Diachronicle

      DAY 33 (LATE AUGUST, YEAR 0)

      In which I meet Tristan Lyons and immediately agree to get into more trouble than I could possibly realize at the time

      I MET TRISTAN LYONS IN the hallway outside the faculty offices of the Department of Ancient and Classical Linguistics at Harvard University. I was a lecturer, which means that I was given the most unpopular teaching assignments with no opportunity for university-supported research and no real job security.

      On this particular afternoon, as I was walking down the hallway, I heard voices raised within the office of Dr. Roger Blevins, Department Chair. His door was slightly ajar. Usually it gaped open, so that anyone walking by might glance at his ego-wall, upon which hung every degree, honor, and accolade he’d ever collected, honestly or otherwise. When not yawning thus, the door was tightly closed, advising “Do Not Disturb” in 48-point Lucida Blackletter to make sure we all understood how exclusive his company was.

      But here it was, uncharacteristically a quarter open. Intrigued, I glanced in, just as a clean-cut man was making a decisive exit, looking back at Blevins with an expression somewhere between disgust and bemusement. His biceps smacked into my shoulder as he ploughed into me with enough force to throw me off balance. I pivoted backward and landed sprawled on the floor. He retreated instinctively, his backpack smacking into the doorjamb with a hard thump. From within the office, Blevins’s voice was hurling a stream of invective.

      “Apologies,” the man said at once, turning red. He was about my age. He slipped out into the hallway and began to reach toward me to help me up.

      The door swung farther open, quite forcefully—right into my shin. I made a noise of pained protest and the pompous voice from within the room went silent.

      Blevins—thick grey hair perfectly immobile, dressed as if he expected at any moment to be sworn in to give expert testimony—emerged from his office and peered down at me disapprovingly. “What are you doing there?” he asked, as if he’d caught me spying.

      “My fault, I’m sorry, miss,” said the young man, again holding his hand toward me.

      Blevins grabbed the edge of the door and began pulling it closed. “Watch where you’re going,” he said to me. “If you’d been in the middle of the hall you’d have avoided a collision. Please collect yourself and move on.”

      He gave the young man a look I could not make out from where I was, then turned back into his office, closing the door hard behind him.

      After a second of stunned silence, the young man extended his hand closer to me and I took it, with a nod of thanks, to rise. We were standing quite close to each other.

      “I am . . .” he began again. “I am so very sorry—”

      “It’s fine,” I said. “If you’ve annoyed Roger Blevins, how bad can you be?”

      At that he looked startled—as if he’d come from someplace where speaking ill of the brass simply wasn’t done. We kept staring at each other. It seemed a perfectly normal thing to do. He was nice to look at in an ROTC sort of way, and his expression implied he didn’t mind looking at me either, although I am not the sort the ROTC boys ever took an interest in.

      Suddenly he held out his hand. “Tristan Lyons,” he said.

      “Melisande Stokes,” I rejoined.

      “You’re in the Ancient and Classical Linguistics Department?”

      “I am,” I said. “I’m an exploited and downtrodden humanities lecturer.”

      Once again, that startled, wary look. “I’m treating you to coffee,” he said.

      That was presumptuous, but I was so pleased with him for upsetting Blevins that it would have been churlish to turn him down.

      He wanted to take me to the Apostolic Café in Central Square, which was perhaps ten minutes by foot down Mass Ave. It was that time of year in Boston when the summer feels definitely over, and the city’s seventy-odd colleges and universities are coming back to life. Streets were jammed with parental minivans from all over the Northeast, moving their kids into their apartments and dorm rooms. Sidewalks were clogged with discarded sofas and other dump-bound furniture. Add that to the city’s baseline traffic—people, cars, bikes, the T—and it was all very loud and bustling. He used that as an excuse to cup my elbow in one hand, keeping me close to him as we walked. Presumptuous. As was the very idea that you could walk two abreast in such a crowded place. But he kept making a path through the crowd with expectant looks and crisp apologies. Definitely not from around here.

      “Can you hear me clearly?” he said almost directly into my ear, my being half a step ahead of him. I nodded. “Let me tell you a couple of things while we’re walking. By the time we get to the café, if you think I’m a creep or a nutcase, just tell me, and I’ll simply buy you a coffee and be on my way. But if you don’t think I’m a creep or a nutcase, then we’re going to have a very serious conversation that could take hours. Do you have dinner plans?”

      In the society I inhabit currently, such an approach would be considered so outrageous that when I think on it, it is hard to believe I did not instantly excuse myself and walk away from him. On the contrary, at the time I found his awkward inappropriateness, his bluntness, rather compelling. And I confess, I was curious to hear what he had to say.

      “I might,” I said. (Confession: I did not.)

      “All right, listen,” he began. “I work for a shadowy government entity, you’ve never heard of it, and if you try to Google it, you won’t find any reference to it, not even from conspiracy-theory nuts.”

      “Conspiracy-theory nuts are the only ones who would use a term like ‘shadowy government entity,’” I pointed out.

      “That’s why I use it,” he retorted. “I don’t want anyone to take me seriously, it would get in the way of my efficiency if people were paying attention to me. Here’s what we need. Tell me if you’re interested. We have a bunch of very old documents—cuneiform, in one case—and we need them translated, at least roughly, by the same person. You’ll be paid very well. But I can’t tell you where we got the documents, or how we got them, or why we’re interested in them. And you cannot ever tell anyone about this. You can’t even say to your friends, ‘Oh, yeah, I did some classified translating for the government.’ Even if we publish your translation of it, you can’t take ownership of it. If you learn something extraordinary from translating the material, you can’t share it with the world. You’re a cog in a piece of machinery. An anonymous cog. You’d have to agree to that before I say another word.”

      “That’s why Blevins threw you out,” I said.

      “Yes, he’s strongly committed to academic freedom.”

      Dear reader, give me credit for not going LOL on mocking him. “No he isn’t.”

      This