A Potter's Tale Read online

  STORY MERCHANT BOOKS

  LOS ANGELES

  2019

  Copyright © 2019 Dave Davis All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form, or by any means whatsoever (electronic, mechanical, etc.) without the prior written permission and consent of the author.

  ISBN: Story Merchant Books

  400 S. Burnside Avenue #11B Los Angeles, CA 90036

  www.storymerchantbooks.com Cover art & interior design by IndieDesignz.com

  PROLOGUE

  I

  t’s time, don’t you think, for you to get to know me? I know you after all. It’s odd of me to permit an imbalance in our relationship.

  My apologies.

  I know this about you: you’re made from the dust of my stars, from my protons and electrons, my molecules and muscles; my neutrons pass through you like ghost bullets, leaving no trace; my suns warm you; my planets support you, though you’re less than grateful. You treat your gifts—and each other for that matter—with less respect than I’d like. I’m sure you’ve heard that you’re created in my image—passionate and apathetic, loving and cruel, generous and selfish. All-powerful and impotent. The perfectionist and the sloppy builder. Yes, just like me.

  But I realize there are impediments to your knowledge of me. The first is what to call me. It’s true I have no name, or many. The unpronounceable Jahweh for example, the arrogance of I-am-who-I-am. Or Father, raising the specter of my gender, a laughable but understandable worry; humans are so—what’s the exact word here?—invested in gender and sex. Or God. You may call me any of those, or none. Or you may use the name I prefer—the Potter, with a capital P, please.

  Then there are questions about my nature. Am I, for example, singular or plural? Singular like Jehovah or Allah. Or plural like those raunchy Greek gods in their virtual heavenly reality show? Or like the Norse gods playing in 4 a potter’s tale

  Scandinavian splendor? Or like the Mayan’s Heart of Sky and Feathered Serpent and their crew? We’ll learn more about the Mayans shortly. Then there’s the question of my person, not the flesh-and-blood type (another silly issue), but how to address me. Am I the first person, I? Am I the third person, He/She?

  The truth is I am all persons, even the second, you. Created in my image, you may recall.

  Perhaps we focus too much on these things. In the end (there’s always an end, just as there’s always a beginning) what matters is the story, not the name.

  I like the beginning of the story, where it’s always the same. When I hold it tightly in my hand—the tiniest, densest grain of matter and energy conceivable, the remnant of my last attempt. I like it when I open my hand to release it into the vacuum of timespace, exploding it, creating it. Scientists describe this movement as sudden, though without the usual benchmarks of time or matter to gauge it, “suddenness” is rather meaningless, don’t you agree?

  I like to watch it unfold, sculpted by me like a potter, at least at the outset. I like the anticipation, thinking that perhaps this time it will be right. I like the waiting, unpressured by limits or accountability. In some ways, it’s like the story itself, unfolding, writing itself. If I appear too critical, too much the perfectionist, you see, I am blessed and cursed with an abundance of time and space, of expectation and hope, even grains. Oh, and stories, perhaps especially stories.

  I should tell you a secret. Of it all—the creation, the unfolding, the mystery about who or what I am, the ending—I do like the stories the best. The Potter’s tale.

  SECTION I THE MISCHIEF OF PLANETS

  1

  PALENQUE, YUCATAN PENINSULA, 1932 A.D.

  H

  e thought she was stupid. Some spoiled daughter of a university big shot. A lightweight poseur, a faux-intellectual who thought a summer spent in an archeological ruin would be just the ticket to get her into graduate school. And she wore those distracting, tight-fitting clothes. Everyone else, in an effort to minimize the

  sweaty heat of the jungle, wore loose-fitting trousers and tops. Not her. He was simultaneously annoyed and stimulated by her. He believed she’d never contribute anything to this particular archeological expedition, perhaps to anything archeological.

  Alberto Ruz Lhulier had never been so was wrong.

  “Professor?” she’d asked, in that irritating, young-person way, a rising, almost-question capping the one word. “Pro-fesser!?” It was early, an attempt to dodge the intense heat of the day at the top of the Temple of Inscriptions. By noon it would be almost unbearable, like an oven.

  “Look at this! All the temple floor stones are perfectly smooth, except here. D’you see?” She was excited, breathless from causes other than the climb to the top of the temple. She was also right: the uppermost chamber of the temple— rising almost ten stories above the jungle—had recently been cleared. “See over here?” She pointed to the center of the floor. “The pattern is different. I noticed it yesterday, so I came here early and I walked around it, until I…” The parade of ‘I’s’ stopped suddenly, caught in her excitement. She bent down, stretching her tight jeans.

  For once, his eyes were focused elsewhere, watching her trace several carefully placed holes in the smoothed floor of the stone, each filled with round plugs the size of a small tree branch. Smoothed over by generations of sandals and the broom of time, they were hardly visible.

  “Do you see?” she said, more exclamation than question. “Those are holes bored into the stone, plugged. This is a trapdoor, a doorway! I bet there’s a stairway built in underneath, maybe leading to a tomb! Who knows?”

  He had some difficulty hiding his excitement. Before him, in a matter of seconds, Anna-Louise was transformed from a stupid young girl interested only in adventure (and one young crew member who had taken her fancy) into an intuitive, intelligent woman.

  Later, he would call the unearthing of the tomb of Pakal the Great the most important find of the twentieth century in the Americas.

  He was wrong again.

  What was under the tomb, that was the discovery of the century. Perhaps of the millennium. Perhaps ever.

  2

  WASHPO, WASHINGTON DC, MONDAY MOR NING

  His mother used to sing to him, “Not too fat, not too thin, just as nice as Gunga Din. Not too short, not too tall, just the right size overall. Not too ugly, not too handsome, he’s perfect and then some. Not too dumb, not too bright, her little boy is just right.”

  Thirty years later, the song reveals some predictive power. Noah is somewhat less than striking and an inch or two short of tall. If he’s slightly thinner than his mother would have wished, that was the product of a careful, nonindulgent nature she herself modeled. And if she was wrong about his brightness, how could she have known what he would become? Or who he’d become. She’s been gone for years, the gift of breast cancer; she can be easily forgiven.

  In the cosmos of the white room, Noah is the sole living object, a microbe in the universe. He adds the only color to the picture. Not his skin—he’s pretty much a text-book Caucasian with English roots, tanned from a summer sun that lasts far into the fall and winter. No, it’s his checked brown and blue shirt, his tan pants that call our eyes to him. Oh, and his Where’s Waldo? socks.

  The white room is a proud advertisement for the Color of the Year defined by the designers of Bezos 1 Plaza. Less Cape Cod Cloud or Inuit Sunset (as retinally orgasmic as they might have been), more knock-your-eyes-out, momput-a-ton-of-bleach-in-the-laundry white. Williams-Sherman’s Snow in the hallways, Pale Ecru on the walls. This is an aggressive white pushing its way into corners and erasing lines and shadows. It blurs the shapes of things, as though an iridescent fog has squeezed through the pores of the building. Erich describes the white as a canvas on which deaths, births, wars, and rising tides can be painted. And the fires of course.

  The white is relieved by little flecks of color on the walls. Sepia-touched century posters are framed in (you guessed it) white. A beigey-tan, taupey-brown floral design not found anywhere in nature but which by some miracle finds its way to the carpet makers of the District.

  In the early morning light of the bleached room, Noah is the picture of pleasant, silent contemplation. But appearances are the thieves of reality: if we were to put our hand over his heart, we’d feel it pounding—110, 120 beats a minute. More, perhaps. We’d watch his hand move to a small pendant resting on his chest, rubbing it like an alcoholic uses his medallion. We’d touch his brow and feel the sweat on our palms.

  He is an insomniac of sizable, even clinical, proportions.

  Most nights it gnaws at him, memories like tiny rats chewing on his feet and legs, on the inside of his thighs, but mostly on his brain. It strikes like a schoolyard bully, slamming his overweight body into Noah’s. Insomnia, the tyrant, destroys the peace of a dreamless, smiling sleep, leaving in its path a darkmorning awakening, a mild unpleasantness congealing into the anxiety of the day. On its worst days, it is a bottomless well of regret, days in which Noah becomes a heart-rushing, sweating whirlpool of thought.

  He derives some comfort in the few gifts of insomnia. It’s propelled him (that and an unusual mind) out of high school at an early age and into an accelerated program in math, physics and chemistry at Georgetown, into medic
al school and residency. And then, fueled by events, ambition and a kind of hungry curiosity, into journalism. The insomnia, and the mental machine behind it, are like rafts, floating him to WashPO as the Lead Health and Science Reporter.

  The largest newsgathering agency in North America, WashPO is a juggernaut assembly plant, taking facts, figures, data and information, reordering and synthesizing them, producing easily digestible and above all, accessible (the current buzzword from WashPO’s communication staffers) news. And then disseminating that news by any of the WashPO channels—websites, Twitterfeeds, email blasts, TV-streaming, video/podcasts. Despite the alimentary analogy of plugging data in at one end and churning news out at the other, it holds great interest for him. Like a giant vessel, it holds the story on these pages.

  Noah would caution us not to be too impressed by his title. “Leads” exist in pretty much any domain, created at the drop of a hat or an email. A long string of them are already at work in Gardening and Pollution, Geology and Petrochemicals, Inter-personal Relations, Congressional Affairs, the last attracting rude remarks like metal filings to magnets. Let’s not forget Cooking and Eating Out. Noah had a little thing with the Eating Out Lead for a while; they had fun with her title.

  But it takes more than leads to move the wheels in the news-industrialinformation complex: it also takes collaboration between the individual curiosities and minds. A straight storyline is one thing, say a new scientific discovery like a gene identified in the almost-constant quest to diminish the impact of autism or Alzheimer’s, medical bookends of the early mid-century. But, a bifold story? Alzheimer’s linked to pollutants, for example. Or the trifecta? Alzheimer’s plus unwanted chemicals plus unethical corporate behavior? Better still. And those highly multifaceted stories, their angles glistening like light on a diamond? Those are the best, Erich always says.

  Erich is WashPO’s editor in chief. Erich Fulweider.

  Erich occupies a small frame, perpetually bent forward as though thrusting itself into the jaws of the news lion. He plunges into meetings as though driven by a strange inquisitive appetite, asking, “Who? What? Where?” in a voice pitched just below dog-ear level. It emerges from a point just south of his saltand-pepper moustache, like nails on chalkboard. Erich sees the world as a giant living-breathing Facebook. Noah is never sure: is Erich the nephew of the current mayor or the one before him (the one in prison)? Is he the cousin of someone in Congress? It’s of little importance; Erich name-drops like Johnny Appleseed spreads apple seeds.

  There’s also a more polished Erich who loves to hold monthly, we’re-all-onefamily sessions in which he describes the WashPO World. Staff members gather in the lobby while Erich appears on the third-floor balcony like the pope, blessing his flock. He grabs his little hand-held (Noah and his friends make jokes about Erich’s little hand held; all men are little boys inside), telling them, “We are the information platform. News services in every part of the world need our information!”

  For the most part, he’s right. Ever since the early part of the century when the social media king bought the Post, moving it from pulp to digital, from Washington to the World. It’s when you get him alone on an elevator or in the hallway (rare occurrences; he has his own special elevator to whisk him to a little white-on-white aerie) that Erich’s internal dismissiveness makes itself visible. If you’re one of his hundred employees, that is. If you’re a member of the board, or a congressman, or the president, your fate is sealed: you’ll have a kiss planted on your ass.

  He’s not, however, totally without merit. He has introduced several innovations to WashPO (“inn-ohvayshuns.” Try it. There, right through your nose. Perfect).

  One of them is teams. Erich believes that reporters need to collaborate not just within their own field—crime, say—but across them. History plus Science. Business plus Ethics. To grease that process, there are random seat assignments, stirred into the meaningless acronym stew of WashPO. Once a week, reporters are directed to different workspaces, getting RSA’d elsewhere. And finally, if a team finds a really big story (an RBS—now you’re getting it), they’re assigned rooms. (Yes! A room!)

  Noah is almost the only person at Bezos 1, the WashPO headquarters, cheating dawn by a few minutes, and beating Hernando, the green-shirted security guard, by a few minutes more. Hernando sits on a raised dais in the three-story atrium of Bezos 1, his grin often the first and the most welcome sight that greets Noah every day. Hernando is a refugee from Colombia, happy to be anywhere but his war-raped, overheated country.

  In the white-white newsroom, Noah focuses on the warmth of the coffee in his right hand, reaching with his left to touch the carved talisman that hangs around his neck. His fingers begin to scroll through his e-screen, gliding over stories, focusing, focusing on the silvery slippery feel of the semi-glass on his fingertip. Focusing on the edges of symbols carved into the pendant, a reminder of the Taliban. He feels the sweat drying on his back, a shivered conquering of PTSD, another gift from Afghanistan.

  News stories, the talisman, and the slippery feel of the e-glass: they’re working, holding back the storm, at least temporarily.

  Noah pushes his way past Headlines of the Day, cataloguing last night’s tornadoes, products of the ever-rising sea and overheated globe; a new typhoon (Armando, the first of the season) hammering the Philippines; the most recent terrorist attack. And more.

  NASA reports no evidence of life forms beyond Earth despite six decades of work; extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) efforts defunded by Congress. White House announces youngest-ever junior science award winner. Charter schools continue to grow; recent stats show excellence in math & science. CERN researchers claim Higgs boson (the so-called “God Particle”) is proof of parallel universes. Gates-Clinton Foundation to move the Third International Congress on Advancing Science from fire-ravaged Sydney to Melbourne. Homeless camps now in every state, some holding thousands. Dark Energy trumps Dark Matter: astrophysicists claim expanding universe is proof. Mayan ruins hold new clues about a vanished civilization, archeologists say.

  In the scrolling world of stories, the last headline stands out. It’s accompanied by a picture of a teenage African American girl, tall for her age, with incredible dark eyes, a surprising black jade. She is standing beside a poster of Mayan temples, a city of temples. Above it, in the rounded balloon letters kids like to use, the words, “THE COLLAPSE OF THE MAYAN CIVILIZATION: CHAOS, CLIMATE OR SELF-CAUSED?” The caption reads, “Fourteen year old wins national science prize.”

  Touching his talisman again, Noah thinks, random, unrelated stories. Movements in a pinball machine. He is wrong. Like Alberto Ruz Lhulier almost a century before, he misses the undercurrent of purpose in a sea of randomness.

  Worse, Noah stands on a thin ice-pond of memory, a poor protector from what’s to come.

  3

  PALENQUE, YUCATAN PENINSULA,1935 A.D.

  Alberto Ruz Lhullier was wrong about other things, too. He thought there’d be only a few steps leading down to a tomb, that they’d make their discoveries later that summer.

  That was three years ago.

  The stairs were so packed with debris that uncovering each one consumed several days’ work, removing the stones and rubble; loading it into heavy burlap sacks; taking them cautiously down the steep, sun-baked, once-red exterior stairs of the temple; sifting through the rubble like gold panners from the last century.

  The creators of the internal stairs had established a narrow landing half way down, aligned the stairs perfectly, and then filled the space with rubble so carefully that it hardly deserved the name: less debris perhaps, more a barrier, dissuading visitors, even well-intended ones.

  Ruz Lhulier was as determined as the tomb-builders. Guided possibly by the ghost of ancient architects, his surveyors indicated that, for every meter ascending from the main floor of the plaza, there was an equal distance downward into the base. Slowly, methodically, like patient archeologists unwrapping a mummy, he and his crew released each step from its bondage. Finally, on an early June morning, with the rubble cleared, they reached the tomb.