A constant whisper came from his lips as he translated. He repeated words and parts of words in both his native language and the foreign tongue before writing again. Eight facial tissues soaked with sweat and wadded into twisted balls lay around the ancient codex, his notes, and the other piles of lexicons, histories, and atlases on his desk. He wished he had a handkerchief, a towel, or something. He couldn’t afford to get the document wet with the salty water running nonstop from his face.
With a clamor, Alred entered the sweltering office. She dropped her bag and gasped. “You have the heater on in here?!?”
“The date’s all wrong,” Porter said, his eyes wide and ferocious, concentrating on the words scrawled on the codex. His unprimed voice left his mouth with a growl as if he’d been sleeping for the last twelve hours and not working. He needed rest.
She could hear the vent, pumping hot air into Porter’s tiny office. But she couldn’t find a thermostat on the wall.
“Heating’s controlled from a central system. In all my years at Stratford, I have yet to find the controls,” Porter said without lifting his eyes. “What perfume are you wearing? Polo Sport?”
“There’s gotta be a way to turn this down,” she said, using a chair to boost herself up to the vent. Almost sacrificing her nail and the tip of her thumb, she successfully pulled the little lever on the metal grating, shutting the duct. Looking at it from the ground, however, she realized the aperture would only close halfway.
“We could go to Bruno’s,” said Porter, dropping his pencil. He stabbed both his tired eyeballs with his fingers and smashed them as if they were trapped cockroaches.
“What did you say?”
“Where the temperature sustains human life. Sorry, I-”
“No,” said Alred, “about the dating?”
Porter looked to the right of his chair. From amid the high stacks of indiscernible files, multicolored volumes, and stapled papers, he pulled up the last issue of LOGOS, The Journal of Archaeology. “In Albright’s article.” He flipped it open to a well marked page.
“Did you memorize it?” she said, looking at his yellow and green highlighting, blue, red, and black underlining, and the masses of notes he’d scrawled in the margins.
“Right here in the introduction Dr. Albright says he’s dated the KM-1 codex to 700 BC.”
“BCE,” said Alred. In the modern world of scholarship, there was a big difference between the terms Before Christ and Before the Common Era, though the years were essentially the same.
“Whatever.”
“He said he dated KM-1 based on the writing. He talks about that later in his paper,” Alred said, leaning over Porter and pushing red hair behind her ear. Porter realized he smelled a little too well-aged today and knew Alred recognized this also as she pulled back to a standing position.
“He’s guessing. And these footnotes?” Porter looked up at her. “They look like they’ve been added by someone else, an aid or something. I think Albright hadn’t returned to the states before writing the article.”
“You’re saying Albright raced to get his paper published?” Alred said, taking the seat opposite the desk. She couldn’t even stand by Porter, he stunk so bad. It came with not showering. His exuberance and panic at completing the task would make him a social outcast, she deduced.
Porter’s hair hung wet to his eyebrows. If he’d had Fabio-length locks, the sweat probably would have repulsed Alred out of the room. Nevertheless, Porter nodded and reached for another magazine. “I missed this. Too busy with my dissertation, I suppose.”
Alred examined the periodical as he flashed the front of it. Bold letters in a black cover read: Archaeological Journal.
Flipping to another spot devastated by his rainbow markings, Porter tossed the open journal onto Alred’s lap.
She looked down.
THE NEW MESOAMERICAN MYSTERY
Guatemala’s Hidden Treasure by
Dr. Alexander Peterson, Ohio State University
“Ohio State University,” she read out loud.
“An obvious connection to Dr. Albright.”
“But this was Ulman’s discovery,” said Alred. “Why haven’t there been any essays by him?”
“Maybe there have been,” Porter said, leaning back in his chair, which squeaked with the sound of a thousand tortured mice. He put his hands behind his head and closed his exhausted eyes. He didn’t want to think about Ulman. Frankly, he wished Alred would go away. Porter preferred working with solitude, his quiet lover these past years.
Alred saw the codex on the desk. Porter weighed the volume through her eyes. She recognized it instantly, once she saw past the piles of other academic junk Porter had put there as if to hide it. The artifact held the same tan color of the other ancient Central American books she had seen.
The manuscript was thick, but the pages were surprisingly thin. Each page of the bark paper had years ago been attached to the page beside it until it looked like an unrolled scroll of great length. But instead of being rolled together, the pages had been bent toward each other to make it look like an accordion or an oriental paper fan that could close into one solid form. The codex was opened now, not unlike the way books open today.
Numerous colored glyphs washed across the pages. Different inks and paints had been used, and pictures were interspersed among the lettering.
Alred squinted as if to decide what language the codex had been written in.
Porter eyed her closely.
She had read and reread Albright’s paper by now, but still couldn’t come to grips with the possibility that Near Eastern devices were found in KM-1. But then, she didn’t know exactly what she was seeing right at this moment.
Porter held his eyelids parted only slightly. He smiled. That the terrible thing was on his desk would be enough to throw her logical mind into emotional chaos, he figured. He’d wait a bit.
Alred saw him appraising her, however, and recreated her unfeeling face with contemplative green eyes. “You don’t think these professors killed Dr. Ulman to get to his find.”
“Well,” Porter said, dropping his hands into his lap, “I didn’t say it. You seem to be more concerned about Ulman than the manuscript on my desk.”
“What is it?” she said nonchalantly, as if it didn’t matter as much as it did. All this time she’d done her work in her apartment, checking out books from the library and ordering others through the inter-library loan system. She’d kept her work quiet. Her prerogative. But in the end, she would need to face the archaeological evidence. Well, here it was.
“In tradition of the great scholars who wrote articles before we knew it was a race, I call this KM-2,” said Porter with a hand presenting the object like a new guest in the small room.
“Ulman’s codex.”
“The one he sent Dr. Kinnard, yes.” Leaning back to his card table, resting his elbows thereon, Porter looked at the bark book and at the notes he’d hoped to finish before she arrived. “I’ve been translating-”
“You don’t know Spanish,” Alred said, “how can you translate a Mesoamerican document?”
Porter looked up at her. “Why are you making this so difficult, Alred? We’ve talked about this. Can you be so obstinate concerning science vs. religion as to not see the facts before you?”
“Religion isn’t an issue,” Alred said, sitting back in her chair.
With unbelieving eyes, Porter said, “I’m glad to hear that. Be a scientific judge then.” He lifted a hand again to the codex.
“KM-2,” she said, carefully picking up the ancient book.
“Hope your hands are clean,” Porter said as he dived back into his notebook. He flipped through the pages to review his work. It really was a mess and needed to be rewritten. But he was really wondering with all his mental faculties what his companion was thinking. “Ever see a volume like that? Looks a lot like a scroll someone decided to press flat and open differently, doesn’t it?”