Chapter 91: Director, Why Are You Doing This?
The Natural History Museum had been closed for a month.
The sign on the front said Temporary Closure — Renovation and Restoration in the specific font of institutional signage that communicated we are handling this without elaborating on what this was. The entrance that Bebop and Rocksteady had turned into a structural question mark was being addressed by a construction crew that had been briefed on the damage and not on the cause of the damage, which was the correct approach.
Inside, the restoration team moved through the exhibit halls with the careful efficiency of people doing work they'd trained for — cataloguing the damage, assessing the pieces, the specific quiet of a building that was used to being full of people operating without them.
The hall had the specific quality it always had in the daytime, which Rango had noticed on his occasional visits during business hours: impressive, well-curated, the accumulated weight of collected history in a building that was designed to carry it. Different from the nighttime version entirely. The nighttime version had opinions and moved around.
The restorers had been working for two weeks. They had developed a rhythm, a routine, the comfortable territorial understanding of people who had taken ownership of a space.
They had also developed a specific sensitivity to the Director's moods, the way people who work closely with someone develop a weather sense for that person's atmospheric conditions. The Director's face had been overcast since the Foot Clan incident — not at the staff, not personally, but with the specific grief of someone who cared about the collection and was processing damage to it.
So when he came through the back door this morning, and the overcast was gone, replaced by something that none of them had a reference point for because they had never seen it before — the Director, beaming, moving with the energy of someone who had received news they had been waiting for their entire professional life — the restoration team did what people do when the weather does something unprecedented.
They stopped working and looked at each other.
"Is he—" one of them started.
"I don't know," another said.
"Should we—"
"I don't know," the same person said.
The Director swept through the hall, paused at the information desk, and turned to address the room with an expression that had no precedent in the institutional memory of any person present.
"Everyone," he said. "Put the work down for the afternoon. Coffee and pastries are coming — I called ahead. Consider it a thank you for the last two weeks." He gestured at the hall around them — at the damage, at the work in progress, at the collection in its state of careful repair. "You're doing good work. This place is in good hands."
He walked to his office.
The door didn't close behind him.
The restoration team looked at each other for a long moment.
"Is he ill?" someone asked.
"He bought us pastries," someone else said.
"That's not an answer."
"It might be an answer," the first person said.
In the office, the Director moved with the specific energy of someone for whom the day has already produced its most important result and everything subsequent is pleasant administration.
He went to the bookshelf.
He ran his finger along the spines with the practiced affection of someone who knew exactly where everything was and had known for thirty years. He pulled three volumes — not arbitrarily, with the purpose of someone retrieving specific tools.
Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. The Director's copy was a first edition in a protective case, which he handled without the case because he trusted himself.
Gulliver's Travels. Jonathan Swift, 1726. A later edition, well-read, the spine creased in the places that mattered.
The Mysterious Island. Jules Verne, 1874. The Director's copy was French, the original, which he read in the original because he had learned French specifically for this purpose thirty years ago.
He opened each to its map illustration — the hand-drawn cartography that the original authors had included, which most readers treated as decorative and which the Director had spent thirty years treating as something else.
He laid them side by side on the desk.
He produced a sheet of paper and a pen and began the process — careful, methodical, the work of someone who had been building toward this specific calculation for decades and was finally running it with the correct data.
The coordinates in the bottom right corner of each map. The rotation required to align the projection systems, which were different because the maps were drawn in different centuries and for different nominal purposes. The overlay that produced a point not present in any of the individual sources but implied by all three.
He wrote the numbers down.
Looked at them.
Said something that the office walls were going to remember for a long time — something that would have been entirely out of character for anyone who had known Director McPhee for twenty years and was, in that specific moment, the only appropriate response.
He slapped the desk with both hands.
Stood up.
Sat back down because his legs had stopped participating in the immediate term.
"Verne was right," he said, to the coordinates. Not to himself — to Jules Verne, who had been dead since 1905 and had apparently been right about something significant. "That beautiful, meticulous, impossible old man was right."
He sat with it for a moment — the specific quality of a person who has spent their professional life operating on a conviction that most of their colleagues considered eccentric, finally receiving the confirmation they'd been waiting for.
Then the joy arrived.
Full, uncomplicated, the joy of someone who has no mixed feelings about a discovery because the discovery is exactly what they'd hoped for and nothing complicated had arrived with it yet.
He started humming.
It was Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx, which was neither the most dignified nor the most contextually obvious choice for the moment, but joy doesn't always express itself through contextually obvious choices.
He was not fully aware he was humming.
He was slightly aware he was moving in a way that, if observed, might be described as dancing, and had decided not to let this concern him.
He was entirely unaware that the door was still open.
Rango stood in the doorway.
He had come to the museum with a specific purpose — to have a specific conversation with his employer about a specific island — and had arrived to find the Director of the Natural History Museum of New York, in his office, with three antique books open on his desk, doing something with his shoulders that Richard Marx had probably not intended to inspire but which the song had apparently inspired anyway.
He stood there for a moment.
The Director sensed him — the specific awareness of someone interrupted in a private moment — and turned.
The humming stopped.
The movement stopped.
The Director sat down with the specific composure of someone reassembling their professional presentation around an expression that was too far into undisguised delight to be fully recalled.
"Rango," he said, with the tone of someone establishing that this was a normal Tuesday. "You didn't knock."
"The door was open," Rango said.
"Yes," the Director said. "There was a reason for that."
"You forgot to close it."
"There was a reason for that as well," the Director said, with dignity.
He looked at Rango. Looked at the books on his desk, which were now simply books on a desk and not evidence of anything.
"You're on vacation," he said. "The museum is closed. Is something wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," Rango said. He came in and sat in the chair across the desk — the chair that Kevin had occupied for his interview, that various visitors occupied over the years, that had the specific wear pattern of a chair that had been sat in by people having important conversations. "I have a question about Indiana Jones."
The Director's expression did the thing expressions do when a name arrives unexpectedly in a context where it nonetheless makes complete sense.
"How do you know Indiana Jones?" he said.
"He bought some things from me," Rango said. "Antiques. Coins and paintings from a collection I came across." He paused. "He paid fifteen million dollars for them and then told me there was an island."
The Director was quiet for a moment.
"He told you about the island," he said.
"He told me about the island," Rango confirmed. "He also told me you agreed to go."
The Director looked at his books.
At the coordinates on the paper.
"I agreed to go," he said, in the tone of someone confirming a decision they've made completely.
Rango leaned forward.
"Director," he said, with the specific sincerity of someone who has thought about how to say something and has decided that directness is the only register that will work. "I've been working here for eight months. In that time, you've been the most consistently decent person in a position of authority that I've encountered in this city. You gave Kevin a job based on my word. You came in at midnight in your pajamas when the door got destroyed and your first question was whether I was okay." He paused. "I want to say something, and I want you to hear it as coming from that context."
The Director waited.
"That island is dangerous," Rango said. "Jones's forty years of documentation describes things that aren't in any standard category. Not archaeological dangerous — actually dangerous. The things on that island predate the current supernatural order." He held the Director's gaze. "You have resources. You have a career that matters. You have a collection that you've spent your life building. Why take a risk like this?"
The Director looked at him.
Rango had expected several possible responses — the rational acknowledgment of the risk, the deferral to Jones's expertise, even the mild irritation of someone being told what to do by an employee.
What he got was something else.
The Director was quiet for a long moment.
Then he looked at the books — at Treasure Island, at Gulliver's Travels, at The Mysterious Island in its original French — with the expression of someone looking at things that have been with them for a very long time and that contain something irreplaceable.
"I want to tell you something," the Director said. "About the museum."
Rango waited.
"Every morning," the Director said, "I arrive first. You know that. You've worked nights — you've been here when I come in." He looked at the window, at the angle of morning light he'd been coming in to every day for twenty-two years. "The reason I arrive first is because for a few minutes, before anyone else is here, it's just me and the collection. The whole building. Every hall." He paused. "In those minutes, I'm not the Director. I'm not an administrator managing budgets and insurance claims and construction timelines. I'm just a person in a room with everything that's ever been discovered and brought back and preserved."
He looked at the books again.
"I grew up reading Verne," he said. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Journey to the Center of the Earth. The Mysterious Island. My mother read them to me before I could read them myself. I became a historian because of those books — because I understood, from them, that the world was larger than what you could see from where you were standing and that the business of a life well-spent was going toward the larger world." He paused. "I've spent forty years as a custodian of other people's discoveries. I've built something I'm genuinely proud of. But I have never—" his voice didn't waver, but something in it changed register — "I have never been the person who found the thing."
The office was very quiet.
Outside, the construction crew was somewhere in the building doing what construction crews do. The restoration team was drinking the coffee the Director had ordered and probably still trying to process the dancing.
"Jones's coordinates," the Director said, "confirm that Verne's island is real. Not metaphorically, not archaeologically approximately — real, at a specific latitude and longitude, confirmed by cross-referencing three independent sources that each contain one third of the information." He looked at the coordinates on the paper. "If the island exists, then the world at the center of the earth is probably real. The Nautilus is probably real. Everything Verne described is probably real, which means my entire professional life has been spent in the antechamber of the actual discovery, and the door is open."
He looked at Rango.
"You ask me why I would take the risk," he said. "I want to ask you something in return. If you knew — with certainty — that the thing you'd been working toward your entire life was real and accessible, and that the only thing between you and it was the risk of the journey, would you stay home?"
Rango looked at him.
At the books.
At the coordinates on the paper.
At the man across the desk, who had been sitting in this office for twenty-two years arriving first and leaving last, and who had just been handed confirmation that the thing he'd been working toward was exactly what he'd believed it was.
He thought about his parents — about Pete and Louise, who had been the best the Cabin had ever had, who had gone to Los Angeles toward something that needed them there and hadn't come back. About his grandfather, who had spent thirty years building a gun for a specific purpose and had apparently known it would be his grandson who used it.
He thought about what he'd said to the Curator about why he'd come to New York. About the first night the exhibits came alive and what that had felt like.
He thought about Toothless — about the Night Fury's appearance in Skull Island's oldest documented accounts. About the system's patterns and what they pointed toward.
About a world that was larger than what you could see from where you were standing.
"No," Rango said. "I wouldn't stay home."
The Director looked at him.
"Neither would I," the Director said.
He picked up the bag he had packed — already packed, which meant this conversation had always been going to end one way — and stood.
At the door, he paused.
"The pastries should be here by now," he said, over his shoulder. "The restoration team has been doing excellent work. You should have some."
"Director," Rango said.
The Director stopped.
"The elderly tour group," Rango said. "Is that still the current heading?"
The Director turned.
"I don't carry bags," Rango said. "I want that established upfront."
Something happened to the Director's face that the restoration team would have been unable to categorize if they'd seen it — something that was simultaneously the expression of a man who has just been told yes and the expression of a man who has known for eight months that this was the person he wanted in the field with him.
"Noted," the Director said. "Your job is your job."
"My job," Rango confirmed.
"Which is not bag-carrying," the Director said.
"Correct."
"Understood," the Director said, and the two of them looked at each other across the office with the specific recognition of two people who have just confirmed something that both of them already knew.
"The Cohiba Esplendidos and the Burgundy," the Director said. "They're in a case at my apartment. I'll have them sent to the museum." He paused. "You've earned them. Multiple times over, if I'm being precise about it."
He walked out.
Rango sat in the chair for a moment.
Looked at the three books on the desk. At the French edition of The Mysterious Island, the original, the one the Director had learned a language to read.
At the coordinates on the paper.
Everything is connected to everything, Amanna had said. That's the architecture.
He looked at Toothless's summons. At the island accounts with Night Furies as scouts. At the coins as mechanism pieces. At his mother investigating Fiona in the year Emma was born. At his parents in Los Angeles maintaining a cage that Azazel had been cultivating toward for decades. At Indiana Jones with forty years of documentation arriving at a specific latitude and longitude.
One thing led to the next. It always did.
Boston tonight. Emma.
Then Los Angeles. His family.
Then — at the end of that thread, wherever it led — an island that Jules Verne had written about in 1874 and the Director had been working toward since before Rango was born.
He stood up.
Left the coordinates on the desk where they were — the Director would want them there.
Walked out through the exhibit hall, past the restoration team and their coffee and their pastries, past the Africa Hall and the Egypt Hall and the Europe Hall and the specific collected weight of everything that had ever been discovered and brought back and preserved.
Through the entrance — the rebuilt one, the new frame and new hardware, the door that Dom's contact had matched to the original specifications at Rango's specific request.
Outside into the New York afternoon.
McQueen was at the curb.
"Boston," Rango said.
"Boston," McQueen confirmed, and the engine came to life with the specific sound of something that knew where it was going.
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