Timeline (2 page)

“Dan, I think he’s hurt,” his wife said.

“Yeah,” Baker said. The old guy certainly seemed to be confused. Baker looked around again: there was nothing but flat desert in all directions, stretching away into shimmering haze.

No car. Nothing.

“How’d he get out here?” Baker said.

“Come on,” Liz said, “we have to take him to a hospital.”

Baker put his hands under the man’s armpits and helped the old guy to his feet. The man’s clothes were heavy, made of a material like felt, but he wasn’t sweating in the heat. In fact, his body felt cool, almost cold.

The old guy leaned heavily on Baker as they crossed the road. Liz opened the back door. The old man said, “I can walk. I can talk.”

“Okay. Fine.” Baker eased him into the back seat.

The man lay down on the leather, curling into a fetal position. Underneath his robes, he was wearing ordinary clothes: jeans, a checked shirt, Nikes. He closed the door, and Liz got back in the front seat. Baker hesitated, remaining outside in the heat. How was it possible the old guy was out here all alone? Wearing all those clothes and not sweating?

It was as if he had just stepped out of a car.

So maybe he’d been driving, Baker thought. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. Maybe his car had gone off the road and he’d had an accident. Maybe there was someone else still trapped in the car.

He heard the old guy muttering, “Left it, heft it. Go back now, get it now, and how.”

Baker crossed the road to have a look. He stepped over a very large pothole, considered showing it to his wife, then decided not to.

Off the road, he didn’t see any tire tracks, but he saw clearly the old man’s footprints in the sand. The footprints ran back from the road into the desert. Thirty yards away, Baker saw the rim of an arroyo, a ravine cut into the landscape. The footprints seemed to come from there.

So he followed the footsteps back to the arroyo, stood at the edge, and looked down into it. There was no car. He saw nothing but a snake, slithering away from him among the rocks. He shivered.

Something white caught his eye, glinting in the sunlight a few feet down the slope. Baker scrambled down for a better look. It was a piece of white ceramic about an inch square. It looked like an electrical insulator. Baker picked it up, and was surprised to find it was cool to the touch. Maybe it was one of those new materials that didn’t absorb heat.

Looking closely at the ceramic, he saw the letters ITC stamped on one edge. And there was a kind of button, recessed in the side. He wondered what would happen if he pushed the button. Standing in the heat, with big boulders all around him, he pushed it.

Nothing happened.

He pushed it again. Again nothing.

Baker climbed out of the ravine and went back to the car. The old guy was sleeping, snoring loudly. Liz was looking at the maps. “Nearest big town is Gallup.”

Baker started the engine. “Gallup it is.”

:

Back on the main highway, they made better time, heading south to Gallup. The old guy was still sleeping. Liz looked at him and said, “Dan . . .”

“What?”

“You see his hands?”

“What about them?”

“The fingertips.”

Baker looked away from the road, glanced quickly into the back seat. The old guy’s fingertips were red to the second knuckle. “So? He’s sunburned.”

“Just on the tips? Why not the whole hand?”

Baker shrugged.

“His fingers weren’t like that before,” she said. “They weren’t red when we picked him up.”

“Honey, you probably just didn’t notice them.”

“I did notice, because he had a manicure. And I thought it was interesting that some old guy in the desert would have a manicure.”

“Uh-huh.” Baker glanced at his watch. He wondered how long they would have to stay at the hospital in Gallup. Hours, probably.

He sighed.

The road continued straight ahead.

Halfway to Gallup, the old guy woke up. He coughed and said, “Are we there? Are we where?”

“How are you feeling?” Liz said.

“Feeling? I’m reeling. Fine, just fine.”

“What’s your name?” Liz said.

The man blinked at her. “The quondam phone made me roam.”

“But what’s your name?”

The man said, “Name same, blame game.”

Baker said, “He’s rhyming everything.”

She said, “I noticed, Dan.”

“I saw a TV show on this,” Baker said. “Rhyming means he’s schizophrenic.”

“Rhyming is timing,” the old man said. And then he began to sing loudly, almost shouting to the tune of the old John Denver song:

“Quondam phone, makes me roam,

to the place I belong,

old Black Rocky, country byway,

quondam phone, it’s on roam.”

“Oh boy,” Baker said.

“Sir,” Liz said again, “can you tell me your name?”

“Niobium may cause opprobrium. Hairy singularities don’t permit parities.”

Baker sighed. “Honey, this guy is nuts.”

“A nut by any other name would smell like feet.”

But his wife wouldn’t give up. “Sir? Do you know your name?”

“Call Gordon,” the man said, shouting now. “Call Gordon, call Stanley. Keep in the family.”

“But, sir—”

“Liz,” Baker said, “leave him alone. Let him settle down, okay? We still have a long drive.”

Bellowing, the old man sang: “To the place I belong, old black magic, it’s so tragic, country foam, makes me groan.” And immediately, he started to sing it again.

“How much farther?” Liz said.

“Don’t ask.”

:

He telephoned ahead, so when he pulled the Mercedes under the red-and-cream-colored portico of the McKinley Hospital Trauma Unit, the orderlies were waiting there with a gurney. The old man remained passive as they eased him onto the gurney, but as soon as they began to strap him down, he became agitated, shouting, “Unhand me, unband me!”

“It’s for your own safety, sir,” one orderly said.

“So you say, out of my way! Safety is the last refuge of the scoundrel!”

Baker was impressed by the way the orderlies handled the guy, gently but still firmly, strapping him down. He was equally impressed by the petite dark-haired woman in a white coat who fell into step with them. “I’m Beverly Tsosie,” she said, shaking hands with them. “I’m the physician on call.” She was very calm, even though the man on the gurney continued to yell as they wheeled him into the trauma center. “Quondam phone, makes me roam. . . .”

Everybody in the waiting room was looking at him. Baker saw a young kid of ten or eleven, his arm in a sling, sitting in a chair with his mother, watching the old man curiously. The kid whispered something to his mother.

The old guy sang, “To the plaaaaace I belongggg. . . .”

Dr. Tsosie said, “How long has he been this way?”

“From the beginning. Ever since we picked him up.”

“Except when he was sleeping,” Liz said.

“Was he ever unconscious?”

“No.”

“Any nausea, vomiting?”

“No.”

“And you found him where? Out past Corazón Canyon?”

“About five, ten miles beyond.”

“Not much out there,” she said.

“You know it?” Baker said.

“I grew up around there.” She smiled slightly. “Chinle.”

They wheeled the old man, still shouting, through a swinging door. Dr. Tsosie said, “If you’ll wait here, I’ll get back to you as soon as I know something. It’ll probably be a while. You might want to go get lunch.”

:

Beverly Tsosie had a staff position at University Hospital in Albuquerque, but lately she’d been coming to Gallup two days a week to be with her elderly grandmother, and on those days she worked a shift in the McKinley Trauma Unit to make extra money. She liked McKinley, with its modern exterior painted in bold red and cream stripes. The hospital was really dedicated to the community. And she liked Gallup, a smaller town than Albuquerque, and a place where she felt more comfortable with a tribal background.

Most days, the Trauma Unit was pretty quiet. So the arrival of this old man, agitated and shouting, was causing a lot of commotion. She pushed through the curtains into the cubicle, where the orderlies had already stripped off the brown felt robes and removed his Nikes. But the old man was still struggling, fighting them, so they had to leave him strapped down. They were cutting his jeans and the plaid shirt away.

Nancy Hood, the senior unit nurse, said it didn’t matter because his shirt had a big defect anyway; across the pocket there ran a jagged line where the pattern didn’t match. “He already tore it and sewed it back together. You ask me, pretty lousy job, too.”

“No,” said one of the orderlies, holding up the shirt. “It’s never been sewn together, it’s all one piece of cloth. Weird, the pattern doesn’t line up because one side is bigger than the other. . . .”

“Whatever, he won’t miss it,” Nancy Hood said, and tossed it on the floor. She turned to Tsosie. “You want to try and examine him?”

The man was far too wild. “Not yet. Let’s get an IV in each arm. And go through his pockets. See if he’s got any identification at all. If he doesn’t, take his fingerprints and fax them to D.C.; maybe he’ll show up on a database there.”

:

Twenty minutes later, Beverly Tsosie was examining a kid who had broken his arm sliding into third. He was a bespectacled, nerdy-looking kid, and he seemed almost proud of his sports injury.

Nancy Hood came over and said, “We searched the John Doe.”

“And?”

“Nothing helpful. No wallet, no credit cards, no keys. The only thing he had on him was this.” She gave Beverly a folded piece of paper. It looked like a computer printout, and showed an odd pattern of dots in a gridlike pattern. At the bottom was written “mon. ste. mere.”

“ ‘Monstemere?’ Does that mean anything to you?”

Hood shook her head. “You ask me, he’s psychotic.”

Beverly Tsosie said, “Well, I can’t sedate him until we know what’s going on in his head. Better get skull films to rule out trauma and hematoma.”

“Radiology’s being remodeled, remember, Bev? X rays’ll take forever. Why don’t you do an MRI? Scan total body, you have it all.”

“Order it,” Tsosie said.

Nancy Hood turned to leave. “Oh, and surprise, surprise. Jimmy is here, from the police.”

:

Dan Baker was restless. Just as he predicted, they’d had to spend hours sitting around the waiting room of McKinley Hospital. After they got lunch — burritos in red chile sauce — they had come back to see a policeman in the parking lot, looking over their car, running his hand along the side door panel. Just seeing him gave Baker a chill. He thought of going over to the cop but decided not to. Instead, they returned to the waiting room. He called his daughter and said they’d be late; in fact, they might not even get to Phoenix until tomorrow.

And they waited. Finally, around four o’clock, when Baker went to the desk to inquire about the old man, the woman said, “Are you a relative?”

“No, but—”

“Then please wait over there. Doctor will be with you shortly.”

He went back and sat down, sighing. He got up again, walked over to the window, and looked at his car. The cop had gone, but now there was a fluttering tag under the windshield wiper. Baker drummed his fingers on the windowsill. These little towns, you get in trouble, anything could happen. And the longer he waited, the more his mind spun scenarios. The old guy was in a coma; they couldn’t leave town until he woke up. The old guy died; they were charged with manslaughter. They weren’t charged, but they had to appear at the inquest, in four days.

When somebody finally came to talk to them, it wasn’t the petite doctor, it was the cop. He was a young policeman in his twenties, in a neatly pressed uniform. He had long hair, and his nametag said JAMES WAUNEKA. Baker wondered what kind of a name that was. Hopi or Navajo, probably.

“Mr. and Mrs. Baker?” Wauneka was very polite, introduced himself. “I’ve just been with the doctor. She’s finished her examination, and the MRI results are back. There’s absolutely no evidence he was struck by a car. And I looked at your car myself. No sign of any impact. I think you may have hit a pothole and just thought you hit him. Road’s pretty bad out there.”

Baker glared at his wife, who refused to meet his eye. Liz said, “Is he going to be all right?”

“Looks like it, yes.”

“Then we can go?” Baker said.

“Honey,” Liz said, “don’t you want to give him that thing you found?”

“Oh, yes.” Baker brought out the little ceramic square. “I found this, near where he was.”

The cop turned the ceramic over in his hands. “ITC,” he said, reading the stamp on the side. “Where exactly did you find this?”

“About thirty yards from the road. I thought he might have been in a car that went off the road, so I checked. But there was no car.”

“Anything else?”

“No. That’s all.”

“Well, thanks,” Wauneka said, slipping the ceramic in his pocket. And then he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it carefully. “We found this in his clothing. I wondered if you had ever seen it.”

Baker glanced at the paper: a bunch of dots arranged in grids. “No,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“You didn’t give it to him?”

“No.”

“Any idea what it might be?”

“No,” Baker said. “No idea at all.”

“Well, I think I do,” his wife said.

“You do?” the cop said.

“Yes,” she said. “Do you mind if I, uh . . .” And she took the paper from the policeman.

Baker sighed. Now Liz was being the architect, squinting at the paper judiciously, turning it this way and that, looking at the dots upside down and sideways. Baker knew why. She was trying to distract attention from the fact that she had been wrong, that his car had hit a pothole, after all, and that they had wasted a whole day here. She was trying to justify a waste of time, to somehow give it importance.

“Yes,” she said finally, “I know what it is. It’s a church.”

Baker looked at the dots on the paper. He said, “That’s a church?”

“Well, the floor plan for one,” she said. “See? Here’s the long axis of the cross, the nave. . . . See? It’s definitely a church, Dan. And the rest of this image, the squares within squares, all rectilinear, it looks like . . . you know, this might be a monastery.”