along this exact route, and remained adoring of one another’s schemes and inventions?
“Alice Le Plongeon, though twenty-three years younger and devoted to Augustus,” Ruth reminded me, “was herself a formidable photographer of the concrete and knowable, risking her life to photograph precipitously placed sculpture located in the territory of hostile tribes and vicious white looters eager to turn chacmools into cash. She left a vast archive, pictorial records of what she called ‘the departed grandeur; silent, deserted, fallen cities.’”
Together Le Plongeon and his wife created a box made up of compartments that could be reassembled to form a portable darkroom complete with sink and black curtain, impervious to sunlight. Two people could set it up in less than five minutes. Something carried in a bag you could snap open almost with little more than a flick of the wrist, the anonymous black box, was converted into a complicated functional structure. The same imagination that gave life to chacmools and studied monkey chatter invented some very practical things as well. Couldn’t you be a crackpot, your ideas held up to ridicule, and still be happy? I fished in my pocket for a jack-knife and traced the outline of a glyph in stone until Ruth told me to stop, the noise of the blade against rock was irritating.
Ruth shook the bottle of Rambug she’d bought at a camping store and sprayed the chemical infusion not just on herself but into the air. As far as she was concerned the discussion was over. She had the world on a string. Walking far ahead of me she relegated nineteenth-century antiquarians and their cabinets of curiosities to useless storage. An emerald-green snake hung knotted from a branch overhead. Ruth eyed it with a raised eyebrow before walking underneath. I’d seen her lop the head off a rattler that came too close and do so in a blink, then move on as if she’d done nothing more than swat a mosquito. Members of the reptile family didn’t occupy her nightmares. These were inhabited by other phantoms, as I would eventually learn. She was afraid of the interiors of local churches, hollowed out, they contained no pews or benches of any kind. Incense burned and people came and went, lighting candles and chanting before saints, offering Coke or Fanta, eggs, or a dead chicken. The saints were lined up along the walls, and each had a mirror hung around his or her neck to keep evil away, and no, Ruth wasn’t some kind of reincarnated demon. She just felt creeped out by churches.
Imagine being interviewed on a television show and when asked how you met the person you married, you have to say you collided at the top of a Mayan calendar pyramid. The audience is cued for laughter, the interviewer raises his eyebrows. He thinks you’re making this up. We stayed in Mexico for a year, then moved back to New York.
I never spoke of Suolucidir to Ruth until I arrived home after the flight back from Miami. She hadn’t met me at the airport, but stayed at home, working, and barely acknowledged the difficulty of my trip, visiting my stepmother, going through my father’s things. The emotional register was often out of reach for Ruth. Dead was dead. Get over it. I left my bags by the door, sat opposite her, and told her that I was going to find Suolucidir.
Ruth barely looked up. She considered the study of the Maya to be constructed of concrete and knowable building blocks of evidence. This wasn’t strictly true, even she would admit that, but the project I wanted to undertake was, she felt, built on a foundation of complete absurdity, hearsay, and postwar quicksand. Chasing a whisper of a myth, the ghosts of Victorian explorers and shadows of Soviet refugees down a desert rabbit hole made her shudder. Jacob’s Ladder looks real, but you touch it at your peril as it crackles into nothingness.
She wasn’t alone in her derision; my academic advisers also threw cold water on the idea of the lost city. If the subject of Suolucidir was raised, I was reminded about the paucity of evidence and told that the Nieumacher relics were now, after the intervening years of turmoil in the region, unlocatable, and perhaps had been fraudulently manufactured in the first place. I was warned that the artifacts the Victorians, Hilliard and Congraves, had sent back to the British Museum were in all probability just negligible offshoots of the Burnt City civilization, a city-state that had flourished to the north of the reputed site of Suolucidir. Even if I traveled to London to examine them, I would find the bits and pieces were merely evidence of far-flung provincial villages, not worthy of serious study. It was all deeply discouraging.
We were on the F train, and it had stalled above ground. It was late at night, and the car was empty except for a couple of snoozing subway workers in orange vests, tool boxes at their feet, and a man sitting directly opposite us who was immersed in a Russian newspaper. Light reflected off the oily surface of the Gowanus Canal and the huge Kentile Flooring sign while searchlights scoped the sky signaling the opening of a store somewhere to the west of the tracks. Ruth was staring glassy-eyed at the furry skunkweed that managed to grow between the rails of the train when it was above ground. Maybe it wasn’t the best moment to have a discussion of this kind, but whether the canal inspired me or the searchlights it’s hard to say. I just plunged right in. I tried, one more time, to interest Ruth in Suolucidir.
“Imagine it’s four thousand years from now and you’re wasting your time excavating Yuba City instead of Los Angeles,” she said. “Suolucidir isn’t even a speck on a page. It’s like those display cases of sparrows and field mice in remote corridors of the Museum of Natural History, lines of tiny carcasses you barely notice on your way to the Hall of Bio-Diversity or the planetarium. Why stand in front of the dead fur commas and question marks when you can go a couple of floors down to the Imax, and watch sharks circling a cageless diver or a special effects re-creation of the eruption of Krakatau, fatal vibrations spreading across the Indian Ocean? If you go too far afield, you’ll end up chasing little nothings and their shadows.”
I argued the comparison to a row of Truman-era stuffed stoats was unfair.
She reminded me of the controversy surrounding Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Had Mead, and consequently her readers, been snookered for years by prankster Samoans? And then there was the scandal surrounding the Tasaday people of the Philippines. The same swamp of uncertainty surrounded the subject of Suolucidir.
“Were they real? Had they existed in isolation in the jungle for millennia? Were they actors playing Stone Age tribesmen with Bic pens, Swiss Army knives, and transistor radios hidden under a rock in a cave? Even if you’re right,” Ruth insisted, “and they’re not actors, and there are no hidden plastic buckets and metal spoons, the charge hangs in the air. Once the seeds of doubt have been planted, you can never get rid of them.”
I wished she would spare the plant metaphors; they seemed like a set of straw men.
“Most people who seriously tried to find Suolucidir disappeared into the Shah’s prisons. There were no artifacts, and they were never heard from again.” Ruth was right, but this was a risk I was willing to take.
The New World with its lost tribes and waves of immigrants was terra firma for her. She was afraid to fly over large bodies of water, which she hated in their endlessness. The deserts and mountains of Sistan-va-Baluchistan were, for her, a sandstorm you could never claw your way out of, a gale of locusts that blinded you, their dry little corpses filled your shoes, piled outside your tent like hail, crunching under foot. She felt ill at ease in places where she didn’t know the language, as if all noise around her was reduced to a series of sequential sounds, and her perception of meaning was no better than a two-year-old’s.
Ruth despaired of imagining upward from a rubble-strewn landscape, or to be more precise, from certain kinds of incomprehensible rubble-strewn landscapes. If she walked through a bombed city, a city of which no building survived, no brick lay squarely on top of another, and she found a shattered shell of a tin can, could make out only the letters . . .oup on a shred of paper clinging to it, she would know how to re-animate a kitchen or a grocery store. There were readily available mental pictures for cupboard and shelf, walls, windows, doors, a radio playing in the background, a ticking clock reminding one of dinnertime. The street bustle, the arguments, the traffic crossings, these
