“I’m sorry I can’t…be of more help. With the sex thing, I mean. You guys are really great.”
Thomas seems surprised I brought the topic back up. “Everett, we understand. We thought you might be into the idea. You’re obviously attracted to my wife.”
“You assumed I was a slut,” I finish for him.
“You are just so damn pretty! I was thinking more like ‘sexually liberated.’”
Dana folds her hands on her lap. “Do you really think so little of us?”
“No, I get it. I was sending mixed signals. I guess that’s an understatement, huh? It’s not your fault. It’s just, stuff like this doesn’t happen to me. I’m boring.”
“You don’t seem boring.” He takes another sip of burgundy. “You actually come across as kind of intense.”
“Intense? Really?”
“You watch me like you’re some kind of predator. I’m sorry.”
“Wow, that is not how I see myself.”
“I can’t tell if you want to jump me or tell me to fuck off.”
“I would never tell you that!”
Dana laughs.
“Your neck is all corded up,” Thomas says. “You haven’t relaxed the whole time you’ve been here.”
I massage the back of my neck, self-conscious. “I’m just not used to all this. I’m a creature of habit.” I explain that I’ve been in a rut for years. I have a boring yet well-paid job. I used to be an artist, creating puzzles, but quit during college as I turned to more practical pursuits. “What’s more boring than accounting?”
“Maybe your family set it up?” Dana says. “Maybe they wanted to help you get out of your rut. Are you close?”
“My parents wouldn’t do this.” I take a sip of my water.
“So you’re an only child?”
I pick up my fork. It’s not my fork, it’s the steak knife, and it slices into my right index finger. “Ow.” The knife drops to the table. I put my finger to my mouth. My tongue tests the depth of the cut. It’s surprisingly deep.
Dana gets up from her chair. “You okay?”
“It’s no big deal.” I hold out my finger. Blood drips onto the white tablecloth in dime sized dots, and I put my finger back over my plate.
“Oh no. I’ll get you something to put on that.” She hurries into the kitchen.
Thomas laughs from across the table. “It looks like even the vegetarian will have blood on his plate tonight.”
You give me a skeptical look. The way I cut myself strikes you as a strange. Is it really possible to mistake a knife for a fork? You mime the action, trying to get a clear mental picture. It doesn’t make sense. I should have noticed the sharp edge of the knife before it cut into the skin. That can’t be how it happened.
In Portland, I haven’t told anyone about my brother’s death. I clenched my fist when Dana brought up siblings. I wanted to feel the blade cut into my flesh. It was a split second impulse. The thing with my brother happened a long time ago, before college. I don’t want to talk about it.
Dana puts a first-aid kit on the table.
“I’m sorry about this,” I say. “Here you guys have this nice dinner, and we end up tending to my wounds.”
“It’s okay, Everett. It’s just good talking with you.” She tends to my finger and doesn’t look up.
“As far as I know, Carrie is the only person who knows about our engagement. We’ve talked about it in emails. Maybe my email was hacked.”
Thomas stabs his last piece of steak with his fork.
“There. That should do it.” Dana snaps the kit closed. “It’s a clean cut; it should be fine.” She refers back to what I was saying. “Hacked emails, huh? Maybe it’s an invitation to a seminar. Maybe on killing.” She is delight by my astonishment. “Maybe it’s a seminar that teaches you how to become an assassin for the CIA.”
“Or maybe MI6,” Thomas offers.
“Just think. You could be a hidden hand of the government. They saw you were good at puzzles. You did well in college, right?”
“Pretty good.” I got straight As (okay, and one B, but Professor Daniels was a prick).
“See,” she says. “You would be perfect for MI6. I’m surprised they haven’t contacted you already.”
“It could be a business proposition,” Thomas says. “And the note was a test. It probably has some connection with the Mafia. They like to test people, don’t they?”
“Or a cult.” She laughs. “You go to this remote estate and it’s a doomsday cult, chanting and all that. They said it would change your life forever. Isn’t that what cults promise, human sacrifice and a life changed forever?”
I cross my arms, holding my cut finger out. “You joke, but you might not be far off. It has that religious symbol. The eternal flame.”
“I’m sure it’s not a cult, Everett. She’s joking.”
“We don’t have enough clues. It could be anything. Do you know anything else about the symbol?”
He shrugs. “It mostly relates to everlasting life and God’s power. I’m no expert in cuneiform, but it’s not related to Sumerian as far as I can tell. The symbol could be Zoroastrian. That tradition has the six divine sparks. Each one is an everlasting flame.”
Dana protests. “That doesn’t make sense. How does that connect with what the gnostics were saying?”
“The symbol on the box might not have anything to do with the tablet inside. It could just be a box.”
“Zoroastrian though?”
“It’s a guess. The infinity symbol has its roots in the roman numeral CIC, so the symbol probably originated after the Sumerians.”
“Then it’s more likely it has roots in Judaism. That would make more sense.”
“I wish we could give you a clear answer, Everett. Long story short, the Muslim gnostic said it meant eternal flame.”
“When you saw it, how did you know you needed to put the note over a fire?”
“Lucky guess? In most ancient languages fire and burning are the same symbol. It’s not just an eternal flame, it’s an eternal burning, or even eternally burnt. It got me thinking. There was all that blank space between the stanzas, and a holy flame is supposed to light the way to salvation, and so I put two and two together and thought maybe there was invisible ink. I didn’t mean to just take it from you like that.”
“No. You were right. I should have thought of invisible ink from the beginning.”
“The return address!” I yell out of the blue.
They both look at me like I’m a weirdo.
“The box has a return address. All I have to do is track down the location of the address and use the key. It’s so obvious. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
“Riddle solved.” Dana stands. “You finished with your plate?”
They should be more excited about this. I guess it’s not their puzzle. I suppress my stupid grin so I don’t look as ridiculous.
Dana takes the dishes into the kitchen.
Thomas backs up from the table. “Before you go, you should look up the address online.”
“You have a computer?”
With the return address in hand, I follow Thomas to a room down the hall.
You look around with fresh eyes. If I lied about cutting myself—maybe just a slight of hand, but still a deception—what else am I lying about?
Cassette Tape Eight:
Urban Legends
The room is empty except for a desk, a printer, and a laptop computer. A sliding glass door leads out to the backyard, and you stand behind me, reflected in the glass. You don’t look happy. You thought I was open about everything. You were being naïve. Of course there is a layer I’m hiding. Everyone you’ve ever interviewed tried to hide something. Why would I be different?
The modem sounds as Thomas logs onto the Internet. It’s paranoia again, but I want to make sure no one is watching from outside. I find the light switch. The well maintained backyard has an empty doghouse and yellow tulips lining a tall white fence.<
br />
“You have a dog?”
“What? Oh, the dog house. No. No, it came with the house.”
You ask me what happened to my brother.
I remain silent as Thomas goes through some websites. You aren’t actually here. I don’t have to answer your questions.
Unlike me, Thomas knows what he’s doing when it comes to the Internet and arrives at a complicated, at least to me, address directory.
I give him the address. He types it in. Nothing comes up.
“That’s strange,” he says. “Maybe it’s not a real address.” He goes to a general search engine. After a few websites, he comes to the Creative Employment Center (CEC) homepage.
“There’s the address.” He points to the bottom of the screen. The web page is plain blue with only one paragraph and no pictures, altogether unremarkable.
“The Creative Employment Center sounds straightforward enough. I can’t believe they would have you go through this whole riddle thing. Are you an artist?”
“I took classes in college.”
“It says here that you don’t contact them, they contact you.” He grins and says, “This has to be it.”
For the first time, I realize the hokey aspect of all this.
I lean over his shoulder. He has on a cologne that I think I’ve tried before.
“It says it’s near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The directory would’ve given you a map, but I guess you’ll have to go to Carmel and ask around.” He scrolls up and down the simple homepage. “Why do they have a website just to say we’ll contact you?”
“Because, how else would I find this place if there is no record of the address anywhere? One more clue to the riddle. At least now I know what area to look in.”
I read it for myself. It doesn’t say much more than what he told me, just that it gives opportunities to those who deserve it. I check the usual systems for encoding messages but can’t make anything out. The copyright at the bottom of the page is in a different color than the rest of the text, and I click on it.
A new page comes up.
It reads:
Twenty-four thousand, five hundred eight people went missing from the streets of Los Angeles in 1984, according to a yearly report from the California Department of Justice. Some estimate the actual number is higher due to the large number of disappearances that go unreported.
Last year Tom Granger, a local talent agent, reported to the LAPD that he was mysteriously losing a number of his most promising clients. He told police, “One day they were pestering me to get them auditions, the next, it was like they didn’t exist.” Every two weeks he would lose another client. A number of other talent agents across the city were reporting similar occurrences.
As the police looked into the disappearances, a pattern started to form. The missing persons were between the ages of 16 and 21 and homeless. None of them had family in L.A. and many of them were runaways. The police connected more than 100 disappearances to the case.
The similarities gave authorities little to go on. No significant clues surfaced until one police officer started to interview the local teenage homeless population.
In his interviews, the police officer discovered reports of young men and women, many who turned to prostitution, disappearing after getting into a black 1939 Rolls-Royce Wraith. Though no one could give a description of the driver, almost everyone knew of the car. According to the reports, the car would pull up to a person on the street and the person would get in voluntarily, never to be seen from again.
“It was eerie,” the police officer confessed later, when asked about the interviews. “All these kids all over L.A. had seen the same car, abducting huge amounts of kids, yet no one was reporting it. I asked them how they knew it was the same car, and that’s when they told me the license plate read ‘ENIGMA.’ It was the first real lead in the case.”
Strangely, many didn’t see the car as a threat.
“He took my best friend,” said a 15-year-old boy who lived in a homeless shelter at the end of 13th street. “Shawn wouldn’t leave me. It must’ve been his big break. I know I’ll see him in a movie and I won’t even recognize him because he’s that good. At auditions, they don’t care if you have talent. They just care if you’re famous. The man in the Wraith is different. He cares about talent. That’s why he took Shawn.”
The man in the Rolls-Royce Wraith was said to be a top casting director from Hollywood who took pity on the homeless of L.A. He came from the streets, so he casts people from the streets.
Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites all told the story of the same driver, in elaborate detail. He was said to have come to L.A. on his 16th birthday, back in the times of old Hollywood, of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. According to reports, he was running away from a mentally unstable mother and an abusive father in Texas. Having mastered all of Shakespeare’s plays, all of Fred Astaire’s moves, and every accent from Irish to Swahili, he was a young acting genius.
However, like many actors who came to L.A., he struck out in the harsh game of showbiz, despite his talent. After two years of auditions and odd jobs, someone introduced him to cocaine. Cocaine was his undoing. He was soon out of money, out of a job, and forced into prostitution to feed his growing drug addiction.
Then his luck seemed to change. James, a casting director, saw the actor at a homeless shelter and instantly saw his talent. The two became lovers, and James gave the actor money so he wouldn’t have to sell himself on the street. James then took the boy, who by this time had just turned 19, to rehab.
Despite his newfound connection, years went by and the actor had yet to play even the smallest part in a movie or television show. The actor never gave up, and worked each day to become better at his craft.
Decades later, the desperate actor, still without a single part, took a walk down Sunset Boulevard with his lover James. The actor asked if he should give up on his dream of becoming a star. The casting director said that the actor had more talent than anyone he had ever met. He said that the actor could have played a hundred different parts in a hundred different movies, but if the casting director cast the actor in something, people would find out they were lovers. James said he would rather die than have people know he was in love with a man. As he said this, a car swerved and hit James from behind, killing him instantly.
The actor wept for James, holding him in his arms, and waited for the driver to step out of the black Rolls-Royce Wraith.
No one emerged from the car.
The actor laid the casting director down, opened the driver side door, and looked inside. The driver was gone.
He stuffed James into the trunk. The part of a casting director was not a challenging one, not for an actor who had studied his craft so vigilantly for so many years. No one noticed James was missing; rather, everyone just thought he became much better at finding talent and maybe had done something with his hair.
Though the actor’s dream of fame never came true, by taking his dead lover’s identity, he was able to help others find success.
It was understood that the actor used that same black Wraith that killed his lover to scout the streets of L.A., endlessly looking for the same raw talent he had boasted so many years ago when he first came to L.A.
When the homeless were asked where they heard this story, they said from a friend of a friend or from somebody who knew somebody, always giving police an ambiguous answer.
The police knew the story was an urban myth, but what, if any of it, was factual? The key was in the “ENIGMA” license plate. The police ran it through the database and found that the car actually belonged to a company called House of Cabal.
“Interesting story,” Thomas says, “but what does the Creative Employment Center have to do with it?”
“Could you print me a copy? And the page before that too.”
You tap me on the shoulder and point to the sliding glass window. The yard has become a dull blur. The tulips blend with the fence the way watercolor bleeds. It’s
odd that it doesn’t feel odd, only like the natural feeling of waking.
“What are you going to do about being locked out of your apartment?” Thomas clicks the print icon. The room around us loses color, the outside already faded to nothingness.
“Dana can drive me to my friend Rod’s house; he has a spare key to my apartment. Tomorrow will suck. I need to talk to Carrie. We had a fight. And I need to ask for time off work.”
It’s just the three of us now, the room has swirled away into the gray. Thomas of course doesn’t notice.
I almost wake from the regression, but you don’t let me. You think I’m hiding something and ask why Rod has a key to my apartment.
I’m half-awake and start to remember the future again. You’re writing my autobiography. We are in some kind of interview. We need to wake up. We have been under too long already.
You tell me that I’m right, this is an interview, so I should answer your questions. You have been an observer long enough, obediently watching whatever I show you. Your job is to investigate.
You change the cassette.
Cassette Tape Nine:
Investigation
Trust me, Chuck. You don’t need to see what happens next. That’s why the world has turned to gray. We should skip this next part. Nothing happens. It’s not part of the plan. If I show you everything in my life, it will take forever.
The more I protest, the less you’re convinced.
All that happens is that Thomas drives and we talk, make small talk, and then I crash on Rod’s couch.
Really, Chuck, there is nothing to see.
You were so discombobulated at the gym you never got a good look at Rod’s face. He has my spare key. I act like he is barely part of my life. You think I’m not telling the whole story.
Chuck, I’ve been more honest with you than anyone ever. My homophobic panic. My doubts about my fiancé. I’ve confessed my sexual hangups. You’ve seen a man in a wheelchair put a condom on my dick. You’ve heard my every impure thought. We need to wake up is all.
House of Cabal Volume One: Eden Page 12
