Dateline: Atlantis (16 page)

“What's so funny?” Amaryllis snaps, irritated from humiliation and the constant delays.

“Looks like old Fossil's running a side business as a P.I.,” Donny says, flipping a card to her. “Not exactly legal if he's working for the police, but probably anything goes in the boonies if you keep it on the Q.T. He's got his retirement to set up. Let's keep the card. It could come in handy.”

A few miles down the main road they hit upon a strip mall, anchored by two large restaurants at either side. There's a place called The Rack, and from the painting of the top-heavy blonde on the front wall, it's obvious to Amaryllis that the neon sign isn't referring to a shelf on a wall. On the other side of the mall is a chain steakhouse, the kind of place where diners can order steaks cooked about twelve different ways, but the chef has never heard of a vegetable. Amaryllis points at the steak house.

“I'm not eating at any place named after a woman's body parts,” she says.

“Can't imagine why not. I'm sure everyone is tastefully dressed,” Donny shoots back, eyes twinkling. He aims for the steakhouse lot and hurries out of the car to open the door for Amaryllis.

“Nobody's done that for me since, well, since prom night,” Amaryllis says. Donny winces. Oops. That must have been a slip. She doesn't remember Donny asking her to prom, but then she wasn't paying much attention to him then, either. Bad mistake.

They enter the restaurant and slump into the first booth that's offered. Amaryllis slips off her uncomfortable pumps and leans back into the padded seating. As they survey the all-beef-allthe-time menu, Donny orders a Scotch and water, while Amaryllis sticks with a coke. Donny shuts his menu and peels off his already loosened tie. Amaryllis looks at the fake cowboy bric-a-brac covering the walls. The place looks like it should be in Texas, not on the Florida coast.

“What's the deal with your story and Atlantis, Wiggly Quigley?” he asks. “I never could figure that out. And how did your
parents, college professors, get hooked on the idea? Isn't Atlantis just a crazy legend that won't go away?”

Amaryllis gives a lopsided smile and starts drumming her fingers on the tabletop.
Here we go again, the same old song and dance.

“First of all, I'm not looking for Atlantis. I just found some relics that seem to pre-date accepted history. And if you mean, ‘is it just a New Age fantasy?' you'd probably be surprised by how many people take the Atlantis story seriously,” she answers. When she sees that his skeptical expression hasn't changed, she plows on. “Yes, the official line on Atlantis is that it's a myth, made up out of whole cloth by Plato, and wishful thinking on the part of folks who swim regularly with the dolphins.” She smiles in spite of herself. She's known quite a few of those Aquarian Age crackpots in Los Angeles herself. Most of them were in the yoga class.

“But there's another side? One that makes sense?”

“Surprisingly, yes. But first of all, I have to point out that my parents didn't believe in Atlantis. They thought that an ancient civilization had to exist, but they didn't give it a name or buy into Atlantis theories.”

Donny nods, as if to say he found this a reasonable approach.

“So, I did a pretty thorough search at the newspaper and again at the libraries when I had some time to kill in Chicago. There are modern-day researchers who have combed ancient documents and have come up with some remarkable material. And then there are those like my parents, who are diving, looking for artifacts under the sea.”

Amaryllis sees that Donny is back in this listening posture, head propped on hand, so she continues.

“Several writers have gone through the histories of cultures all over the world and discovered that nearly everyone has a memory of an ancient flood. It's easy to just brush this aside as only myth, but most myths have some basis in fact. The Oera Linda Book from an ancient part of Holland recalls the fall of a huge
Atlantic island. The Maya and Aztec peoples had stories that their ancestors were survivors of a disaster in the Atlantic Ocean. There are tales that the Phoenicians brought back shiploads of riches from the west—west of the rocks of Gibraltar. But they would never reveal their source. Even more amazing is that the Egyptians, who told the original tale of Atlantis to Plato, claimed the Europeans were mere children in the historical scheme of things. They had a king's list that went back tens of thousands of years. Of course, today's Egyptologists consider this all myth, but the Egyptians didn't see it that way.”

She stops for breath and looks to see if Donny is following all this. So far, so good.

“It may be that the Egyptians even made their way to Atlantis. Archaeologists just found the remains of ocean-going vessels in Egyptian sites. Scholars used to think these ships were just religious symbols, but the latest finds show the boats actually were used in the sea.”

“As I recall, they thought Troy was a myth, too, until Heinrich Schliemann discovered it,” Donny says, his chocolate brown eyes melting into a far-away gaze.

“That's exactly right. And they've done excavations deep in the Mediterranean near the Nile and discovered Cleopatra's palace, another place that was considered to be just a dream. And after the tsunami of 2004, whole temples were discovered off the coast of India. They were impossible to date, but surely had to be ancient, pre-Ice Age, to be in water that deep.”

“But have they actually found something that might be considered Atlantis?” he asks. “What would make your parents go against the tide of historical thought and search for a place that's considered a phantasm?”

“A great deal has been going on,” Amaryllis says, cutting off her speech to recite her dinner order to a tall, large-chested woman in a tank top and running shorts. She wonders if they hadn't actually stopped at The Rack by accident. The waitress, who has
hair bleached so white it looks like a billowy snow cap, copies everything down with elaborate care.

“Do they allow you to dress like that here?” Donny asks, his eyes bright. “With the air-conditioning on this high, you must be frozen.”

She smiles with a look of interest in her heavily made-up eyes.

“You should see what they wear over there,” she says, pointing her pen toward The Rack. “Whoo, boy.” She then leans down, pressing her body close to Donny and asks is they want free refills on their drinks. They decline and the server turns, swivels her head back and gives a broad wink to Donny.

Amaryllis throws up her hands.

“What is with it with you and this winking? Is it some kind of secret Southern code or something?”

“Yeah, yeah. It's nothing,” Donny says, as if he hadn't even noticed. And maybe he doesn't notice. With him, flirting is just set on automatic. Amaryllis, nonplussed, continues her story.

“So I was talking about the dives,” Amaryllis says, picking through the breadbasket. “Yeah, right. There have been many in the Caribbean, especially lately. There's the famous Bimini Road that Wright was talking about, and the argument continues about whether it is a natural feature or not. One diver has found leveling stones under the rocks, which just wouldn't be there if the road was a large chunk of fractured beach rock. Also, some divers have found other areas, possible breakwaters or quays that look to be manmade in the area. Some claim to have found fluted columns but the skeptics call it ballast ejected from ships.”

“Column-shaped ballast?”

“Sounds unlikely to me, also. But I'm trying to keep a level head about all this. The next thing that's extremely interesting is a sonogram that a Cuban submarine is doing of the sea bottom in the area around Cuba, Miami and the Bahamas. They are using satellite-integrated ocean-bottom positioning systems, echo sounders and high-precision sonar. And I'm not sure what all
that stuff is. They've claimed to have found an entire city with pyramids, roads, and everything. But no one has been able to get his or her hands on the report. With our poor relations with Cuba, communication is nonexistent.

“But there is an Englishman—they can travel freely to Cuba, you know—who has investigated some caves that have been submerged for thousands of years and inside he's found writing. Deliberate, human writing. Not just squiggles and swirls.”

“Like the stuff your parents found?”

Amaryllis nods. She realizes she's turning this into a monologue so hurries to a finish. She's eager to discover what Donny thinks.

“Last of all, a satellite company has been taking NASA images of the area and employing a great deal of enhancement techniques. Some of it takes a good imagination to view, but I found one website that shows some pretty convincing undersea triangles in an area where you'd expect to find only flat sea bottom.”

“So what did your parents find that's different?”

“Of what I saw, they found small artifacts that were obviously made by humans and not of the culture of the Carib Indians. The items in Freya's cabinet were made by someone from a higher culture. The vases looked as fine as anything I've seen in an ancient Egyptian collection.”

Donny accepts his salad from the waitress, who places the salad before Donny with loving care and then plunks Amaryllis' soup down without ceremony, sloshing a bit of it on the paper tablecloth.

“So you're telling me the dolphins didn't tell your parents all this?” He's toying with her now, as he dribbles the dressing on the salad.

“No, and mermaids aren't whispering to me in my sleep, either.”
Or are they?

They eat for a while, both trying to absorb what Amaryllis has discovered in her research. She knows there is far more to do, but separating the real scholars from the wackos has not
been easy. Most of the websites she found when she searched for “Atlantis” turned out to be past-life memory pages with New Age music and plenty of bad poetry.

“These writers, do they have footnotes?”

“And sources and everything.”

“How about your parents' papers in the academic journals?”

“Can't find them. I think they've been purged.”

Donny chews some more and pushes his plate away. He looks into her eyes with that soft-focused gaze that drew her into his embrace back in Chicago.

“So, you are in the middle of an honest-to-goodness controversy,” he says as he reaches across and grabs one of her hands. “But why are you in danger because of a fight over what could be just a fantasy?”

“It's threatening somebody. Other academics, certainly. It's like Sean said: they don't want their own work invalidated.”

“But the heavies with the guns. Someone who'd kill your photographer. I don't know any professors who would do that. The worst thing they ever did to me in law school was make me argue a case against evolution.” His lips curl up at the memory.

Amaryllis' head snaps up just as their vixen waitress returns with the steaks. She completely ignores the woman's presence and stares into Donny's eyes like a cat fascinated by a robin. He acts as if the server isn't there.

“That's it,” Amayllis says, excitement mounting in her voice. “Evolution. Don't you get it?”

Donny shakes his head in puzzlement as the waitress twirls and shows off her behind like a model. He doesn't seem to see the maneuver.

“Get what?”

“There wasn't supposed to be a 10,000 BCE if you read the Bible literally.”

The gears are working, but it takes a few seconds before he lifts his head and lets out a hoot of a laugh. Heads turn in their
direction, but he grabs Amaryllis' hand again and pumps it up and down.

“Bible thumpers. We're up against a holy war. Oh, man, if they could see this now in law school.”

Amaryllis pulls her hand back and starts to carve her meat.

“I think you forgot something, Donny. Some of those thumpers are survivalists. Don't you remember the cults, the Jim Jones Kool-Aid suicides? Janet Reno and the Branch Davidians? These people are dangerous. They have guns and money.”

Donny continues to smile, humming “Lawyers, Guns and Money” while he gets down to the business of putting away a rare steak. That's Donny's way of driving her crazy, so she lets it slide, but she puts her head down as she wonders why she has not told him about the crystal.

#

While Donny runs off to a discount store to pick up Florida-weather clothing, Amaryllis checks into their modest hotel. She gets a room with two double beds and lets the bellman schlep her bag full of winter clothing into the room. She gets Donny on his cell phone.

“Yup,” he says. She hears plenty of background noise and figures he's found a store already.

“Get me some things, too.”

“Aw, Amy, I'm no good at selecting women's clothing. I have no idea what you like.”

“It's simple, go to the sporting goods area and get some plain t-shirts and shorts, size medium. Just don't buy blue. It looks awful on me.”

“I'll bet everything looks beautiful on you.”