He was tall and handsome. His suit was light brown, as were his eyes and hair. He was ten years younger than I and it was obvious that I’d never come close to him in the world.
“Joe Lion,” I lied giving the name my seat had been reserved under.
I put out my hand and he shook it.
We sat there side by side with Bruce and his goons all around us.
I was upset at first but then the lights went down and the music began.
It was a Mozart violin and piano concerto, Violin Concerto No. 5, in A major, being performed by an orchestra that had come from Beijing. The rage, alcohol, and sweet sense of victory in my veins made the classical music for once beautiful to my ears. I actually enjoyed the performance but I also had a job to think about.
Compliment both men, Bron had told me. Your support of both of them at just this moment in time will cause a change, albeit a small one, in a world that is tilting toward the Eschaton.
My fingers were tingling. My instincts told me that there was a fire burning somewhere and I should be running away. The music anchored me but at the same time I felt that there was something I had forgotten. There was something, something …
The Chinese musicians’ playing was flawless. They executed the works of the past master perfectly but I wondered what they could have done with someone like Jimi Hendrix.
Whenever I closed my eyes I saw a bright red light shining in the distance. This light hurt me deeply like a sore in the folds of my brain. Even if I only blinked the light came back to me. But when my eyes were open the concert was soothing, lovely.
In the middle of the performance Tom Ontell rose from his seat. He was preparing to go.
I turned to him and whispered, “I hope you win, Mr. Senator.”
He smiled at me and reached out. I clasped his hand with real feeling and he seemed pleased, not even wiping the sweat away.
For the next few hours it felt as if I were floating between this and that. I left right after the would-be senator. I had dinner at a pizza place near Lincoln Center and then took a cab back to my forever sublet. I went over the litany of what Bron wanted me to do. Pharmacy, cabdriver, Lincoln Center … I was coming in the door to my apartment when I remembered that I was supposed to take the pill that I got from the pharmacist before entering the hall.
I took out the plastic amber container and dumped the pill into my sweating palm. It was a huge round thing, turquoise and shiny. It took me three attempts to swallow it. I was feeling confused and achy. I found myself trying to remember what time it was. It was night I was certain; time to report to Bron.
Sweat stung my eyes and now the red light enveloped me with its roots of pain writhing through my arms and legs and torso.
I took three steps to the loft, where my mother once knitted sweaters for the homeless, and fell, drool coming from my lips, my blood jumping in my veins like dancers at Mardi Gras in the garish red light.
* * *
FOR A LONG TIME the light grew brighter and hotter. I was an earthworm shriveling under a relentless red sun. I wasn’t asleep or even unconscious. It was more like I had been paralyzed by a great scarlet spider who would one day return to suck the juice of life from me. I accepted this fate. The pain of all that red was draining me, making me into a corpse who still somehow retained consciousness, while wishing without much commitment for death.
And then on the distant horizon of my mind’s eye a blue wisp of ambient light worked its way through the hideous curtain of red. A heavier element, it descended bringing with it breezes and showers of cooling blue weather. It rained relief down on me allowing life and breath and blood back into my desiccated cadaver.
And then for a very long time I slept. The hard stairs were like the most advanced space age mattress. There was no gravity or pain or hunger even. I slept like a child after the longest day of his life. I slept like a dead king who had delivered his people from famine, war, and plague.
When I finally awoke my body ached all over. My lips were cracked. I had soiled myself. I stumbled back down the stairs, undressed, turned on the shower, and sat in the bathtub allowing the hot water to cascade over me. Looking down at my body I felt odd. After a few minutes I realized that I looked different … I’d lost weight, a lot of it.
I washed and washed again and when the water finally went cold I threw my pants into the tub and made my way up the stairs.
Bron had been trying to contact me for a long time. I was about to respond to him when I noticed the date. It was Wednesday, four days since I’d gone to the concert. The news ribbon across the top of the screen was talking about, had been reporting for days about, the sudden deaths of Tom Ontell, Bruce Boxman his head of security, and Mike Harris who worked for Boxman. There had been 278 deaths from a disease that doctors had not yet isolated or even named. The press had labeled it the Scarlet Death because of a rash that had appeared on the faces of more than half of the victims.
The CDC was looking for a middle-aged black man, named Joe Lion, who had been sitting next to Ontell at the Lincoln Center concert. At some point the candidate had complained of this man having had sweaty hands. Profuse sweating was one symptom of the Scarlet Death a disease that came on quickly and killed anyone who didn’t receive immediate medical care.
Bron, are you there?
Friend Hogarth, you are alive. Thanks to the stars and moons and the lanes betwixt.
There are over two hundred people dead, Bron. Dead from a disease I gave them.
You merely shook hands with hopefuls, friend Hogarth. You did not know that they would die.
Hundreds died.
Thousands would have expired if M. D. Amir was left on his own. He would have gone home and infected people in his community, people who the authorities would not have noticed for days. Thousands would have died if not for the future senator’s untimely demise.
You made me murder him.
You were doing the work of the Divine, friend Hogarth. There are beings far from your time and place, superior in ken and subtlety that will live and prosper because you killed a man whose misguided zeal would have slaughtered millions and another man who would have destroyed all meaningful life on Earth.
Bron explained to me that the pill I should have taken earlier was an extremely powerful antibiotic in a time-delayed coating. I had begun to succumb to the Scarlet Death when the medicine finally kicked in.
I hate you, Bron. I will turn you over to the police.
But, friend Hogarth, who will believe you when you tell them that an anonymous person over the Internet masterminded a biological attack on a senatorial candidate from Ohio?
He was right of course, I had no proof and also I had no idea how Bron had predicted the events that unfolded. It was a long string of unrelated, circumstantial events. Even if I could convince the police that I was the weapon used to commit the crimes they would blame me and never get to Bron—unless …
No, friend Hogarth. My conduit to your computer is not only untraceable it is also undetectable. If you attempt to contact the authorities they will become suspicious of you but they will never suspect the true nature of our venture.
Can you read my mind, Bron?
Not at all, friend Hogarth. I have been monitoring you, reading your documents, following your interests on what you call cable TV, and, at times, listening to your conversations over fiber optic lines. Over time and through these methods I have come to be able to predict with some accuracy your response in different situations.
The smug confidence of his words both enraged and frightened me. Bron had turned me into a murderer and there was nothing that I could do about it. If I went to the police with the truth they would dismiss me as a lunatic. And if I convinced them of my involvement by telling them about the antibiotic I bought under a pseudonym they would arrest me and try me as a mass murderer and a terrorist.
But I was innocent. There was no way that I could have known about the Scarlet Death or the assassination plots of Br
on. There was no rational explanation that I could convince the authorities with. No one would believe me, not my mother, not Miguel.
You might say that I should have known that there was something wrong from the beginning, that I should have been suspicious of the clandestine meetings and my sudden promotion. But Bron didn’t have me distributing state secrets or toting bombs. I had gone from being a nobody in the middle of nowhere to a position of power and respect. Bron didn’t ask me to break any laws or hurt anyone—not that I could tell anyway. I hadn’t had sex in three years before Mink and Shawna came to my door. I hadn’t been called sir but a handful of times in my entire life.
While I was thinking Bron was reeling out long paragraphs. But I didn’t read his words. I had come to understand that I would never get the upper hand in a dialogue with him, whoever or whatever he was.
My situation, I understood, was hopeless and so I got up, unplugged the power strip connected to my computer, plasma monitor, and printer. Bron blipped out of existence, disappearing from my life permanently.
I breathed in a deep sigh of resignation and went down to sit at the small table next to my stove. There I prepared for the problems that might still come my way. Nearly three hundred people had died because of my actions … Well, not exactly from my actions; M. D. Amir had gotten the disease from the fare he’d picked up from the airport before me. He, and his fare, Malik Johnson, had given the disease to their families. But those infection branches had been cut off early because of the would-be senator and his broader dissemination of the disease. There was something to Bron’s claim that he, and I, had helped reveal the illness before it could cause much more widespread damage.
But there was still guilt to assign.
I wasn’t guilty but I had to be ready if the cops came to investigate me. I decided that I would tell them a tale about meeting a man in front of Lincoln Center who just came up to me and offered the ticket. This man said that he had an urgent appointment and that he didn’t want the ticket to go to waste. His name was Joe Lion, I’d say and that was why I used his name when introducing myself. They could ask me about the fight or what I was doing at Lincoln Center but I could bluff my way through all of that. I would quit my job at Shiloh. I would not sign on to a computer again in five years, maybe I’d never sign on again.
After making up my mind I crawled into bed and slept for hours, until hunger and thirst drove me to consciousness.
I kept a five-gallon jug of water and thirty-two cans of tuna in my apartment ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the citywide blackout a couple of years later. I figured if I had to stay inside for a week or so that would be enough to see me through.
I bolted my front door, unplugged the telephone, disconnected the door buzzer, and for the next five days I read my book and watched cartoons on the station dedicated to that genre. I did not listen to the news, call anyone, or even look out the window very often. I ate two cans of tuna preserved in spring water each day and continued to lose weight.
My sleeping habits changed drastically. I slept in short intervals at odd times of the day and night. I had also unplugged my clocks and put tape over the time on the cable box. I didn’t want to know anything about the world outside my door. Once, when I thought it was day, I looked out of the window and saw that it was the dead of night.
I always went to sleep watching cartoons.
One time I woke up, I didn’t know if it was day or night, having dreamed that my mother had called to me. I thought that I must have turned over on the remote in my sleep because the TV was tuned to a nature channel. The topic was jellyfish and their long history in the sea.
The show depicted many species of the diaphanous creatures and their endless, floating, dreamlike existence on all levels of the ocean. The images were so beautiful and haunting that I kept watching, pretty sure that no news coverage would interrupt.
One jellyfish had developed in the depths of the African Ocean (now called the Atlantic) but slowly migrated to more shallow (but still deep) waters off the coast of Madagascar. These creatures were giants among their kin, anywhere from fifteen to forty-five feet in length, tubular, nearly colorless, between three and twelve feet in diameter, and possessed of a strange luminescence that conventional science had not been able to explain. These sea dwellers devoured anything that would fit inside their hollow bodies; from schools of krill to the man-eating white sharks that infested those waters.
“Now and then in the depths these alien-looking creatures gather by the thousands creating strange lights not inside themselves but between them.” The narrator’s voice was deep and sonorous. He spoke with conviction and empathy for the strange herd of diaphanous sea creatures.
The lights appearing in the gray darkness of the ocean were like the whorls of galaxies. As the camera neared these lights a chorus of sound arose: beautiful music and voices. These vibrations caused a deep longing in me. Tears ran down my face. The images were no longer on a screen before my eyes but inside my mind. For brief snatches I was not even me experiencing the excruciating pain of being. I was, somehow, these different, alien, inexplicable beings that moved toward each other and praised …
The intensity of the vision outstripped any experience I had ever known. I felt things that were impossible. There were beings far from this planet, this galaxy sending their knowledge and their spirits through these odd tubular beings to places so far away that space could not contain the distances.
“Sometimes the Stelladren die,” the narrator said.
I had not heard this name Stelladren before. I reasoned that this appellation was given at the beginning of the show. I grabbed on to this mundane thought hoping that I could somehow pull myself back to the normal, nonecstatic world. I was about to press the information bar to get the description of the show when one of the blank spaces between the lights imploded with a wan and yet exquisite glimmer. A dissonant cacophony tore at my mind and my heart. It felt as if the anchor that all life has to some unseen universal soul had been severed and that lives, billions of them, were set adrift without meaning or hope.
This passage of light transformed me. I was a mother holding her stillborn child, a man standing on a battlefield where his race has just been slaughtered, a beast of the plains suddenly dropped into the middle of an endless sea. I cried out from a pain so deep inside my mind that I lost consciousness so as not to die from the deprivation.
Awareness returned as a sensation of floating. I was a clump of seaweed on a fairly calm sea under overcast skies. I had no intelligence or goals. Flies flitted about on my surface leaves while small fish nibbled away at my underside.
When I awoke Scooby-Doo and his friends were solving a child’s mystery and I knew that my soul had been irrevocably changed. I had again been comatose for many hours. In that time the well of my unconsciousness had rushed upward into the tiny capacity of my awareness. I wanted more than anything to return to the time when I was a data entry operator with no knowledge and no real meaning or purpose to my life.
* * *
WHEN I PLUGGED MY COMPUTER in and turned it on Bron was waiting.
Friend Hogarth?
Tell me about the Stelladren, Bron.
They are as I showed you on your television, friend Hogarth. They are the conduit of trillions of races that commune across uncountable, indefinable planes and spaces. They are gods to an infinite number of sentient beings flung across the billion billion planes of existence. They bring understanding and forgiveness, transcendence and grace to the Universal Soul that contains all life in all of its permutations.
And humanity threatens their existence?
Mankind’s abuse of the planet will destroy the Stelladren. And this will throw us all into darkness and death.
How can we keep this from happening?
The only sure way is for the human race to perish.
I was startled by this declaration not for its immensity but because in my heart I agreed so readily with this disembodi
ed intelligence’s sentiment. I had felt the godlike strings of the lights that glimmered between the Stelladren. Each one of these beings represented an entire universe of thought and being. They encompassed and connected life-forms far beyond any human comprehension. If humanity, consciously or not, threatened all life on all planes of existence then we must certainly come to an end. This was a truth harbored inside of me like a new organ, a gland that secreted a bitter empathy for the Divine.
Friend Hogarth?
It’s hard to understand, Bron. How can humanity rise to such importance? The way you’re saying it we are a threat to God. But that’s like a drop of rain on a redwood, a grain of sand on a camel’s back.
The Stelladren are not themselves Spirit, friend Hogarth. They are matricies that have harnessed a form of radiation that can open portals to other realities and across existence. They are not soul but a material construct through which the soul can make itself manifest. They are like hands or eyes or genes; they are conduits, material things that can suffer damage and die.
So killing all of humanity is like me taking that antibiotic to kill the Scarlet Death? We’re like a disease for these creatures?
Exactly.
But what if something else happens? Something that your time sense has not yet perceived?
I do not understand you, friend Hogarth?
What if a hundred years after man is gone something like that meteor comes out of nowhere? It hits the planet and blocks the sun for a thousand years or maybe a plant develops on Madagascar that makes some toxin that kills or changes the Stelladren? What if there were no computers, no people to do your bidding in order to save the Stelladren from future dangers?
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