that she would carry on their work, but it wasn’t until this morning that she knew how to do it.
It’s late on a Saturday, and she knows Donny will sleep until noon if she lets him, so she grabs some clothing and slips into the bathroom for a quick shower. There’s so much to plan for, so many people making demands on her time. This day, she decides, she’s going to be impossible to find for a few hours. No marriage plans, no job offers, and definitely no calls from television producers. This is her day, and she seizes it with jealousy.
After dressing in simple jeans and a fine-gauge sweater, she pops on a pair of walking shoes, waits for the elevator, then heads down to the busy sidewalk outside. She walks several long blocks west on this spring day, past students, past the park with the Tin Man statue, and remembers Donny singing “If I Only Had a Heart” as he cavorted around the artwork. She watches softball teams at fierce play on the new April grass. They look hot, yet she still hasn’t shaken off the chill of the morning. If Chicago is lucky, the temperature will hit seventy degrees today. Nearly ideal. Just like Amaryllis’ new life.
She turns north to the elevated train station. As she mounts the stairs to the “L,” she remembers her somber walk through the streets of a small Mexican town, when she wondered what would become of her life if her news story proved correct. Now that she has arrived at the other side of success, she’s cool about the experience. It’s only a story. They can’t take my life. But they surely can try to take my time.
The train lumbers to the station, and she gets in, gazing at the hip-hop kids who mime the words to the soundless headsets stuck in their ears. Across the aisle is an ancient man with more hair growing out of his ears than from his scalp. He’s decked out in Cubs regalia. She smiles at him, and he says to no one in particular, “This is the year.” She plops herself down next to a Hispanic woman who’s trying to keep her two toddlers from wandering into trouble. Over in the corner, a tourist consults his pocket map and tries to juxtapose it with the subway plan on the wall. Amaryllis decides to be a model citizen.
“What are you looking for?”
The tourist, a large man with enormous front teeth, looks as if he’s found a savior.
“Millennium Park,” he says with a heavy Texas accent.
“Randolph stop,” she says pointing to the correct station on the wall map. “Then walk a few blocks east. You’ve gone too far if you end up in the lake.”
He nods like a bobble-head doll. Amused, she sits down as the tourist consults his guidebook.
She leans back and considers her journey from the Mexican caves to this moment. The doubt she had in her own abilities to report the lost civilization story had been so glaring, like blotches on her reporter’s résumé. Then the fear when Garret was murdered made her distrust herself even more. All along, she knew she was in for a wild ride, but she never allowed herself to dream the resulting story would cause worldwide fervor. But it did.
First, there was the initial Sunday issue, the sensation it caused in Los Angeles, and Wright’s literal dance of glee in his office. Then the television appearances started to materialize. Soon, speaking-engagement offers poured in. Jobs offers were rife. A publisher proposed a book deal, which she deftly shunted off to Shoshanna and Thorgeld, who were already deeply at work on their next opus.
She was ready, but never fully prepared for the negativity of the naysayers and debunkers who came out from under every rock and sewer cover. These were the guys who tried to find little evils in her reputation, cracks in her reporting history, anything to make her look like a joke. That had been the most grueling part—dealing with the crank calls, indignant letters to the editor, people camping out at her apartment building’s front door. She even had to call the police on a guy who was tailing her for weeks. Donny finally had a showdown with him one weekend, and the creep never returned.
No matter which way the skeptics tried to shoot her story down, the photos didn’t lie, and the rock buildings still stood. Soon other adventurers confirmed her story—and the race was on to discover more about this fantastic, submerged world.
All along, Amaryllis had to fight her own disbelief to pursue the story, but she overcame all reservation when she saw the ancient inscriptions through her parent’s eyes, courtesy of the crystal. When Shoshanna translated some of the writing, Amaryllis became a believer in a civilization older than any known before. It was not because she was gullible, but because her heart told her what was true.
Yet here she sits on an elevated train system first introduced in Chicago in 1892. She rode on this line with Freya when they went downtown to see Christmas decorations in the windows of Marshall Field’s (now, sadly, Macy’s). The buildings outside have changed, but the “L” train still bounces and sways the way it always did. How far have we come, really?
The train tunnels underground, and she alights at Randolph, walking behind the Texan, who studies everything from the street musician near the stairwell to the public-health posters on the walls. Up and out onto Millennium Park, she breathes the cool lake breeze and marvels at what she has become. A housewife? Surely not. A columnist? She decided against it. A flash in the pan? She hopes that fate will never happen. She knows she has more than fifteen minutes of fame and plans to work forever on the dig for truth.
Here in this park that once was nothing but a dilapidated old train yard, she watches the twin glass-block fountains with their video images of giant faces and waits for them to gush water from their digital mouths. The sculptor of this piece of urban art said the images were meant to remind us of fountains of ages past that displayed the gods spewing magic from their bearded mouths. How fragmented and delicate those Roman statues are now. How will the Millennium fountains look in ten thousand years? Probably a lot like the barnacle-covered pyramids of the Caribbean depths. Everywhere Amaryllis looks, she sees change, and the constant mutability of matter.
She holds up her hands and looks at the sun’s reflection in her diamond, marveling at the colors she never knew could exist in super-hardened carbon. What gems then lay under volcanic rock a mile under the sea? What else did the earth have to tell us?
After dreaming and strolling the gardens for delicious hours, Amaryllis gets herself ready for the assault of the real world. She turns her cell phone on, a
nd the message signal immediately bleeps.
Time to get back to 21st-century America. Time to put my game face on.
#
Shoshanna sends e-mail from Mexico, where she she’s been attending the grand re-opening of the water diversion project along the Quintana Roo coast. No one cares much about the waterworks, however. Thanks to Amaryllis’ story, all eyes are on the ancient pyramids that re-emerge amid the caves on the enigmatic shoreline. Shoshanna’s note is written in her usual breathless style.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: the emerging story
Hey, girl, you’ve got to get back down here, because the fascination with what you found is intense. Thanks to the Berlitz credentials—and the fact that you wrote about me in your story—I got past the guards and was able to stroll around the temples nearly by myself. And temples they are!
As I was trying to tell you before you hauled off and moved back to Chicago, now I can read much of the Old Civilization script. Don’t wanna be calling it Atlantean or I’ll get old Thorgeld mad at me. But that tower we were in, it said “Knowledge” against the back wall. There were a million words I couldn’t read, but later I looked at the pictures and compared it to the other ancient languages it resembles. Like Egyptian and the Mayan language, it’s made up of both glyphs that signify entire ideas and of symbols standing for sounds. It’s incredibly complex, making Egyptian look like a walk in the park
Anyway, I have to tell you that the temple of the jaguar on the Mexican coastline indicates that there is a “Hall of Knowledge” somewhere nearby. Other carvings suggest that the hall contains the writings and cultural relics of the Old Civilization. It might be the key to understanding everything about the ancient culture.
Dateline: Atlantis Page 26