Book of Knowledge

by Slater, David Michael

  “I think he’s crazy,” Dex concluded. “I think he’s been crazy since forever, and I think the reason no one knows his stupid plan is because there is no plan because he’s crazy! Did Latty say what she thought it meant?”

  “No. And I don’t think he’s really crazy,” Daphna said, “or if he is, he’s still going to do something terrible. That’s scary, Dex. I mean, what if there really is some kind of connection to the Garden of Eden there? We’ve got to do something soon!”

  “You’re right,” Dex agreed, checking quickly on the statues. “But what do you want to do? Should we just go there and make him stop whatever he’s planning?”

  “I’d be scared to try that,” Daphna admitted. However panicked she was, she didn’t feel ready.

  “Me too.”

  “I wish there was a way to protect people from him without getting near him. That way it wouldn’t matter what he did.”

  At that moment, Emil began to stir, just slightly. Dex turned to re-freeze him, but an idea stuck him first. His face suddenly lit up.

  Daphna saw this and looked at James. Her face lit up as well.

  “Rolling!” Edwin called. Daphna and Dexter were sitting on the couch looking at the camera’s red light and swallowing into dry throats. “Rolling!” Edwin repeated.

  “Ah—right. Okay,” said Daphna. “Hello out there. My name is Daphna Wax. This is my brother, Dexter, but I guess our names don’t matter. Please listen closely because I am going to say a Word. Okay, here goes—” Daphna pronounced her Word as clearly as possible. Then she said, “Good. So, okay. Now, listen closely again. I need everyone to know this. There is a man. His name is Adem Tarik. He is evil and has plans that could affect the entire world. No one is to cooperate with him no matter what he says or does. He does not have the power to force you to do anything. He should be ignored completely, or maybe thrown in jail—”

  “And while we’re at it,” Dex said, “all you criminals out there—give it up. You are going to start living honest lives, right now. If you are cheating anyone, stop. If you—”

  “And—” Daphna put in, “people are going to start being nice. Don’t judge anyone by how they look or how much money they have. Life is not a popularity contest!”

  “And you need to take it easy on people who have problems, like if they have reading issues or things like that—”

  “And kids who read and study a lot and who want to make something of themselves should be respected, not used—”

  “And this world shouldn’t be a place were people’s lives stink because they have bad luck! What kind of God—”

  “Dex,” Daphna interrupted, snapping out of the fever she’d been drawn into.

  Dex shook his head and snapped out of it, too. They’d said far more than enough.

  “Okay, Edwin,” Daphna said, and the red light blinked off.

  The twins turned to the others in the room.

  “Just make sure this gets on the news,” said Dex. “The national news—no, the international news. Do whatever it takes.”

  “Easily done,” said James. “Everyone on earth with a TV set will see this tonight.”

  “Wait!” Daphna shouted at Edwin, who was fitting the lens cover back on his camera. James had just made her realize a limitation of their plan. “I need to add one more thing.”

  A minute later, the camera rolled again.

  “Sorry,” Daphna said to it, “I forgot something. We need everyone who sees this to find anyone and everyone who didn’t see it and ask them to call us. We’ll leave a recording of our message on our voicemail. Here’s the number—” Daphna gave their home phone number, but then another snag occurred to her. “And, for the people who live way out there, like in tribes, with no technology, we need people to go out in those trucks—with the speakers on top?—and broadcast the audio part of our message. After that special Word, you can translate what I said into whatever language you need. There,” she said, “that should cover everyone I think.”

  “Good,” said Dex. Daphna always thought of everything. He suddenly realized, once and for all, that he needed to appreciate that.

  “You wouldn’t believe the power of word-of-mouth,” James said. “Within twenty four hours, you could reach literally everyone in the world this way, everyone who isn’t deaf anyway.”

  Dex and Daphna looked at each other. “Wait!” they shouted, but neither knew exactly why this time.

  “What can we do, Dex?” Daphna asked. “There are a lot of deaf people in the world.”

  “I don’t know. Do we really need to worry about them?”

  “Maybe not, but it just seems like we ought to be thorough. Everything counts, right?”

  “But, if someone can’t hear the First Tongue, how can we get to them?”

  Daphna turned to Emil and James. “How do you reach deaf people?” she asked.

  “Well, there’s closed captioning,” James replied. “And many newscasts feature signers. It’s incredible what they can do these days. They can even sing!”

  “Right!” Daphna cried. “But wait—we don’t know a sign for our Word, and just reading it doesn’t do anything to you.”

  “I know one that does!” Dex cried.

  “What? How?”

  “Singing! That’s why I sang that stupid song that woke me up! The other day, I read this Word that sounded Spanish. Then I read the next word, which was ‘sing,” and I started singing! I didn’t even think about it. I thought I was just losing it.”

  “So, if you read that Word, then you’ll do whatever you read afterward? That’s perfect!” Daphna said. “And I’ve got an idea that might be even better than closed captioning.” She signaled to Edwin, who trained the camera on her.

  “And if you know anyone who’s deaf,” she said, “get them to go to this website—” Daphna gave her father’s site address.

  “Genius!” Dexter cried.

  Edwin lowered the camera once again, but only by an inch or two.

  “We’ll reach everybody,” Dex said, “except, I guess, anyone who’s blind and deaf, but how could they help Adem Tarik anyway?”

  “They couldn’t,” Daphna promised, feeling very satisfied with their spur-of-the-moment planning skills. “This should buy us a little more time to learn more about—”

  “Wait!” the twins cried together, but the red light was already on.

  “Sorry!” Daphna said. “This really is the last thing. We want anyone out there who’s an expert on the Garden of Eden to call us and tell us if you know anything about books being there. We need a little help on that. Okay. Cut.”

  Edwin looked hesitantly at Daphna, unsure whether to bother moving the camera off his shoulder.

  “You can all go,” Dex said, “and by the way, forget everything that happened here. Just get that tape to every network in the world. Tell ’em it’s major big news, and then forget about that, too.”

  CHAPTER 25

  a little help

  It took Daphna just under an hour to clear her father’s webpage and insert their message. Dex remembered everything they’d said into the camera, virtually word for word, so it didn’t take long to reproduce it. While Daphna worked, Dex called the pizza shop; it was one of the many speed dial numbers he had Latty set up. It arrived just as Daphna clicked the upload icon.

  “There,” she sighed, calling up a search engine. “Now we can get to work finding out more about the Garden of Eden. Gimme a slice.” Suddenly aware that she was starving, Daphna snatched at the piece Dexter held out for her and took a ravenous bite that immediately scorched the roof of her mouth.

  “Youw!” she whined, but the pain didn’t register for long. She was already well into what she liked to think of as “Project Mode,” the frame of mind in which she completed major assignments for school. In Project Mode, it took far more than a burned mouth to knock her off stride.

  Dex, biting more carefully into a slice of his own, sat down on the chair he’d dragged into his father’s of
fice. He observed his sister’s feverish work with a mix of scorn and grudging admiration. She looked possessed: eyes narrowed, shoulders hunched forward, forehead wrinkled.

  “Theresatunashtuf.”

  “What?”

  “Shorry,” Daphna said. Her mouth was full and still burning, but after a painful swallow, she managed to say, “There’s a ton of stuff about the Garden of Eden. I thought I’d start with just that, for some background information. But there’s way too much. Here, I’ll refine the search with ‘location’—Wow.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a lot for that, too, but it looks manageable. Gimme another one.” Daphna clicked on the first link on the list. When it came up, she skimmed it over while chewing absently on the second slice of pizza she scarcely noticed getting.

  “This one says the Garden was in Mongolia. I’m going to the next one.” Daphna backtracked and followed the second link. “Well then,” she said after reading it over.

  “What?”

  “This one says that mankind is not permitted to know the exact location of the Garden, and those who seek to find it are evil.”

  “That seems about right. Look at Adem Tarik.”

  “True, but what about us?”

  “We’re not seeking to find it,” Dex protested. “We’re trying to find out what it has to do with Tarik’s plans. Besides,” Dex added, “won’t we find it in one of our trillions of lives anyway?”

  “Good point,” Daphna said. “Here’s one that says it’s in Africa, and that Alexander the Great was looking for it there.”

  “Hey!” Dex exclaimed, “maybe Adem Tarik is Alexander the Great, and he’s still looking for it!”

  Daphna considered the idea. “I guess we haven’t tried to figure out who he really is yet,” she said. “I mean, Alexander the Great wanted the world to be his, right? And I think it just about was for a while.”

  “And remember what Ruby told us?” Dex said, “that throughout history some individuals learned the First Tongue pretty well and used it to gain great power over others!”

  “True! How else could someone take over half the world when he’s like, I don’t know, twenty or something like that?”

  “It’s him! He’s Alexander the Great! Oh, wait. Dad can’t speak the First Tongue. I forgot. But maybe he trained his generals to use it!”

  “Hold on,” Daphna cautioned, reading through another site. “Looks like Alexander the Great isn’t the only candidate. This one says there was a saint, Saint Brendan, who sailed around the Atlantic for seven years searching for Eden in the 5th Century, and speaking of boats, Columbus was supposedly searching for it, too.”

  “Columbus?”

  “Yeah, hold on. “It says he wrote a lot about it in his journal. All that stuff about proving the world was round and finding better trade routes—it was all cover.”

  Dex was crestfallen. The Alexander the Great theory felt so right. “Anyone not looking for it?” he grumbled. As usual, he’d been hasty.

  “Wait a minute,” said Daphna. “I ought to at least try a search for ‘Adem Tarik.’” Daphna returned to the search engine and typed into it. Zero matches came up.

  “Nothing,” she sighed. “Not that I thought he’d have a website or anything. I’m going back. Hold on—”

  “Okay.”

  Daphna waited a moment for the results to come back on screen. Then she scrolled down to find links she hadn’t tried yet.

  “Okay,” she said after choosing one, “thissite says the Garden is in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.”

  “The Sea Shells Islands?”

  “It’s not spelled like that. Here’s one that says it’s in the Sinai Desert. That’s much closer.”

  “Why don’t you just type ‘Turkey’ in there with ‘Garden of Eden’ and see what comes up?”

  “Because,” Daphna replied, slightly put out, “I’m getting background information, like I told you. It’s good to do that before you dive right in because sometimes you learn stuff that gives you ideas you wouldn’t have thought of, like Alexander the Great—Whoa—”

  “What?” Dex asked, but only because he’d stopped listening to his sister the second her voice took on lecture tone, halfway through the word ‘because’ on this occasion.

  “Western Missouri,” Daphna read.

  “Western Missouri? Someone thinks the Garden of Eden was in Western Missouri?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think we’ve gotten enough background, Daphna. No, wait, see if anyone thinks it’s under the steps going down to my room.”

  “Ha, ha. Garden of Junk, maybe. Here’s one that says the entire story is a metaphor and anyone who looks for it in real life is a flaming idiot. Wait—here’s another close one: ‘The Garden of Eden is now under the waters at the head of the Persian Gulf where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow into the sea.’ Hmmm, let’s see. Okay, here’s another one in the same area. It says the Garden was definitely in the Mesopotamian region because that area was the birthplace of so many things: writing, organized cities, written laws, some type of agriculture, and a whole bunch of other stuff.”

  “And—?”

  “A ha! Here’s one that says Turkey, from the Chicago Sun Times!” Daphna clicked over and read the title to Dexter. “Garden of Eden said to

  be in Turkey!”

  Daphna put out her hand for a third slice of pizza and munched on it as she skimmed the article. When she’d finished both the munching and skimming, she summarized for Dexter.

  “Okay, in Genesis,” she said, “the first book in the Bible—it says that a river rose out of Eden and divided into four heads, which it says were, hold on—here they are: the Pison, the Gihon, the Hiddekel and the Euphrates.”

  “And all those are in Eastern Turkey?”

  “Well, not exactly, or it really would have been obvious. I guess they think one of those is the modern day Euphrates—one of the other three is a fork in it. Then there’s the Tigris, and the last one is the Murat. The guy’s big claim is that no rivers ‘rise’ in the desert. These are the only four rivers that meet in that entire region, and they just happen to rise in the mountains of Eastern Turkey. He used satellite photographs or something.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No one else could have come up with that in all of history?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not if you need satellite pictures. Do you think he’s crazy?”

  “Could be, but that wouldn’t mean he’s wrong, I guess.”

  “He’s not wrong—or, if he is, then Adem Tarik is wrong too, and something tells me, he’s not wrong.”

  “So what about all the books he’s putting in the caves?”

  “Right.” Daphna returned once again to the search engine and typed in “Books in Garden of Eden.” Nothing came up. She tried ‘Garden of Eden’ + ‘library,’ but all that got her were library websites with books about the Garden of Eden. She tried various other combinations of related words but wound up with nothing useful.

  Discouraged, and growing drowsy and crampy from too much greasy pizza, Daphna finally gave up. “Dead ends, all of them,” she sighed.

  “Well,” said Dex, “maybe someone will call after they see the news.”

  “The news!” It was 6:01. The twins jumped up, ran to the kitchen and turned on the TV.

  They were already on. The lead story.

  For a moment, the twins stared incredulously at the screen. The experience of seeing their own faces staring back at them was intoxicating. But as soon as the initial thrill wore off, it was mostly embarrassing. Dex flipped around the channels quickly. They were on all the news shows.

  By 6:04, they were off.

  At 6:05, the phone began to ring.

  Electrified by the immediate results, Dex and Daphna waited for the voicemail to collect the information they’d asked for. When it was done, the phone rang again.

  “Dex, it’s working!” Daphna cheered. The
second message was received, and then the phone rang again. And after that message came in, it rang again, and then it rang again and again and again and again. It rang ceaselessly for an hour, pausing only for the length of time it took for voicemail to record. The twins were gratified to see their plan working, but by the end of the hour, they were also getting a bit annoyed.

  By the end of the second hour, they were more than a bit annoyed, and by the end of the third, they were going batty. They discussed playing CD’s on high volume, but since Dex’s screaming guitar music gave Daphna a headache, and her “easy-listening” songs made him wretch, they abandoned the idea.

  They turned off the ringers on all the phones for a while, but both became irrationally worried that would somehow kill the line. Dex had the idea of putting pillows over the phones to deaden the ringing, but it was even more annoying trying to strain to hear if what sounded like a call really was a call. And it was impossible to tune the ringing out because the messages people were leaving weren’t all the same length. The exact moment the phone would start ringing again was always a surprise.

  At 9:30, the twins decided there was nothing to do but go to bed. They unplugged all but the kitchen phone, which was still just slightly audible in both their rooms. But that wasn’t the reason neither could get to sleep. They were too wrapped up in thoughts about who was calling and what they were saying. Even more exciting was the thought of their message making its way around the world, bending people far and wide.

  Dex got up at ten and flipped through the Book of Nonsense, but it wasn’t changing. He put it back on his desk and lay down again. He didn’t want to deal with it anyway.

  The phone was still ringing. He could hear it through the vent overhead. He leaned over and flipped his radio on, but it didn’t help. At eleven, he turned it off. The phone was still ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing. It wasn’t until midnight, when Dex’s imagination was exhausted and the quiet ringing finally blended into the background of his mind, that he finally fell asleep.