Revelation at Tikal | Literary Adventure Fiction Podcast

The safe route to Chichicastenango meant the long loop through Guatemala City. Cutty doesn't have time for safe. His sister Floey was last seen weeks ago, painting the monastery walls of Santo Tomás, and a job like that has an end. If she finishes before he reaches her, she's gone down another road he can't guess. So Cutty and Paula point the BMW down a thin dotted line on the map and ride four hu...

In Chapter 17 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty finally receives the replacement bearing that can get his motorcycle back on the road. The part arrives by cargo plane at the Tikal airstrip, carried in by a Scottish pilot whose casual story suddenly changes everything. Over beers at the Jaguar Inn, the pilot reveals that he met Floey, traveling as Florencia de la Carmelites, and flew her from Tikal tow...

In Chapter 16 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty realizes he has not been following Floey so much as the afterimage she leaves behind: rumors, sightings, symbols, and the lives she has disturbed along the way. Timothy departs Tikal by DC-3, the Temple of the Moon acolytes disappear from view, and Cutty's search for his missing artist sister takes on a new shape. As he waits for a motorcycle part and ga...

Cutty is waiting on the airstrip at Tikal, running every wrong version of this reunion in his head, when Paula steps off the bus from Palenque and straight back into his life. This chapter follows their uneasy reconnection: her hard questions about his drug use, his promise to stay clean, and the fragile "probation" they both know he deserves. Together they explore the ruins of Tikal—temples, acro...

Cutty's day at the Tikal airstrip starts with flirtation and boredom and turns, very quickly, into an animal rescue and a reckoning. While Colleen heads back toward the Jaguar Inn, a charter plane vomits out tourists in double-knit leisure suits and one woman in a red dress with a toy poodle in a matching sweater. When a huge eagle stoops out of the hard blue sky and locks onto "Sweetie Pie" as it...

Tikal, Guatemala. 1977. Cutty wakes in a thatched bohío hollowed out by dysentery, marooned with a dead BMW, a missing sister he hasn't found, and an outhouse that smells like flat soda. Civilization arrives in the form of a battered VW bus and a campground full of fellow wanderers — Conrad the Canadian mechanic, Raul the Madrid snob, Kevin the Australian veteran of worse scrapes, and two art hist...

Before dawn in Palenque, our narrator kicks his BMW to life and tears off into the jungle, certain Paula has climbed into Conrad's jeep and abandoned him for Tikal. She hasn't — but the story he's telling himself is louder than the one that's true. The road has other plans. Dysentery, bad pills, and jungle heat turn the ride into a moving disaster. At Puerto Fronterizo El Ceibo, teenage Guatemalan...

Cutty pays the bill for every bad choice he's made on the road to Palenque. As the last of the speed burns out of his system, Randy's grudge and Hernandez's talk of pilgrimage start to sink in—and Paula quietly decides how close she's willing to ride beside him. A thin wall, two separate motel rooms, and one simple question ("Promise me you're not going to kill us chasing your sister") push their...

Cutty and Paula limp into the sweltering jungle town of Palenque looking for a barefoot "nun" who paints motel signs and answers to Floey. Instead, they walk straight into a wall of heat, mushroom‑eating pilgrims, and Randy—an old L.A. friend whose grudge may be more dangerous than any bad road. Over one long day, Cutty learns how far ahead his sister has already gone, who flew her into the jungle...

In Chapter 11 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty decides that time is the enemy. Floey circled Palenque in her books. She might already be there. She might have found whatever she was looking for and moved on. So Cutty does what Cutty does best and worst: he tells himself a story that makes the reckless thing sound necessary. He takes a black beauty without telling Paula. What follows is an all-night s...

In this chapter of Revelation at Tikal, the road finally eases up—at least for a while. Cutty and Paula roll into a funky beach shack outside Mazatlán, where "Mi Restaurante" serves fish baked in a stone stove, Mexican Coke in sweating glass bottles, and attitude from a green parrot that refuses crackers. A simple meal turns into a kind of truce: between sore bodies, bad Spanish, and a mission tha...

After the play and a long drinking session with the actors, Cutty and Paula wake up in Rocinante at Dr. Summers' place feeling the price of the night before. Cutty's head is trying to leave through the ceiling, his stomach has become a tilting disk at the bottom of a lake, and the only sensible rule is simple: move slowly, and do not anger the physics. But even hungover, he reaches for his journal...

Episode Description In Chapter 8 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty needs a place to leave Rocinante and a person who knew him before Alaska. He picks Dr. Jennifer Summers, the Beverly Hills High English teacher who once treated his writing seriously enough that the writer he might be became more real than the screw-up he already was. The drive over gives Paula and Cutty their first real travel-compani...

Episode Description In Chapter 7 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty parks Rocinante across two metered spaces in front of the Oxnard DMV — a minor crime in service of an important cause — and walks into one of the smaller circles of California hell. Linoleum floor. Quiet suffering in lines. The shortest queue is Information, behind a sun-bleached teenager trying to retake his driver's test before "Surf...

Episode Description In Chapter 6 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty wakes inside Rocinante still gripping the fingers of a dream. He is standing in front of a small locked metal case. The long, complicated key in his hand should fit, but the teeth are wrong. It is not his key. It is Floey's. The key stretches and grows new notches as he holds it, until he sees her hiding it in a crevice between two gra...

Bonus: Previously in Revelation at Tikal – Chapters 1–3 I flew down from Alaska expecting a surprise reunion with my big sister at her first Los Angeles gallery show—and walked straight into a tombstone painting she'd signed with her own name and death date. While collectors treated her "death" as a clever stunt and the gallery owner counted the money, Floey herself was nowhere. Chasing the few cl...

Full Episode Description In Chapter 5 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty and Paula need a place to sleep before they hit the marina at Oxnard, and Cutty picks Leo Carrillo State Beach Park, the same stretch of sand he used to sneak into on his motorcycle whenever school and friends started to itch. Rocinante is too tall for the bridge, and there's floodwater under it anyway, so they take spot number tw...

Full Episode Description In Chapter 4 of Revelation at Tikal, Cutty and Paula climb back into Rocinante and head five more miles up the mountain road, away from the main Temple compound and toward the rented bungalow where Paula and Floey once lived as roommates. On the way, Paula explains the financial machinery behind Ayer Dada's smile — the sob story about Brotherhood vehicles, the donated prop...

Full Episode Description In Chapter 3 of Revelation at Tikal, the search for Floey takes Cutty up into the mountains north of Pasadena, where Rocinante grinds her way through hairpins with the BMW lashed to the stern rack like a pendulum trying to drag the whole rig into the canyon. A glossy billboard for Villa Viejo, a paper retirement project that exists only in an architect's hallucination, giv...

Chapter 2: Rocinante and Old Friends Floey's no-show at her own gallery opening sends Cutty back to old haunts. He rides up to Jerry's Pasadena house, lets his hand trail along Rocinante — the thirty-foot diesel bus Floey gave him as a graduation gift — and drops down into the bomb-shelter bunker where Jerry, Mark, and Randy are still jamming as if no time has passed. The weed is gone, replaced by...

Chapter 1 — The Tombstone Painting Los Angeles, December 20, 1977. Cutty Braughn flies in from Anchorage expecting a surprise reunion at his sister Floey's first gallery opening on La Cienega. What he walks into instead is a small framed painting of a tombstone — her name, her dates, her handwriting — and a room full of strangers placing bets on whether she's dead, missing, or staging a stunt to r...