The Manhattan Prophet

by Jake Packard

  A millionth of a second was not good enough for Bullmoose, however it didn’t stop him from liking Dolores. She was sweet, and beneath those bulky sweaters of hers lurked a killer body that did prove to him that the universe was curved. Bullmoose was built in such a way that he couldn’t help himself.

  It was a weak moment when Henry actually let Grandma talk him into bringing Dolores over to Perry Street so she could be formally introduced. After a couple of glasses of wine Henry stormed out in a rage over some inappropriate remarks by Bullmoose in front of his girl. Even though both Grandma and Bullmoose protested and said that it was just his way of trying to be charming and there really was no harm, no foul, Henry was too sensitive to his dad’s incomprehensible social graces and inescapable reputation. He fumed out of Perry Street with Dolores in tow, vowing never to come back again.

  To Bullmoose’s credit, he persevered. He made repeated overtures for forgiveness to his son even though he was rebuked again and again. He called, he faxed and he emailed even though he hated computers. He stood out in the rain waiting for them to come home to their love nest by the T only to be violently ignored by his son who would unlock the front door, hustle inside and stomp up the stairs, slamming the door behind him. Dolores gave Bullmoose a wispy look over her shoulder, not really understanding the problem. Admittedly he said some off-color jokes that night that most people would consider highly questionable considering the circumstances, but Dolores found him cute, unique in a middle-aged way. She really didn’t find the disrespect in his slightly tipsy comments that Henry did. But no matter how gentle she was trying to convey this simplicity to that brilliant mad theoretical physicist she was totally in love with, he refused to listen. The boundaries of family feuds, powered by those particular emotions, know no logical constraints.

  The awful silence continued until that fateful graduation day. Grandma sat alone near the back as her son accepted his diploma, magna cum laude. Cautious, she approached them after the commencement, and couldn’t help but detect the difference beneath the caps and the billowing gowns. Sensitive to the explosiveness embedded into the personality of her son, she tried to make small talk with both of them, but they acted more cryptic than usual. Dolores had a furtive and nervous look about her. After a few minutes of awkward nothing talk, they excused themselves saying to Grandma that they had some parties to attend. They disappeared into the blazing and dazzling hullabaloo of academic costumes.

  A mother is nothing without her innate bundle of instincts. Grandma hustled over to Kendall Square and hung out in a Greek diner across the street from their apartment and nursed several cups of coffee until she spied them walking up the street.

  Henry’s proud arm was tenderly wrapped around Dolores’ shoulders and her lithe little hands were proudly holding her very rotund and pregnant belly. Well, of course! How could Grandma help herself then? She left some change on the counter, thanked the counter girl in demure tones and sprinted across the street.

  She caught them at the moment of entry into their humble apartment that overlooked the subway as it emerged from underground, just as Henry’s key was inserted into the lock, opening the door for his expectant woman.

  There on the noisy and dirty street below their little love shack, the tears of exhalation and exultation came running out and mighty hugs followed. Grandma was always a cut above the rest. There was nothing she did to intend or provoke guilt and no contrition was made. Just the joy of new family and the jubilance of the grand mystery of life came streaming forth from within this special woman, and this was something even these cool, budding clinicians who professed to be unraveling the origins of the universe could appreciate now. Grandma was now zooming into her own, through her son, her fate and destiny now made apparent by the fecundity of the moment.

  Grandma made no mention of marriage, far be that from Grandma, but she was delighted to hear that the kids were intending to get married at city hall before the baby was born. Henry made mention of this with subtle references to his own bitter feelings of illegitimacy, which Grandma never could deter. Now wasn’t the time to make a case for how very loved Henry was and how certainly he was wanted. A marriage certificate could never have changed any of that. To her this was about the reconciliation and reuniting of her family over the impending arrival of its newest member, her grandchild. She didn’t want to get into any sticky past issues.

  Even though he was mollified by the emotions, Henry was still stubborn and resisted any meetings whatsoever with his dad. However he had to back away from these feelings and learn to honor the wishes and emotions of the women in his life, who always dominate when it comes to basic family matters like childbirth, since they were the ones doing the real work.

  Against his wishes he agreed to a little baby shower, but he wanted Dolores’ relatives present as well, since it was a joining of the two families that was being celebrated. In his tender young mind it would serve as a much-needed buffer between himself and his father. A date was set for an intimate family get together with the newly expectant, their parents and, of course, Uncle Pranan and Aunt Lorraine, the only other close family for Henry.

  It was a long summer night at the end of June. The coastal North Atlantic haze and humidity had settled over Boston, making it feel more like sub-Sahara Africa than Massachusetts, everyone retreating to air conditioning, their nerves already frayed.

  Pranan and Lorraine had arrived early with their kids so they could help with the preparations and were surprised by Bullmoose and his new and moderate demeanor. Genuine in his desire to patch things up with his son, he was determined to be on his best behavior. He even cut his hair and shaved. His signature ponytail since 1969 was gone, leaving only an inch or two below the ears. He was clean and sober, not even a token puff of pot for a week. Pranan was astonished and Grandma was so proud. Her anticipation of this evening was intense and now her expectations were going to be exceeded.

  Henry and Dolores arrived a bit late. He helped her out of the front seat of their little Hyundai, like actors from Central Casting auditioning for the life insurance commercial that asks first time pregnant parents if they thought about how they were going to pay for the kid’s college education while preparing for their own eventual deaths.

  They were followed into Perry Street by Dolores’ mom, Sonia, a smallish woman, Mediterranean in complexion and slightly hunched. She walked with pride but showed the wear and tear of the hard life of a single mother and an immigrant. She looked warmly upon Grandma and gave her a big hug, two women from different continents about to be united through the issue of their loins. She was effusive and agreeable with Pranan and Lorraine, but when she greeted Bullmoose with all the open mindedness she could conjure, a look of puzzlement flashed across her face. Sonia was wise enough to see that beneath his simple nature and natural good looks there was a more complicated free spirit lurking within. What was there she didn’t want to know and hoped she wouldn’t find out.

  The evening started off well enough. Pranan’s good-natured soul added to the ease and familiarity the night needed. They sat in the small living room talking away. Lorraine babbled to Sonia about her three kids, who had already excused themselves and went down to the basement to fool around with Bullmoose’s electric rock and roll instruments of pure antiquity. Her fourteen-year-old girl was impossible to talk to, angry at the whole world, and acted like she was already nineteen, online all the time and caring nothing about nothing except for her friends. The eleven-year-old girl was just the opposite. Brilliant in school and always cast as the lead in the school play, she was interested in a career in acting and kept her room as clean as a whistle. The seven-year-old boy was the apple of his daddy’s eye. Pranan always wanted a son, that’s the way it was with macho men from India. Sonia just smiled through all this kid talk. Lorraine got a little embarrassed by coming across as such a typical American parent, overindulging her children and re-living her own imperfect childhood vicariously through theirs.

  Befo
re Sonia could interject a word of her own, Henry turned the conversation around and back to themselves. He brought into the living room a chilled bottle of champagne and everyone giggled at the sound of the cork popping free. Tonight was such a special night. The baby’s due date was only a couple of weeks away and both parents had received notification that they were awarded graduate fellowships at the California Institute of Technology. They would teach several classes a week and play with a world-famous particle accelerator while studying with Richard Feynman’s associates as they tried to unlock all the secrets to the unified theory of the universe. Pranan and Lorraine smiled in genuine pride and Grandma poured the champagne.

  Bullmoose was overtly quiet, trying hard to force himself not to say anything as to how or why anybody on earth could think they could decipher unfathomable mysteries of anything by playing with silly little neutrinos and bosons that were spun off by the vibrations of some equally unobservable tiny quantum string system that nobody ever really saw or actually could prove existed. To him any science that said that the act of observation would change the results of the experiment couldn’t be very accurate at all, now could it? That actually ran contrary to the time-honored tradition that science is science because theories can and need to be proven by actual experimentation.

  Of course Henry jumped all over his dad’s first adversarial utterance, which Bullmoose delivered with a slightly cynical tone, and demanded how anybody living at this point in time could, as mankind roared towards Y2K, deny the fact that modern physicists, due to background cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang, have been able to determine the origin of the universe down to a nanosecond approximately fifteen billion years ago, and only fossilized Neanderthals and anachronistic aging hippies could still apply miraculous interposition to the origins of life on earth.

  Bullmoose, not to be outdone, took another long draught of his champagne and retorted that if his narrow-minded son, myopic in his own overly intellectual way, and blinded by the bindings of academic physics, thought that his own father believed that God placed all creation on earth only a few thousand years ago, then he was as ridiculous as those creationists who actually did still believe that. And if ignorant and stupid men believed they were created in God’s own image, then even more ignorant and stupider men worshipped a God that was created in man’s own image. Which was what Henry and his cohorts were trying to prove with their self-inscribed prayer books of abstract reasoning written in a language of mathematics that nobody except for the few contributing authors could understand or would even want to understand.

  Henry leaped off his chair that was next to his rotund and doting wife who was beginning to look worried over the intensifying heat of the discussion. He stood over his father and replied that it was similar to a criminal investigation, where forensic experts could piece together events that nobody ever did witness, yet still come to an accepted belief about what went down in that crime scene during that unobservable period in the past.

  Bullmoose jumped out of his seat and stuck his nose in his know-it-all son’s face and replied that there was a unifying system of physical laws with which the universe operated, and there were no accidents within the mystery of the universal count-on-able rules; nothing stays the same, everything is interconnected, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next. That proves that even though evolution seems like random natural selection to scientists, their had to be something that actually set these forces in motion so that self-important men could evolve out of the primordial muck on earth and search for these so-called unified laws of the cosmos and pompously name them after themselves.

  He sat back down and sipped on his champagne, the little bubbles bursting in his brain. Everyone in the room tried to ignore him but Sonia sensed a darkening cloud form as he brooded in his favorite armchair with the cigarette burns on the arm rests.

  When the champagne ran out, Pranan opened a bottle of Cabernet that he said he was saving for a special occasion. Since he was now through having kids of his own, what better way to celebrate than with the coming together of these two families and the imminence of their latest issue nigh upon the planet. His eyes watered when he said Bullmoose and Grandma were his family, and he toasted to that.

  Everyone drank as he refilled their glasses and the room grew cheery again for some, and bleary for all. Henry made a point of kissing Dolores deeply on her mouth, partly out of affection, but partly out of some sense of triumph. Grandma tried to ignore that, as everyone chatted on about the oncoming change in history when the dates they would write on their personal checks would change from nineteen hundred to two thousand.

  Grandma went into the kitchen to tend to her cooking while Lorraine began telling Sonia how Pranan and she met. She left out, of course, all the long-haired and sensitive young men marching in and out of her bedroom that kept her engine fueled for garbage sculpture, and the part about how the first time Pranan saw her she was peeing naked in the bathroom just at the top of the stairs reading the Kama Sutra. Pranan took it further back and explained how he met Bullmoose and he showed Sonia the magic ring they came upon in India and how it saved their lives, glossing over the part about the little Gypsy and how old she was when Bullmoose knocked her up.

  That’s when the rules really take over and the glories have to be taken completely on faith. Which means besides believing in the things you don’t know, you must also live through the things you never thought you could. With an alarmed look on her face, Sonia seemingly levitated off her chair and crumpled forward to the floor on her knees. Bullmoose thought she had simply drunk too much and rushed to her rescue. He got down on the floor and put his hands under her head and lifted it off the floor. Kneeling, they gazed into each other’s eyes and everyone in the room witnessed the recognizable horror that was there, as Sonia communicated in a nonverbal way that although she lived in a Portuguese community, she never said she was Portuguese.

  Bullmoose fell back on his butt on the living room rug stunned.

  Pranan rubbed his face, stupefied as twenty some odd years melted away in an instant.

  Grandma held her breath as she felt some psychic earthquake reach out through time and wrench the ground beneath her life, throwing the people she loved into the air and tumbling them back to the earth. To get up again as strangers to each other as well as themselves.

  Unable to cope with the gargantuan moment, all Henry could do was grab Dolores and pull her up out of her comfortable seat on the couch, uttering, “I’m outta here.” Before anyone had the strength or the clarity of mind to do or say anything to stop them, he had thrown his pregnant lady back into his Hyundai and was insanely screeching back out of the driveway.

  The little Perry Street living room was left in worse shape than an explosion inside a vacuum. It was a whirlpool of nihility, completely sucking the reality out of everything that could have meant anything to any of them. The enormity of their consequences stemming from the count-on-able rules was staggering. Nothing now could ever be the same, and how could this interconnectivity find such a convoluted connection, and what could possibly happen next?

  Grandma sunk to her knees beside the little Gypsy and put her arms around her, gently squeezing her quaking body closer to hers, sisters in some surreal psychotic plot that only the angels up above could ever hope to understand. Bullmoose staggered out the door.

  All left in speechless terror, pondering the depths of the glory of the grace of God.

  # # #

  As the unseen helicopter roaring away overhead switched to stealth, Herbie tightened the B string just a bit too much and it snapped. He unraveled what was left on the tuning peg and stuck it in his pocket. It always was the hardest string for him to tune.

  * * * * *

  Part 5

  Fourth Day of the Prophet

  Office Tomb

  December 25, 2047. 6:00 a.m.

  The armored office was deathly still when Theodore blinked onto one of the cold, blank monitors, filli
ng it up with his magnificence. The mayor looked up from the throes of tortured contemplation and smiled at his dad, this was truly a fine Christmas present.

  Teddy was dressed in his holiday best, the dark brown suit with tan pinstripes, a dark blue shirt with matching handkerchief in the breast pocket, and the red silk bow tie with the little dark green spheres in a pattern, like Christmas tree ornaments. He looked the personification of holiday cheer, complete with the crackling fireplace, strings of homemade candy popcorn, and the smells of hot apple cider laced with the best Barbados rum. His smooth and clear brown skin belied his age, so it was his mustache peppered with silver that gave him the distinction of his years, adding the right visuals to the wisdom of his words. But this time, for once, Theodore Roosevelt Storm didn’t say anything at all. He just beamed down on his son Jack who was sitting by his computer, swiveling back and forth on an office chair as if he was a little ten-year-old boy.

  Jack has heard silence before. He was in the thick of the deafening crack of collective dismay when the total will of all good men was sucked out of their lives by a vengeful satanic warlord, descending on the jugular of all mankind. He was a crafty demon. Beaten back time and again away from the warmth and safety of the community fire, and cast out into the cold and dark to eat or be eaten, he had always found a way to return. Evolved now, time worn, tested and ready, he had come once more to collect his revenge on an unworthy and thankless species. How else could hundreds of thousands of people die in one blink of an instant? That is the sound of silence.

  It wasn’t the quiet in his operations room that spooked him; he actually liked it and was genuinely grateful for it. It was the city out there full of humans that depended on him that made him sad. People who leaned on Jack in the worst of storms, who would watch him grapple with torrential bursts of wind and tsunamic crashing waves, and after conquering these extreme forces, they would cheer as he sailed with quiet valor into a clean harbor of protected waters.