That image served as the spine of the poem. Those caramel eyes. With that in place, I just picked up the rest of the pieces and put them where they belonged. When I typed in the final line, inverting the opening line to close the circuit, a charge shot through me. The fine hairs at the back of my neck stood out as I reread the entire text.
Another masterpiece. Finished, and free.
I printed the poem, snapped up the page, plucked two markers out of a cup on the desk, found a manila envelope on the center table. I crossed to the cabinet by the door and hauled out the student directory. I leafed through the C section until I found Amber V. Chandler's homeroom listed as room C216, on the second floor at the opposite end of the building. I returned the book, slid the poem into the envelope unfolded, and wrote Amber's name on the front in black. Then I uncapped the red marker and reached to the upper left corner of the envelope.
The Creek Reader got more than its fair share of mileage out of the Jack of Hearts story. One of the girls on the staff received the first poem, because that guaranteed that it would get noticed. Winsome Donne edited the paper's poetry section, and she reprinted the poem in the next issue under an anonymous attribution, asking the author to come forward and take his credit.
By October of last year, Ethan caught the story after hearing gossip about seven girls who received similar anonymous poems. He interviewed each girl, and concluded that Jack chose girls who were perfectly ordinary. He shared this insight with only me, Phil, and Ben. I suggested that he identify the recipients by month like Playboy centerfolds. If Jack intended to celebrate the common woman, I suggested, then we would help.
We would turn them into celebrities.
I pressed the red marker to the manila envelope, and grinned. When a junior in the Student Council received the first poem of our senior year last September, I invented the theory that the Jack of Hearts as fictitious.
I, too, shared this with only Phil, Ben, and Ethan. I theorized that the girls receiving poems actually wrote them for themselves in a bid for attention. Only a poet might hatch such a scheme, I reasoned, and that implicated Winnie, the first recipient, as the mastermind.
It was part joke and mostly deflection. And it wasn’t a terrible theory, except that I already knew the truth.
But Ben ran with it. He wrote a sidebar commentary to go with Ethan's article in the October issue, questioning the authenticity of the Jack of Hearts letters, insinuating that the recipients manufactured counterfeit popularity.
The reaction was immediate. By lunch on the day that the October issue circulated, Ben couldn't walk down the hall without being verbally assaulted by female students.
And it worked out perfectly for me. Ben's crudeness drew suspicion away from me without vilifying me. Some people actually believed that Ben himself secretly wrote the Jack of Hearts, and that he meant for his crude commentary to deflect suspicion away from himself.
I sketched the capital J in red into the left corner above Amber's name, then drew a scarlet heart beneath the letter to complete the ideogram. I spun the envelope around 180 degrees and put a second symbol in the opposite corner.
It liked the work. I nodded, and grinned.
I attached two loops of masking tape to the back of the envelope, threw on my jacket, and started out the door. I jogged the hallway, took the stairs three at a time, trotted around the horseshoe of Wing C. I passed Room 215 and slowed, reaching the door to Amber's homeroom with the envelope at my side. I watched that door standing closed, likely locked, waiting to be tested or abandoned.
Or merely to be marked.
I waited, not knowing why. Seconds ticked by. The time felt out of joint. Uneasy energy pulsed in my temples, thrilling me, filling me with fantastic terrors. This moment had not been written into the story. I was sure of that.
I considered that door for longer than any door ought to be considered, and I felt suddenly, hopelessly, out of place. This felt like a mistake. I knew that I should turn back, go downstairs to the newsroom. Pick a different girl to name Miss March 1998. Leave this door unmarked.
Fiery defiance flashed across my mind. I slapped the envelope to the door, pressing the adhesive to the wood.
Then I nodded, and turned without another thought. I headed back to the stairwell and climbed up another flight. Three balconies made up the third floor, looking down on the auditorium. A single corridor ran behind them, and I pushed through the door that connected to the highest landing, moving toward the far end of the hall.
After six hours, I needed the cold taste of fresh air. I climbed the four metal stairs to the far door, hit the bar at the center, and threw the door open. The fire-alarm that should have sounded didn't. Teachers whose passion for education rivaled only their addiction to nicotine disabled that alarm long and long ago. I spilled out into the night, crossed the roof to the rampart above the courtyard.
Merciful darkness pressed down on the campus. The door clicked shut behind me. Headlights flared below as a Nissan Sentra swept through the parking lot toward the curving two-lane drive that connected the high school campus to Wenro County Community College.
I pulled the collar of my jacket higher around my neck. The light of dead stars and unknowable galaxies dotted the sky like crumbs of glass thrown across macadam. Orion winked in his winter vista. I smiled at up the Hunter.
Fresh headlights ignited below. A guttural thumping rose up, reciting the poetry of the urban soul. A lowered Dodge Neon raced through the parking lot, taking its place near the gym among a dozen other vehicles. More than a thousand teenagers attended Prophecy Creek High School, but only a fraction of them see the school at night. Only a slim minority of that fraction sees it from up here.
I stood on the verge of cosmic insignificance, and felt the soft breath of nothingness on my face. I savored the solace of the empty places, and stared unflinchingly into the abyss as the abyss stared unblinkingly back into me.
I saw what few see. I followed my own solitary pursuit, and I loved it. Authors peer into the dark corners where others refuse to look. That is our duty. To find the truth inside the lies. The only truth that matters.
I laughed at myself. Numbness crept up my arms. I leaned on the rampart, watching the industrial landscape below. A wide stone staircase rose up from the far side of the courtyard, ascending to a concourse that stretched back thirty feet to another staircase that led up to the student parking lot beyond. A brick island stood at the center of that concourse, containing a patch of dehydrated dirt where nothing more than weeds had ever grown.
A bitter breeze sliced across the open grounds, carrying a far-flung grumble of thunder like the night trying to clear its throat. I turned to the horizon, and saw heat-lightning jittering distantly in the sky to the south, somewhere over Prophet's Point. Electricity flickered between the charcoal thunderheads, distinguishing them for one instant.
Light twitched across the darkness, and I felt it sizzle in my blood. The visceral thoughts of the universe arced across those black synapses, and I stared beyond the borders of the world. I felt the elusive texture of eternity. Because up here, in the spectral darkness and the solace of the empty places, I felt the unspoken voice of the universe brush itself against my mind. I was certain of it.
Sure. Standing on a rooftop at eight-thirty at night, I could believe that sort of thing. I shook my head, and I laughed at the thought. I couldn't help myself.
Because at that moment, I thought of Regina, and Phil, and Ben. And the soapstone boulders out there on the timeless island of Prophet's Point, and an operating room. And lightning. Of course. Always the lightning.
4.
It was the eighth day of a sweltering July heatwave.
"You know he's never going to make a move on her."
I looked up from my copy of the Wenro County Register. Phil watched me from across the table, hunched over an open book. Three more volumes stood in a stack at his right while a closed binder lay on the desk. He glanced to his right and I looked t
o my left, spotting Ben from across the library at the microfilm reader. I shook my head.
Ben sat at the machine as he had for nearly an hour, scrolling through eighty-year-old issues of the Philadelphia Bulletin. He had talked Phil into stopping at the Dickinson Union Library on our way out to the Winslow Graham Mall, and when he stepped up to the circulation desk, he asked the girl: "Read any good books lately?"
"Oh, Jesus," Phil had said. I had laughed at that. Ben had shot me a hard glance. I had coughed to cover up my laughter, and that had made Phil laugh.
Erin Chandler worked behind the desk. She'd been a senior during our freshmen year. Ben and Phil knew her because she'd been one of the two editors of the Creek Reader when they joined the paper as ninth-graders.
Instead of just asking her out, Ben concocted a story requiring the use of a microfilm reader. He just needed someone to show him how the machine worked, he told her. He requested the Bulletin film reels from June through September of 1910, and he listened attentively as Erin explained how to operate the reader. Twenty minutes later, he traded the Summer of 1910 for the Summer of 1911, and twenty minutes after that, he swapped the Summer of 1911 for the Summer of 1912.
Now I watched him unload the latest reel and return it to its cardboard box. He picked up the last carton on the table, loaded the reel, and bent toward the screen.
"Yeah," I said to Phil without looking. "I know."
Phil watched me for another few seconds. I turned back up to him. I waited for him to say something else, and when he didn't, I just shrugged. He flashed a quick grin then, and laughed, shaking his head as well.
Phil indulged this little tangent of Ben's mostly because the air-conditioning in his rickety Chrysler Newport quit back June. I passed the time reading the daily newspapers carried by the Library, and Phil occupied himself by once more pulling the black binder out of his bag.
He inherited his interest in John Doe 83 from his father. Lysander Michener worked for the Prophecy Creek Police Department, and his first case as a detective had been the body of a man found slumped in a cracked plastic chair on the balcony of Room 16 of the Gateway Motel on April 3rd of 1983. He never identified the man, but the autopsy showed no evidence of foul play. The case ended there.
Just another Prophecy Creek oddity.
But Detective Michener's obsession did not end there. He continued his attempt to identify the dead man on the balcony, building a formidable file of peculiar data that wound around itself and doubled back to nowhere. When asked by his son one night in April of 1996 what the black binder contained, Lysander told Phil the strange story.
Phil convinced his father to make him a copy of the file for himself. Now he pulled that binder out again, and I glanced to the Seiko Chronograph on my right wrist. Noon approached. Across the table, Phil sucked in a hard breath. I looked up from a piece by David McCleary on a proposed human-relations ordinance. Phil grinned.
He jabbed at a page in his book. "I knew it."
I watched for a moment. "Knew what?"
He laughed, then spun the book in my direction and pushed it across the table. I snapped up the newspaper and folded it to the side as Phil slapped at a page in the volume. "I knew I read that line somewhere before."
I looked down at a page in the fourth volume of Sebastian Hunter's rambling Stanzas collection. Seven cinquains took up page 181. I scanned them, looked up at Phil again, shook my head. "What am I looking at?"
"Last stanza," he said. "Bottom of the page."
At the foot of page 181, I found a poem, labeled with only the number 9,247 in parentheses, reading:
Upon that timeless island's bloody sand
Where April skies, by raging light, are split
Those sentries to the south, four brothers stand
bound by a truth unknown and infinite:
The only truth that matters.
The last line rang in my head for a long moment, like the pure tone of a tuning fork. The only truth that matters. It felt like a phrase worth remembering. I laughed.
"This is what you've been looking for all this time?"
Phil's grin widened into an expression of victory. He opened the binder and flipped through the pages until he came to the one he wanted. Then he spun the binder in my direction and pushed it toward me as well. He nodded down at the page, still flashing that triumphant grin.
I looked down to see two pages of photocopies. The page on the right showed three 1953 two-dollar bills with sequential serial numbers. The page on the left showed the front and back of a business card that Detective Michener pulled out of John Doe 83's pocket fifteen years ago.
The front of the card showed an old logo of the Wenro County Credit Union, and the name "Faith O'Ryan." In one corner, I spotted what looked like an [I] pushed over on its side, sketched hastily by hand. The Greek letter Xi. The back looked blank, except for a single sentence hand-written in what looked like pencil. Nine words scribbled in a nearly-illegible scrawl that read only: "Upon that timeless island's bloody sand, four brothers stand."
My mind snagged. My eyes flicked back to Stanza No. 9,247. The wording matched. I looked back to Phil, and I could see in his face that he knew that I saw it.
"Huh," I said, sliding the binder back across the table.
Phil spun it back to himself. "Yeah," he said, reaching for the book. I let him take it. "How about that?"
"So the dead man was carrying around a line of obscure 18th Century poetry?" I asked, more to myself. "Why?"
Phil shrugged. "Might as well ask why there's so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe."
I blinked twice, and watched Phil flip the pages in the binder again. "But it might explain why his boots were full of sand when they pulled them off at the autopsy." He stopped at a densely typed page. "You get three guesses as to what color it was, and the first two don't count."
I thought a moment, then said, "'bloody sand'."
Phil nodded. "'Subject's right boot'," he read from the page, "'found to contain 5.1 grams of coarse sand, red in color. Left boot found to contain 4.7 grams of same'."
I leaned back in my seat. "How about that."
Phil flipped the binder closed and pulled Volume Four of the Stanzas back in front of himself. He scanned page 181 again, silently rereading No. 9,247 once more, laughing as he stood. He crossed the main room to the bank of copy machines against the far wall, and I followed as he asked me, "You ever been out to Prophet's Point?"
I shook my head, and asked, "Have you?"
"Not since the bridge collapsed." Phil opened the lid of a copier and laid Volume Four down on the glass.
Now I grinned. "That was during the quake in `51."
"It was," Phil said, feeding a dime into the machine and pressing the COPY button. "Wasn't it?"
"That bridge was almost three hundred years old when it fell," I told him. "The Wenrohronon Indians built it."
Phil picked his copy out of the tray. "You know what color the sand is along the waterline out there?"
"Do I get three guesses?" I asked.
Phil laughed. "But the first two don't count."
We crossed back to the desk. Phil tucked his copy into the front pocket of the binder, returning the binder to his bookbag. Then he unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag, stuffed it into his jeans pocket. "Prophet's Point was where Hunter's four sons made their stand against May's Raiders in December of 1761."
I nodded. I remembered Mr. Kershaw's lecture on the Battle of the Four Brothers, all those months ago. My mind snagged again. "'Four brothers' stand'."
Phil zipped his bag closed, slung it over his shoulders. "Except that it wasn't called Prophet's Point back then. It had a Wenro name." He laid Volume Four on top of the three volumes on the desk and picked up the pile. "The most common translation is the Everlasting Land, but it's also been referred to as the Timeless Island."
I shook my head. We crossed to the circulation desk. "This is why no one lets you
play Trivial Pursuit."
Phil set the first four volumes of the Stanzas down on the counter and turned to me. "I'll bet you every penny in my trust fund that John went out to Prophet's Point."
I watched him. A moment later, Ben stepped up to the counter and dropped his stack of cardboard boxes next to the books. He grinned at Phil. "You have a trust fund?"
Phil shot Ben a sidelong glance, cocked an eyebrow at him, and said, "No." I laughed at that, and Ben opened his mouth to say something just as Erin Chandler stepped up to the other side of the circulation desk. She tucked a swatch of dark hair behind her ear and looked at Ben with shockingly green eyes. "Have any luck?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said, shooting her a quick grin. "Um, no." He slid the pile of boxes across the counter to her. "Can I get the Bulletin for June through September of 1913?"
"Sure," she told him. She really did have an adorable smile, especially when she flashed her dimples. I could understand Ben's fascination. "Hang on."
"You know what? Don't worry about it," Phil told her before she stepped away. "That's okay."
"Are you sure?" She glanced uncertainly from Phil to Ben and back. "It's no problem. I'm here all day."
"Yeah," Ben said to Phil. "It's not a problem."
"She's here all day," I offered, grinning. Ben nodded.
Phil ignored us. "We have to go," he told her with a cordial smile. "But thank you for all of your help."
She flashed those dimples again. "Anytime." Before Ben could answer, Phil bustled him toward the doors, and we stepped back out into the sweltering July heat.
5.
Even with the windows down, I sweated through my shirt by the time Phil pulled his rickety Chrysler Newport onto the soft shoulder of Galloway Road.
I climbed out of the passenger's side and stepped out into the middle of the gravel road. I peeled my Flogging Molly t-shirt away from my chest, flapped it to get some air circulating. The sky hung low overhead, the color of brushed chrome, like a massive expanse of dented sheet metal. The temperature broke 100 degrees again.
The Danger of Being Me Page 2
