It wasn’t just me: that summer, everything was slightly skewed. The weather was strange—had been strange, for months and months, which made Dylan’s comments about his mother even more unsettling. After a long and terrible winter, with its earthquakes and blizzards and record cold, there came a terrible spring—floods and mudslides, more earthquakes in places with unpronounceable names, unexpected volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that dumped a fine layer of ash into the atmosphere. That did not bode well for the coming winter, though scientists seemed to think we might be graced with a cooler summer.
But then summer came, and by the second week of July we were experiencing a record heat wave—a record even for D.C., which is really saying something. The temperature stayed up around a hundred, and scarcely dropped in the evening, when the streets and sidewalks would be covered with immense cockroaches and water bugs trying, like everyone else, to find some respite from the heat. At first the brownouts came weekly, then every few days; but I soon got used to hearing shouted curses and shrieks from odd corners of the museum, whenever the power cut and the computer network crashed.
Elsewhere it was worse. In the Midwest a drought ravaged crops. A biblical plague of locusts swept from Missouri to the Dakota Badlands, leaving dust and mounds of hollow carapaces in their wake. More flash fires devoured the West Coast, where people were still trying to rebuild from the earthquake. On the Baja Peninsula an outbreak of rodent-borne hantavirus caused a temporary quarantine to be set up. Up in Acadia National Park a devastating fire swept across Mount Desert, brought on by the hot weather and a careless hiker’s match. In the Pacific Northwest a full-scale war broke out between loggers and environmentalists, with tree-spikers getting picked off with AK-47s and logging trucks blown up in the middle of Route 687. The locusts were blamed for at least one major airplane crash; in D.C., cockroaches literally smothered a child sleeping on a front porch swing.
“Jesus,” I said when this last news item came over NPR, and switched stations.
There was the usual talk of apocalypse, of the coming millennium and the failure of schools, and god only knew what was going on in the Middle East. So yes, it was strange and disturbing and even frightening, but it was also so much business as usual—you know, Texas Cult Claims Entire Town. Bus Crashes in New Delhi, Thousands Die.
And I just didn’t care, I just didn’t want to think about it. I just didn’t want to think about anything but Dylan. I bought some boric acid and a new fire extinguisher at Hechinger’s, and laid in a case of decent chardonnay from the Mayflower. I stopped reading the front section of the Post, and started hanging out with Dylan at Tower Records and flipping through Pulse.
It was harder for me to ignore that something odd was going on in the museum, something that took up a great deal of Dr. Dvorkin’s time. I saw him leaving his office at odd hours, always with a strained expression, often heavily laden with sheaves of papers, manila folders, even wooden boxes. When I went down to Laurie’s desk to ask her about it, she only shrugged.
“I don’t know, Katherine. It might be another one of those Native American things—”
I groaned. Like a number of museums across the country, we’d come under fire for having sacred objects in our collections. There’d been a few lawsuits, a few out-of-court settlements, a lot of unhappy-making press, and one of our Native American galleries closed for renovation when its permanent collection of kachina dolls turned out to be not so permanent after all. “Am I supposed to be doing something? Like, not talking to the press? Or talking to the press?”
Laurie jabbed at her computer with a paper clip. “Too late. Somebody from the Post was in already—oh, but you were out sick, weren’t you? Well, anyway, there’s supposed to be some big story coming out soon.”
“More Indian stuff?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so—I think it’s something bigger than that. Something with Turkey, maybe.”
“Turkey?”
“The country, Katherine.” Laurie tossed the paper clip into a corner and looked at me suspiciously. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You still look a little out of it—”
I gestured feebly. “Nothing. A sinus infection. What’s going on with Turkey?”
“I’m not sure. Robert hasn’t told me, but everyone down in Paleo is having a cow. I think Robert’s just trying to get some damage control going.”
I tapped a handful of papers against my palm. “Guess I chose the wrong week to be out, huh?”
“Or the right one.” The phone buzzed and she turned away. “See you later, Katherine. I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
I walked slowly back to my office. I wasn’t terribly concerned about whatever might be happening in Paleolithic Europe, except insofar as it might cause me actually to think about my job instead of Dylan.
But whatever storm was brewing, it wasn’t ready to break quite yet. The rest of that week was quiet—unusually quiet, even for the curatorial wing of the Museum of Natural History in mid-July. Dylan and I played hooky, coming in late, leaving early—the sort of thing that gives civil servants a bad name. I barely pretended to work. Instead I walked around in a Technicolor haze, feeling as though I’d somehow wandered from the world I knew into the Bombay Film Board’s version of my life, the Mall outside magically transformed into an exotic festival complete with fireworks and sloe-eyed boys and girls, Hindi puppet shows, and little stalls selling bird cages and fighting kites and puri. The heat wasn’t so bad, if you didn’t actually have to move. Dylan and I took three-hour lunches, and I found that Jack Rogers had been as good as his word: Pink Pelican beer was now being sold at all Aditi food kiosks. I arranged to use up some of the million or so vacation days I’d accrued over the last eight years, and basically did what everyone else in D.C. did that summer: not a damn thing.
Dylan did get some work done. He cataloged photos for the Larkin Archive and gradually learned his way around the museum. For hours he’d wander through the Anthropology Wing by himself, poking into odd corners and storage bins, occasionally coming back by my office to show me something he’d found—a first edition of The Origin of Species shoved beneath the leg of an ancient rolltop desk; a cardboard folder holding original photo gravures of Edward Steichen’s most famous works, the Flatiron Building and Central Park in the snow and half a dozen other images, all printed on tiny narrow bits of paper frail and lovely as dried violets; even one of Maggie’s hissing cockroaches that had made its home near a collection of Malaysian spirit puppets in the Indonesian corner.
“Keep looking,” I told him after he presented a German helmet from World War I to a bemused ornithologist. “Jimmy Hoffa’s in there somewhere, and the guy who wrote The Little Prince.”
Dylan grinned. “And Elvis?”
“Elvis is over in American History.”
One week flowed into the next. I put off calling Baby Joe, just like I put off everything else. The heat wave showed no signs of abating. Perhaps as a result of that, the threatened Post article didn’t appear. I was just starting to think that maybe, just maybe, I might get away with it. That maybe this was what it was all for—all those lost years, my exile from the Divine and the only people I had ever let myself love. That I had finally found a safe place; that I had finally found one of the Beautiful Ones. And he loved me.