Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.2]

Chapter One

Professor Simons had returned the night before to his own modest home on the North Shore of San Francisco. It was a house he had spent the better part of his career living in while a professor at Berkeley over the past thirty some years. It was once a warmer place, when freshly moved into during the 1970's. A home once made vibrant by the young scholar and his artist wife who both worked tirelessly to remodel and decorate with all the trappings of a hopeful future. That future had been complete with the desire for children and the promise of happiness in old age. Yet, it now somehow only resembled a larger version of the professor's cluttered office at Cal, and there was a sad and deafening silence as he entered the dark living room alone once more.

The professor made his way through the stuffy hallway to the back bedroom. He placed his tired satchel on the floor by the nightstand. His single bed was still unmade, as he had left it three days before. He entered the bathroom and ran the hot water for a bath. It was the one place he had, years before, designated to completely relax and reflect. His evening bath for decades had become his small shrine for meditation, yet rarely did he contemplate history there or any of his industrious achievements with the university, past or present. It had become a place he came to soak his tired body, allow time to stop, and enjoy the few treasures of his early memories.

Disrobing and entering the tepid water, it was his habit to submerge himself up to his neck, and then lean his head back against the porcelain tub and close his eyes. There soon appeared one of the reoccurring visions which had come to him hundreds of times over the years:

It was his daughter, Irene, around the age of eight years old. Just two years before the accident. She was running on the beach with a puppy he had bought her that summer. In this reverie he would see and hear her laughing, animated in her yellow and turquoise bathing suit. Her young, tireless body glowed with the blue sky behind her and the unforgettable hiss of the waves in the distance. Her skin had a perennial cinnamon shade, inherited from her mother, and now was even darker from the season. He could picture her expressive face, imbued also with the girl's mother's features—her Asian eyes and an animated mouth always offering up a smile to him. In his mind now Irene was laughing infectiously while the puppy thrashed from side to side in the sand, barking. Like the spontaneous puppy and the adoring father on this uneventful but eternal day, the little girl seemed intoxicated with joy. It was an image he had conjured up so many times, never waning in its vivid intensity or melancholic power.

The professor savored the collected memory and got out of the bath to dress. He moved into rooms and turned on lights which exposed nothing but bookshelves and boxes of papers—all of which seemed to have grown out of the walls and collected on the floor. The house had remained this way, virtually empty of life, save for its sole inhabitant returning home in the evenings, since the early 1980's, when John Simon's wife and daughter were both killed in a boating mishap just outside the mouth of San Francisco Bay.

This tragic event, after several years of painful attempts by the scholar to move beyond it, resulted in his dissolution with ever starting over for a dream of wife and children. The lonely academic instead buried himself in his work further, eventually bringing great accolades to his career through publications, teaching, and a legendary single-mindedness which only helped to establish Cal's preeminence as a venue for its Center for California Studies.

Now, late in his career, Professor Simons was thrust into a find which captivated him like nothing else he had ever encountered as a researcher. There was something otherworldly about the historical possibility it offered which made him sleepless at night and gave him the gnawing trepidation that he might not live long enough to see its great mystery unfold or its significance be widely recognized.

Being given exclusive credit for taking on the early probing of the tomb's significance was somehow secondary to him after building a life's reputation upon academic excellence. There was simply something more to this find than eventual notoriety which inspired his passion for the truth. As a seasoned historian and one privy to all the fanaticism, cruelties and compassion of civilization—past and present, Dr. Simons could sense in the workings of tomb's discovery an intelligence and a passionate vision behind it. This mystery of this vision was beginning to even eluded his theories of who and why.