As I signed the form, he leaned in closer to me and said quietly, sounding delighted with himself, “I have some of the cuneiform in my bag if you want to take a look at it.”
I believe I gaped at that. “You’re carrying a cuneiform artifact around in your backpack!?”
He shrugged. “If it could survive the fall of Ugarit . . .” There was a boyish gleam in his eye. He was showing off now. “Want to see it?”
I nodded mutely. He opened his bag and drew out a lump of clay, roughly the size and shape of a Big Mac. So that’s what had banged against the doorjamb of Blevins’s office. Marked into it in tiny, neat rows . . . was cuneiform text. Tristan handled it as if it were a football. I stared at it for a moment, disoriented by seeing something I had only encountered while wearing gloves in the workroom of a museum, now casually sitting on the table next to my coffee-like beverage. I was almost afraid to touch it; that seemed disrespectful. But within moments I had tossed such a delicate thought aside, and my fingers were caressing it. I studied the script.
“This isn’t Ugaritic,” I said. “It’s Hittite. There are some Akkadian-style markings.”
He looked pleased. “Nice,” he said. “Can you read it?”
“Not offhand,” I said patiently. Some people have a very romanticized notion of what it means to be a polyglot. But not wanting to appear lacking, I added quickly, “The light in here is too low, it will be hard to make out the forms.”
“Soon enough,” he said, and pushed it back into his bag with the same casual roughness. Once it was out of sight I began to wonder if I’d really seen it.
Tristan reached back into the bag and pulled out something else now: a sheaf of papers. He pushed them across the table to me. “You still have the pen,” he said. “Want to get started on these?”
I looked at the papers. There were seven blocks of writing, almost none of them in the Roman alphabet—even the Old Latin passage used Etruscan. At a glance I also recognized biblical Hebrew and classical Greek. The Hebrew I knew best, so I looked more closely at this one.
And blinked several times to make sure I was not imagining what I was seeing. I took a look at the Greek and then the Latin to make sure. Then I looked up at Tristan. “I already know what all of these say.”
“You’ve taken this test before?” he asked, surprised.
“No,” I said tartly. “I created it.” At his confused look, I explained: “I chose these specific samples and I wrote the translation key against which to check the students’ work.” I felt my cheeks grow hot. “I did it as a project under Blevins when I was a graduate student.”
“He sold it to us,” Tristan said simply. “For a lot of money.”
“It was for a graduate seminar on syntax patterns,” I said.
“Mel,” he said, “he sold it to us. There was never a graduate seminar on syntax patterns. We—that is, people high up in my shadowy government entity—have been working with him for a long time. We have contracts with him.”
“I would happily sign that nondisclosure form seventeen times over,” I said, “to express the depth of my sentiments toward Roger Blevins at this moment.”
Julie Lee, Professional Smart-ass Oboist, swept by us, bussing our cups without asking, as Tristan’s phone made a noise and he glanced down at the screen.
He typed something into the phone and then pocketed it. “I just told them you passed with flying colors,” he said, “and they just told me you passed the background check.”
“Of course I passed the background check,” I said. “What do you take me for?”
“You’re hired.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but whoever they are, please let them know I’m the creator of the test I just passed.”
He shook his head no. “Then we get into an IP inquiry with the university and things get messy and public, and shadowy government entities can’t go there. Sorry. If this project falls apart, though, feel free to take it up with Blevins.” His phone beeped again and he checked the new incoming message. “Meanwhile, let’s get to work.” He pocketed the phone and held out his hand for me to shake. “You have an agreeably uninteresting existence. Let’s see if we can change that.”
Diachronicle
DAYS 34–56 (SEPTEMBER, YEAR 0)
In which magic is brought to my attention
TRISTAN DETERMINED TO BEGIN the translations immediately—that very evening—and so he ordered carry-out Chinese, asked for my address, and said that he would show up in an hour with the first of several documents. I was, please know, outraged that he was driving around with ancient artifacts in the backseat of his beat-up Jeep.
At that time, I dwelt alone in a one-bedroom walk-up flat in North Cambridge (without being considered a spinster or a loose woman, as would be the case in my current environment). It was walking distance from the Porter Square T stop and an easy bicycle ride down Massachusetts Avenue, cutting through Harvard Yard, to the department (although I would no longer be making that ride). Tristan appeared punctually with bags of Chinese and a six-pack of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter, which as I was to learn was the only beer he would consider drinking. He casually commandeered the living/dining/cooking area, placing the food on the counter, far from the coffee table, where he laid out four documents and the cuneiform tablet, a notepad, and several pens. He looked around the space, zeroed in on my personal reference library, pulled out four dictionaries, and set them on the table.
“Let’s eat first,” he said. “I’m starving.”
For the first time, we made small talk. It was only brief, for he eats too fast, although I did not comment on it that first time. Tristan had studied physics at West Point but ended up assigned to the Military Intelligence branch of the Army, which—in roundabout ways he constantly deflected with the term “classified”—led to his recruitment by his “shadowy government entity.”
For my part, since nothing was classified, I divulged the source of my polyglot tendencies, that being: my agnostic parents having been raised Catholic and Jewish, my two sets of grandparents competed for my faith from my earliest years. At the age of seven I proposed to my Catholic grandparents that I learn to read the New Testament in Latin, in lieu of attending Sunday school. Thinking I would never attain this, they agreed—and I was functionally fluent in classical Latin within six months. Emboldened by this, shortly before my thirteenth birthday I similarly evaded being bat mitzvahed by testing out at college level for classical Hebrew. My Jewish grandparents offered to fund one semester of university education per each ancient language I mastered at college level. That was how I afforded my first three years of school.
Tristan was very pleased with this story—almost as pleased with himself as with me, as if patting himself on the back for having chosen such a prodigy. When we finished our meal, he collected the disposable containers, rinsed them, and packed them neatly back in their bag. “All right, let’s start!” he said, and we moved to the couch so I might examine the documents.
In addition to the cuneiform tablet there was something in Guānhuà (Middle Mandarin) on rice paper, about five hundred years old—Tristan to his credit at least knew to handle this with gloves on. There was also, on vellum, a piece written in a mixture of medieval French and Latin, I would say at least eight hundred years old. (It was fucking insane to see these things sitting casually on my coffee table.) Finally there was a fragment of a journal, this written in Russian on paper that looked positively brand-new in comparison, and was dated 1847. The librarian in me noticed that all of them had been marked with the same stamp—a somewhat ill-defined family crest, surrounded by blurry words in a blend of Latin and Italian. They had, in other words, been acquired by a library or a private collection, and been duly stamped and cataloged at some point.
As he had warned, Tristan would not tell me where he had obtained these artifacts, nor why it was such a (seemingly) random collection. After several hours with them, however, I saw the common theme . . . although it was hard to believe wh
at I was reading.
In short, each of these documents referred to magic—yes, magic—as casually as a court document refers to the law, or a doctor’s report refers to medical tests. Not magician-trick magic, but magic as we know it from myths and fairy tales: an inexplicable and supernatural force employed by witches—for they were, per these documents, all women. I don’t mean the belief in magic, or a mere weakness for magical thinking. I mean the writer of each document was discussing a situation in which magic was a fact of life.
For example, the cuneiform tablet was a declaration laying down what a witch at the royal court of Kahta was due in recompense for her services, and regulated the uses of magic that courtiers were allowed to ask of her. The Latin/French one was written by the Abbess of Chaalis regarding the struggles that one of her nuns faced, trying but failing to renounce her magic powers, and the abbess wondered if she herself was to blame, as she was not truly wholehearted in her own prayers for the sister to be relieved of her powers, since those powers often made life easier at the abbey. The Guānhuà took a little more work—I had but a cursory relationship to Asian language groups by then. It was itself a recipe from the provinces for a dish involving various hard-to-find aromatic herbs, as described to the writer (a circuit-riding Mandarin magistrate) by self-reported witches (whose activities were referred to as a footnote on the side of the recipe). Finally, the nineteenth-century Russian was written by a self-identified (aging) witch and lamented the fading powers of her sister witches and herself. This one also made a passing reference to the desirability of finding certain herbs.
These were rough, almost off-the-cuff translations. When I had finished the fourth one, there was a silence between us for a moment. Then Tristan gave me a disarmingly sly grin, and spoke:
“What if I told you we had more than a thousand such documents. All eras, from six continents.”
“All bearing this family crest?” I asked, pointing to the blurry stamp.
“That is the core of the collection. Others we collected on our own.”
“Well, that would challenge certain assumptions about the nature of reality that I did not even know I had.”
“We want you to translate all of them and extract the common core of data,” said Tristan.
I looked at him. “I assume there’s a military purpose.”
“Classified,” he said.
“If I have a context for translating, I can do a better job of it,” I protested.
“My shadowy government entity has been collecting documents of this nature for many years.”
“By what means?” I sputtered, both fascinated and dismayed to learn that a well-funded black ops organization was competing against academic researchers in such a manner. That sure explained a few things.
“The core of the collection, as you’ve been noticing, is from a private library in Italy.”
“The WIMF.”
“Beg pardon?”
“The Weird Italian Mother Fucker,” I said.
“Yeah. We acquired it some time ago.” His face twitched and he broke eye contact. “That’s not true. I was just being polite. We stole it. Before other people could steal it. Long story. Anyway, it gave us plenty of leads that we could follow to acquire more in the same vein. By all means fair and foul. We now feel we have a critical mass that, upon translation, might yield a sense of what precisely ‘magic’ was, how it worked, and why there are no references to it anywhere after the mid-1800s.”
“And you wish to have this information for some kind of military purpose,” I pressed.
“We wish to have one person do all the translations,” Tristan said, firmly not answering my query. “For three reasons. First, budget. Second, the fewer eyes, the safer. Third and most important, if the same person processes all the material, there is a greater chance of gleaning subtle consistencies or patterns.”
“And you are interested in those consistencies or patterns why, exactly?”
“The current hypothesis,” Tristan continued as before—that is, without actually answering me—“is that perhaps there was a worldwide epidemic of a virus that affected only witches, and magic was literally killed off. I don’t think that’s it, but I need to know more before I offer an alternate hypothesis. I have my suspicions, though.”
“Which are classified, right?”
“Whether or not they are classified is classified.”
The documents were many, but brief; most were fragmentary. Within three weeks, working alone at my coffee table, I had produced at least rough translations of the first batch of material. During that time I also gave notice, apologized to my students for abandoning them before they’d even gotten to know me, moved out of my Harvard office, and managed to reassure my parents that I was still working, without telling them exactly what it was I was doing. Meanwhile, Tristan was in communication with me at least twice a day, usually appearing in person, occasionally calling and talking to me in the most oblique terms. Never did we email or text; he did not want anything said between us to be on record. There was something rather swashbuckling, if unsettling, about the need for such secrecy. I had no idea what he did with the rest of his time. (Naturally, I asked. You can guess what his answer was.)
Our dynamic was singular, unprecedented in my life certainly. It was as if we had always been working together, and yet there was an undercurrent of something else, a kind of charge that only comes at the beginning of things. Neither of us ever acted on it—and while I am the sort who rarely acts on such things, he is (while extremely disciplined and upright) the sort who immediately acts on such things. So I attributed the buzz to the excitement of a shared endeavor. The intellectual intimacy of it was far more satisfying than any date I’d ever been on. If Tristan had a lover, she wasn’t getting the real goods. I was.
At the end of the three weeks, when he came to my apartment to receive the last (or so I innocently thought) of my translations, Tristan glanced around until he saw my coatrack. He studied it a moment, then took my raincoat off of its peg. It was late September by this point and the weather was starting to turn.
“Come on, we’re going to talk at the office,” he said. “I’ll buy you dinner.”
“There’s an office?” I said. “I assumed your shadowy government entity had you working out of your car.”
“It’s near Central Square. Carlton Street, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Apostolic Café. How’s Chinese sound?”
“Depends on the dialect.”
“Ha,” he said without smiling. “Linguist humor. Pretty lame, Stokes.” He held my coat out. I reached for it. He shook his head and glanced down at it. Giving me to understand that he was not handing it to me, but offering to help me put it on—a gesture much more common in 1851 London than it was in that time and place. Some low-grade physical comedy ensued as I turned my back on him and tried to find the armholes with my hands. What a weirdo.
Carlton Street was the poor stepchild in an extended family of alleys and byways near MIT, where scores of biotech companies fledged. Most of the neighborhood had been rebranded into slick office complexes, with landscaped parks, mini-campuses, double-helix-themed architectural flourishes, and abstract steel sculptures abounding. Tristan’s building, however, had not yet been reclaimed. It was utterly without character: a block-long two-story mid-twentieth-century building thrown together of tilt-up concrete slabs painted a dingy grey that somehow managed to clash with the sidewalk. There were a few graffiti tags. The windows were without adornment, all of them outfitted with vertical vinyl blinds, all dusty and askew. There was no roster of tenants, no signs or logos, no indication at all of what was within.
Laden with bags of Chinese food and beer, we approached the glass entrance door at dusk. This building was one of the few places on earth that not even twilight could improve upon. Tristan slapped his wallet against a black plate set into the wall, and the door lock clicked, releasing. Inside, we moved between buzzing fluorescent lights and matted industrial ca
rpeting, down a corridor past several windowless doors—slabs of wood, dirty around the knobs, blazoned with signs bearing names of what I assumed were tech start-ups. Some of these had actual logos, some just cutesy names printed in block letters, and one was just a domain name scrawled on a sticky note. We walked the entire length of the building and came to a door next to a stairwell. Its only distinguishing feature was a crude Magic Marker drawing of a bird, seen in profile, drawn on the back of a Chinese menu blue-taped to the wood. The bird was somewhat comical, with a prominent beak and big feet.
“Dodo?” I guessed.
Tristan made no answer. He was unlocking the door.
“I’ll take that as a yes—you’d have jumped all over me if I’d guessed the wrong species.”
He gave me an inscrutable raised-eyebrow look over his shoulder as he pushed the door open and reached for the light switch. “You have a gift for caricature,” I told him as I followed him in.
“DODO welcomes you,” he said.
“Department of . . . something?”
“Of something classified.”
The room was at most ten feet by fifteen feet. Two desks were shoved into opposite corners, each with a flat-panel monitor and keyboard. The walls were lined with an assortment of used IKEA bookshelves that I suspected he’d pulled out of Dumpsters a few weeks ago, and a couple of tall skinny safes of the type used to store rifles and shotguns. Perched on top of these were military-looking souvenirs that I assumed dated from some earlier phase of Tristan’s career. The shelves were filled with ancient books and artifacts I recognized very well. In the middle of the room was a long table. Beneath it was a bedroll: just a yoga mat wrapped around a pillow and secured with a bungee cord.
I pointed at the bedroll. “How long have you—”
“I shower at the gym if that’s your worry.” He pointed to the closer of the two desks, by the door. “This one will be yours.”