Compendium Effect : : Tolen's Trial

Suspend (thine own) Disbelief 1

Professor Osbourne Tuttle swatted a mosquito he had been listening to, patiently waiting in the dark, gradually locating it at his left temple. The smack, in their apartment in Detroit, would have likely awakened his girlfriend, but in the tropical forest of Laos, under seven layers of mosquito netting, in a tent pitched within walking distance of the Phong Nhe-Ke Bang National Park, Bo Tråch District, Quang Binh Province in Vietnam, if you were a meter away, any sound traveling into the jungle was swallowed whole like one giant marshmallow. He laid still, savoring the memory of their bodies entwined together. Aroused, he thought about waking her, listening to the stream that ran through the middle of a small clearing in which they had pitched camp.

This relative silence meant that probably their guide would do his best to collect another day of per diem, and for another day, the party would wait, listening, just as it had done last year. Much closer this year to the monsoon season, Doctor Tuttle had grown weary with impatience, watching the slow and sure daily increase in precipitation and the rising, green sea of beer bottles collect around their guide's cot, knowing any day, any hour, any minute, one gram too much water will find its way through the flowstone and the river will surge and passage to the temple doors will, again, be impassible.

Rain tapped the tent shell irregularly and he no longer heard droplets hitting leaves as they fell through the canopy. If he laid in and listened for long enough, he'd hear Tal, the certainly false name of their guide, wade though the Mickey's Big Mouth malt liquor bottles in the floor of his tent, having predetermined sometime the night before, while cracking open number nine, against moving out today. Osbourne decided there was no choice but to talk to the interpreter and get moving, provided a drunken guide was their only obstacle.

He left the double cot that he and Doctor Kim Flanders, his girlfriend, shared. He watched her sleep for a moment, finding it difficult to imagine a life in which she was not present. He dismissed that line of thought. It was impossible; their careers could not contrast more. She was the assistant chair of the Anthropology Department at the same small, private liberal arts college, Rhodes Crosse College, where he once held tenure. Still enjoying good standing, she was here to capture footage of known petroglyphs and to observe, to actually continue building knowledge upon the legitimate, peer reviewed foundations of academia. Doctor Tuttle, on the other hand, was here on the word of a secondhand account from an alien abduction victim and one, long dead academic, ostracized for suggesting the City of Atlantis might have been a real place and it might have existed in what we know today as the Sahara Desert. The key he sought had been encoded there, the story went. One day, their relationship would be weighed in the false balance of professional reputation. He tried imagining what it would mean to give up on ever finding his brother, or at least discovering what had happened to him, who had taken him and where and why, and he couldn't. Hushing his movements, he dressed for the caves, hat and rubber boots, and with some care not to make noise. Lost in thought and paying only half attention, he managed to get past the netting, part the tent flap, and step outside without making much noise. That day is not today and if all went well, or at least to plan, that day may never come.

A seasonal brook gurgled, flowing past the low mound where he and Kim had pitched their tent. The balmy air and wet everywhere meant monsoon season had begun in earnest and it more power to ruin him today than it had levied against yesterday. Can't happen, he thought. Another delay would likely cost him a knee cap, maybe a finger.

Osbourne pulled his face, massaging away the last of his sleepiness. He wished he had been firm when had Kim insisted on making the trip, on taking footage for her ethnology seminar series. After last night he found his ultimately decision very difficult to regret. It was too late for that now and he refused himself the luxury to ruminate on it, as he had done yesterday and the day before that, listening to the never-ending drizzle of the atmospheric river coalesce in the over-story, falling and collecting into ever larger raindrops until finding its way, eventually with a tiny slap-pat to the forest floor. The guide, shirtless, lay, behind only netting, wearing a pair of blue running shorts, snoring in his open tent. A cloud of spent booze filled the air. He detected movement to his left and walked that direction, grateful for his ugly and thoroughly waterproof Wellingtons, as he stepped into the ankle-high brook with impunity, working up the courage to speak with the interpreter. He passed in front in her tent, thinking she occupied it, but he couldn't tell because, though hanging loose, the flaps were down. Stumped, he looked around the tiny, empty clearing, a patch of moss and monkey grass in pom-pom clumps was much longer than it was wide. Osbourne scanned the jungle foliage.