Deviant Behavior

by Mike Sager

  “Plato wrote about Atlantis?” Freeman snorted.

  “It’s in a book called Timaeus,” Greene said, digging for another volume. “He writes of an Athenian named Solon, a wise man who traveled through Egypt. At a place called Sais, Solon meets an old priest. The priest tells him that compared to the Egyptians, the Greeks have little knowledge of the great events of ancient history. He goes on to tell Solon a story about a long lost island in the middle of the ocean.

  “Plato quotes the priest,” Greene said, finding the place, reading aloud: “‘On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings. …’” He skipped ahead, “‘… which arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia.’”

  He flipped a little further in the text. “‘There were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night … Atlantis was swallowed by the sea and vanished.’” He raised his head from the text to gauge the impact on his visitors, who were visibly rapt. “The priest goes on to tell Solon,” he continued, “‘You and your fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that remained, but you know nothing about it because so many succeeding generations left no record in writing.’”

  “Why weren’t the skulls lost with everything else?” Freeman asked.

  “Supposedly, the Atlanteans knew they were doomed. They wanted to preserve their culture. They put all of their collected knowledge into the skulls and sent them off to different parts of the world. That’s the story anyway. One of the stories. Some people believe that the Atlanteans may have been responsible for the unlikely leaps of technology made by many of the Earth’s great civilizations. Like the Mayans. The way their culture seemed to sprout up out of nothing.”

  Sojii riveted him with an intense stare. “So is this the Master Skull or not?”

  Greene pulled out another book, found a section of high-quality color plates. He held it up. “What do you think?”

  She read aloud the caption beneath: “Discovered in the jungles of Belize.”

  “In 1915,” Greene added. “It was called British Honduras at the time.”

  “Just below Mexico,” Sojii said.

  “On the Caribbean coast. Where Atlantis was supposed to have been.”

  Sojii turned the page. A photograph of a tall, thin, serious man. He is standing in the jungle, squinting against the bright sun, wearing a floppy hat, jodhpurs, knee-high boots. A fancy, long-stemmed tobacco pipe is angled out and down from his mouth. She read: “Bertram Metcalfe.”

  “He’s the one who found it,” said Greene. “Or actually, it was his daughter. His adopted daughter—there is some evidence that he fathered a child with her, though he never claimed parenthood or even saw the child, apparently. They found the skull in a place called Tumbaatum, which is Mayan for ‘City of Fallen Stones.’ It’s quite a story,” he said, selecting another text, a brittle old book. “A disastrous expedition through the jungle. Crocodiles and predatory insects. Injury, delirium, a love triangle … you name it.”

  Greene opened the book, obviously a valuable limited edition, hand-sewn, leather-bound. “This is a diary. It was self-published by a man named H. R. Stuke. He was a Cornish watercolor artist. There are some of his prints and sketches included as well. Apparently he signed on with the expedition at the last minute. This Metcalfe guy was short on funds; Stuke was an Eton kid with a sizable trust fund.”

  He paged through the book with care, mindful of the brittle binding. “According to Stuke, after hiking for weeks through the treacherous rain forest, Metcalfe literally stumbled upon the city: he tripped over one of the fallen stones buried within the thick underbrush and hit his head. He was gravely injured—from the sound of it, he suffered a minor stroke and was debilitated for some time. Stuke says that he had no choice but to assume command of the expedition. He hired scores of natives from the surrounding tribe and began clearing the underbrush. They hacked away with machetes and native stone implements for several months trying to reclaim the city from the jungle. Finally, he decided to set a fire.”

  He read from Stuke’s diary: “‘The inferno raged for several days and nights like a mighty blast furnace, spewing out white hot ash and spitting red embers all around, nearly choking the very life breath from our party of explorers and native tribesmen. As the holocaust swept onward, the mythical city was slowly revealed, like a vision from a fairy tale …

  “‘In its totality, we would eventually calculate, Tumbaatum occupied some six square miles. There were pyramids, palaces, houses, subterranean chambers. A huge amphitheater appeared as if it were designed to hold more than ten thousand people. The magnitude of the labor that must have been required is almost beyond computation: the only tools available during that era were flint axes and chisels, of which we found many at the site. One morning, in imitation of the workers or slaves who built the place, I set out to square a block of stone with one of these implements. The task took me an entire day.’”

  “You said the daughter found the skull?” Sojii asked.

  “Adopted daughter. Her name was Roberta. They called her Bobbie. She was probably just about your age at the time—how old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “She was maybe a year older. Old enough, apparently, to fall in love with Stuke—or at least, he was in love with her. He never says it in his journal, but it seems pretty clear—some of his prose gets pretty purple,” Greene sniggered. “About a year after the skull was found, Stuke and Metcalfe fought a pistol duel on a street in downtown Belize. Bobbie ended up sailing back to England—pregnant, some say. Stuke’s shoulder was shattered; Metcalfe was an expert marksman. Stuke never painted again.”

  “How did she find the skull?”

  “One morning, according to Stuke’s diary, Bobbie woke up early and climbed to the top of the central pyramid. Metcalfe had forbidden her to go up there—it was more than fifteen stories high. But she got it in her mind to go, and go she did. She is portrayed as a tough little nut, not shy about voicing her opinion.

  “Anyway, one morning, as the rest of camp still slept, Bobbie climbed to the top of the pyramid.” He picked up the story on the page: “‘The climb was difficult but she was in excellent shape. Once at the summit, she sat for a long time, entranced with the beauty and the wildlife, the birds and monkeys, the vast canopy of the rain forest stretching around her for miles, the closest part of it charred from the fire we’d set, which luckily had been doused after several days by the first driving rains of monsoon season. (Frankly, the idea that we would have to put it out never occurred to me.) As the sun rose higher overhead, she became aware of something glittering—something way down inside the pyramid. She could see it shining through a deep fissure …’”

  “It took the party several weeks to enlarge the hole,” Greene narrated, turning the pages. “When everything was ready, Bobbie volunteered to retrieve the skull.”

  He read again: “‘Slowly, hand over hand, the natives let her down, feetfirst, into the opening, which was certainly more than fifty meters in depth. She was a leggy thing, long of limb and finger; a sprite, barely eight stone. Her eyes shined fearlessly, ferociously, utterly dedicated to the task. Taking no chances, I insisted on utilizing some twenty of our diminutive brown employees for the task, ten on either of the two ropes. Their skin glistened with the weight of their responsibility, for everyone in the party, Christian and heathen alike, had the utmost regard for this wonderful young woman, whose ready smile and intelligent blue eyes had seen us all through the darkest of times.’”

  Greene skipped ahead. “‘With due haste, Bobbie was pulled back to the surface. Flush with her accomplishment, she removed the object from beneath her blouse, where she had held it for safekeeping, and raised it aloft. In hushed silence we gazed at this strange object, mesmerized by the way it refracted the rays of the sun, sending forth great rainbows of light. Then, spontaneously, the native workers erupted with joy. They lau
ghed and cried, kissed the ground, hugged one another, as if an ancient memory had been triggered, as if each of them knew intuitively of this crystal icon, that it was a significant part of their past, a long lost deity finally returned home.

  “‘When evening fell and the first stars appeared in the sky, Metcalfe—finally up and around after months of debilitation, he was acting his part as Cock of the Walk—placed the skull upon a makeshift altar the natives had built. Fires were lit all around. There was drumming and chanting and singing. Dancers appeared from the shadows, decorated with the plumes of jungle birds and the skins of jaguars. The celebration went on for days, drawing natives from other villages, bringing all work at the dig to a complete halt.”

  “How do we know this really happened?” Sojii asked.

  “The only other account we know of is Metcalfe’s. His personal papers are said to be privately held. I’ll tell you one thing I do know for sure: up until you took that skull out of your bag”—he indicated the Master Skull, still sitting on his desk—“it had been missing for seventy years.”

  “But it’s been on the Pope’s desk ever since I’ve known him.”

  “The Pope?”

  “The Pope of Pot. He has a church on Fourteenth and P.”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Greene said dismissively. “All I know is that people have been searching for this thing for years. Someone is offering a lot of money for information about it.”

  “What is it supposed to be used for, exactly?” Freeman asked.

  Greene pulled out another book, this one more modern.

  “Back in the early twenties, before it went missing, Metcalfe took the skull to be examined by ocular scientists in Germany. They ran a complete battery of tests.”

  “And?”

  “For one thing, they found that the skull was made of pure, natural quartz, which doesn’t age, so you can’t tell how old it is, not even with carbon dating. But the weirdest thing was this: even under extreme magnification, the scientists could find no evidence at all of what they call ‘tool chatter’—a telltale pattern of repetitive scratch marks left by the makers.”

  “Meaning … ?”

  “Meaning that the scientists couldn’t figure out how the skull was actually made. There was no evidence of any type of hand craftsmanship or machine work or anything. It’s like, poof, you know? Like it just materialized in its present form.”

  “That’s what the scientists concluded?” Freeman asked. “That it just materialized?”

  “Actually, no,” Greene said. “There was a big dustup over the report. The official version ended up concluding that the Master Skull had been made by hand—by slowly and patiently rubbing and polishing a large quartz rock with a mixture of sand and water.”

  Sojii shook her head emphatically: no way. “That would have taken years!”

  “Three hundred years,” Greene said. “That was their estimation.”

  33

  Sidestepping an unattended gurney—the patient/inmate in full restraints; on his face the terrified befuddlement of a wounded animal ensnared in a trap—Seede approached the reception desk on the fifth floor hospital ward of the DC Central Jail.

  He carried his pad, pen, and tape recorder. The rest of his stuff was stowed in a locker downstairs in visitor intake. Around his neck dangled his Certified Media Credential, known as a CMC, a three-by-five-inch laminated card issued by the Metropolitan Police Department after a rigorous background check. The CMC provided official access to crime scenes, precinct houses, and government buildings. It also exempted its holder from the usual routine searches of person and personal effects.

  The cinder block walls up here were painted a darling shade of little boy blue; the air smelled of ammonia and industrial deodorizer, the familiar bouquet of a modern health care facility, with a slight after-nose of dirty mop. Seede shifted his paraphernalia awkwardly to one hand, separated the paperwork he’d been given downstairs, proffered it to the khaki-uniformed guard.

  The guard glanced down at the sheets of paper, then down a bit further, toward the miniature television that was peeking out from the bottom drawer of his desk. A popular game show played at low volume. Transfixed, he tipped back his baseball-style cap—the most expensive in the catalog, the bill embroidered with fancy gold scrollwork known as scrambled eggs—and scratched absently at the top of his balding head.

  Seede’s own balding head was glistening with sweat; his complexion was alarmingly green. His mouth was dry and foul-tasting; a leaf of something earlier ingested was lodged between his cheek and gum. Beneath his V-neck sweater and button-fly jeans, his T-shirt and briefs were soaked. Standing as he was beneath a large air vent, part of the network of exposed ductwork and hanging sprinklers and suspended lighting that gave the vaulted reception area the feel of a chic converted warehouse space, he was beginning to feel a chill.

  While Larry the Pharmacist had warned him of the possible side effects for first time users, Seede had been surprised by the intensity of his reaction. He’d come here directly by cab from Ma’s Place—a thirty-minute ride across the Anacostia River into far southeast Washington—with no particular ill effects. In fact, he’d found the cocktail of heroin and crack, known on the streets as a speedball, to be exceedingly pleasant. To his great relief, the jittery edge of the cocaine high, the prolonged and jangled trough that followed each fleeting orgasmic spike—the intensity and duration of which diminished incrementally as the binge continued—was now completely gone. Gone too was the insistent need for constant maintenance, the all-consuming urge for more, a hunger that manifested itself as a yawning pit in the middle of his gut, as a constant carping voice in the back of his head, growing ever louder and more demanding. After a couple days without sleep, he’d noticed, he’d start getting traces of phantasm, trails and flashes of movement around the room, convoluted aural hallucinations, shadowy people who weren’t really there. The voice in the back of his head would begin to sound like Elvis. It would sing the same song over and over, a bastardized bit from Bye Bye Birdie: One more hit, oh baby, one more hit / Oh oh oh / Gimme one more hit.

  But as he was juddering across the pocked and pitted surface of the John Philip Sousa Bridge, lounging in the backseat of the cab on the way to the DCCJ, a ten-dollar bindle of Hellraiser heroin surging through his bloodstream, a perfect synergy had been momentarily achieved. Seede had the sensation that he was floating on a small raft in a large pool on a perfect day. The chronic stiffness in his neck and shoulders was gone; his jaw had ceased to clench. He closed his eyes and savored the golden upside of the crack high: a grandiose state of grace he’d been chasing, to the tune of four hundred dollars a day (the maximum allowable ATM withdrawal; there had to be some rules), for the past two months—a feeling of promise and possibility, of visionary entitlement, of personal and artistic luminosity, of unwavering belief in himself and all that he was out to achieve. (Accompanied, meanwhile, by a constant nagging tingle in his crotch: nine weeks and five days since he’d last had sex with a person who was not himself.)

  By the time he’d arrived at the DCCJ and paid the cabbie, Seede was feeling unusually copacetic, albeit no less aroused: the amorphous cocaine tingle having been augmented, he couldn’t help but notice, by a very specific heroin itch, localized on the under-side of his penis, in a patch of sensitive skin just below the clefted rim of the glans. Fighting the urge to grab himself like Michael Jackson—a level of self-control that some of the other visitors to the jail appeared unable to muster—Seede had entered the DCCJ and followed his usual routine: he’d checked in with the duty sergeant at visitor intake, exchanged the requisite jocular banter, signed the log, received his locker assignment, hung up his coat, the inside pocket of which contained the remaining bindle of heroin, about a gram of his home-cooked freebase, and a crack pipe fashioned from aluminum foil and other household products.

  And then, without warning, an intense wave of prickly heat washed over his head. He broke out in a vici
ous sweat; a rush of nausea nearly buckled his knees. He stumbled to the visitors’ restroom—a popular site for unofficial conjugal trysts, providentially unoccupied—and spewed forth a bilious projectile of vomit, a slight bit of which could be seen on the tip of his black Dr. Martens boot.

  Now, after standing nearly two full minutes before the reception desk on the fifth floor hospital ward, waiting for the guard to acknowledge his presence, Seede could hear the game show theme song filtering up from the bottom drawer, signaling a commercial break. The guard picked up the telephone, spoke a few words, hung up. He looked at Seede, nodded indifferently toward a pair of double doors to his right, the entry into the ward proper. Seede ventured a supplicating smile.

  Returning his attention to the television, the guard crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back slowly in his chair—gunmetal gray with black Naugahyde upholstery—shifting his ample weight gradually aft, until the two front legs lifted off the floor. He teetered at the fulcrum for an instant, frozen in weightless repose, like a living monument, like a statue at the center of one of Washington’s celebrated traffic circles, this one a memorial to the government’s army of entitled employees, a unionized everyman with a lifetime job, astride his trusty throne. And then the chair found its tipping point and resumed its quiet ride through space, a neat arc of about fifteen inches, the crown of the metal frame coming at last to rest with a muffled thunk against the little boy blue cinder block, where a dark scuff on the wall told of many a similar feat. His eyes still glued to his television, he reached over with his right hand and pressed a button on the wall. The doors swung inward.