Back in Iowa, I’d had stopped into a coffee shop called Java Joes’. This area was famous for its tornadoes this time of year. A friendly girl offered me a coffee, and I sat at a booth to review my map. The hexagon that I’d drawn on the map had the standard six corners. These corners landed on six locations:
1) Chicago’s Coyote Building
2) The Third Masonic Temple in Minneapolis/St. Paul
3) The Crow Creek Indian Reservation in South Dakota
4) Salina, Kansas
5) Columbia, Missouri
6) Cheyenne, Wyoming
I had been to the first two locations, and a hunch was leading me to a third. It came in the numbers that I’d gathered from Johns’ paintings. The paintings, upon closer inspection came in pairs. Each background color appeared just twice. The sets of hidden numbers were: 90-55, 94-35, 80-25, 70-30, 90-27 and 70-50. As I looked down on the map of the United States, the Eisenhower highway system seemed to pull itself from the page. In the upper-right corner of the hexagon, I-90 intersected with I-55. The six sets of numbers corresponded to highway intersections of six cities. The points on my map fell within twenty miles of each of these intersections: Chicago, Minneapolis, Cheyenne, Salinas, The Crow Creek Reservation and finally Columbia. Not all of the highways had been completed, but by the original Eisenhower plan, they would be numbered correctly if built and would have fallen smack on the corners on my map. Direct hits. You sunk my Battleship.
The next hint came from another quality in the paintings. Two of the painting sets contained the famous all-seeing eye. The same one that I’d seen perched above the pyramid on the four wrinkled dollars that I’d used to pay for my coffee. This Masonic symbol was always displayed highest in their symbolic ranking. This led me to hold these two paintings and thus locations in higher esteem than the others. The chosen cities were: Cheyenne and Salinas. These paintings, in typical art deco style displayed brave faced gods, male and female versions of Atlas and Titan. I bet on Titan and headed for Colorado.
Driving toward Colorado in the dark, I thought about my brain. More than just sinking my head into my pillow, it had always been there for me when it came to the basics: tooth brushing, shoe tying, there to tell me to turn off the blinker after a lane change, but what else had it really done for me? It had definitely failed Morton Petes back at MIT. In turn it had failed to preserve my marriage, and only recently, on the plus side, had it possibly played some part in finding Barbara Arnoff. Not a great record. Then I thought about Clifton Johns’ brain, nestled in that eighty-year old head of his in the early days of the Cold War. It had succeeded in earning him great wealth, but then he seemed to have come unglued. He’d become the neighborhood weirdo, and then he’d vanished. In his apparent raving state, he left messages with words like We the sighted. This was a clear sign of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder and he was just getting started. He’d hidden numbers in painting and formed a web across America. We were tied by a common gift. What was next for me?
Adam called my cell phone and sounded a bit distracted.
“Theo, my friend, there’s something that I didn’t tell you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I’m afraid it was a little embarrassing to the temple at the time.”
“Your secret is safe with me, Adam.”
“When Clifton Johns left, he took six of us with him.”
“How’d he do that?”
“Apparently he had a rather magnetic personality. Don’t all you math types?”
“Our gifts are varied,” I laughed.
“Thing is, Theo, no one ever heard from those members again.”
I pulled into one of the frightening rest stops that dotted I-80, and quickly used the urinal. Standing next to me was a large man in flannel whose gaze, from the corner of my eye, seemed to drift toward my urinal and more. The chances of me finishing under this kind of attention were slim. My abdomen tightened and I decided that I’d given enough to Wyoming. I took my own advice, finished up, washed my hands and dried them on my pants as I rushed back toward my warm Mustang. In the rest room lobby, though, something triggered in my mind. Standing outside, I looked over my shoulder at the lobby and slowly treaded back inside. I didn’t see anything of note. So I retraced my steps and on the wall near the travel brochures stood the state seals of Wyoming and its neighbor Colorado. Featured on the Colorado crest was the very same all-seeing eye. Colorado. It was within range of Cheyenne. I’d chosen the right state. It made me feel good enough to say hello to my flannel-clad friend as he left he bathroom.
“It’s Colorado! It’s all-seeing!”
This time he was the one averting his eyes.
I was past the barbed wire now and the wind had picked up even stronger. The site, twenty miles south-east of Cheyenne and due east of Fort Collins, CO was abandoned but still highly illegal to trespass upon. The 80-25 paintings, held the figure of a waiting god. The concrete hole in the ground once held the namesake of the same painted figure: Titan. The abandoned Titan I missile silo lay five stories under my feet. It was a cold war weapon, global chess piece, instrument of the potential death of millions and, forty years ago, the western destination of my crazed forbearer Clifton Johns.
I took a look around the dark plains. Ever since I’d left Minneapolis, I’d found myself comforted by the landscape. In an all natural world, a person sensitive to patterns had much less to distract him. The hills rose based on random reactions to the shifting continents, underground volcanic activity or glaciers. The plant life responded to random weather patterns and human farming successes. The horizon and the farmland were explainable, but random. I felt no urge to sense anything. I was able to relax. Why had it taken me so long to find nature, I’d wondered. Now, though, as I approached the concrete block and black tunnel beneath me, I was surprised to find myself wishing that I could make a prediction of what would come next. And it would have been helpful, because what happened next was not pretty at all.
I reached for the doorknob of the bunker door and upon touching it, fell to my knees. Like the pattern sense it came, but it had every other trait of a nightmare. I saw Morton Petes’ lifeless body resting in a bathtub reddened by his blood. My perception caused me to seem to fly around it and see it from all angles. His face was held in an anguished expression and yet the corner of his mouth seemed to start to curl upward. Then, the pale-blue face, nauseating in its distance from recognizable life moved, opening just one all-seeing bloodshot eye. I woke up on my back, looking at the stars.
I got up and looked back toward the cement bunker. I couldn’t get the image of Morton and his opening eye out of my mind. My arm was scratched, but I wasn’t concerned. I approached the bunker door again with caution. This time, as I touched the knob, I felt nothing but cold steel. Locked cold steel. I was ready for this. I studied the lock. Classic tumbler style. I’d expected more from this place, but then it wasn’t military property any more. I removed a lock pick kit from my pocket. Many missile silos across America were dismantled after the 1960’s. Back then the Cold War was still in progress, so it was only obsolescence compared to the Titan II or Minutemen that probably did this one in. Then ownership had reverted back to the farmer whose land it was. Many silos had recently been sold as homes, some remodeled and opened as bed and breakfasts, some used as scuba training tanks and other across America had become schools. Names like Atlas C and D, or Titan I had become names like The Salina Cold War Museum, this is one reason that I learned that there was no sense going to Salina. Any clues to Clifton Johns would have been long cleared away there. Although the hexagon point had fallen on Cheyenne, this was the only Titan I silo in area. It had to be the one. The tumblers fell into alignment and the door clicked open. I turned on my flashlight and shined it inside.
I took a very deep breath and entered, closing the door behind me. The roar of the wind suddenly stopped and I was alone in quiet darkness. The flashlight shone around the room to reveal a wide array of graffiti on odd-angled steel. The room smelled of urine, rust and age. Expressions in the paint seemed dated, even by my less-than-cool self. Standard messages referred to one person’s girlfriend and another person’s mother, but also referred to President Ronald Reagan in less than flattering terms. The room was round, as it is in essence a giant cylinder. The blast door used to control emergency misfires was open, and the obvious next step was to descend the staircase beyond it. I shown the flashlight on the stairs and noticed the light bobbing, I steadied my hand with the other, then gave up. I started down the stairs.
Clifton Johns, profiteer and prophet of the sighted had taken the Masonic symbolism beyond its intentions. He had left the house in Minneapolis with six members in tow and my guess was that the We referred to him and his new friends, although I begrudgingly had to include myself as well. I descended through the dark rooms and tunnels for nearly thirty minutes, the graffiti became less and less dense, until there was none. To calm myself as I walked, I counted the prime numbers in my head. One, Three, Five, Seven, they were beautiful and pseudo-random. By the time that I reached one-thousand and thirty-seven, I also reached a dead end. A placard above this door read Control Room, but the door was sealed with a bead of welding steel. It wasn’t going to open. I looked around the room and tried to see it as Clifton Johns would have, fifty years ago. The Control Room seemed like the obvious place for a person trying to lead six others. History suggested that Johns had arrived just after the silo had been decommissioned and had probably paid the land owner to leave him alone. The door, though, was probably sealed as the military had left. So where did Johns go next?
Time to leave, geometry guides us, the gifted follow,
minds never rest, we are the sighted.
Had the six that Johns brought along been “sighted” as well? It was unlikely. I thought about the old bastard, wandering the streets of Chicago, I thought about the signs that, if you could read them, clearly beckoned you to join him. Clifton Johns was losing his mind, but partly, it seemed, because of loneliness. He wanted others to see the world in the way that he did. He thought himself “chosen.” But what fun is it to have this talent alone? So he left a trail, and if no one followed, maybe he’d tried to teach six others. But in time, someone would follow. Leave the signs long enough and have enough people walk through Chicago, and eventually. It was a swirling drain that was meant to pull in the likes of me. It had. But what about the six?
The Minneapolis six didn’t know what they were getting into. Following a rich guy is classic stuff, but beware the dismantled nut jobs. My glance fell to the floor as I thought of those poor souls when I spotted one piece of graffiti that I hadn’t noticed earlier. AIITBIIECII. It was familiar. Then I knew that I had to lift the panel beneath it. AII was A squared, T was +, BII and CII were B and C squared and E was for = . It was the Pythagorean equation for description of the length of the sides of a right triangle.
a squared + b squared = c squared
It was geometry 101 and in the first chapter of the Mason handbook. The perfection of math and right angles were things to live up to. To be square with someone was to be honest to them. I lifted the panel and beneath found some stairs. A hallway led under the control room and up to an identical room on the other side.
This time the mirror-image control room door was not sealed. This time the door contained a combination lock. I shown my flashlight on it, then noticed something from the corner of my eye. Graffiti. Only this wasn’t from the mind of a teenager making suggestions about your mother. This was the work of a madman. I slowly turned to see that every square foot of the walls and ceiling contained a number or letter, spray painted in red paint. Clifton Johns was asking me, or someone like me to kindly sense the pattern and open the door. I began to look at the numbers then stopped before I felt them. I thought about innocent people like Morton Petes and the six Masons from Minneapolis. How wrong it was to mix this gift with people. People aren’t numerical. People aren’t predictable. We were better off solving patterns in a database than mixing with real people. Clifton Johns took it the entire opposite direction from me. He tried to merge the patterns with humanity. He wanted someone to see like he did. His selfishness and insanity and loneliness had led us all across the country and down into this hole.
I looked at the numbers and let it happen. I let my vision recede to my other sense. My eyes glazed over and the numbers and symbols on the walls looked back at me and then, did nothing. What? I tried again. The numbers remained painted on the wall, defying any sense of pattern. According to my little inner-friend, there was nothing here. This was random. I looked back to the lock. It had three wheels that formed a triangle. I looked back to the numbers, there must have been a pattern at one time. Had some worn away? Why did a madman trying to have a companion throw completely random numbers on a wall when there was no way to decode them? I looked back to the three knobs. Was Johns that cruel? Or was it kind? I turned the first dial to the number three, the second to the number four and the third to the number five. The smallest integers that could be plugged into the Pythagorean equation without being all ones. I pulled a latch next to the door and it clicked, then opened. Having the sense to know when chaos is just chaos was the flip-side of the talent. Johns had given a red herring.
I shined my flashlight inside and saw the room was filled with painted numbers and letters as well. Every bit of it. On the other side of the door that I’d just opened were the same three dials. I shown my flashlight around the room and then, on a cot in the back corner, I saw Morton Petes. The breath left my lungs and I felt myself suddenly sweating. He was laying out just as he was in my vision, only on a cot instead of in a tub. I slowly approached him and he started to change. His hair was black instead of brown, his clothes were dated with bellbottom jeans and a floral shirt. That is, they were dated now, but not when he’d died. I was looking at the mummified remains of what was surely one of the Minneapolis Masons. Unable to crack the chaos, he died here waiting for the gift. The gift to be sighted. The gift that Johns had promised him would come. Then, in the most humiliating twist of all, he’d made the combination a simple 3,4,5 triangle that opened the door from either side. Leave and you’re sighted. Enter and you’re a pawn like me.I would say that Johns were evil if I thought that he was using the same moral set as anyone else, but to Johns, I think that this probably seemed like a lark. An easy task for his novices. Johns just never returned to check on them. And chances are that there were five other mummified bodies, near the other corners of the mapped hexagon. I fell to a crouch. I was given a bit of the same DNA sequence as this man? Talk about winning the bullshit lottery.
I looked back to the door and saw that Johns really had thought the games were over after this point. A plaque on the door, below the knobs simply read. “When you open the door my sighted friend, join me in Steamboat Springs.” A refreshingly simple message, finally. One that must have made the poor mummy even more irked not to make any sense of the numbers painted around him. I headed back through the maze to fresh air.
next chapter
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