myself of Blevins and quadrupling my income all in one go. But if I am honest with myself I confess there was a definite pleasure in being Chosen by someone with such agreeable features.
“Right,” he said, after we had been staring for a couple of heartbeats. “Here.” He reached for his bag.
I read the form, which said precisely what Tristan had described, making it at once boilerplate and singular. I held out my hand, and Tristan offered me a government-issue ballpoint pen. A far cry from the slightly blood-smeared Hughes & Sons Ltd. model number 137B, Extra Fine, with which I am writing this.
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.
