steep Tikal pyramids like the ones in the rainforest savior’s guidebook, but something much smaller and flatter that we were able to enter near ground level through a stone doorway that looked like an open mouth. “It is a mouth,” Rikki explained when I asked. “The mouth of a Witz monster. It takes you into what they called Xibalba, the Underworld.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“The land of the dead,” he added helpfully.
“Why is the temple so small? Aren’t they usually much bigger?” Straight out of the guidebook, but Rikki didn’t know the difference.
“This is an older section of the city,” he said. “It was probably built around 50 B.C., seven hundred years or so before the big pyramids were put up. Lots of times, they just built right over the old ones, but this one must have been in the wrong spot.”
Just then Jan called out that we should come in, and we shuffle-crouched down a long passageway filled with rubble, a perfect hideout for víboras, to a tiny room with a low stone bench at the back. Beneath the bench was an open shallow pit. Even in the dubious light from the big battery-powered lanterns, traces of red on the walls made it clear that this room had once been plastered and painted.
Jan seemed to know exactly what he wanted to do, though I could not figure out what he thought was worth photographing. The room seemed entirely empty except for the bench. He spent some time arranging the two lights in different ways, then beckoned. I went and stood beside him. He pointed to the faintest traces of something black on the wall behind the bench. If this keeps up, I thought, we might actually get through the entire three months in sign language. I moved closer, squinting, and made out what looked like a hieroglyph, the merest squiggle.
“Can you photograph this?” he asked me.
“I don’t know if I can pick anything up.” I hated saying that—photographers never admit defeat—but it was true. The lines of the glyph were so faded I could hardly see them with my eyes.
“Try,” he said. “Take as many photographs as you need. Try everything you can think of.” He was leaning in close to the wall beside me and his arm brushed mine. I remembered that sensation—someone’s tensed muscles coming into sudden contact with my skin—from sitting on the couch beside Bruno, aka my father, watching boxing when I was a kid. Bruno looked upon boxing as a blood sport, especially when it pitted a noble white guy—i.e., Rocky Marciano, Ingemar Johansson—against one of those “black kopiles,” as he called them, sad that I’d been born too late to witness Marciano’s glory days. My father was not exactly with the times, especially when it came to race relations in our fair city of Chicago. Back then, he had the massive forearms of the steelworker he was, and when, at six, seven, eight years old, I felt one of them brush up against mine, I always got a disorienting jolt.
No jolt this time, however, or at least not a nasty one. Jan’s forearm was tense but radiated a pleasant warmth, the likes of which I had not experienced since abandoning co-ed tent life after Cambodia. Well, well, I thought, glancing down at the corded muscles, the bone-deep jungle tan under its gray pelt. Then I went back to squinting at my hieroglyphic quarry. Without actually touching the wall, I ran my fingers lightly above the painted area. Sure enough, there was a slight bulge in the plaster, just enough to bring out the glyph a little, which meant a light held to one side would cast a bit of a shadow, which we didn’t need.
“Rikki, come here,” I said. “Try holding your light this way.” Rikki trotted over and I stood him behind me and made him hold the light square on the glyph in a line directly above my head. Since height-wise he had me by at least six inches, the plan worked out nicely. “Okay,” I said. “Can you steady that without the light stand? If you can, I’m going to use the stand for an off-camera flash.”
Jan said, “Rikki can balance the lantern against my shoulder.” So that was how we did it: the tripod up as high as it would go, me on tiptoe sighting, Jan breathing down my neck, and Rikki pressed up against his father, stabilizing the light.
After a while, I switched over to pencil and sketchbook and attempted to draw what I could hardly see, though once I began, the shape unfolded fairly naturally. It was a single glyph, quite simple, that looked like a four-petaled flower inside of a squarish double oval. At the bottom, below the oval, was a group of painted streamers, blown sideways. I made four different drawings, a close-up of the glyph on its own and then in context, holding them up silently for Jan’s approval and getting a thumbs-up each time.
It was clear that this particular tomb had already been stripped, either by robbers or archeologists. My boss himself was the most likely candidate—how else would he know about the glyph? Then I felt someone watching me and turned to meet Jan’s blue stare. He’d noticed me speculating away, exactly what he’d hired me not to do. “Quite a place,” I said. “Never been in one of these before.” I shook my head like an admiring tourist and added a heartfelt “wow.” He narrowed his gaze, then turned abruptly toward the passageway. Rikki and I fell in line like two ducks behind him.
Night in the jungle is like nothing else on earth. The darkness is absolute and has an underwater texture to it, as though you are flutter-kicking through it in a wetsuit, with limited air. The forest sways—a moving kelp bed of trees, insects, nocturnal creatures hunting for food—and the ground swells and sinks, an oceanic illusion of tides and the rising backs of whales. I lay awake in my sleeping bag, listening to the sea-surge of the jungle, and thought about Stefan.
Before I got on the plane to Guatemala, Jonah gave me all his letters, hoping they would help me contact the people I needed to find in Chiapas. It was strange to read the words my brother had written to someone else, someone who not only understood his singular worldview but shared it. I knew the child version of Stefan well, better than I’ve ever known another living being. We were best friends back then, true compadres, the only people either of us could trust. But since we’d grown up and became who we were, we had found ourselves on totally different roads, and I could no longer predict what he would do or why.
In the morning, after café and scrambled huevos, Rikki and I were told we had the day off. After all the hustling, this was a surprise. “I need some time to plan,” Jan explained. These were the first words of the day for him, except for whatever he had muttered when the spatula turned up missing. The repressed intensity he’d revealed inside the tomb was gone; once again, he was sunk in contemplation.
“When do you want us back?” asked Rikki.
“Four,” he said. “We’ll be hiking in to the North Acropolis after dark.”
“I didn’t know. . .” Rikki began, then snapped shut. They certainly weren’t very subtle about hiding things. He gave me an apologetic look and said, “Would you like to see the park?”
An hour later, Rikki and I were standing in the Great Plaza of Tikal. I’d seen pictures, but nothing one-dimensional could come close. The limestone pyramids, black with mold and scraped-off jungle, were so steep their faces looked vertical. Their crumbled roof combs, like broken molars, jutted into the sky high above the trees. Straight up the front of each were wide stairways made of slick and dangerous-looking steps. Rikki gestured toward the only one not swarming with people. “That’s Temple I,” he said. “The tomb of Ah-Cacaw. They’ve had it blocked off since the early eighties when a tourist fell a hundred fifty feet and killed himself.”
“Who was Ah-Cacaw?”
“You’ve never heard of Ah-Cacaw?” He sounded amazed.
“Obviously not.”
“Sorry.” He really was sorry, his
