“We can’t do that,” I said.
“We must,” GT said.
So we climbed back into the hills near San Mateo and dug a shallow grave for a man who had already been dead for ten thousand years. I remember throwing the dirt on his face. He didn’t wince or grimace. He was passive to the last, saying nothing—at least not in words.
“He was at peace,” GT told me as we drove our stolen car down along Lombard Street. “The life of the Wave and he are one. If the Wave continues, then he continues. His soul will rise in the sky, as will yours and mine when Farsinger comes.”
We ditched the car and then registered at the Galaxy Motel on Lombard. GT had a pocketful of money that we used to pay for the room.
“Where’d you get the money, GT?” I asked when we were finally alone. The room had two double beds and a small TV set upon a dark brown bureau.
“I took it from the bodies of soldiers I killed,” he said with little, if any, emotion.
“Soldiers that attacked you?” I asked.
“No. They were looking for the cave, but they wouldn’t have found it. They never saw me coming.”
“Then why kill them?” A prickly feeling was running under my scalp.
“To learn how.” GT turned his face to me. His eyes were galaxies; his skin, the void.
“Wh-why?”
“It is hard for us to commit violence,” he said. “But we knew, we feared, that our survival might depend on the ability to murder. The mission was given to me to gain this ability, and then, if it was necessary, to share my experience with the Wave.”
“You murdered for practice?”
GT nodded the assent of a cosmos.
“How many?” I asked.
He closed his eyes as if maybe he could blot out the number.
“Thirty-three,” he said. “Stabbed, shot, strangled, dismembered. Some I killed slowly and others with great speed.” Tears welled in his eyes.
“For no reason?”
“The reason is there,” he said, gesturing at the leather backpack that held the Wave.
“Does that now contain your knowledge?” I asked.
GT gave me a wan smile.
“It has heard what I know, but it has not incorporated that knowledge physically,” he said. “It knows my experience but is as yet unaffected by it.”
I stared at my father, the murderer, and at the god, also a killer. I knew that it was only self-defense on the part of the Wave. It had to learn to kill in order to protect itself. I wanted to forgive, but could not. I wanted forgiveness for my lack of faith, but there was no one who could grant my wish.
“It can hear your thoughts?” I asked, not able to bear the silence.
GT nodded.
“Is that how you knew I’d be at Shelly’s?”
“I didn’t know you’d be there until you arrived.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. Inside I was battling numbness.
“Every night in the cave, did you have dreams?” GT asked.
“Yes.”
“Dreams about confabulations between angels and celestial councils, gods and intellects, comprised of light?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe those dreams to be the product of your imagination?”
Gazing into his eyes I could still see vestiges of the cosmos. I shook my head and looked away.
“There is among the stars a unity,” GT said. “A knowing and a language that is at once life and the expression of life. You, all of humanity, are the space before the first word in that dialogue. Your idiom is like the babble of an infant when its only notions are of hunger and of pain.
“I followed you to the orchard where Wheeler kept you prisoner. I didn’t try to free you because your life is precious to me and to the Wave. I sensed you leaving with the soldier and the wife. I heard you climbing in the canyons and arrived at the same time. You are a part of me, Airy, a part of the Wave. I could follow you beyond the solar system, on to galaxies neither one of us could imagine.”
“But why would you?” I asked.
GT grinned and reached out, touching my chest with his fingers, now the digits of a killer.
“Until we arrived at the detritus of genes toward the surface, we were unaware of life devouring itself. We had no concept of struggle or evil. Our discovery of life led us to try and understand. Veil was our first human. As we resuscitated others, we were amazed at their feelings and fear, and the violence in their hearts.
“Then other men captured our chosen. They imprisoned them, tortured them, and most of all, feared them.
“This body,” GT said, touching his own chest with his other hand, “had already been washed by the Wave. It was set free to find one among humanity that would help us. You were that one.”
“But why?” I asked again. “Why not someone smarter or more powerful? I can’t help you.”
“But you have,” GT said. “You have loved us and seen through our eyes. You decided to help us even though we might have hurt you with our power.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t you just kill Wheeler and Gregory and the people who plotted against you?”
“We didn’t know how to kill except in self-defense. And even then, our violence had no plan, no logic.”
“You had to learn if you were to deal with humans,” I said.
“Yes.”
We sat there staring at each other. I had never been closer to my father. He had never been so far from me.
“That was my mission,” he said after a while.
“What was?”
“To find you and learn the ways of humans. To learn to fight them once they decided we should die.”
“Why let them find you in the first place?” I asked.
“Veil didn’t have the wherewithal to fight us. His kind would fear us, but they couldn’t hurt the Wave. It wasn’t until after we had resuscitated hundreds that we realized humans might be a threat.”
“It’s just that they’re afraid you’ll take over the earth,” I said, feeling that I had to defend our stupidity.
“But Wheeler must know that we multiply very slowly. If we grew one percent in a million years, that would be amazing. And often our numbers recede. The Wave is everlasting. Population is not our priority. He knew at least some of this from his studies. You told us as much.”
“Maybe he thought there were many more of you, enough to take over all the people of the world.”
“He was afraid that we wanted to be human? That would be like you wanting to crawl into a snail shell, like a whale wanting to inhabit a pond.”
“Humans believe they’re the most important creatures in the universe,” I said. “It’s hard for us to think that you wouldn’t want what we have.”
“Or maybe they know that the Wave is superior to man. Maybe we present an end to the dream of humankind as the rulers of all they see.”
“But they had to wonder why you would take human form in the first place,” I said. “I mean, was it only a posture of defense?”
“Not only; we also wanted to experience the human equation,” GT said. “To share with you what we knew of life. We were coming to the surface anyway. At first we wanted to show you how far you might go. We see now that it was a great mistake.”
“Wheeler and his people thought you wanted to take over the world.”
“The Wave is not vermin, Airy. That province is held solely by man.”
There was nothing about XTs or the slaughter in the caves on the news. Bush was still threatening war in Iraq. The North Koreans were saying that they had the bomb. Millions were dying of AIDS in Africa, and Norah Jones had won five Grammys.
I woke up once in the middle of the night. GT was hunkered down next to the backpack. He had taken the metal scoop from the ice machine in the parking lot. With this he ladled out a large portion of the Wave. This he was pouring into his mouth.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
The sounds he made were li
ke the strangulation of a whole herd of bison. He waved me away and then went back to his feast. His gesture brought on a great exhaustion in me. I staggered back to the bed and collapsed.
GT was gone when I woke up. He had left me a note before going this time.
Airy,
I’m going now because I can only bring you trouble. They’ll be looking for me a little harder than you. So take our Soul and put it somewhere Wheeler and his soldiers will never find it. Then run, son. Run deep into the world and keep your head down. Remember, God is in you now. You are forever and the light.
Your father
I wandered the environs of San Francisco for the next few days. There was no reason to believe that Wheeler and his band of murderers knew I was there. I looked everywhere for a place to secret the greatest treasure in the world. I went from Coit Tower to the San Francisco Zoo to Fisherman’s Wharf.
Finally, I came upon the statue of a lion in Golden Gate Park. It was six feet high and over nine feet long, standing upon a great marble dais. It was a hollow bronze icon that had been there for over a hundred years. I waited until late at night and then sneaked up on the regal metal beast. There were holes where the nose was. I opened my backpack near the snout, and the black tar began to tremble. Suddenly it gushed forth and into the great sculpture. For thirty seconds, I watched God slither into hiding, and when he was gone, I feel down on my knees, exhausted from what seemed like a lifetime of hard labor.
For nearly a year after that, I lived in and around the Mission District, washing dishes when I had to, crashing at various homeless shelters when I couldn’t raise the money for a five-dollar room. My hair got long, and for the first time in my life, I grew a beard. I lost a lot of weight and took up the habit of drinking wine after the sun went down.
I wasn’t a real wino, like some of the people down there. I’d take a few slugs to be sociable and to cut the edge on all that I’d lost. Every now and then I thought about Nella Bombury. Once I even called her, but her number had been disconnected.
The saving grace of my life was the dreamtime that the Wave brought me. The XTs in me sang of all their history. A thousand beings arisen from the dead chanted to me every night and day, telling me their stories. Housewives and cave bears, scientists and jellyfish, all together, alive inside me. They moved together with my own consciousness. I was the many and the one.
Every now and then, some tough in the street would pick a fight with me. Sometimes it was to steal what little money I had, other times just because he didn’t like the way I looked. But as the days passed, the Wave made me stronger. I could hold my own against most enemies, and even if I lost against a gang, I healed quickly.
The days went by without much to mark them. I got thinner and stronger and often could be found wandering down along the wharves, talking to one of the souls that inhabited my mind.
I never went near the bronze lion in the park. I never went to the park at all, just in case one of Wheeler’s agents was on my trail.
As the days passed, I became lighter in my heart. My wife’s infidelity and my father’s crimes lost meaning. I worried about my sister at times, but I knew going to her would only get me arrested.
The newspapers, which I read almost every day, had nothing to say about XTs or mass exterminations of that ancient species. GT never appeared in the news; nor did any other strange being with extraordinary powers.
Twelve months from the day that I had poured the Wave into that bronze lion, I had a waking dream.
Liliane Modesto, a young woman who had died of AIDS in 1996, came to me. She wore a sheer slip and no shoes or makeup. It was the way she thought of herself. I suppose she looked about twenty.
“You can go back to your life whenever you want,” she said to me.
I was sitting on a stone bench in front of the opera house in San Francisco, but she and I were perched on a red rock at Joshua Tree National Park on a bright day when no one else was there.
“You are free now,” Liliane said.
“But what about the Wave?” I reasoned. “What if they capture me and find out where it is hidden?”
“You don’t remember,” she said, and I realized it was true. Part of my memory had been blocked, temporarily, as it turned out. I knew nothing of the Wave’s whereabouts. I couldn’t betray my God.
Liliane came over and sat on my lap. She kissed me, and I was ashamed because my clothes were filthy and I hadn’t bathed in over a week.
“You’re beautiful to me,” she said. “You are our hero. The greatest hero in the longest history on earth. You have even saved the Farsinger, who surely would have died of loneliness if we were not here awaiting her.”
I don’t know what the people around me thought. Some bearded black bum pretending to be holding a woman, sticking out his tongue in a show of pitiful passion.
32
I went to work for a fishermen’s collective just south of San Francisco. My job was to help unload boats every morning from four-thirty to noon. Within five weeks, I had enough money for a suit of used clothes and a bus ticket to L.A. The Wave dreams subsided, and I could pay attention to my surroundings. I kept my long hair and beard, figuring that Wheeler’s agents might not notice me if I looked older and thin.
I bought a short-handled shovel and a bag to hold it in and then, the night before I was to leave, I took a BART train over to Berkeley. Under a light of the crescent moon, I climbed up into the semi-wilderness of Pioneer Park. My night vision had improved under the influence of the Wave, so it was easy to find my way to a place that was mostly isolated. There I climbed deep into the bushes and began digging my hole.
When the pit was maybe three feet deep, I took out my journal, which I had wrapped in an oilcloth. It was now a thousand pages long, ragged and uneven, filled with incomprehensible space languages that I now spoke with some fluidity. I refilled the hole, then covered it with leaves and branches, even though it was unlikely that anyone would ever come across it.
In the morning I headed to the Greyhound station and made the daylong journey back home.
I got to Nella’s apartment building at around eleven on a Thursday evening. I felt nervous there, knocking on the door. Her phone had been disconnected. She had probably moved, too.
A big man who wore only jeans answered. He was black and heavily muscled, with dreadlocks and a clean-shaven young face.
“Yes?” he said as a challenge.
“Nella,” I replied.
“What you want wit’ her?” he asked me.
“Nella,” I said a bit louder.
“Who?” she said from somewhere beyond the young African godling.
“It’s me, Nella. It’s Errol.”
“What?”
Nella ran to the door, pushing aside her new man. She looked at me with wide bright eyes and then folded me into her arms.
“You’re so skinny,” she said. “And what’s all this hair? Where have you been, baby?”
“Who is dis man?” Nella’s new man friend asked.
“Not now, Roger,” she answered. “Not now. This is an old friend who I t’ought was dead.”
“Well, you need to tell him that it’s too late to be droppin’ by people’s houses,” Roger said.
“When you get your own house, you can tell your guests whatever you want,” she snapped. “But until then, move out of my way so I can show this man a seat.”
Roger wanted to hurt me, I could see that in his face. But I wasn’t worried. There were tears in my eyes as I looked upon Nella. She meant as much to me as did GT or even the Wave. That moment might have well been my first true experience of adult human love.
“Where have you been, Errol?” Nella asked after seating me at the kitchen table. “Can I get you some water? You need something to eat.”
“Have you heard from my sister?” I asked.
“She’s fine, and so is the baby. She named her Aria after she came out of the hospital, and she was so sick, too.”
“Bu
t she’s better now?”
“She’s an angel.”
“That’s good.”
“Now, where have you been?” Nella asked me.
I didn’t know where to start, so I just looked at her.
When the front door broke open, I knew instantly what was happening.
Nella screamed. Roger came running out of the bedroom, where he had retreated. Six or seven men in dark suits, carrying guns, ran in on us. I was thrown to the floor, and so were Roger and Nella.
They put handcuffs on me and covered my head with a bag while Nella cursed at them.
I didn’t know what they were doing with me, but it didn’t matter. I was safe from their machinations, their plans to murder a superior being. All of the kicks and punches were reminders that I had defeated mankind and saved the Black God of Earth.
I was thrown into a dark, damp cell. They took the bag off my head, but my hands remained chained behind my back. At one point three men came in and took blood samples from my arm. I didn’t fight them. I didn’t worry about the darkness or the cold. Many a night in San Francisco, I had slept on the street when the fog brought a chill in that went right through me. My hands hurt only until they went numb. And the Wave returned to me. It whispered rousing tales of dung beetles and crocodiles. I flowed through a dozen life-forms before the door to my cell opened again. I immediately recognized the silhouette in the hall.
“Dr. Wheeler,” I said.
“Hello, Errol.”
Two soldiers came and in and pulled me to my feet. They took off my chains. I squinted past them at the green-eyed mass murderer.
“How’s your wife?” I asked him.
“Thank you for asking,” he said pleasantly. “She was killed in an automobile accident two months after you escaped.”
The next day found us in the secret bunker where I had first seen the atrocities that Wheeler had committed. We were sitting in a comfortable room with wooden chairs and a long Formica-topped table. Wheeler served me coffee and sweet buns. He was smiling in a most self-assured manner.
The Wave Page 14
