Miriam Archer

I first saw Miriam Magdaléne Vidal on a Sunday but met her on a Tuesday. I was teaching and working on my doctorate thesis in Puebloan Archaeology at the University of New Mexico. She was a Grad Student working toward her Masters in Anthropology and curator of the Southwest Museum on campus. I was at first struck by her piercing dark eyes, sun-kissed olive skin and thick dark hair that seemed to want to explode from its strategically placed clips. I was acting interested in the Zuni Katsina dolls on display at the time but at every turn I was really just trying to catch a glimpse of her in the reflections of the cases. This was my third visit to the exhibit in as many days. Like a schoolboy, I couldn't bring myself to speak to her. Despite my academic accomplishments and status at the University, seeing her made me question everything about myself. I couldn't make a move. Then I didn't have to.

"This is one of my favorites too." She said walking up behind me. A clean breeze of lavender chased her walk and I was dumbstruck.

"Um, sorry?" I said still looking at her reflection as if it were an imagined encounter.

"Kokopelli. He's the trickster katsina." she continued looking straight at my reflection. I turned my head slightly and bashfully looked at the floor in front of her.

"Koko..."

"Kokopelli. Not many visitors even notice him, but you've been staring at him for quite a while."

"Three days." I thought to myself but I had no idea what doll was in the case in front of me. He just happened to be behind the glass that angled perfectly at her reflection where she sat reading and answering questions for the lucky people who could approach her without sweating. As a student of Southwestern architecture, I knew well who Kokopelli was, but I wasn't going to let my knowledge get in the way of a perfect excuse to keep her talking to me. I quickly scanned the placard next to the doll and picked out some emergency facts.

"Oh yes, I see he's a fertility deity but 'Trickster' you say?"

"Yes. He's best known for fertility and music but he has a very strong trickster quality too that he uses to woo women."

"Interesting. He certainly seems to be comfortable with himself." I said motioning to his exaggeratedly large phallus.

"Indeed. Apparently detachable too. He would send it down rivers to seek out young Hopi women." She said with a smirk.

"Convenient option." I said with an uncomfortable chuckle. 

That was our first encounter and it was this kind of playful exchange of facts that set the tone for our relationship over the next ten years. Although I was only months away from being called "Doctor" Emit Archer and she was content with a Masters, I always felt and she always knew that she was the smarter partner. Her ability to grasp and retain facts then synthesize them into other disciplines never failed to both impress and discourage me. I heard all her lectures to undergraduates considering the Anthropology school. I was the drone to her queen but she never let me feel that way and that was her greatest gift—a patience that came from an otherworldly wisdom.
That and those dark brown eyes.

Miriam came from an eclectic family. Russian Jews that had settled along the northeast coast of Spain a couple of centuries ago. It was a perfect marriage of cultures—millennia-old traditions nestled in a family-centric environ. A stark contrast to my White Anglo-Saxon Protestant upbringing where emotions were tempered with either scholarly analysis or drowned altogether in single malt scotch. No amount of initials after my name could impress a woman like this which is why I was a twelve year-old boy again in her presence.
It was on a trip we took to her family hacienda near Costa Brava that we fell in love. She drove us up the coastal highway from Barcelona and just before the turnoff inland to the family's Mandarin orchard, she took a sharp right and down the cliff drive to the Gulf of Roses.

"Where are you going? The sign said the exit was up and to the left." I said wearily looking down the side of the cliff and gripping the door handle tightly.

"Trust me, Emit. This will change us." She said with a smile and determined squint.

In a few moments we were parked at the bottom. She bowed her head and whispered to herself, "Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo" then jumped out and ran toward the sea. I followed her through the head-high feathered reeds then the grass gave way to the most sublime view I'd ever seen. Sure, the Mediterranean cove and white gold architecture across the teal blue bay was brilliant, but what took my breath was Miriam. At water's edge. Staring South. The water breezes dancing with her linen skirt and her long twisting hair. As she turned back to me, her being was so present and her face so content, I quite literally fell to my knees and grabbed the sand as if I was staking my claim to that place and moment. Or trying not to fall of the Earth.

"Are you okay, Emit?" she said as if I was having a stroke.

"Yes I am." was all I could utter. She was right. It did change us. But mostly because that image, that moment changed me. A Literature professor once insisted that when an author writes about sex, it's never about the sex. But I'm a scientist-soldier and the way we laid waste to that forest of reed grass that afternoon was no motif.

The weeks that followed were a fable. Long days of walking through their Mandarin orchards and longer nights of Piaya and Sangria. Hacienda Vidal was a college for me and each of her eleven-member family were rogue scholars of culture, history, and philosophy. I wasn't just falling in love with this woman. I was becoming one of her twelve and falling in love with this family. This place. Hacienda Vidal.

One evening, after Miriam had fallen asleep, I stared up at the olive tree shadows on the white ceiling and wondered how many layers of paint had kept it that bright over the generations. I thought about the richness I felt after days of being steeped in the Vidals. The olive trees rustled but I could just make out a low and steady hissing sound. I walked to the broad window and saw a faint blue glow from a room across the courtyard. The hiss was timed to orange flashes like metal being soldered. Squinting, I could make out a figure leaning into the flashes in a measured motion.

"Go see him." Miriam's tired voice said softly.

"Who is it?" I asked. My eyes fixed to the cadence of the blue and orange lights.

"It's Rafael. He's working. He always works at night. Go. He loves to talk about his work."

"What kind of work is he doing?" 

"Go see, Emit. Make his day...or...night." She lay back down, pulled my pillow tightly to her chest and fell back asleep.

I walked across the courtyard and lightly knocked at the old wooden door between orange hisses. Rafael looked up, lifted his welding glasses then motioned me in. He pointed to a spare mask and then a stool near him. For the next twenty minutes I watched this man weld a crucifix onto a goblet that was identical to the old one set on the table beside him.

I thought at first that he was making a set but soon realized that even the imperfections and scars were being recreated. He explained later that he was replicating a valuable artifact for the local museum so that they could display it while keeping the real piece safe away. His tiny workshop was stocked with what I thought were priceless artifacts but turned out to be modern replicas. We spent the entire evening getting to know each other’s obsessions and mutual passions. Only to be interrupted by Miriam with a tray of coffee the next morning.

"You men need a second wind?" She said placing the tray on the table and smiling like she had just launched a great friendship. She had.

We would return to Hacienda Vidal many times since that first visit. Our last time together there was our wedding. She married me and I married the Vidals.

Miriam was my wife, my friend and my savior. Without her I may never have completed my doctorate thesis, at least not with the novel approach it ended up having. She had a gift for synthesizing data. It was she who first pointed out to me a series of uncanny connections between Tibetan and Hopi culture and their social mores. That the Tibetan word for moon “dawa”  sounds like the Hopi word for sun “taawa”.  This is why this Southwestern Archaeology doctoral student went to Tibet to complete a novel dissertation and learned to be still.

Miriam was also my secret weapon. In fact, it was Miriam who led me to the hypothesis that the Codex we unearthed in Coba could reveal a miscalculation in the Mayan Calendar. She was aware of a sect of Mayans that discovered the glitch millennia ago but too late to update the Long Count calendar across the Mayan Empire. And for that paradigm shifting synthesis of artifact to scholarship, all my professional ego could spare her was a dedication in my first book and a co-producer credit on subsequent webisodes of Unearthed.
This was just one of the myriad regrets that caved in on my soul when she died.

It was the evening of the ceremony to unveil the "Coba Codex" (as it was coined) that I lost my wife. We were late for the event which was being hosted by the First Lady of New Mexico, Angelica Esperanza, at the Governor's Mansion in Santa Fe. Miriam and I loved the Governor. He was broadly smart and an infinitely kind and trusting man. Miriam introduced me to him after an event at UNM and we became fast friends. She had, however, serious reservations about Angelica when the Governor introduced us to her a few years later. A manufactured beauty and peanut heiress from Eastern New Mexico, Angelica had an insatiable appetite for collecting artifacts. Which is why the Governor was so sure we would all get along famously. I had never seen him happier so I shrugged off Miriam's intuitions about the new First Lady for a long time. The same intuitions I ignored about Siméon Baalath when the First Lady introduced us to him. 

Siméon was an ex-network executive who shared a lust for ancient artifacts with Angelica. He knew where to find the relics and she had the power to commission each under the auspices of the New Mexico's State Cultural Society. I never saw any of the pieces go farther than the in-mansion museum the First Lady set up east of the entry hall. 

Our dinner parties at the mansion were never lacking in conversation. Miriam's sweeping knowledge of the cultures and the peoples that actually forged the artifacts Siméon and Angelica would show off made for fascinating stories and intriguing connections. Once my rapport with Siméon became less formal and more inspired, he asked me to host an internet program he was developing that later became Unearthed. Truth is, I was mildly auditioning for the part since our third dinner party once I realized Siméon wasn't an "ex" TV executive, just one on a sabbatical of sorts. More like an exile I later learned.

The opportunity to get paid by advertisers to immediately start doing what would have taken me 18 months of grant writing and fundraising to begin was way too tempting. This is why I betrayed Miriam's intuitions about not getting involved with Siméon Baaleth. His thirty pieces of silver came in the form of hundreds of artifact finds in exotic locations and a global, albeit pixilated, spotlight on me. But no amount of money and niche celebrity could rationalize-away our last dinner party with the governor, Angelica and Siméon. The night Miriam's intuition folded outward.

It was the week before the Coba Codex unveiling ceremony. The governor and I had retired to the library for Brandy and cigars while Miriam wandered over to Angelica's 'museum' to see what was new. There seemed to be new pieces arriving every other day back then. Within a minute she rushed back into the library, kissed the governor and handed me my coat.

"We're leaving right now." she whispered into my ear.

"What? We haven't even lit these things yet." I replied out loud.

The Governor slurred, "Miriam...stay...please...I promise I won't let him finish the thing." He was grinning hazily from the wine the First Lady kept him flowing in all evening. 

"I'm sorry, I just remembered we have to get back for Jack." she said while pulling me up by the elbow.

For the first half hour of the drive she was silent. Finally she let out a frustrated snarl and told me why we had to get out of there so quickly. When she walked into the museum she heard laughter echo from the back of the great hall. She walked back to join what she thought was Baaleth and Angelica talking. What she saw instead was Angelica on her knees in front of Baaleth who was grimacing in ecstasy and staring straight at Miriam. 

"That poor man!" She yelled at the dashboard.

"I don't understand. Was she hurting him? What the hell..." I began, confused at her reaction.

"No, Emit! The Governor! How could she do this to him?! That poor, sweet man." She put her head in her hands and sobbed for most of the trip home.

We wrestled for days about whether or not to tell the Governor. The dilemma bounced back and forth between our allegiance to him and the desire not to hurt him. Finally we decided to tell the governor about Angelica and Siméon after the Codex event. I knew it would end my association with Baaleth but I took solace in knowing that the work I had done on the Codex would assure my continued celebrity and my loyalty to the Governor had its own rewards.

The following week was the night of the Coba Codex ceremony. We were late and it was raining one of those hard fast and fat New Mexico rains that sweep across the west mesa toward Texas in sheets. I was driving fast along I-25 just north of Santa Fe, anxious to be the guest-of-honor. My last sensory memory was the sound of a tire exploding. I later read in one of the state trooper's reports that coyotes had been reported along that stretch of road earlier that day and, although there was no physical evidence of the crash being caused by coyotes, it was nonetheless the singular piece of information I clung to for months to deny my own responsibility for the accident. I was in a hurry to be lauded for my discovery and new-found global prominence yet, in my vainglorious haste, I lost the one grounding element in my life.

Miriam Magdaléne Vidal Archer was the reason I was there. I was the reason she wasn't.