Mr. X (23 page)

Then another sizzle, another stupendous crack. Rays of lightning darted across the sky, cutting off from a central bolt that executed a left-face over the meadow, stretched out, and angled for the woods. I smelled ozone even before the shaft came slicing down over the top of the oak and hammered into my old friend the maple. It split apart and burst into flame.

A vertical column of lightning erased the darkness. It sped in the direction of the house, executed a right-hand turn, and began working back toward my part of the woods. For lightning, it moved slowly, almost deliberately, and the entire fork remained in place as its business end winged down, carving Z-shapes in the air. I jumped away from the oak and tore through the tail end of the woods. A missile the size of a freight train brushed close enough to heat up my back. All the oxygen was sucked out of the air. I charged onto open ground, and a wall of water sent me stumbling for balance as the missile exploded against the oak tree. I kept running until I reached the stone slab beneath the portico.

Rainwater streamed from my ruined clothes and puddled on the stone. I wrapped my hand around the metal knocker and slammed it down. I waited; I raised the knocker for another blow.

A lock clicked; a bolt slid into a casing. Soft light spilled out.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said to the person invisible behind the door. “I was caught in the rain, and I wondered …”

Behind the figure who held one hand against the door lay a gallery lined with glowing porcelain vases on delicate side tables.
In the middle distance, a chandelier like a great ship made of light cast brilliant illumination that turned the man in front of me into a silhouette. A white cuff fastened with a golden link protruded from the sleeve of his gray suit. His fingernails gleamed.

“… if I could use your telephone.”

He leaned into the darkness to hold the door, and I stepped across the threshold. As soon as I entered, I experienced a recurrence of the sense of familiarity that had always shocked me out of my nightmares. The door slammed shut. A lock resoundingly clicked.

My host’s almost entirely familiar eyes shone in triumph; his almost entirely familiar mouth opened in a smile. He offered an ironic bow. Although the utterly striking handsomeness of the man before me in no way resembled the way I looked, his individual features, taken one by one, mysteriously replicated my own. In combination, all resemblance vanished. His forehead, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth fused with the modeling of his jaw and cheekbones to create an extraordinary physical beauty. It was like seeing what I might have looked like if I had hit the genetic jackpot. But more than his good fortune separated this man from me—thousands of miles of experience lay between us. He had gone further, survived more, risked more, won more—simply, nakedly, taken more, and done so with an instinctive, passionate rage beyond any emotion I had ever known.

Surrounded by the vulgar splendor of his domain, odious to the core, the shadow stood before me and laughed at my helplessness. I cried out and shuddered awake.

26
Mr.X

Listen to me, You Star-Flung Entities, this isn’t easy. It never has been, if You want to know the truth.

No one not born into my condition, in other words no one, except He of whom it now occurs to me You may have never heard, can understand the agonies of uncertainty I have endured. Great
Ones, should You exist at all, I hereby request a degree of Recognition commensurate to my Service. Unless my life has been wasted, I deserve an honored Immortality. This Account of my Travails should be displayed in a Great Museum of the Elder Gods. Call it, say, the Patriot’s Museum, or the Museum of Triumphs. I ought to have, if I may make a suggestion, a diorama reconstructing these humble chambers. The present Journal would be installed upon a replica of my desk. I also see a model of myself, animated if possible, now deep in thought over the page, now standing in a contemplative pose by the sink. A descriptive plaque or framed text of not less than eight hundred words would fill the bill. I am being modest. Remember, if You will, that the Nazarene has been represented in works of art all over the world, and his Image hangs in every Christian house of worship.

Do You in Your Otherness even
know
about The Other Guy? I mean, providing that You do exist, is it possible that You chose Him before me and watched everything go down the tubes? Attend—

Even the Jesus brainlessly sentimentalized in Canon Reed’s Sunday school exercises had his moments of frustration, doubt, and despair. After all, He was half human too! I bet He stormed around in a black, blinding rage a lot more often than the Gospels let on. What I want to know is, didn’t Jesus sometimes wonder if that Messiah stuff was a delusion? And this: did He have dreams?

A being in possession of supernatural powers and a world-altering Mission ofttimes finds Himself down in the dumps for weeks on end. More often than any mortal, He endures periods of psychic sludge when the emotional landscape looks like a river-bank at low tide on an overcast day. A few old tires, broken bits of wood, and a couple of beer bottles lay scattered across the mud. All the best sources agree that these bleak periods are necessary to spiritual evolution. It isn’t depression, it’s the Dark Night of the Soul. I’d give you a hundred to one that whoever came up with that convenient equation was figuring out a way to turn his doubts into aspects of belief.

And if Jesus got it wrong, what about me? I
know
, but how can I be sure that I
really
know?

Until I was well into my twenties, the egotism and arrogance attendant upon the human condition prevented me from being distracted by those aspects of the Master’s work not directly applicable. God knows there was enough to keep me happy. Doubt tiptoed in when I admitted that a number of the Master’s tales did
not quite come up to the mark. Some of them refused to get down to business altogether.

I told myself that sometimes His antennae had garbled the message, that He had kept trying even when He wasn’t on the right wavelength. I told myself that He may have been incapable of distinguishing between truth and fiction in His own work.

Ah, before me rises the possibility that what I had taken as Sacred Text was all along merely pulp fiction. Night after night of Dark Night, I whisper to myself:
Your life is a grotesque error, and you are far, far smaller than you think
.

Misery-laden dreams pollute my sleep. I enter a shabby room where a man toils at a desk. The lantern jaw and cheap suit familiar from a dozen photographs identify the Providence Master, and I move forward. At last I stand before Him. I ask,
Who am I?
He smiles to Himself, and the pen drifts across the page. He has not seen or heard me—I am not there—I do not exist.

Only days ago, confident energy sent me loping through the night streets, abuzz with pleasure. The Grand Design swept toward its conclusion, and Star’s wretched brat was to meet an excruciating death. Now … now it’s all I can do to get out of bed.
I think I was mistaken. I think I got it wrong
.

If You do not exist—if the Elder Gods did not place me on earth to prepare its destruction—what am I doing here? Who
was
my true father?

27

Faint, oyster-colored light washed through the window, making the chair and the dresser look two-dimensional. The hands on the sheet in front of me also seemed two-dimensional. From the blurry face of my two-dimensional watch I managed to make out that it was a few minutes past five-thirty.

I didn’t have a prayer of getting back to sleep, so I brushed my teeth, washed, and shaved, telling myself that the money in my jacket pocket had been a part of the nightmare. It had the same unreal quality—it seemed real in the same unreal way—besides,
I
knew
I had not won that money, therefore I had dreamed about finding it. Then I dried my face and looked in the closet.

The blazer hung evenly, displaying no signs of dream-boodle. I poked my hand into the side pockets and found only Ashleigh Ashton’s business card. Male vanity suggested that she had slipped it into my pocket when I wasn’t looking. Showing off, I even checked the inside pockets.

See?
I told myself.
You knew it all along
.

When I pulled a pair of jeans out of the duffel, I caught sight of my knapsack under the bed. Everything inside me stopped moving. I put on my socks and regarded the knapsack. An ominously dreamlike quality suffused my old companion. I got into my shorts, pulled a polo shirt over my head, thrust my legs into the jeans, and yanked the thing onto the bed. Dream-memory singled out one of the buckled pouches. I worked the buckle, raised the flap, and drew the zipper across the top of the pouch. When I reached inside, I touched what felt like currency. My hand came back into view gripping a fat wad of bills.

Five hundred and eighty-one dollars. Two fives had been plastered together with beer.

I rammed the money back into the pouch, zipped it shut, and shoved the knapsack under the bed.

28

A purple shirt hung from Uncle Clark’s shoulders, and a turquoise bracelet swam on one of his wrists. He looked like a conga player awaiting the summons onstage, but what he was waiting for was breakfast. I got coffee going and started opening cabinet doors.