Dustin Thomason: 12.21

Outside the enormous cathedral, she dashed out the end of her second cigarette, flicking it into a trash can beneath the strange, androgynous statue of the Virgin guarding the entrance. Then she pushed open the heavy bronze doors. Inside, Chel took in the familiar sights and sensations: sweet incense in the air, chanting from the sanctuary, and the largest collection of alabaster windows in the world, casting earth-toned light across the faces of the community of Maya immigrants gathered in the pews. These men and women were directly descended from the ancient people who ruled Central America for nearly a thousand years, who built the most advanced pre-Columbian civilization in the New World. They were also Chel’s friends.

At the pulpit, beneath five golden frames representing the phases of Jesus’s life, stood Maraka, the elderly bearded “daykeeper.” He waved a censer back and forth.

“Tewichim,” he chanted in Qu’iche, the branch of the Mayan language spoken by more than a million indígenas in Guatemala. “Tewchuninaq ub’antajik q’ukumatz, ajyo’l k’aslemal . ”

Blessed is the plumed serpent, giver of life.

Maraka turned to face eastward, then took a long drink of baalché , the milky-white sacred combination of tree bark, cinnamon, and honey. When he finished, he motioned to the crowd, and the church filled with chants again, one of the many ancient traditions that the archbishop let them practice here once or twice a week, as long as some of the indígenas continued to attend regular Catholic Mass as well.

Chel made her way down the side of the nave, trying not to draw attention, though at least one man saw her and waved enthusiastically. He’d asked her out half a dozen times since she’d helped him with an immigration form last month. She had lied and told him she was seeing someone. At five-foot-two, she might not look like most women in Los Angeles, but many here thought she was beautiful.

Beside the incense altar, Chel waited for the service to end. She looked out at the mix of congregants, including more than two dozen white faces. Until recently, there were only sixty members of Fraternidad . The group met here on Tuesday mornings to honor the gods and traditions of their ancestors in a steady stream of immigrants from all over the Maya region, including Chel’s own Guatemala.

But then the apocalypse groupies had started to show up. The press called them “2012ers,” and some seemed to believe that attending Maya ceremonies would exempt them from the end of the world, which they believed was less than two weeks away. Many other 2012ers didn’t bother to come here at all—they just preached ideas about the end of the “Long Count” calendar cycle from their own pulpits. Some argued that the oceans would flood, earthquakes would rip open fault lines, and the magnetic poles would switch. Some claimed it would bring a return to a more basic existence, banishing the excesses of technology from the earth. Still others believed that it would usher in a “fifth age” of man and wipe away the entire “fourth race,” all the humans who now walked the earth.

Serious Maya experts, including Chel, found the idea of an apocalypse on December 21 ridiculous. It was true that one of her ancestors’ signal achievements was a complex calendar system, and 2012ers were right when they claimed that according to the more than five-thousand-year-old Long Count, human history has consisted of four ages. But there was no credible reason to believe that the end of the thirteenth cycle of the Long Count would be different from any other calendar turn. Of course, that hadn’t stopped 2012ers from using ancient Maya wisdom to sell T-shirts and conference tickets or from making Chel’s people the butt of jokes on late-night TV.

“Chel?”

She turned to find Maraka behind her. She hadn’t even noticed that the ceremony had ended and people were filing out of their seats.

The daykeeper put a hand on her shoulder. He was almost eighty now, and his once-black hair had gone entirely white. “Welcome,” he said. “The office is ready. Of course, we’d all love to see you at an actual service again one of these weeks.”

Chel shrugged. “I’ll try to make it to one soon, I promise. I’ve just been very busy, Daykeeper.”

Maraka smiled. “Of course you are, Chel. In Lak’ech .”

I am you, and you are me.

Chel bowed her head toward him. It was a tradition that had fallen into disuse even in Guatemala, but many of the elders still appreciated it, and it felt like the least she could do given her own dwindling interest in prayer.

“In Lak’ech,” she repeated quietly before begging off to the back of the church.

Outside the priest’s office Chel used every week, the Larakams were first in line. She had heard that Vicente, the husband, was taken in by a bottom feeder in the moneylending business who preyed on people like them: newly arrived, unable to believe that what might be ahead could be worse than what they’d left behind in Guatemala. Chel wondered if his wife, Ina, who impressed her as an intelligent woman, had known better. Ina wore a floor-length skirt and a cotton huipil with intricate zig-zag patterns. She still dressed in the traditional way, and the traditional role of wife in their culture would be to support her husband no matter how bad his judgment.

“Thank you for seeing us,” she said quietly.

Vicente slowly explained that he had signed a contract at exorbitant interest in order to rent a one-room apartment in Echo Park, and now he had to pay out more than he earned working as a landscaper. He had the haggard look of someone with the weight of the world on him. Ina stood quietly by his side, but her eyes implored Chel. An unspoken message passed between the two women, and now Chel understood what it had cost Vicente to come to her and ask for help.

Silently, he gave Chel the papers he’d signed, and as she read the fine print she felt the familiar anger blooming inside her. Vicente and Ina were only two in a vast sea of immigrants from Guatemala trying to navigate this overwhelming new country, and there were many willing to take advantage. Still, on the whole, it was the Maya way to be too trusting. Five hundred years of oppression hadn’t managed to instill even survival-level cynicism in most of Chel’s people, and it cost them.

Fortunately for the Larakams, her contacts were extensive, particularly in the areas of legal aid. She wrote down the name of a lawyer and was about to call in the next person when Ina reached into her bag and handed Chel a plastic container.

“Pepian,” she said. “My daughter and I made it for you.”

Chel’s freezer was already full of the sweet-tasting chicken dish she was always gifted by Fraternidad members, but she took it anyway. It made her happy to think about Ina and her young daughter cooking it together and to know that this community had a future in L.A. Chel’s own mother, who’d grown up in a small village in Guatemala, was probably spending the morning in communion with Good Morning America over a bowl of Special K.

“Let me know what happens,” Chel said as she handed Vicente back their papers, “and next time don’t get involved with anyone whose face you see on bus-stop benches. That doesn’t make them famous. Not good famous, anyway. Come to me instead.”

Vicente took his wife’s hand and smiled tightly as they departed.

So it went for the next hour. Chel explained a vaccination program to a pregnant woman, weighed in on a credit-card dispute for the junior daykeeper, and dealt with a landlord complaint against an old friend of her mother’s.

Once her last visitor left, Chel leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, thinking about a ceramic vase she’d been working on at the Getty, the inside of which contained some of the first physical residues of ancient tobacco ever discovered. No wonder it was proving so damn hard for her to quit smoking. People had been doing it for millennia.