The Celestial Instructi0n (2 page)

“Hellafuck?”

He looked closely at the new tiny pit
in the sandy soil to see if there was a fragment of a bottle or can that exploded.

In a galvanic response that would have
done credit to a man twenty years younger, Joex was bounding down the slope
toward the center of the forest and the town beyond, leaping from knot to bank
to stream-graven trail toward the dripping darkness of the ancient Redwood forest,
within a fraction of a second of seeing the sunrise bloom of the six petals of
a fully-expanded hollow point.

As he ran, favoring his knees as much
as he could, Joex had no idea where the shooter had been lying in wait. His cardboard
apartment had been at the top of the forest, where the ground had been
clear-cut and bulldozed to prepare for a development that had never
materialized. He would have heard well beforehand any vehicle capable of
reaching the site, and there were only a handful of bluffs a good hundred yards
away capable of concealing a person close enough for a good shot. But for the
same reason, as hard as it was to conceal a person on that clear-cut forest
edge, it would be equally impossible that anyone had innocently mistaken him
for something that could be legally shot and killed.

While he reached the dark fathom of the
forest, Joex was tiring quickly now, succumbing to the stiffness of his 50-odd
years. But his mind was spooling up. In a previous lifetime he had been an engineer,
devising tiny software structures that were as stolidly reliable as they were
the opposite in design to the exotic side-effect coding by the bit-slice clubbers.
That engineering personality roiled to the surface as if the bum-fog of the last
half-decade temporarily began to burn off. As was his habit of late, Joex
started an animated discussion with himself as he crouched in the shadow of the
dripping forest:

“He must have arrived well in the dark.
He had enough gear for warmth as he waited for first light, as well as whatever
arms he equipped himself with.” “But, then, he didn’t know where I was since he
waited until first light rather than shooting me as I slept.”

Now the only question is whether he had
been a target of opportunity, or chosen by some maniac’s unknown criteria over
an unknown length of time. Indisputably, it was that Joex’s home lay perfectly
defensively in a way that he just discovered: it was hard to approach, and
relatively easy to escape from a distant, laden, unmotorized, but presumably
younger attacker.

Joex considered that the strongest
proof of its quality was that fact that he was not yet dead.

Joex reached the southern edge of the forest at the border of the campus,
which lay between him and town of Mad Landing, a tiny town on the Pacific coast
equally distant from Portland and San Francisco. The campus was circled with a
narrow road which was closed to traffic during the spring break, which Joex
realized was just about now. He waited, shrouded by the forest just a leap away
over a ditch from the forest to the campus and presumably from the crazy shit
he had just awakened to. Even if he (or she or they) were just crazies wanting
to shoot up remote homeless people for sport, then it was virtually certain
that they were not crazy enough to risk identification or capture by continuing
to pursue their prey to a populated area. But he wouldn’t bet his life on it.

Joex was familiar with the Mad State campus since he used it to
fill his old media player with music, film, lectures, and books from the
electronic nipples of the library computers. Rain had finally finished his
electronics off and Joex had been getting by with paperbacks from the free box.
It turned out that this was fine even though Joex had already read virtually
all of the better discards, as Joex kept copies with him to read to other travelers
on the increasing rare occasions when Joex shared a shelter or camp. Before the
lights were extinguished for the night, or when he had enough smoky flame from
a candle or kerosene wick, he would read Orwell or Peake or Stephenson or
Churchill in the quiet before the exhausted or sobering sleep. The trick was to
read as not stooping to hand-out intellectual charity to the partially literate
dwellers within hearing, but recited as if pleasantly remembering aloud, to
himself. As the cold squeezed in among the blanket fragments and damp sleeping bags,
he knew from the ebbing movements of those around him that his voice had become
that of a loving mother singing her children off to sleep. It didn’t matter
that he started in the middle, or that he had only a few pages torn from
discards; it only took a few sentences to capture attention as he passed on the
flickering Academy: there was something beyond the frigid night, and even the
poorest could touch and interpenetrate it. And even his  own homeless
dissolution had not yet extinguished it.

  “Even if this is some lunatic one-off bum hunter, I
sure as hell aren’t going to be sleeping around here tonight,” Joex decided as
he was taking in the lie of the land on the quiet morning campus. Joex was
choosing where to put his feet to jump the ditch when he heard the approaching
crunch of gravel on a limb of the road just outside his view to the left.

Instantly he realized several things.
First, from the volume and number of distinct pop and grinding sounds, it was
heavy. Not feet, not a bicycle, but a full -sized sedan or more likely a truck.
Second, he didn’t hear the whirl of the electric motors universally used by the
carts and wagons used by the campus gardeners and security. Third, it was
travelling slightly off the road because he could see no gravel on the swept
tarmac of the portion that he saw. Fourth, it was travelling slowly. But most
alarmingly, it was very close, and closing.

Joex back-scuttled behind some bracken.
He froze, only letting the bracken’s random pinnate waving build a picture of
what was passing in front of him on the road. It was the implication rather
than the vehicle itself slowly crossing a half a dozen feet in front of Joex that
thrust itself into his attention: a spotless silver GMC Suburban with windows
tinted, not by a cheap reflective mirror film as found on the streets of
Oakland, but the sea-deep green dispersion of exceedingly thick and expensive armored
glass.

A vehicle like this in the town of Mad
Landing was as likely as a honey-wagon cruising the Imperial Hotel in Geneva.

He relaxed and sunk into the wet duff
as he considered everything that had happened in the last few minutes. In
addition to the cramping fear emptying his gut, Joex suddenly had the paradoxical
quieting image of a connection among the deep green color of the SUV glass, the
emerald of the foliage, and the dead-green verdigris of a decomposing copper
jacket.

“Hey, you want the rest of this
oatmeal?”

The server at the Street Commissary
wore a plastic shower cap down over is ears and a crooked tag that said
‘Derret.’ The skinny man labeled Derret was holding up a two gallon warming pot
with a crusted metal serving ladle stuck out of it.

“Sure,” Joex said holding out a
Styrofoam plate, “fill ‘er up.”

Joex desperately needed time to think
about what had happened. More immediately, to get something to eat and replace
his lost bindle. His entire possessions at this moment was a stiff flannel
shirt, two pairs of boxer shorts, one green and one white, a cast-off pair of
cuffed khaki trousers and a pair of faux shearling slippers, no socks. He had
muslin pouch with some loose tobacco in his pocket. He needed a smoke.

While Joex wolfed his oatmeal at a
table covered with the remnants of a morning newspaper, he had the feeling as
if all the staff were looking at him. “Jesus, I am getting paranoid.” He casually
scanned to inspect faces. A glance here and there. Nothing you could put your
finger on, but odd, definitely odd. Since becoming homeless years before, he
was used to being invisible. “The original invisible homeless man, brought to
you by Ralph Ellison by way of H.G. Wells,” he spontaneously commented to
himself.

Coupled with the events of this
morning, being noticed made him want to retreat, get away, get on the road.
Away from here.

“Don’t be getting paranoid, Joe baby; you’ll
be seeing faces on Mars next.”

Beak, another patron of the Commissary,
walked over to Joex’s table, put his thumbs in a vest he was wearing under a
windbreaker and officiously said, “Have the police caught up with you yet, Big
J?”

“What?”

That old detective Lacey was looking
for you last night. Showed a picture of you. You looked like a kid.” Beak smiled.
“I didn’t tell them anything,” Beak thought to add conspiratorially.

“Must have been mistaken. No one is
looking for me. I am Joe X Bombadil, the master of leaf, litter, and lane.” But
Joex stopped eating, unsettled, and pushed his considerable self away from the
table. “Time for me to earn some money, Beak. So long.”

He needed a few dollars to buy his
evening food and drink. Especially if traveling, since almost by definition the
road was between places where he could get a meal, a place to sleep, or the
best of all, a shower and a used-clothing give-away. Once outside he walked
past the parking lot, beyond the underpass and over to the bus station’s
outdoor benches that even at this early hour were filled with a number of
street people—some sullen, some arguing with themselves, some rocking and
twitching. He tipped some his remaining shag into a piece of newsprint, rolled
a homemade, and bummed a light. He was disappointed that it was a butane lighter.

He was just beginning to relax after
his meal as he finished his smoke when though the underpass he saw the hood
profile a Silver Suburban pull up abruptly in front of the Commissary, the
heavy vehicle rocking back on its springs. A tall, thin man who could have been
Hispanic, or middle eastern or perhaps Indian, got out, casually looked around,
looked at the front door, then went inside the mission. But before he went in,
he adjusted his blazer and made an almost invisible brush of his left hip with
the inside of his elbow. The motion was not lost on Joex.

“Shit. Joe X, Joe X, Joe X, more
paranoia now? Maybe not. But I’d be crazy to think otherwise,” Joex thought.
“Shit.” He got up and went inside the bus terminal the bus station to
temporarily hide out in the toilet. He rapped at the door to get the attention
of the ticket clerk who controlled the door lock. “Do you got a ticket?” the
clerk shouted out rudely across his counter and across the room. “No, sir” Joex
shouted back, but he rapped again on the toilet door. The clerk scowled and
buzzed Joex in.

“This doesn’t look so good, Joe baby.”
Joex sat on the toilet with his pants on, thinking about the implication of the
Suburban. “Definitely not police. Nor FBI, nor Marshal's office, nor State
Bureau of Investigation, nor anyone else I have ever heard of. Looks like a
damn drug lord car.” Joex hadn’t been on the road so long that he thought
everything happening was a pure accident or a delusional artifact of a
misfiring mind.

As a traveler, Joex was getting used to
following life as if it were a disconnected string of basic human needs for
food and shelter and money and drink and smokes as scenes in the world pass by,
unraveling. Planning ahead, as he remembered it, involved too many parts that
could break or get lost. Homeless, it didn’t matter that the parts were
unconnected and rattling. The map was fraying and splitting along its creases.

Now some ancient part of his mind told
him that everything this morning was in fact related and had to do with him,
and involved people executing deadly force. Intended for him. And there was
absolutely nothing in his life that would explain why.

He could go to the police. The Mad
Landing police. “Yeah, right, old buddy, that would be comic gold; might as
well shoot myself in the head.” He, somehow, knew that the well-dressed stalker
would take him from the police on some convincing pretext and Joex would
disappear.

Michael Voide, the first Celestial of
the First Choir, impatiently messaged his assistant Angel, “Where the fuck are
you and why hasn’t Geedam touched bases with me?” Michael, as chief material
representative on Earth of the International Church of the Crux, expected to
meet wealthy donors and celebrities who insisted on face time to go with their
money and endorsements. Not to waste his time in his clerestory waiting for
John Geedam, Esq., a Principality of the Fourth Choir, and goddamn
not-yet-disbarred counselor to call with what had better be the expected news
of the recent passing of Joex Baroco, quondam engineer and now hapless bum.

“And when he calls, have Kingston
conference us.” Kingston was his Security Throne and, right now, as the person
who managed the reconnaissance and information security office of the Crux, a
very powerful man in his own right.

Not short, nor tall—just about
perfectly unremarkable—Michael leaned back and idly viewed one of the
hundred-inch video screens that covered the walls of his immense twelve-sided
office that effectively blocked view of Portland’s grey sky and the rest of the
turrets, spires, cooling towers and monolithic cubes that made up the remainder
of the Crux compound.