The Daykeeper's Grimoire (27 page)

“Wow, harsh,” Justine says.

Chasca shakes her head. “They do not know you.”

“I don’t know whether to be insulted or overjoyed,” I say. “I hate being called ‘odd and weak,’ but at least they don’t think I’m a threat.”

“Yet,” Nima says.

“So what do I do with this?” I ask.

Apari answers, “You would do us, and the world, a great service by allowing us to analyze this information.”

I scoot the book across the rug. “It’s all yours. I hope you can do some good with it.”

“You have no idea how helpful it is to have these plans,” Chasca says. “We have never been able to get concrete information like this.”

“Justine was the mastermind behind getting it,” I say. She beams with pride; this spy thing might just be her calling. I lean back and my stomach growls. Everyone hears it and laughs. “Sorry, all I’ve had today was a disgusting airline omelet and a mocha.”

“There is a good Vietnamese restaurant around the corner, it is very secure,” says Nima. “Follow me out the back door. You can have dinner together, enjoy yourselves, then come back and sleep here. We will take you to the airport in the morning.”

“Thank you so much. I would definitely feel safer staying here than at a hotel,” I say. I want to jump up but my left leg is numb and useless after sitting cross-legged for so long. I feel like an idiot shaking it out so I can walk. Here I am: odd and weak!

Nima lets us out the back door. It’s already getting dark. Justine and I hold hands as we walk through the alley to the street. I don’t realize Nima has followed us until we’re in the restaurant; I look out the window and see that she is watching from across the street, sitting on the sidewalk with a cup pretending to be homeless. I’m touched by her protection.

The hostess leads us to the back office, which holds one small table. She leaves us menus and a pot of tea.

“One rule,” I say as we open up the menus. “We can’t talk about any of
this
. I am so overwhelmed right now that if I don’t just talk about dumb girl stuff my head will explode. Give me the latest dirt.”

“Well, you’re not going to believe what Rina O’Kelley told me about Kira Honeycutt and Doug Ostenson,” Justine begins.

Just for a moment I feel normal again.

Stomachs full and feeling safe for the moment, we bed down in the back room of Muchuchumil Imports on stacks of scratchy blankets and rugs.

“So where do your parents think you are right now?” I ask Justine. “Did they want to take you to the airport in the morning?”

“No, since I was going to ‘Scotland,’ Mom tagged along on a business trip with Dad. God forbid she ever spends a second alone. They left yesterday and asked Esmeralda to watch me and take me to the airport.”

“They left you alone with that crabby housekeeper?”

“Yes, and get this: when I told Esmeralda I was going to spend the night at a friend’s so she wouldn’t have to take me to the airport, she didn’t even care. She was just psyched to have the house to herself. She’d be so fired if my parents knew what happened to me today.”

We both laugh at the thought. “If any one of our parents found out what we did today we would be under house arrest for decades,” I say.

It doesn’t take long before we are both sound asleep on the blankets that smell like faraway places. We don’t wake until Nima brings us tea and bread in the morning. She tells us we need to go in a few minutes; they let us sleep in because we seemed so tired.

“Are you meeting David at the gate?” I ask Justine as she packs just what she needs for the trip into a backpack.

She nods. “I wish we were in the same terminal. I’m sure he’d love to see you,” she says, brushing her long gorgeous hair.

“Thank you,” I say. “For doing this. For everything.”

“You’d do the same for me,” she replies. “I know you would.”

But I have to wonder if this is true. I’m not sure I’m that good of a person.

We part ways at the airport. When I get to the gate, Alex and Thomas are already there. I want to hug them both but that would be too weird. Alex stands up like a gentleman when I get over to them, and he’s looking more incredible than ever. His worn corduroy jacket brings out the pale blue of his eyes, and his skin, tan from fishing, is set off by his white button-down shirt. He’s a little rumpled from the long flight, making him all the more attractive.

“Can you believe we’re really doing this?” he says as he sits beside me.

“I hope I can pull this off,” I say. “You would not believe what’s happened since I left Scotland. Pardon the funky smell; I slept in an import warehouse last night.”

“Want to fill me in, mate?”

“Maybe later, I’m too … I don’t know … I just can’t talk about it right now.”

An announcement is made that we will begin boarding in five minutes. Thomas gets up and says, “I’m going to hit the cludgie one last time.”

“Oh, I almost forgot: look at this,” Alex says, fishing a piece of paper out of his backpack. “Last night I got an email from a lad at school about the
Tzolk’in
calendar!”

I unfold the paper and read, hardly believing my eyes. It’s the email I sent to all the kids at Cruelties! The text his friend added was, “Alex, got this from my cousin who lives in New York. Looks interesting—have a peek.”

“This is incredible!” I wish I had checked the website count to see how viral it had gone.

“This is your old school, right?” Alex says, pointing to the email address.

“This is
me
! I registered that email address to look official. Can you believe I started an email on the Isle of Huracan and within days it came back to
you
, one of like twelve people who lives there? I mean, what are the chances?”

“Wow, that is quite a coincidence,” he says, looking a little freaked. I resist the temptation to use Bolon’s line,
Coincidence is merely a fleeting glimpse of wholeness
.

I see Thomas walking toward us, cradling his hand. “That still really painful?” I ask. He just nods. Being hurt has put him in a black mood.

We stand up and get in line to board. I’m glad when he has to go to the back of the plane. Alex and I are up front, near business class.

After we take off and get settled, I pull out my laptop to read more about the
Tzolk’in
. Alex leans in to read along.

“So I made big progress on the conversion of numbers to notes,” Alex says.

“Really?”

“Aye, they’re lousy with fractals and harmonics.”

I try to recall what a fractal is. I sort of remember it’s a small piece of something that looks like the whole but just in case, I ask a question that doesn’t immediately show my stupidity, “Like what’s an example?”

“Well, take the
Tzolk’in
, it’s a cycle of 260 days—that’s a fractal of the 26,000-year cycle of precession. And the Long Count Calendar, the one that ends in 2012, is a cycle of 5,200 days, and then there’s another calendar that’s fifty-two years. This goes on and on between the twenty calendars. The numbers 13, 20, 52, 260, and 144 all seem to be important.”

For the first time I am more stunned by his brain than by his looks. Both of our arms are on the edge of the shared armrest, with just millimeters between us. As I feel the warmth coming off his skin and seeping into mine, I imagine my vibrating atoms jumping over to bump into his.

“That’s amazing,” I say, a little too gushy like some kind of fan girl.

“There’s something really beautiful about all of these cycles of time nested in one another. These guys were such elegant mathematicians, thousands of bloody years ago!”

Elegant
is one of those buzzwords that computer and math people use. For Dad it’s the highest compliment he could get, that his code was elegant.

“So how does music fit in?”

“Well, I wrote a little music algorithm app that converts sets of numbers into notes.”

“Are you like a closet genius?” I ask.

“If I were a genius, I wouldn’t be hidin’ it in a closet.” He shrugs. “It’s just math.”

“
Just
math—”

“Hey—you’re no slouch. How long did it take you to make that website? Or write that Mayan birthday converter?”

“That’s just HTML and JavaScript.”

“Aye, well, then we’re a good team aren’t we?” he says as he nudges me with his elbow.

I carry all these touches around with me; I can still feel the time he sandwiched my hand between his in the library, still feel his hand on my shoulder, still sense the warmth from his back on the castle wall after he’d stepped away from it. Even this nudge I’ll catalog and save.

He pulls a thumb drive from his pocket. “Reckon you’d like to see it?”

I slip the computer onto his tray table. As he installs it he says, “Okay, today is 12
Chicchan
—perfect because twelve is the pulse of understanding and
Chicchan
is all about human evolution and forward movement, aye?”

“Isn’t that amazing? I mean, that’s exactly what we’re doing this minute—trying to understand this human evolution puzzle!”

“It’s bloody cool is what it is,” he says, his face full of excitement. “Okay, now let’s plug the long count number into the music algorithm app and I’ll play you the tones of the day. Today is 12.19.17.8.5 in the Long Count.”

“Those numbers seem so random.”

“They are random by themselves, but each number is in relation to another—like this first number in the string, I take that as a fraction of the total it could be, which is 144,000 days. That’s all built into the algorithm, though.”

“God, you have really done your homework on this thing!”

“I set piano as default,” he says as he clicks the play button. “But we can change it to whatever instrument we want.”

A beautiful string of notes plays.

“That sounds … I don’t know …”

“Haunting?” Alex says, finishing my thought.

“Yes! It’s both beautiful and eerie at the same time.”

“So if sound really has something to do with changing DNA, we just have to figure out how to get kids to hear the daily tone,” Alex says.

I lay my head back for a moment to think.

“Ringtone?”

“Pardon me?” Alex says.

“What if there was a way to subscribe to a cell service that changes your ringtone to the
Tzolk’in
tune of the day?”

“Right! We could make a widget! Every time the phone rings the tone plays and the daylord and bar-and-dot number come up.”

“And like a daily astrology download, there would be a sentence describing what that day means!”

“We could easily do this, Caity. Seriously.”

“Hey, have you heard about the ringtone kids are using now that’s in the hertz range that only people under twenty can hear?” I ask.

“Yeah! That’s the mosquito tone that was developed for shopkeepers to blast so kids wouldn’t loiter.”

“Exactly. But kids have hijacked it to use in school, so teachers can’t hear their phones ring. So if we wanted to keep it quiet, we could just translate your tones into mosquito hertz level,” I say.

I am overwhelmed with what feels like a déjà-vu, but isn’t. It’s not exactly as if I’ve
seen
this before, it’s as if I feel like I am exactly where I need to be.

“As soon as we get back I can start on that,” he says. “I’ve an idea on how to do it but I’ll have to do a bit of research first.”

Before long, the food service and movie start. When the flight attendants darken the cabin and give everyone pillows and blankets, I pretend to fall asleep and slowly lower my head until it is resting on Alex’s shoulder. I expect it to stiffen as my cheekbone touches it but there’s no resistance, he just shifts a little to make it more comfortable for me. I can feel each skin cell in contact with his shirt. Before I know it, I really am asleep.

By the time I wake up, Alex is sleeping. I carefully pull out my sketchbook, trying not to disturb him. I want to draw that peacock room that I dreamed about yesterday, before I forget all the details.

Well into the sketching, I realize that Alex has woken up and is watching me. “Reckon you can draw me?” he asks, stretching as well as he can in the veal pen we’re confined to.

I look at him as if I’m considering it. “I don’t know, maybe,” I say, as if I had never sketched him before. Turning to a clean sheet of paper, I’m nervous that my complete adoration for him will ooze out in the drawing. But I realize this will give me an excuse to
really
look at him for an extended amount of time.

Things to take note of: (1) There is not one ridge on his nose. It’s as if it’s been sculpted rather than grown. (2) His eyelashes are freakishly long, like a doll’s. (3) The channel between his lip and nose is exquisite and it is extremely, extremely hard not to lean over and put my lips to it.

I take my time sketching, because we’ve got a lot of it, and it turns out to be one of the best portraits I’ve ever done. Of course, it’s the best subject matter I’ve ever had, too.

When we land in Chile, I am blown away by the Santiago airport. I was expecting something small and rustic, but it’s massive and modern and really clean. Boarding our last three-hour flight, I’m feeling both anxious and weary; I want to take a long shower and sleep in an actual bed for awhile.

Alex closes his eyes and I open up the CD again so I can get a better grasp on what I’m going to say. I spend the whole three-hour flight absorbed in the calendar. The more I read, the more I understand that there is some sort of strange power in this system.

The captain starts talking in Spanish so I look out the window. The island is in the distance and as we get closer, we see what it is famous for. At first they just look like dots, but then they come into view—hundreds of those big carved heads. I get goose bumps on my arms; this is just something I never thought I’d see in person. Pulling out my sketchbook and pen to take it down, I start to commit what I see to the page.

My fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Lea, was the one who first told me about Easter Island. She was kind of a hippie and really into stuff like this. She used to show us weird movies from the seventies like
Chariots of the Gods
and this other one about how much your soul weighs after you die until she got in trouble for it because some parents thought it was pagan. She had a bouquet of different feathers in a jar on her desk and wore long jangly skirts that looked like they could be used for belly dancing. The very first day of class she made us write this quote eleven times: