The Way of Sorrows

by Jon Steele

  “How the hell this crowd can call themselves the good angels with a straight face is a fucking mystery to me.” She looked at Corporal Mai. “Could you get me a chair, please?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “A chair. For me. In there next to Goose.”

  “You will need to obtain permission to enter the room, Madame Taylor. I was told to let you see him only.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Get me a chair.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I get the feeling you and I are going to spend a lot of time together, Corporal, and I think I could get used to you. But let’s get a few things straight. I’ll take the medics’ potions and teas to keep from falling off the edge of the earth. I’ll eat your chocolate chip cookies, tell you they’re yummy, and pretend there’s nothing else in them. I’ll even play along with whatever supercop has planned to get my son back. But I’ll be damned if I will allow that broken child to be alone one more minute.”

  Katherine could see Corporal Mai was muddled.

  “Get me a fucking chair, Corporal. Please.”

  Katherine blinked, saw the boy’s hand in hers now. She looked at his half face and smiled.

  “The whole time-loop thing is pretty wild, isn’t it? I can’t imagine how you lived with it. I can’t imagine how you lived with any of it.”

  She turned around, saw Corporal Mai standing in the hall keeping the watch. The corporal had dutifully gotten the chair for Katherine, called in a few doctors to answer questions about Goose, who then took their leave when Katherine said she wanted to be alone with the boy. Katherine wondered if she had been too hard on the corporal. Then again, maybe the corporal was testing Katherine’s progress, seeing if she was capable of thinking for herself. No doubt her progress had already been reported to the cop. Who knew what would happen next? Katherine turned back to the boy.

  “They told me you’re really smart. Actually, they said you’re a genius. They said you hacked a supercomputer and got it talking with a spaceship. A for-real, no-kidding spaceship that’s leaving our galaxy right now. She said it’s carrying an SOS. That’s so damn cool, Goose. My son would love you. He’s a full-fledged member of the Star Trek brigade. I remember taking him into the back garden of our house on moonless nights. He would stare at the stars, point to this one and that one, gurgle and coo and laugh. Sometimes I imagined he was giving names to the stars. It was only the same two names: ‘Goog’ or ‘Boo.’ Those were about the only words he knew. ‘Boo’ was short for his cat, Monsieur Booty. Actually, it was someone else’s cat. He’s Max’s cat now. And mine. Perhaps when you get better and when Max comes home, you two could meet. He’d love to hear how you’re talking to a spaceship. My son’s name is Max.”

  Katherine felt a wave of sadness. She sighed and it receded.

  “Corporal Mai said you knew you weren’t the child of the prophecy, that you were only trying to protect your father and the half-kinds. That’s why you let the world know the comet over Paris was coming. You were telling the world it wasn’t you, you were telling the world it was someone else. Did you know it was my son? Did you know it was Max? Did you suffer so to protect him?”

  She gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

  “I think you did, Goose. I think you were trying to protect him, too. And I want you to listen to me now, because I’m imagining that you can hear me. I’m going to protect you, Goose. I’m going to stay with you until you wake up. I’m here and I’m going to stay with you.”

  She waited, almost expecting the boy to respond. He did not. She reached out and touched his cheek.

  “Oh, my name is Katherine, in case you were wondering.”

  She turned the boy’s hand and studied the palm. She had done so a few times already sitting with him, each time even more amazed at the number of lines etched in the skin. Maybe he was twenty-six, but the palm of his right hand appeared ancient. Hundreds of tiny lines intersected and crossed over one another.

  “I went to a fortune teller once. She looked at my palm and told me I had a wounded love line. Man, was she right. I wonder what she would say looking at your hand. So many lines and crosses and stars.”

  The respirator stopped. The beeps of the monitors stopped. But there were no alarms or medics rushing into the room. And Corporal Mai stood in the hall as still as Lot’s wife.

  “What the heck?” Katherine looked at the boy’s half face. “Goose?”

  Then there was a wheezing voice. “No temas. El niño va a estar bien.”

  Katherine looked at the shadowed corner of the room. A raggedly dressed man stood there. It was the bum from her dream in Lausanne Cathedral. The one who lifted her into the light pouring through the stained glass windows. Harper called him Monsieur Gabriel. Oddly enough, seeing him again, Katherine wasn’t afraid.

  “Hello again,” she said.

  “Buenos días.”

  Katherine stared at him. “Did you speak Spanish the last time I dreamed about you, when you did that trick with the light?”

  “Sí.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish. But I understood what you said. You said, ‘Be not afraid. The boy will be fine.’”

  “Muy bueno.”

  “Gracias. But that’s not the point. Where did I learn to speak Spanish?”

  “We are not really speaking, Madame Taylor. This is only a dream.”

  “Okay. I’ll buy that.”

  She looked at the boy. She was still holding his hand.

  “What happened? Why did Goose stop breathing?” she said.

  “He breathes. I am only visiting you in the moment between one breath and the next.”

  Katherine looked at Monsieur Gabriel. “How can we be taking the time to have our imaginary conversation if we are in the moment between one breath and the next? Did the cop lower a time warp over the place?”

  “There is no need for a time warp in dreams.”

  “Why not?”

  “You are full with questions, madame.”

  “It’s the chocolate chip cookies. Why no time warp?”

  “Because dreams do not exist in time, they only exist in the moment.”

  Katherine nodded. “Okay, I’ll buy that, too. How do you know Goose will come back?”

  “He was only waiting for you to pronounce your name to him.”

  Katherine smiled. “So, on top of everything else that’s happened to me, looping and linguistics included, I’m a miracle worker, too?”

  “You were chosen among women to bear the child of the prophecy and bring light into the world.”

  “Who chose me? When?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Call me curious.”

  “Call me the one who cannot answer the question.”

  Katherine tried to stand. “I’m stuck.”

  “You are.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are in the moment from one breath to the next.”

  “And why are we here?”

  The bum’s eyes were bright now. “So that I can tell you about your son.”

  Katherine received his words without sinking. “What about him?”

  “He will not be safe until the betrayer of the creation is destroyed.”

  “I take it you mean the slimeball who kidnapped my son, Komarovsky.”

  “Sí.”

  “Okay, what are you waiting for? Go get him, and take Harper with you. I’ve seen him in action, he’s good at it.”

  “The light within him struggles to live. He will draw out the enemy and wound him, but he is too weak to destroy him. It falls to another.”

  “Who?”

  “You, of course.”

  “Me, of course?”

  “It is the simple truth.”

  “In other words, it should be fucking obvious to me.”

  Monsieur Gabriel nodded again, scratching at the bend of his arm this time. Katherine recognized the action. She had seen it loads in beforetimes, back in L.A. The bum was in bad need of a fix.

 
“Help me out with the fucking obvious. On the jet from the States, Inspector Gobet told me all you guys know about your own existence comes from the legends and myths and religions of men.”

  “Sí.”

  “Exactly. Gabriel was God’s messenger in the Bible. Pretty face, white robes, big wings, always appears in a heavenly light. He gave the Virgin Mary the good news that she was pregnant. Which in her day wasn’t good news at all. But Gabriel convinced Mary she was part of a divine plan, that she was bringing the light of God into the world.”

  “That is the legend.”

  “Exactly again. You’re a junkie with a bad complexion. You’ve got a ragged overcoat for wings and you’re standing in a dark corner delivering a message to an ex-hooker that she needs to kill your bad guy as part of your truth. Not that I object to the last part, necessarily. But how is it our legends, our myths, our religions, ended up as your reality? Or is it the other way around?”

  “That is the truth of your dream being revealed to you.”

  Katherine smiled. “I was hoping for something a little more starry-eyed. Something along the lines of ‘Your dreams are ours, our dreams are yours.’”

  Monsieur Gabriel smiled with yellowed, junkie teeth. “We do not sleep, we do not dream. Your dreams are your own. I can only point to the truth within them.”

  Katherine laughed a little. “So is that the great angelic riddle? Which came first, our dreams or your truth?”

  “You are a creature of free will, madame. You can choose to accept the truth of your dreams or not.”

  Katherine looked at the hundreds of intersecting lines etched in the boy’s right hand. So many lines and crosses and stars.

  “What if truth is older than dreams? What if truth is something ancient written in the stars, like the stars in the palm of this boy’s hands? Born of an act of love, wasn’t he? That is his truth, isn’t it?”

  “¿Perdóneme?”

  She kissed Goose’s palm, looked at Monsieur Gabriel. “What if the truth is our free will has been so twisted by fear and greed that we’re not free at all? What if everything around us is an illusion designed to make us the worst kind of slaves, the kind who imagine they are free? What if the truth of it is, given the suffering and pain in the world, we’re no different from you anymore, we don’t have a fucking choice if we’re going to survive?”

  “Exactamente.”

  Katherine looked at Goose, then out into the hallway at Corporal Mai. Everyone, everything, continued to remain still. She looked at the junkie bum.

  “So which of your truths is hidden in my dream? And is it this dream or did you have another, older dream in mind?”

  Monsieur Gabriel slowly raised his trembling hand and pointed a long, spindly finger at Katherine Taylor.

  “As you gave flesh to the light, so must you crush the head of the serpent.”

  Katherine tossed the words back and forth in her brain. A memory of a statue at Our Lady of Peace Catholic School popped hot. Katherine walked by it every day with Sister Superior and the rest of her class on their way to chapel to recite the Angelus. The statue always watched Katherine pass with its ceramic blue eyes. The statue held a small wooden cross in its hands. It was standing atop the world; under her right foot was the head of a snake.

  “Okay, angelman, you have my attention. But before you say one more word, back up to the part about Harper. What’s wrong with him?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  i

  Harper came to the banks of the River Jordan.

  South was the Dead Sea; north was the Jordan Rift Valley. Up there was a desert spotted with farms, Israeli settlements, and Palestinian towns. One of them was Jericho, the oldest town on the planet. Down the other way was the lowest spot on the face of the earth and a body of dark, lifeless water. Across the river was open desert till you hit the foothills of the Central Highlands. The hills were falling into evening shadow now. Farther west and higher up the sun was setting behind a cluster of mountains. There was Scopus, there was the Mount of Olives, there was Zion. Against the fading light Harper saw the silhouettes of towers and steeples that marked the Holy City of Jerusalem. He had to admit the view looked familiar.

  He pulled his electronic fag from his trench coat and smoked. He waited for evening shadow to cross the desert. When it found him in the palm grove where he had taken cover, the air grew cold. He closed his coat, scanned the geography again.

  A mile upriver was Allenby Bridge, the official crossing between the Kingdom of Jordan and Israel by way of Palestine’s West Bank. It was modern; it was four lanes across. But it was only the latest edition in crossings at this spot. There had been bridges here since the days of the Ottoman Empire. Before the Ottomans, people simply waded across the river, as did the disciples of Moses, according to legend. It would not have been too difficult a task. The mighty River Jordan had never been all that mighty in width or depth. And these days, with most water run off from the valley being diverted for irrigation, the river barely qualified as a stream.

  Harper looked up at the sky.

  Heavy clouds were rolling in from the Mediterranean beyond Jerusalem. Good, he thought. The clouds would diffuse the full moon’s light and give him cover. He checked his watch: 18:05 hours. He had one hour, twenty-five minutes before the Israeli Border Police experienced a glitch in their electronic surveillance capability near Allenby Bridge, courtesy of Inspector Gobet’s SX geeks back in Switzerland. All CCTV cameras, fence alarms, and motion and sound detectors within a two-mile radius of the bridge would go offline for ten minutes before the system magically rebooted itself. In the sudden dark Harper would walk across Allenby Bridge. But not by way of the modern, four-lane job. That one would be crawling with Israeli and Jordanian soldiers keeping a lid on things during the shutdown. Harper would take the small abandoned bridge of the same name tucked in the shallow depression just ahead of him. Access to both bridges was cut off by a high-tech security fence marking the beginning of no-man’s-land. Thirty feet along the fence was a remote-controlled access gate. This side of the river, the gate was used by Jordanian soldiers to enter and patrol their sector of no-man’s-land. There was a similar access gate on the Israeli side. Infil plan was: shutdown hits, gates on both sides of the river pop open, Harper strolls across the bridge and into the Holy Land.

  “What could possibly go wrong?” he mumbled while thinking about it.

  He looked back over his shoulder, back to the east. He watched evening shadows rise up the slopes of Mount Nebo. That’s where Krinkle dropped him a few hours earlier after spilling intel on geography and mission targets, as well as the swell plan to reach those targets. Needless to say, Harper didn’t think much of it. Especially after hearing the rest of the plan: hoof it, unseen, twelve miles across the desert and get to Qumran for a recce in the dark. And that was only stage bloody one of the mission; stage two was getting to Jerusalem for “an as yet undefined task.”

  Harper flashed through his timeline . . .

  He locked on the roadie’s face during the mission brief. The roadie’s expression was serious as he poured a round of Galileo’s single malt.

  “Stay focused, brother. The entire mission is off-radar. You’re not here, you’re being dried out in a stasis tank for tweaking your radiance allotment. Now, we’re hoping you’ll pick up some help on the inside, but we’re not sure it will be there. So be wary of any help offered. Which reminds me: Leave your wallet, passport, and watch with me. In the event you’re snatched by the Israeli cops, you don’t exist, got it? However it plays out, do not bother contacting anyone at base until further notice. Not Gobet, not me, not Karoliina, not Gabriel, not nobody. Ever.”

  “I’m not surprised. The whole bloody infil plan is daft.”

  “No, it’s so friggin’ improbable, it’s foolproof. Look, things are tense inside. I know that sounds like same-shit-different-day for the Holy Land, but given the lines of causality converging overhead at the moment, it’s obvious something ugly is ab
out to fall. And it’s like the locals feel it.”

  “And shutting down Israel’s electronic security grid isn’t going to start World War Three?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. The shutdown will look like a computer glitch, nothing more. And it’s only a tiny part of the grid. Nobody will die.”

  “You are confident of that.”

  “Reasonably.”

  Harper rubbed the back of his neck. Bollocks.

  “You hanging in there, brother?” the roadie said.

  “More or less.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  Harper looked at the reliquary box at his feet. The leather strap still bore the teeth marks of the Great Pyrenees mutt, but it was almost dry of the beast’s slobber. The sextant, the one-third of a clay cup, the one carpenter nail with faint traces of blood . . . The things of Christ, the last Cathar called them. Something else popped hot as Harper looked at the reliquary box, something else the Cathar said about the pottery shard and the nail: In pieces and separate, they are the things of men. Rejoined and together, they become things of the gods again. Harper tapped the side of the box with his shoes.

  “It’s all daft, because it’s not just me crossing a river. It’s our kind crossing a line we can’t come back from. We are getting ourselves directly involved with the consciousness of the locals.”

  “Not us, you.”

  “And I should proceed because?”

  “No choice.”

  Harper downed his single malt. “Humor me, then. Tell me how the plan is so bloody foolproof given the Holy Land will be crawling with Israeli soldiers on high alert.”

  Krinkle drank his glass and poured again. “Easy. The Israelis will be concentrating on big Allenby, the settlements in the valley, and the Palestinian towns. They’ll be looking the other way.”

  “That’s daft, too.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m crossing the river within the shutdown radius. From what I hear, the Israelis are excellent shots in the dark.”

  “The abandoned bridge you’ll take will appear normal at Israeli Security HQ in Jerusalem even though it’ll be offline, so things will be cool. All you have to do is get through no-man’s-land and get to Qumran. Double-time it and you’ll be there in two hours. We hacked a Landsat orbiting four hundred thirty-eight miles up. We used it to reconnoiter the area. Qumran is locked down, officially, but it’s not airtight. If you stick to the coordinates, it’s easily accessible. Once you’re inside the cordon, it’s a walk in the park.”