Eventually it had also been logic telling him to turn his back on the streets, even at a moment when he was on the cusp of making a small fortune. It had been logic, along with the birth of his daughter and a couple of well-chosen words from Harris “Smoky” Washington, the head of the Essex County Youth League where Knight had been sentenced to perform community service after nearly putting a man’s eye out in a drunken brawl in Hoboken. “I seen your evaluations, you asshole!” Washington had said, getting in his face and hammering him in the chest with a calloused forefinger. “An IQ so high it just about goes off the charts, but you don’t got sense enough to see where you’re heading? You’ll make some money on the streets, sure! You’ll blow some money all over the place like the hotshot you think you are, sure enough. Then you’ll die. And you know it! A bullet don’t care how smart you are when your back’s turned. And that bullet’s out there. And then what? You’ll become your old man, that’s what. You’ll be the same piece of shit he was because now you’ve left your kid and her mother to fight for themselves in that same sewer out there where your white trash piece of shit daddy left you.”
Logic every step of the way, as far as Knight was concerned.
“I know what you’re saying, Doc.” Lacy’s voice snapped Knight back into the moment. “With all the crap in this world…if the great invisible being gets angry because you eat meat on Saturday…well, I think the great being should just try a little harder.”
Instead of naivete, Knight saw something knowing and mature in that impossibly youthful face of hers now. But he also needed to remind himself that underneath the young, tomboy-punk looks, Lacy Anderson was also a veteran. When she talked about the “crap” of the world, it was more than rhetorical. She, too, had seen her share of it.
Ballantine cut in, “I don’t recall those details from your bio.”
Knight was glad to have to shift his body and glance at the ex-cop. Having been forced to twist around and look at Lacy and Cornelia in the seat directly in back tried his hip and lower back.
Ballantine cast a look his way for a moment, then returned his eyes to the road. “What happened in Haiti? You saw something, right? And now the facts seem to be pointing toward something invisible putting those globes out there.”
Knight didn’t reply right away. There was something lurking under Ballantine’s words that bothered him. No…it pissed him off. Sure, Knight admitted, he could just as well have been paranoid, but there had always been something subliminally irritating about Rick Ballantine. Knight wouldn’t have said that he disliked Ballantine, only that he didn’t entirely care for the man.
He knew for a fact that it had nothing to do with Ballantine having been a street cop, whereas Knight had grown up as a hoodlum. He was too old to get caught up on that most basic of their differences. Knight had, on occasion, tried to give some analytic thought to his feelings about Ballantine. Perhaps it was just the fact that Ballantine always appeared to be too sure of himself. While Knight appreciated confidence, he had also learned to be wary of people who believed they were always right. Perhaps it was the academic in him, Knight pondered, that stoked the animosity for those who felt they had all the answers. The fact was, in Knight’s estimation, that the more one learned about the world, the more an intelligent man became convinced of his own smallness and inadequacies. Ballantine, as far as Knight suspected, based on his very short acquaintance with the man, seemed to lack that quality.
Furthermore, at that very moment Ballantine’s words felt like a subtle…jab. A jab! the thought flittered across Knight’s mind. That was it, he pondered now. He didn’t like being jabbed by Ballantine. Sure, on the surface Ballantine looked like a tough guy, a hard guy, the ex-cop, former high-school or college football-player type, no doubt, based on his muscular physique. But Knight also sensed that there might have been a weakness inside Ballantine. Despite his years on the streets of L.A., Ballantine was the product of the suburban middle class. He had first been schooled in the worlds of crime, violence, and depravity out of books in some criminal justice class in some college. Ballantine had seen, had become acclimated to a world that could be brutal, but Knight couldn’t believe that Ballantine could be a truly brutal man himself. He was perhaps afraid of the recesses of his psyche where brutality lived. Certainly, Knight was aware of the sketchy basics of Ballantine’s troubles with the L.A.P.D. Internal Affairs division, but those were troubles he could have fought. But Rick Ballantine was not as tough a fighter, Knight estimated, as his rugged, tough guy exterior suggested.
And how many jabs did you let that lazy bitch of an ex-wife of yours take at you? Knight wanted to say. Probably a lot. Just as many as those bottom-feeders and bureaucrats jabbed at you in L.A. when you let them end your career without fighting back.
“My bio didn’t get into that,” Knight said evenly. “But, if everyone’s curious, I saw the exorcism of a kid in Haiti. The son of a French doctor working in a charity hospital. Up until that moment I was, as you might imagine, skeptical about possessions and exorcisms. You hear a million stories of little kids or average people being possessed by Satan or demons or dark forces or some such dire, apocalyptic beings. So what’s wrong with that picture?”
Knight paused and looked around the SUV. When no replies came, he realized how pedantic he must have sounded, as if he was delivering a lecture in the classroom.
“OK,” he went on. “So it’s kids and all these so-called average people, right? So think about this: these demonic beings are possessing people because they want to destroy humanity. Or at least that’s what most religions that have this sort of a light-and-dark duality tell us. Well, aren’t the demons underachievers? You want to destroy humanity, so you possess a fifteen-year-old girl and make her scream some obscenities? Is that the best the devil or the great deceiver or the prince of darkness can do? Why not possess the pilot of a fighter jet carrying enough bombs to wipe out a small town? Why not possess the guy with the nuclear launch key in the silo?”
Knight caught a rueful grin on Lacy’s face, and knew his reassessment of her was on the money. She indeed had seen too much bad shit in Afghanistan to believe in simplistic black and white, angels and demons fairy tales.
“But something made you change your mind,” Cornelia said.
“Not about whether or not gods and devils control us. Or tempt us or expect us not to eat real dairy ice cream on the Sabbath lest they get pissed off. But that there’s something out there no one’s created a measurement device for. You see objects move on their own, levitate across the room around this supposedly possessed kid in Haiti…well, you get scared real fast. And no, not scared of the wrath of gods or the attack of demons. If there are forces in the great beyond—”
“The great beyond?” Lacy cut in. “The place you can’t measure?”
“That’s exactly it. The place you can’t measure, you can’t experiment on, and can’t replicate in the lab. But if there are places like that…out there—outside of, I don’t know, our known dimensions, our consensus reality—well, whatever lies in a place like that probably doesn’t give a damn about how we live and which way we face when we pray. It probably doesn’t care whether we keep our heads covered any more than you care about the mating rituals of mosquitos in a pond.”
But before he was finished speaking, Knight noticed the ever-darkening look on Melinda Rowland’s face. “That’s very pessimistic, isn’t it?”
“Pessimistic?” Knight asked.
“Sure,” said Melinda. “If you have some higher—I don’t know—power, I guess—”
“Wouldn’t he try to save us the way we save endangered species?”
“Yes, that’s exactly right.”
This is interesting, Knight thought. So we find the cast-iron traditionalist in the girl bodybuilder of our group? And it turns out to be a woman who likes to challenge conventions…or at least conventions of traditional gendered appearance
s. “Then why hasn’t he—it, whatever—done it already?” he asked her.
“It wants us to help ourselves,” Melinda replied.
That, of course, was what he’d expected her to say. It was the standard retort of the religiously inclined. Knight had heard that kind of argument coming from people like Father Petrocelli, the Jesuit priest occasionally teaching writing classes at Essex County Youth Activities Center and working at the soup kitchens in Newark in the mid sixties. God calls all people to service to combat the injustices of the world, Petrocelli used to explain, and God looked long and hard at those who shirked their duties to their fellow man. There is plenty of work to be done on the streets and in the trenches, Petrocelli would say, and there was plenty of praying and confession to be done to keep one’s soul clean and well-managed. To Knight, that seemed to suggest that God was as much of an underachiever as the demons who wasted their time possessing teenage kids for no other reason than to make them throw cursing tantrums. And what was the point in managing one’s soul and confessing all the time if it was to please a being who didn’t seem to care a whit about all the garbage, bedlam, and destruction polluting his marvelous creation?
“Sounds like a pretty useless higher power then, doesn’t it?” Knight asked, keeping his tone neutral, theoretical rather than confrontational.
“Well, if it did everything for us, it would…well, it would take away—”
“Our free will?”
“Exactly!”
“So instead it lets us torment and kill each other? You know your free-will argument only goes so far, don’t you? Sure, some fanatical nut can exercise his free will to try and blow up an entire ship full of people. But where do his victims’ rights to exercise their free will kick in?”
“But what about all the people who choose to do the right thing when they don’t have to?” Melinda insisted.
“What about them?”
“Well, there are plenty of people out there in horrible circumstances who choose to do good when they could just as well profit from evil. Don’t you think their conscience might be a sign of…you know, something trying to guide the world in the right direction?”
An old question, Knight pondered, an old question he had asked himself a million times when taking stock of his own life and his own choices. “That’s the biology of good and evil. Evolution.”
“Say what?” Cornelia spoke up this time.
“Most people have a conscience and an inborn sense of empathy because it was evolutionarily advantageous,” Knight replied. “The morality gene, if you will. Our species needed it to survive.
“Well, Doc,” Ballantine said with an exhale after a beat of silence hung in the car. Knight wondered how many of his companions’ Sunday school upbringing he’d just stomped all over. “So that may explain a lot of things, right? Except now we have these big globes out there. And some power is sure making its presence felt.”
“Yeah,” Cornelia jumped in. Knight noted the force in her voice as she did so. “And it certainly wants something from us,” she added.
“I know,” Knight said. “And how does it fit into a cynical rationalist’s world view? It doesn’t. It scares the hell out of him. Because that big granite ball exists and it makes no sense. That’s why someone like Spangler is scared out of his mind right now.”
“And what about you?” Cornelia asked. “How does it fit into your—what?—modified cynical agnostic point of view?”
Knight’s gaze drifted out the windshield in front of him as they crossed the Albany Street Bridge from Highland Park into New Brunswick. “I’m trying to figure that one out. And it scares me too.”
4.
Knight thought that Jerry’s voice and delivery usually sounded like he had just stepped out of some 1940s film, perhaps a screwball comedy or a tough-talking newspaper melodrama. It was amusing up to a point, but also easily irritating. Now that staccato, machinegun delivery of Jerry’s was screeching out of Knight’s cell phone. With the device on speaker phone, the producer’s voice felt like sharp pin pricks along the auditory nerves.
“Yeah, there are mysterious forces at work, my friends, and right now those forces are grinning at us, ear to ear,” Jerry said.
Knight and the Confirmation team stood around the breakfast table in Knight’s corner king suite in the Heldrich Hotel the morning after their visit to Rutgers, listening to Jerry’s update of the latest twist in the story of the granite globes.
“So, Jerry,” Knight interrupted. “Does this mean that we can renegotiate our contract?”
“That’s very funny, Dan,” Jerry’s words slashed out of the speaker phone. “I like that. You’re a character—all you guys are—and the audiences will love it as well.”
“I wasn’t kidding. And yes, since you asked the first time we met, you can call me Doctor Knight.”
“Your whole team has been in the middle of the story since the beginning,” Jerry said. “You know more about this than any one person now.”
The truth of the matter was that Knight and his group might have been in the middle of the globe situation from the beginning—or from the beginning as far as they knew, since they couldn’t be sure if the Mount Shasta globe was the first of its kind—but they knew as little about it as everyone else. Knight had said as much last night when he got a call from a reporter working for the LiveScience online newswire service.
“It might all appear unexplained,” Knight had told the reporter, “but we must put it under the most rigorous of scientific tests. There are things out there we can’t explain, but we should not look at science as an enemy, and science should not look at people who have unexplained experiences as some kind of a threat. Let’s work together to find the truths of this mysterious, unexplained universe.”
By this morning, according to Jerry’s breathless phone call, the quote had been picked up by a dozen papers and online news services, including The New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Miami Herald. In each article, Confirmation was also prominently mentioned. Jerry’s ecstasy was understandable.
“You guys need to discuss this with everyone who asks you a single question about it,” Jerry yelled across the line. “You understand that? And, needless to say, make sure Confirmation is every other word that comes out of your mouth.”
“We’ll be sure and do that,” Ballantine deadpanned.
“I got meetings with ABC and NBC,” Jerry shot back, “Forget cable and syndication, my friends. Friggin’ ABC! Can you get a load of that? And right now, it’s CNN for you, Doctor Knight.”
The whole point of Jerry’s call was to relay the news of an invitation for Knight to discuss the globes on CNN’s all new Peter Rollins Show. Once word of the Watchung globe had hit the New York media, and the fact that the Watchung globe was the second of its kind, newspapers and news stations started perking up. But most importantly, when the national media wanted to talk about the globes, they wanted to do so with the stars of Confirmation.
“And you realize that the best part of the CNN interview will be that chance for you to pound on that old nemesis of yours, the Amazing Pike,” Jerry screeched across the phone line. “That’s gotta be better than even a pay raise, right Doc?”
“I think I prefer the pay raise.”
Jerome “The Astounding” Pike was Knight’s counterpoint when it came to unexplained phenomenon. Calling himself a “warrior for rationalism, reality, and radical common sense,” the former stage magician had made almost as good a living writing books debunking the paranormal as Knight had advocating the reality of the supernatural. The two had already debated about ghostly phenomena on Fox News and MSNBC on a couple of Halloween night “special editions.” The Peter Rollins Show apparently was more interested in a verbal professional wrestling event than a reasoned discussion of an unexplained event.
Jerry said. “Go knock that
bum out.”
The complimentary paper slipped under the door that morning had yet another front-page globe story. But this story made Knight wonder about why The Astounding Pike would want to debate the issue on television. From the way events were shaping up, it looked like it would be harder and harder to tack on yet another one of the standard hoax/misidentification/crazy-people explanations to the phenomenon. According to the paper, the Mount Shasta and Watchung globes were not the only ones of their kind. A third one had just been found outside of Edinburgh, Scotland.
5.
The crazy fact was that Knight actually liked a lot of what The Astounding Pike had written about belief systems and people fabricating elaborate fantasy scenarios to explain how unseen forces accounted for the way the world worked. He, of course, would never tell Pike that. It had been too good for business to be attacked by a rationalist fanatic like him. One only built a loyal readership, a dedicated fan base, if one presented himself as a hero, a crusader for a cause, a man with a message. And what every hero needs to make him look good is a villain.
Pike had no problem acting as a caustic foil to Knight. Despite the fact that he liked to talk a good game about rationality and common sense, Pike was a high-strung, wild-eyed fanatic down to the core of his being. He was just as obsessive and blind in his zeal as any snake-handling fundamentalist preacher. He would have wagered extravagantly, would have been ready to fight to the death for the idea that no phenomenon existed that was beyond the explanatory capacity of known scientific measurement devices.
But now, sitting just a few feet away from Pike on the set of the Peter Rollins Show, Knight could imagine a sudden spike in the sales of at least his last two books. Pike had come in his best bombastic mood, and it looked like he would spare few words in attacking the superstitious scourge of the world.
Confirmation Page 6
