“You mean, like employees of the month?” Lonnie asked.
“Something like that. You have the maps?”
Byron pointed to the tube.
“Well, that’s just a tube, isn’t it?” Scissors said.
“They’re in there. You can check,” Byron said. “Besides, that’s how you told me to do it.”
Scissors kept his eyes on Byron. “I want you to look around this room, up at the ceiling. Start at one o’clock. Don’t move your head, just the eyes.” Byron looked. “Okay, now three, seven, nine, and eleven. I realize you can’t see your seven.”
“Cameras?” Lonnie asked.
“This location was not a stupid choice, Mr. Ashdown,” Scissors said. “The anonymity of this carnival, and the panopticon surrounding us makes certain everyone minds their p’s and q’s.”
“What does panopticon mean?” Byron said.
“It means, we’re not going to roll out this transaction in plain sight, but . . . an exchange will take place,” Scissors said.
“It’s simpler than you’re saying. You give us the money. I leave the maps sitting right here.” Byron said, gesturing to the tube with a nod. “We take off, then you stick around for a while.”
Scissors reached into the side pocket of his suit coat and held out his hand. He relaxed his grip slightly; a brass skull dropped and spun on its chain.
“Hey, wait,” Byron said, a look of panic streaking across his face.
“You’ll leave when I decide you can go,” Scissors said.
“When did you—” Byron said.
“Trade secrets, friend. A magician never tells you how the trick is done. Feel around on the floor,” Scissors directed.
Byron moved his boots from side to side and he kicked a small package. “What’s that?” he said.
“There are two envelopes, one for each of you. I took the liberty of dividing your fee up front . . . in the interest of family harmony.”
Lonnie smiled and gave a tiny fist pump. Byron glared at his brother. Lonnie lifted his eyebrows and said, “What? I trust you.” When Byron looked back at Scissors, he was holding the cardboard tube.
“Hold on a minute,” Byron said.
Scissors stood and slipped the tube almost invisibly inside his jacket. “Open your bag,” he said.
Lonnie grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Inside was a pair of blue swim trunks covered in red, green, and orange popsicles. He lifted it out and held it up. There was a second pair inside and a small key card folder from the casino.
“I’m going to have you two stay here for a couple of weeks, let things cool down. You’ve got a room, paid through the end of the month. Two king beds. And there’s a prepaid credit card in there too, with five hundred on it. For incidentals.”
“That’s cool,” Lonnie said. “But what about my job back in—”
“Shut it,” Byron said.
“Consider this a time to reinvent yourselves. Sit by the pool. Read a book. Binge-watch something. Stare at the walls. But don’t go home. I’m serious about this.” Scissors then turned and walked through the slot machines. A man in the row got a jackpot, and his machine lit up. A second later, Scissors was gone. A huge grin came across Byron’s face, and Lonnie thought his brother had gone crazy.
___
Sophia spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in a conference room, doing paperwork and finishing up the last of her PowerPoint presentation on the ethics of preservation and the problem of restoration. To clear her head before the program, she dashed to the shuttle stop and hopped on a bus right as it was leaving. It was packed with people in a way that was familiar to her as someone from the East Coast who was still somewhat uncomfortable in the openness of this western landscape.
There were no seats, so she took hold of an overhead bar and listened to the bits and pieces of conversation: a jambalaya of Japanese, Korean, Italian, French, German, Polish, and a little English, but not much. Because of her research on the impact of archeological sites under different jurisdictions, she constantly thought about the numbers of people who came here. The National Park Service was one agency among many in the United States, which was one of many governments around the world trying to manage the erosion of history. Her interest came from a course on the history of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It was an organization that seemed amazing from one perspective, but over the course of those fifteen weeks it had been unpacked and reformed into a complex colonial force that left her unsure if there were any good institutions at all anymore. It was one thing to study theories in the classroom and something else entirely to watch power and money in action.
Sophia let her eyes drift through the bus. She watched a father in a nearby seat tracing the path of the Fairyland Loop on a map for his daughter. She asked questions in Cantonese and sucked on the rubber straw of her water bottle as he answered. Sophia could only guess what a trip like this might cost. Surely less than Disneyland. What experience did he hope for her? For himself? What memories did he want her to have of this place when she was old and he was gone? This was the question that fueled all of her studies, the work she felt driven to do. Would that girl treasure the water bottle and its memories when she left for college? Would she find the map in her father’s things when he passed away? Which stories seep into the everyday things we leave behind? Which ones evaporate?
She looked up and down the aisle of the bus as it stopped, some people stepping off, new people climbing on. She wondered if any of these people would be coming to her presentation, or if they were just interested in snapshots of the scenery. So many people think an archeologist wears a fedora and a leather jacket, cracks a bullwhip, and jumps from trains onto the backs of galloping horses. But so much of the work is slow and meticulous, the gathering of information, the sifting of it. Mountains and mountains of paperwork, so much of it digital these days.
One of her professors would read Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” to her students, tell them that living memory dies and our knowledge of the past survives only through the trace of physical things, which eventually crumble and blow away, leaving us with two stone legs, a partially buried face, and a single half-crazed witness. This professor was fond of saying that the only thing left behind to speak of us will be the Statue of Liberty buried to the waist with the surf crashing all around it. Even this reference, Sophia thought, was almost lost, gone like Charlton Heston, French science fiction, Romantic poetry, and every other good and noble thing.
The shuttle stopped at the lodge, and Sophia waited while everyone in front of her stood and filed off. She stepped down the bus steps and back into the fresh air, surrounded by towering ponderosas. The buildings, shingled in brown and green, came from another age, like buildings imagined for a film.
Across the parking lot was a white tour bus with a massive red swoosh across the side. In the front window was a cling banner that said RANCHES, RELICS, AND RUINS in a gaudy Egyptian font. Tourists spilled from the doors of that bus as well and filed into the lodge under the direction of staff people with clipboards and palm-sized walkie-talkies. She couldn’t imagine having your first encounter with a place like this be something like that, but maybe it’s better this way than not at all. Maybe it’s better than turning them loose on the place like shoppers on Black Friday. She didn’t know anymore. The lodge was packed, and if she didn’t have to be there, she would have gone right past it and out to Bryce Canyon itself, the majestic red-rock amphitheater that sells this park to the world. The sculpted expanse makes the lodge a mere curiosity by comparison.