“Wherever he is,” Winston says, as if reading my thoughts, “he is no longer our concern. Each soul falls as it should.”
Head bowed again, Gladstone parrots Winston’s tone. “Each soul falls as it should.”
“So what happened to you?” I ask.
Winston lifts his face again to the steeple. “I have been to a place few can conceive.” The faith in his voice reminds me of Snake and his encounter with Patsy Cline in the afterlife. But a near-death experience wouldn’t explain where Winston got the khakis from.
“Show me,” I say.
With his arm around my good shoulder, Winston escorts me past Gladstone, who keeps looking at the ground. In the sacristy we pause at the vault that once held chalices and Eucharists. Winston lifts a kerosene lamp from a shelf stocked with buckets of yellow paint. After lighting the lamp, he opens the door that leads up to the haunted room where we mounted Trevor’s satellite dish. “Choose now to follow me,” he says, “and nothing will be as it was.” He and the bubble of shifting firelight drift up the stairway. I start up the creaky steps.
As we climb, a flapping sound above grows louder. It makes me imagine a flag snapping in the wind. Winston starts mumbling under his breath, some kind of chant or incantation. Stepping into the room, I see a sheet of thick, clear plastic nailed over the window through which we both once climbed. The wooden slats have all been removed and the wind rattles one corner of the plastic sheet. Early evening light leaks through it, but not enough that we don’t need the kerosene lamp, which sends swinging glows sliding up the steeple, bouncing into the vast empty cone over our heads. The floor has been swept free of ash and bone, and the satellite dish sits exactly where I last saw it. Fresh yellow paint, ripe in my nose, dries on three walls. But graffiti covers the fourth wall, the one across from the window. Only when I move closer, I realize I’m looking not at graffiti, but at handwriting, tight black scrawls in rows like newspaper type.
Standing behind me, Winston stops chanting and lifts the lamp. “It took me almost twenty straight hours, starting on my first night back. My fingers cramped up. You can tell where I switched to my left hand. See how it slants suddenly? There was so much I wanted to get down, it was like my brain burned with the words. Have you ever felt like that, Buddy, where the truth felt like something alive in your skull trying to claw its way free?”
I consider this for a moment, then say, “No, Winston, but it sounds terrible.”
He sighs. “Quite the opposite, my friend. It is ecstasy.”
I lean in close and try to read the ecstatic truth. But I can’t understand the symbols, which look like the hieroglyphics Indiana Jones is always trying to decipher inside pyramids and on the sides of sacred artifacts.
“The Chronicle Wall details what happened to me,” Winston explains. “What I learned while I was away.”
Across one line I see an upside-down triangle, an eye inside a box, and what looks like two fish kissing.
Winston steps between me and the wall, raising the kerosene glow. He aims a finger at the symbols I was studying and begins to speak slowly. “While the probing pained me deeply I do not blame the Svobodians for that pain because it helped me focus. Just as intense fire burns but purifies. They did not realize the probing was uncomfortable for me. The pain of the probing, I believe, was strictly unintentional.”
He pauses and looks at me over one shoulder. My face remains blank. His hand floats across the scribbled wall and settles on a passage toward the end of the final column. “Ahh, yes,” he says. “I think I got this part just right: When they informed me that I was to be returned I wept bitterly, and seeing me weep they hummed to me in their way the songs that soothed. For they cannot stand the sight of discomfort in any sentient. Once I was calmed they revealed to me the truth of why I had to be sent back, and my mission was clear to me, and I stopped all my weeping, for weeping is for those lost and without hope.”
The wind picks up and the plastic rattles hard, snapping like it’s about to give way. Winston turns to it. Without looking at me, he says, “You think I’m crazy. Don’t you?”
“Crazy isn’t a word I would use,” I say.
“It’s OK. People thought Wilhelm Hoade was insane. The opinions of others do not molest the truth. That’s the third of the Seven Sacred Svobodian Tenets.”
I point at the strange symbols. “So this is Svobodian.”
“As close as the untrained human mind can comprehend it.”
“And you learned all this in the last seven days?”
“No, no. It took me about three months. Their language is very complicated. Conjugating is a nightmare, worse than Latin. But that has to do with the Svobodian concept of time. They don’t make the same kinds of hard-core distinctions we do between past, present, and future. Now and forever mean almost the exact same thing. Recall the seminal work of the French mathematician-philosopher LaPlace. He claimed that if given enough mathematical data he could reasonably calculate where you’d be for dinner and what you’d eat on any given day five years from now. Très Svobodian. They have no translation for words like might or maybe. No conditionals, do you understand?”
“So these Svobodians have no use for free will, is that what you’re telling me?”
“You’re free to make any choice you want. But that choice isn’t random.”
“Winston,” I say. “You have not been gone three months.”
He takes a deep breath and says, “Dr. Cooper, with God as my witness, I have been gone for almost two years. Inside the homeship dimension, time flows differently.”
I feel tired and heavy. Still, I can’t take my eyes off the symbols. I find the kissing fish in a few places, and I also notice a recurring symbol that looks like a four-fingered hand. Behind me, the plastic rattles with the wind.
“Once the Svobodians realized that they were right about me, a series of operations were performed. When my neural pathways were clear of debris, when I had the capacity to comprehend the vast amounts of poetic mathematical understanding with which they wanted to bless me, I was plugged into a huge living machine for three days and nights. On the third day I awakened and I understood. I achieved perfect clarity. I saw.”
I turn from the Svobodian words and see his eyes reflecting the kerosene flame, flickering and clear. I think of Hardy when he told me he was saved by a miracle, of Rhonda when she said there had to be a reason, of Snake in the back of the hearse, convinced he’d come back from the dead, even of Alix, when she told me she’d love me forever with all her heart. And I think of myself when I told Rhonda she was not alone, when I claimed to see her future as a thing rich with hope. The sensation of rightness that came in the field and out front in the car. But those moments were fleeting, and based on my pretending to be someone I no longer am, a man with gold boots and a sure dream.
I find Winston’s eyes and I whisper, “Tell me what you saw. Please.”
“What’s coming is nothing less than a planet-wide transfiguration of man. We’ll shake off these shabby skins and metamorphosize into beings of pure light, like the Svobodians.”
He lifts a hand to the plastic covering the window and snaps it away, like a man revealing a curtained painting. The wind tears inside and sends the lantern flame twisting and ducking. Staring over the city, Winston says, “Look at us.”
Eagerly, I leave the wall and go to his side. The wind rips at our faces but we stand and look together at the entire city spread out before us. The dull brick barracks of Simplicity Gardens, its windows blocked with plywood. The long corridor of Castle Street, where even the cops won’t go alone. The strip malls lining Market Street. The condos crammed in behind the MegaWal-Mart. The new franchise gentlemen’s club that was too powerful for even the Baptist. The five-mile run of chain stores along College. The giant bucket rotating on the roof of the Quicky Chicken.
Winston opens his hands, palms up, as if he’s displaying Wilmington for me. He says, “I’ve stood here for days and studied them, Buddy.
I’ve mapped the straight lines they race in, driving from work to home to the bar to church to the shopping mall to home to work to the bar to church, scattering desperately past each other like rats in a maze, certain the way out was the way they came. All of them afraid to slow down for fear someone might speak the terrible truth: There’s no way out—this is just the way it is. And like those same dumb rats, so few of them with the sense to be calm and stop running and turn to one another for more than the diversion of biting or humping. It’s so terrible, Buddy, how can you stand it? How can any of us stand it?”
I want my remote in my hand, Alix beside me in bed, the mask tucked tight over my face, a beer and a pink pill, to be on my knees.
Winston, his voice cracking with tears, goes on. “All this. This filth and pain and regret. This is not how we were intended to live. We were meant for paradise. This has all been a big mistake. But the Svobodians understand and want to help us realize our destiny. Their world is a utopia, a place with no hunger, no disease. Since everything is as it was meant to be, there are no questions, no blame, no guilt, and no doubt.”
The thought of such a place washes over me like warm rain, and I say as a joke, “When do we go?” But when I hear my own voice I’m frightened by its conviction.
He pats my shoulder. “That’s the best part. I know now what NASA knows. What Donald Trump and the WTO have known for a long time, I suspect. We don’t have to go at all. It’s coming to us. Though the Svobodians are beings of pure light, they still require a physical host. Their homeship is the asteroid, Buddy. They live at the heart of its hollow core. They’re coming right at us.”
-----
An Assault on the Beach. What People Used to Think
the World Was Like. Columbus’s Men. Prayers and Such.
The Healing Properties of Salt Water.
Where Quinn got his hands on an amphibious assault vehicle I’ll never know. But this doesn’t seem to concern Hardy or Snake, both of whom are occupied in their own worlds as we skip across the waves along Wrightsville Beach. As for myself, I’m having a hard time staying in the here and now, can’t keep from replaying scenes from the dozen D-day flicks I’ve watched alone on late-night TV. I keep picturing all those movie-soldier faces set hard with determination, ready to stare down destiny like real Americans. How the men in open boats just like these josh each other as they storm toward Normandy Beach, laughing about killing Krauts, dreaming about all the long-legged ladies waiting in Paris to be saved. There’s always a single nervous one, some kid from Nebraska on the verge of almost thinking about crying even. But a salty veteran, John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, calms him down by passing on his lucky rabbit’s foot, pressing it into the kid’s palm with a hearty male handshake. “You give this back to me on the beach, Jimmy.” At this point, you know the salty vet’s a dead man. He’s just signed his death warrant. Here’s one thing I’m sure of: As a rule in movies about D-day, or invasion films of any kind, never give away your lucky rabbit’s foot. And even if you need to believe that you’ll live through the special-effects explosions waiting in your future, never predict it.
I find myself reaching for my own lucky charm, the vsaji Brook gave me, but the space on my chest is empty, and only when I feel that nothing do I remember removing the necklace back at the SWC Training Facility, when I was getting suited up. Quinn had to order a fresh Terror costume since the original is currently bloodstained and bulleted, probably in an evidence box in police lockup. Though the throbbing in my shoulder has dulled and the drainage has all but stopped, I still had to work the arm slowly into place. I offered to go without the immobilizer, but Quinn wanted me to wear it. “The sympathy factor combined with the air of dramatic realism,” he explained. This is the same rationale he used when asking Snake to cover his bloody eye with a black pirate patch. If it’s possible, my new suit’s even hotter than the old one, and though I’ve been trying to stay in the shade, this boat is basically a deep tin box with a motor, so my body’s getting cooked out here inside the spandex. I look down at the mask on my lap. It seems empty, deflated, like my guardian angel/demon balloon back at New Hanover.
Across from me in the boat sits Quinn, whose artificial tan only seems more odd in direct sunlight. He’s on a bench fiddling with a Pentium PowerBook connected to a toy-sized satellite dish. His NASA headset-phone is wired into the computer. But on the monitor, only a static blizzard rages. He twists a knob on the side of the headset and says, “Victor, let’s not point fingers at solar flares for everything. Demonstrate some initiative. And expedite. Our time constraints are nonnegotiable.”
A few moments later, the static clears on Quinn’s monitor. I step over, shield my eyes, and lean in to check the reception. But instead of the Beach Bash wrestlers I expect to see, ballet dancers skip across a stage. For a second I think of Brook, then of Rhonda. But these dancers are genuine professionals, dressed in light pinks and dark blues, hitting their marks sharp and tight. A monster, what looks like a Chinese dragon, chases a blond ballerina. Quinn sees me watching and says, “PBS has this kind of broadcast power and still they demand federal funding. Absurd.”
The boat pitches with a wave. Overhead a plane flies by trailing a message, but from this angle I think it reads T-SHIRTS SAVE YOUR LIVER. Leaving Quinn alone with his hi-tech gadgets, I balance my way to the rear, where Snake sits bent over a stack of index cards. The black pirate patch hangs crooked over his bloodied left eye. Sweat has lined little streaks down the white makeup on his gaunt cheeks, so his bruise is starting to show, and his black goatee seems wet with milk. With trembling fingers, he plucks the Nicotaint from his black-lipsticked lips and recites, “Everyone is entitled to a second chance. It’s never too late to begin again. Today can be a fresh start for you too.” He glances down at his notes, then back at me. “Honestly, Buddy, doesn’t this sound a little too preachy?”
“It sounds good, Snake,” I say, and his face sours. At this morning’s meeting, he reminded us all to call him Paul. I apologize and go on. “Paul, the fans’ll eat it up. You and Quinn should be proud.”
He nods toward the front of the boat and says, “This is just so important. I don’t want to let him down.”
The him in question is Hardy Appleseed, standing on a metal box up in the bow, looking over the side, pressing his face into the wind. His All-American cape streams behind him like the flag of certain victory. The Victory Belt is secured around his waist. When we were getting changed at the Training Facility, he made a point of showing me the dent on the belt, from that bullet’s impact. I pushed my finger into the tiny crater.
“Just be yourself,” I tell Snake. “You’ll be fine.” I pat his shoulder, trying to ignore the Kevlar vest I feel under his shirt, this a precaution insisted on by Lieutenant Tyrelli. Paul nods and puffs on his Nicotaint, turns back to his notes. Balancing myself against the rocking of the boat, I sidle up to Hardy on the metal box and look with him over the edge, across the ocean. His face is turned to the horizon.
“This is nice,” he says. “My pap had a sailing boat.”
“I remember you telling me that,” I say.
“When I was real little I used to be afraid,” Hardy tells me. “I used to cry if we got too far from the beach.”
To our left, the shore is maybe two miles in. I can see the bright patchwork of beach towels. “The beach is right there, Hardy. We’re safe.”
“Full stop, Antonio!” I hear Quinn shout into his headset, and the engine shifts into a lower pitch. The boat slows to an idle. Quinn says, “Victor, in two minutes I’m either seeing what I want on this screen or placing an advertisement for your current position. ‘Help Wanted,’ it will read, ‘Incompetents Need Not Apply.’”
The triangle top of a circus tent rises from the beach about a half mile down. Back at the Facility, when we were reviewing the day’s plan, Quinn told us that overnight the pay-per-view orders doubled, spiking right after the five o’clock news, when word of the attack at the cemetery started sprea
ding. He’s hired extra security for our protection. All afternoon the other wrestlers have been pairing off. We’re the grand finale.
Hardy says, “Mr. Cooper, I ain’t afraid no more. I like to go swimming. I always been a real good swimmer. Pap even taught me to do the backstroke.”
I tell Hardy I can’t do the backstroke, but I’m not sure he’s listening to me. His eyes remain fixed on the horizon. He points. “That’s what used to scare me.”
I scan the smooth blue water, thinking a shark fin might be slicing along or something like that. But there’s nothing.
Speaking apparently to the waves, Hardy goes on. “The map was in a big book in the room where Pap slept. It had shiny pages. It was a old kind of map, a painted picture of what people used to think the world was like. There wasn’t any America yet and Africa was all skinny. Along the edges in some places there was pictures of sea monsters coming in and out of the water with scary faces. But that ain’t what made me afraid because even when I was a little kid I knew there was no such thing as monsters.”
He pauses and looks at me for a second, as if he’s asking for confirmation on the nonexistence of monsters. I nod and he turns back to the water to continue. “What I always snuck in there to look at was the boat falling off the end of the map. It was tilting over the edge of this giant waterfall that just went right off the page. There wasn’t any bottom to it. Them people thought the planet was flat as a pancake.”
He points to the horizon. “They thought that was the end of the world.”
Together, we study the flat line where the sea meets the sky. I say, “But they were wrong, Hardy. The world doesn’t have an end.”
“I know, I know. It’s round like a basketball. That’s what Christopher Columbus proved. He had three ships. The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.”
“That’s right,” I say. “1492.”
“I’ll bet those sailors were awful afraid,” Hardy says. “I’ll bet they prayed a lot.”
Buddy Cooper Finds a Way Page 19
