Jude

by Jeff Nesbit

  In one instant, which I’m sure Jude had mapped out thoroughly in advance, because he might never get another opportunity like this with me—not since my decision to separate our lives—a hundred camera flashes went off as the photographers captured the unusual occasion in front of the square.

  The cop smiled. “Wow, he’s a dead ringer for you, Mr. Asher.”

  “Yeah, and he’s a Mr. Asher too.” Jude smiled broadly.

  “Just not as famous,” I muttered. I leaned over and whispered in my brother’s ear. “Get me out of here, Jude. You promised. I don’t want a public profile here.”

  “No worries. I only wanted to make sure you arrived on the platform safely.”

  Grabbing my shoulder, he guided me up to the row of seats behind the platform and podium. He directed me to a seat slightly off center enough from the podium that I would still be in every single TV camera angle whether I liked it or not. But I didn’t care any longer. It was out of my control at this point.

  I stopped him right before I sat down. “Are they here? Those things?”

  Jude smiled. “Yes, they are. Always. But you know that.”

  I glanced around. It had been easier to tell when I was younger. Now, as Jude had gotten more sophisticated and worldly, so had the forces he depended on for help when he called on them. “But where would they be?” I asked. “There are thousands of people. They could be anywhere at all in this crowd.”

  “Precisely,” he said before focusing on the business at hand.

  As I watched the crowd settle in for the announcement, I had to marvel again at the scene that Jude had created for it. Off to the right was the site of the World Trade Center that had come down more than a decade earlier, only to be rebuilt again. I was certain that, at some point, Jude would gesture skyward toward that newest tower and remind everyone about the incident—and how it had changed the country.

  Behind us, in the park itself, Jude had brought in hundreds of union workers and former members of the Occupy Wall Street movement who were there to say, with their physical presence, that the unions and the 99 percent supported the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat in New York even though he had, in fact, been a literal Wall Street banker once when he was the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

  And on stage with us were a whole slew of prominent celebrities who lived in their 20-million-dollar, three-bedroom apartments overlooking the Hudson River, as well as wealthy New York cognoscenti who would undoubtedly raise whatever it took to bankroll his campaign beyond what Jude himself was prepared to spend. Jude’s wife was in the front row.

  It was curious. Democrats had to be populists and still raise vast sums of money to run for gubernatorial and Senate offices. Very few could manage the trick. Clearly, my brother seemed to have the gift.

  I looked off to the side and spotted one of my colleagues from The New York Times leaning up against a post, watching the drama in order to report on the campaign announcement. I felt instantly uncomfortable, sitting on the stage as a prop for my brother when my instinct, my real responsibility, was to be off to the side as an observer and scribe. I grimaced at my colleague and rolled my eyes heavenward. He shook his head but grinned back. At least I’ll have a decent campaign source, I could almost hear him thinking from off in the distance.

  The crowd settled to a low roar as the warm-up act stepped up to the microphone on the podium. I hardly even listened to my brother’s bio as she read it for the crowd. I knew his story by heart. I certainly didn’t need to listen to some stranger recite the public details.

  As Jude accepted the introduction and stepped up to the microphone, I noticed that one of the police officers around the podium platform started to rock back and forth rhythmically. He was directly in front of the stage. He was close enough to the stage that Jude and I were both in his line of sight.

  It was odd. All the other cops were clearly on edge because of the setting and the big crowd, but they were motionless, only their eyes scanning the crowd. A few occasionally turned to glance at the stage, but this particular cop swayed back and forth. He seemed distracted. He kept turning to look back directly at my brother and me.

  As Jude started into his speech about an America capable of rising up from the ashes of defeat to straddle the world again, the words became fuzzy for me. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cop. There was something so out of place with him that I couldn’t turn away.

  When he turned and pulled his revolver from his holster, I reacted instinctively. In an instant, I knew. Like Bobby Kennedy and others in a long line of populist political figures, my brother had become a target for a lone madman intent on taking his infamous place in history.

  With time nearly at a standstill, I jumped from my chair behind the podium. We were both in his line of fire, so I took the direct route toward him. I grabbed Jude’s shoulder as I rushed by him, pushed hard to force him down behind the podium, and then sprinted past. I covered the last ten feet in a rush and leaped toward the gunman.

  He got off only one shot. I could feel the bullet tear through my leg, and then I was on him. I smashed into him like he was a tackling dummy on a practice football field. We crashed to the ground hard. Ignoring any thought of pain or my own personal safety, I grabbed his shooting arm and smashed it to the ground. The gun rattled away.

  The rest of the cops were on us a second later, pinning both of us to the ground. I could see two of the cops securing the gun, and two more pinning the shooter to the ground. But a half dozen other cops, not sure exactly what had happened, were literally piling on top of me to keep me in my place.

  The intense pain started then. I could feel myself slipping into unconsciousness. There was no keeping it away, and the crowd of police pinning me down wasn’t helping matters.

  Somehow, through the madness, I heard Jude’s voice. “Let him up! Let him up!” he called out from somewhere on the other side of the pile of cops who had me pinned to the pavement. “That’s my brother, and he just saved my life.”

  And then my world went black.

  Chapter Seven

  I don’t know how long I was out. It could have been an hour or two weeks. All I know was that my brother was standing there, staring down at me balefully when I finally came to after the shooting.

  I glanced around the room. I was in some sort of a private hospital recovery room. It was just the two of us.

  “Wow, was that dumb.” Jude shook his head sadly. “You might at least have told me before pulling a stunt like that. If you recall, that’s our deal. We give each other a heads-up before jumping into the hero business.”

  “It is not our deal,” I tossed back. “It hasn’t been for some time.” My eyelids were half open. Excruciating pain radiated up one side of my body, originating from a spot on one of my legs. Then I remembered. I’d been shot by a policeman.

  “It is,” Jude insisted. “I’ve always given you fair warning before incidents like that happen.”

  I tried to sit up, grimaced, and then collapsed back onto the hospital bed. “Yeah, but you plan them, maybe even control them in some weird way I’ll never understand.”

  “You understand, Thomas,” he said softly. “You can pretend otherwise, if it makes you feel better. But you understand. You always have.”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t about to give my brother the satisfaction of knowing that I understood him and how he moved through the world. “So, all right, what’s the deal? What happened?”

  “You got shot.”

  “I know that, you moron. What I meant was, why? I thought you had that kind of stuff under control. You told me they were around in droves. So how did something like that happen?”

  Jude’s eyes bored into mine. “They were around. The event was very well attended. I made certain of that.”

  “Then how could that have happened? I mean, I’m assuming the guy who tried to shoot you wasn’
t actually a policeman?”

  “No, he wasn’t. His name is Samuel Chambers, and he’s a religious fanatic.”

  “So I’ll ask again, how? I thought they controlled things like that, to keep threats to you away?”

  Jude took a deep breath. “I’m still learning, even now. And what I learned there is that anger and hate, once embedded, can’t be controlled. Not entirely. Not perfectly. I thought it could. I made assumptions, and I’d received certain assurances. But I was wrong.”

  “So that guy was like an unguided missile, aimed in certain directions that aren’t entirely under anyone’s control? And on this particular day, it happened to be aimed at you? And you weren’t made aware of this fact?”

  Jude’s face was a grim mask, holding back a certain fury. “Yeah, something like that. He clearly had a target in mind. There are always random, uncontrolled chances and circumstances at any given time, no matter how well prepared we might be. Humans have free will, after all, up to a point. But that should not have happened. What I don’t know, yet, is why it happened. Trust me, I intend to find out.”

  My eyes met my brother’s, and our gaze held for a minute in silence. He and I hadn’t spoken of this sort of thing in any form or fashion in two years. Our separation had been irrevocable and, I believed, complete. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know any of this any longer. But I couldn’t help myself, given what had just happened.

  “Come on!” I waved a hand in frustration. “I know you have the ability to direct things. How many times have I seen it?”

  “This was different,” Jude said sharply. “I didn’t direct this. And I don’t know, exactly, why it happened. There are some things I don’t understand, at least not yet.”

  “But you have an inkling?”

  “Yeah, I have an inkling,” he murmured. “But it’s a bit like trying to guess what shape might be casting a shadow. I can see the shadow, and I know what’s behind it. But I can’t see the shape. Someone not under my influence or control wanted something. What I don’t know yet was what that might be or why.”

  “Who? I’ve always assumed you knew …”

  Jude exhaled audibly. He looked at the hospital floor for a minute before he spoke again. “I don’t know everything, Thomas. There are a very great many of forces at play at any given time, at quite a few levels. It’s not unlike the levels of government that the world knows so well. Some rule little towns. Some rule nations. And some, somehow, rule worlds.”

  I closed my eyes and rested, still feeling the pain shoot up my leg. “Well,” I said slowly, “all I can say is that I hope you didn’t plan this—to put me in harm’s way, I mean.”

  “I didn’t plan this, Thomas. I would never do that. I give you my word. And you know that means something.”

  I did. Jude was many things, but a pathological liar wasn’t one of them. He’d always been brutally honest and straightforward with me about what he was doing and why. That was something I’d never had to doubt about him.

  I scanned the sparse hospital room. I was still struggling to get my bearings. “How long was I out, by the way?”

  Jude reached behind him and grabbed something. He plopped a copy of The New York Times on my chest. “They gave you a sedative to help you sleep. For your scrapbook. This is the front page of today’s paper.”

  I looked down at the front page, which was covered by an enormous photo. I turned the paper so I could see it more clearly. Someone had snapped a picture of me an instant after I’d taken the bullet in the leg, as I was lunging toward the attacker, who had just fired a shot at my brother, the political candidate.

  “Oh no.” I groaned. “Seriously? It’s on the front page of my own newspaper?”

  “Not just your paper,” Jude said, laughing. “It’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country and half of the papers around the world.” He pulled a sheaf of call slips from his shirt pocket. “What’s more, you now have, like, two hundred requests for interviews. Every TV producer on the planet wants to book you.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “That sure blows my cover.”

  “Yep,” Jude said. “You’re the hero, the guy who thwarted a political assassination attempt.”

  “And I’ll bet it didn’t hurt your Senate chances any?”

  “It certainly didn’t hurt,” Jude said ruefully.

  “You’re absolutely sure you didn’t plan this?”

  “I meant it before,” he said, his tone deadly serious. “I would never do that to you. If I’m doing something that appears dangerous—and you’re involved—then I will tell you about it. I’ll tell you beforehand. You’ll know the score, like always.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jude got it right on our tenth, and final, set of foster parents. At the time, what I wasn’t quite certain was why he even bothered. I mean, given what he was already capable of at that point, why bother with intermediaries? Why not simply cut out the middlemen, take what you wanted, and go tell the rest of the world to jump in the lake?

  Perhaps it was that, by then, Jude had seen too many twisted, warped, manipulative foster parents who were utterly sanctimonious about their motives for wanting to “help” the poor orphan boys who were now in their teens. I don’t know. It may just have been easier for Jude to set it up with a third party.

  All I knew was that it freed us—again—from an institution that looked an awful lot like prison. We’d been in and out of so many rundown orphanages and state-run institutions by the time we were both seventeen that I was desperately willing to try anything to get out of the system once and for all.

  We had one more year to go—one more year of high school as orphans and wards of the state. One more year of being shopped from foster home to orphanages for older boys like us who had no permanent set of parents, places that were really nothing more than slightly better-dressed prisons.

  I had often wondered what would happen to us when we turned eighteen and were legal. I’d dreamed of the day often. Would they simply turn us loose from the system? Would we be allowed to go our merry way, thankful for the opportunity to be adults at last? Would they give us a stipend and a graduation certificate—“Congratulations. You’ve survived family hell. Now it’s time to go make your way in the real world as an adult”?

  “I’ve found our adoptive parents,” Jude said casually that August.

  The last set of foster parents had turned us back over to the system at the end of the school year rather than keep us and the burden that went along with it. This particular set of foster parents had bought an RV with the ward-of-the-state money and were planning to visit Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon in it. They couldn’t be burdened, of course, with two rambunctious teenage boys at the same time.

  So we said good-bye to our third high school in three years and climbed into the dilapidated bus that took us fifteen miles down the road to Haverford Institution at the edge of Warrenton, Virginia. We were issued our standard ward-of-the-state uniforms, ushered into our ward-of-the-state rooms—complete with a toilet, sink, and bed—and were given instructions on when to show up for our three meals of the day and what we were expected to “contribute” to the upkeep of the place as our daily chores.

  The only difference between Haverford and prison, in my mind, was that they didn’t ask you to do chores in prison. In prison, you could just sit in your cell and read books, unlike Haverford, where fussy adult supervisors pestered you incessantly about things you had to do at various points of the day. I think I might have preferred prison to Haverford—but Jude took that decision out of my hands.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “We go seventeen years without parents, and someone is going to adopt us now, right before the system turns us loose?”

  “Better late than never,” he said.

  And then they showed up—a kindly, elderly couple from Charlottesville, Virginia, who’d never had any child
ren of their own. They’d driven up Highway 29 to Haverford to spend time with us. The next day, we’d climbed into the backseat of their car, and driven back to their farm on the outskirts of Charlottesville.

  It was only later, after we were safely ensconced at our fourth and final high school as the newly adopted twin sons of this kind family, that I learned the truth.

  The elderly man had once been a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Virginia. His wife of forty years had been a post doc under his care and guidance. Somewhere along the way, the physics professor had stumbled across an interesting way to permanently control and stabilize single layers of carbon atoms—graphene sheets—and then stack them one on top of another so they could form a variety of conductive materials that really big, multinational manufacturing companies could use.

  The physics professor had carefully patented his invention and then sold the ideas to one big global company after another for royalties that would last nearly forever. He’d always been vague about the inspiration for his ideas. But it hardly mattered. He had the patents that clearly explained the knowledge, which meant he owned them.

  Before long, the professor had become quite wealthy—beyond his wildest dreams, in fact—and was able to retire from his tenured faculty position at the University of Virginia. And ten years after that, the physics professor had seen his wealth accumulate into billions of dollars as the royalties from his patent literally poured into his bank accounts.

  But that wasn’t the truth. Oh, I’m sure this story played a hand in why Jude chose them as our final set of foster parents. But it wasn’t the truth. It wasn’t what really lived at the very center of this physics professor’s life, what made him feel alive and consumed nearly every waking minute of every part of his day.

  No, the truth was that the professor’s marriage was a lie. He didn’t love his wife, or even women for that matter. What he really liked, what made his heart race and flutter, were young boys.