Authors: Daniel Nayeri
Another Pan (31 page)
Simon sat at the teacher’s desk in history class, grading inarticulate, illiterate backwash that somehow passed for essays these days. His red pen slashed at the papers like the samurai that he was. He had three katanas and a kodachi blade in his apartment in London, which he’d gotten in a seedy Chinatown mall. They were sharp enough to slice through any intruders — not to mention the shuriken he had under his pillow. Now he was performing a ritualistic slaughter of every three-page response paper in the stack in front of him.
“Stupid.”
“Inane.”
“Asinine,” he said to no one in particular, as he scrutinized each assignment.
“Garbage.”
“Archeologically inaccurate.”
“Grade-school material.”
“Wrong font.”
“One-inch margins? Right.”
Simon took immense pleasure in imagining their smiley young faces dropping as they saw their grades tomorrow. Somehow, the professor had managed to slough off the work of grading these essays onto Simon, just because they were response papers to
his
lecture. It was ludicrous and beneath him, but of course, he couldn’t say no. The old man had connections far above Simon.
As Simon wrote a particularly cutting remark on the cover page of Marla’s paper
(Try to think on a higher level — at least where the rest of the class is),
he heard a creak. Simon jerked his head upward. He didn’t see anyone. It could have been the pipes. Or it could have been spies sent from the Egyptology department of Duke University trying to plagiarize his work. Simon pretended to go back to the papers. Then, nonchalantly, as though he didn’t suspect anything, he pretended to yawn. The dramatic arc of his neck allowed him to look into the vent shaft above his head. There was no one in there.
But he couldn’t be too careful with his work. Simon decided to do something else, something that he could do while laying a trap for any archeology spies from Duke. He picked up his new trinket, the arm bone he’d gotten from John, from atop an old, dusty book with a broken spine and wrinkled pages,
The Undiscovered Histories,
by Professor George Darling. Simon didn’t have much respect for it. It was written before carbon-14 dating, and it may as well have been a work of fiction. But Simon thought he should scan it a little, if only for amusement. He flipped to a random page.
And so it’s important to remember — no, it is absolutely critical to understand that everything you have ever heard or believed, everything in the great story of the world, has been passed to you by someone else. Even in the sciences, it is a rare individual who has gone back to the beginning of his knowledge and conducted experiments to lay down the very foundations of his own thoughts
.
Peter used the crowbar to pull apart the grate. He let it fall to the ground. There was no one but him in the back of the building where the air vent led outside. The LBs were distracting Boykins now — that was phase one of the plan. Phase one: Distract Boykins so Peter can climb in. Phase two: Make a big noise to draw Simon out. The key was for Peter not to be on record going into the school. He couldn’t use his RA badge or be caught on security cameras, because if anything went wrong, Peter couldn’t be implicated. Right now, Tina was using Peter’s ID to open the front door of the boys’ dorm, all the way across campus. She would do this once every ten minutes for half an hour to establish his alibi. He couldn’t lose his job at Marlowe. Not while the book was here. If anything happened, the LBs would have to take the fall. He stretched a little and swung his arms like a swimmer about to take a dive. Then he bent over and crawled in.
It was Isaac Newton who said he stood on the shoulders of giants. All those with knowledge stand on such shoulders. But all I present in this book is that perhaps our giants are dwarfs. Perhaps as we gaze at what we once thought were the farthest horizons of truth, we’re standing at the cliff side, its peak far above us
.
Down the hall, Officer Boykins was reading the
Post,
trying to figure out why in the world people were famous for doing nothing but shaking what their mama gave them on a tabletop in fancy clubs. As Boykins was unscrewing the top of his thermos, he saw a figure walk in that he couldn’t quite make out.
“ID,” he said to the figure.
“ID?” mimicked the boy. “I left my ID in my locker. I have a . . . um . . . a game of, um, polo to attend to, participate in, and likewise.”
It was the rich kid with crazy hair that was always causing trouble around Marlowe.
Boykins wasn’t sure if he was being played or if this hooligan was acting a whole lot stupider than usual. “You’re not going anywhere with that gasoline, son.”
“What gasoline?” the boy mumbled, blatantly hiding a sloshing drum behind his back. Then he reached into his pocket and a whole bottle of pills (a club drug called
W
) spilled out. This was definitely out of Boykins’s jurisdiction. He picked up the phone.
“Administrators’ office,” said the gruff voice on the other end of the line. Boykins backed away from the receiver and looked at it. Was it broken? Because that was definitely not Sally, the assistant. Must be a temp.
Boykins hesitated. “Can you come down here? We have a situation.”
“What’s the situation?” asked the temp with a grunt. “’Cause I’m supposed to wait here for the polo players to check in.”
The smile on Boykins faded. “Did you say polo?”
“Yeah. Gotta stay here and make sure they’ve all got their . . . um . . . cornrows.”
“What in heavens are you blathering on about?” said Boykins. “What’s cornrows got to do with polo?”
“Tons,” said the temp. “Cuts down on wind resistance. And it’s better to bleach it, makes the hair weigh less.”
“Are you serious?” said Boykins. Somebody was playing him for sure. He was starting to think this was some kind of hidden-camera TV show. “Look, buddy, maybe you should come down here.”
Simon could hear people talking in the halls. He tried not to pay attention to anything that had to do with children. He flipped to the middle of the book. He was scoffing before he even finished one paragraph. How did this gullible old man climb so far in the field?
Once we establish that the claims of the
Book of Gates
are true, then the testimony of the legends is consistent. Each of the five figures undergoes tremendous punishment (figurative and literal), enough to create an extraordinary amount of emotional energy. In the instance of Garosh, it is quite easy to assume that some massive amount of stress-induced toxins could contaminate his very bones. Of course, this is all conjecture
.
“You got that right,” said Simon, trying to ignore the noises from the hall, which sounded more and more like an argument. This book was pure science fiction. The old man didn’t present a shred of evidence.
The evidence of this claim would come from direct examination of Garosh’s bones (had we access to them). Since the mythic figure is said to have walked the desert for years in the undead state, it stands to reason that his bones would present highly abnormal osteographic patterns. The vertical pressure on the decaying bones, as the mummy staggered in the desert, would create vertical striations, unlike any we have seen in the past
.
“Hmm,” said Simon, glancing at the bone sitting on his desk. It also had vertical striations. Proof that Professor Darling didn’t even know basic science. If this bone had those striations, too, then how could they be proof of the mythic bone with all its special
bonedust
. Whoo. Magic beans, all of it.
Outside in the hall, Officer Boykins was trying to pacify the punk kid, who was irate at not being allowed into his own school.
“This is outrageous,” said the boy. “I mean, seriously, man, me and my can of fuel have a polo game to get to. Now. Do you want me to call my father?”
Boykins kept thinking that this was all wrong. “You’re in serious trouble, son. I suggest you surrender the gas and the pills right now.”
“Bite me,” said the kid. And then it got even worse.
“What’s the matter, Roy?” came the temp’s rough voice as he strolled down the hall. It was that rapper’s giant son, who had been going to this school since who knows when.
Just last week Boykins had busted this one for smuggling drinks onto campus.
“
You’re
the temp?” Boykins asked. “But you’re —”
But before he could finish, the so-called temp jumped in with serious anger in his voice.
“What? What am I? I’m
black
? Is that what you meant to say? Is this a racial thing?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, now wait a minute,” said Officer Boykins. “I was gonna say —”
“
You
called
me
in the office,” said the temp, “because you can’t do your job, and then you start getting racial? And what are you doing with my boy over there? What do you need? Fingerprints? Would you like to Tase him a few times to see if he screams like a real Marlowe student?”
Officer Boykins began to cower and worry about his job. And Poet was just warming up.