12.21 by Dustin Thomason Read Free Book Online Page A

last time you read a book written in Mayan?” Chel asked.
    “Why read a Mayan book when I spent all that time learning English? Besides, I haven’t heard of any good mysteries in Qu’iche lately.”
    “Mom, you know I’m not talking about a modern book. I’m talking about something written during the ancient era. Like the
Popol Vuh
.”
    Ha’ana rolled her eyes. “I actually saw a copy of the
Popol Vuh
at the bookstore the other day. They’re putting it with all that 12/21 nonsense. Loudmouth monkeys and flowery gods—that’s what you get in Mayan.”
    Chel shook her head. “Father wrote his letters in Qu’iche, Mom.”
    In 1979, two years after Chel was born, the Guatemalan army imprisoned her father for helping lead Kiaqix into rebellion. From jail, Alvar Manu secretly wrote a series of letters encouraging his village never to surrender. Ha’ana herself had smuggled out more than thirty entreaties into the hands of village leaders across El Petén, resulting in a doubling of the volunteer army in weeks. But the letters were also Chel’s father’s death warrant: When his jailers discovered him writing in his cell, he was executed without a trial.
    “Why do we always talk about this?” Ha’ana asked, standing to clear the plates.
    Chel felt frustrations toward her mother bubbling up. She loved her, and she would always be grateful for the opportunities Ha’ana had given her. But deep down, Chel also felt that her mother had abandoned their people, which was why Ha’ana hated to be reminded of it, and why showing her the codex in its current condition would be useless. Until Chel could figure out what it said, her mother would see the book as little more than disintegrating fragments of history she wanted to forget.
    “Leave the dishes,” Chel said, standing up.
    “They will only take a minute,” Ha’ana said. “Otherwise they’ll pile up like everything else in the house.”
    Chel took a breath. “I have to go.”
    “Go where?”
    “To the museum.”
    “It’s nine o’clock, Chel. What kind of job is this?”
    “Thank you for dinner, Mom. But I really have to go.”
    “This would be an insult in Kiaqix,” Ha’ana said. “When a woman cooks for you, you don’t invite her to leave.”
    Ha’ana used their customs as a religion of convenience, invoking them to her advantage when she could, ridiculing them when they got in her way.
    “Well, then,” Chel said, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Kiaqix anymore.”
    OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS , Chel had built a state-of-the-art Mesoamerican research facility at what was once California’s most traditional museum. When she had the time after hours, she liked to stroll through the empty galleries, set spectacularly high above Los Angeles. Walking past van Gogh’s
Irises
or Pontormo’s
Portrait of a Halberdier
, she had fun imagining how John Paul Getty, the billionaire oilman who founded the museum, would have felt about exhibiting ceramic statues of kneeling Maya worshippers and Mesoamerican gods beside his beloved European artifacts.
    Not tonight, though. Just after two A.M ., Chel stood in Getty research lab 214A with Dr. Rolando Chacon, her most experienced antiquities-restoration expert, surrounded by high-def cameras, mass spectrometers, and conservation tools. Normally, every one of the long wooden tables set up in rows throughout the room was covered with lumps of jade, pottery, and ancient head masks, but now they’d cleared several in the back to make room for the codex. On the walls hung photographs from ruins, which Chel had taken during fieldwork, quiet reminders of the emotional ride that returning to her people’s ancient home always was.
    She and Rolando had delicately removed the contents of Gutierrez’s box piece by piece, lifting and separating each fragment using sets of long tweezers and metal specula, then spreading them out onto glassplates sitting atop illuminated light tables. Some were as small as a postage