The reverse happens when you are driving home. You start to see more of your kind. You start to recognize the old red and white of the Massachusetts plate, until at the very end, you are surrounded by your kind and once again anonymous. I was starting to see more of my species as I drove to Washington D.C. I was getting close to home and far less special. Both were fine with me.
As I tried to find my way to the Washington Monument I was making numerous lane and road changes around the Beltway. This meant that I had to consult my rearview mirror fairly often.
“Could you please sit a little lower? Or move to the side? I can’t see.”
“Have you ever wondered why you care so much about me?” Morton replied, ignoring my request to move.
“I care about Morton because he ruined my life. Pretty simple. We show interest in the ones we despise.”
“It’s pretty simple in your head. I was out to get you. It was a campaign against Theo Burnkey, grad student from Boston, Massachusetts. Stop at nothing to ruin this nobody-guy’s life.”
“I never said it was a campaign, but that doesn’t really matter because the results were the same, I ended up divorced and unable to do my job.”
“And you think that was my goal? And that getting divorced and unemployment were your only possible responses to the tragedy of my apparent death?”
“Shut up.”
“You know I’m right. This possibly wasn’t all about you, and you possibly had some control over how it all ended. I submit to you that possibly, things are more complicated than you are claiming. Or than you want to claim. Complex answers are harder to handle, though.”
“Did I mention the shutting up?”
“I know what you’re most afraid of.”
And then he was gone. I continued driving around Washington. I had checked my laptop and there was no Morton Petes, no Peter Jacobs, no Jake Phillips, no Phillip Morté, no Professor Donald Wren or anything similar registered in the area. I thought about the G. Washington and Washington L. from the professor’s diary and what they could mean. I typed those combinations into my laptop, I went on the internet and found nothing specific. There were thousands of things called Washington this or Washington that, but none of them meant seemed to fit.
I walked around the Washington Monument, the reflecting pool, I walked to the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, Korean, World War II and the Smithsonian and nothing struck me as relevant to Morton Petes. I ended up sitting in a coffee shop in a neighborhood called Adam's Morgan. I sat in my soft coffee-shop chair watching everyone else type into their laptops until the sun went down. I had hit a dead end.
I got a hotel in the same general area, although my cash was getting low again. I looked through the professor’s books on angels and even the one on Pythagoras. The Pythagorean book talked about how the man had also been a mystic, and as such, had integrated math into religion. I understood Donald Wren’s interest in him, but could it just be a coincidence that Pythagoras was showing up again and again? There was something about it that seemed unlikely.
“Hi Polly, did I wake you?”
“It’s 6:00 p.m. here in Seattle, Theo.”
I waited.
“No, you didn’t wake me.”
“Good. I think I’m at a bit of a dead end here in Washington. I followed the clue in the professor’s diary, but I just came seem to find a connection to Washington D.C. I may have made a mistake somewhere. All this and I’m so close to home.”
“You looked in someone else’s diary? That’s a bit intrusive isn’t it?”
“Well, he’s dead.”
“But still.”
“Tell her you like her!” The image of Morton shouted from the mirror above the hotel dresser. I replied with a scowl.
“I thought it was OK. I just read the last page,” I said to Polly.
“Well, damn, if you’re prying into part of a person’s life, why not go all the way?”
“Oh Polly, the road is so lonely without you!” Morton mocked.
“Shut up!” I shouted.
“What?” Polly said from the phone. “Look Theo, I don’t have to help you. In fact …”
“Sorry Polly, I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Who were you talking to, Theo?”
“No one … myself.”
Morton was laughing from the mirror.
“Seriously, Theo, do you have someone in the room with you?”
“I don’t … I just … I’ve been talking to myself more to sort things out.”
“Oh my.”
“I’m fine.”
“Look, just read the diary,” she implored.
“Read the diary!” Morton repeated.
“Fine, I’ll read the …”
My voice trailed as I opened Donald Wren’s diary to the first page. On the inside of the front cover was inscribed in the leather was a familiar symbol. It was the freemason compass and square enclosing the letter “G.” I flipped forward through the diary catching bits and pieces, but enough to change everything I knew.
“Oh my God …”
“What?” Polly and Morton asked.
The implications came to me all at once and pieces fell into place around me. I saw Donald Wren arriving in Athens, Georgia in the 1960’s, later I saw him befriending a boy named Morton Petes, I saw him teaching him math, but teaching him one more very important thing … to hate “the sighted.”
Donald Wren was the last of the Clifton Johns Six, and Morton Petes was his student, so Morton Petes had every reason to hate the man associated with the class of people who imprisoned his mentor and idol. Morton hated me because Wren hated Clifton Johns.
“What is it Theo?”
“Remember the missile silo in St. Louis?”
“Yeah.”
“Donald Wren is the one who escaped from it.”
“No way.”
“And just like he was a disciple of Clifton Johns, Morton Petes became a disciple of Donald Wren, only the message was different for Morton. I imagine it was one of revenge.”
“Whoa.”
“I’ll call you back, Polly.”
I looked back to the mirror and the image of Morton was no longer laughing. He was looking at me with a face full of hatred. His aged face was anchored by the stare of his bright eyes. The only man who seemed to have cared for him hated “the sighted” and I guess he had learned to as well. It seemed as though they considered people with the pattern gift to be a higher, privileged and undeserving class, and had decided it was time for an uprising.
Donald Wren, after all, was the one who had written:
and will go to hell with a sense
for the pattern of death they’ve brought
in their arrogance.
But I
am free.
There was more to it, though, the professor clearly had a change of heart in recent years. He was no longer talking about hell, it seemed, but now of heaven. I wondered if his opinion had also changed regarding “the sighted.” And if so, could that have been enough to make Morton want to kill him? There was more to learn and maybe some of the answers were already in my hand. I started to read the diary.
When Wren had been locked in the missile silo in Columbia, Missouri, he had been up to the challenge. That was, in the first few days he had considered it a matter of pride and he couldn’t wait to join the others in Steamboat Springs. He was an educated man and he saw the challenge as a call to his higher mind. Days went by and he couldn’t solve the Pythagorean riddle. As those days passed he grew disillusioned with Clifton Johns. Faced with his own mortality, he also thought about his friends slowly dying all over the Midwest. He began to doubt and finally hate Johns. So much so that when he finally did solve the riddle, after two weeks of living only on water condensing on pipes, he left the silo ready to kill. He wrote the message on the door and meant every word of it.
Freed in Columbia, he reconstituted himself then hitchhiked to Steamboat Springs. He searched the small town, but found no sign of Johns. Even worse, none of his friends from Minneapolis had arrived as was the plan. Eventually he followed rumors to the same cave where I had been. He had made a drawing of it in is diary. He too faced the same toxic fumes and tried to brave them, only he didn’t have much strength at this point and the next morning some children found him lying at the mouth of the cave. He awoke in a hospital the next day and decided to form a new less self-destructive plan of revenge. He decided to go home to regroup and rebuild his strength. He was embarrassed to return to Minneapolis, though. He had no family waiting for news of his escape. Eventually he wandered to Athens, Georgia and into his job there.
In Athens he began researching Johns carefully. He had no interest in telling the police about the madman, his revenge would be of a higher order. He wanted to know what had given Johns his pattern sense or to disprove him as a fraud. He had believed in his heart, or wanted to, that the only thing separating him from Johns was John’s ego.
In the end, there was not much to research. It seemed that life eventually busied Wren enough to distract him from the constant obsession with Johns, but the hatred remained. The symbols of freemasonry were reminders of how he’d met Johns and it took him time to separate them from the memories of betrayal. The symbol that bothered him most was the all-seeing eye. To him it was always Clifton John’s eye watching him from somewhere. He wasn’t the sort to hide from his fears, though. He had placed the all-seeing eye and a picture of Clifton Johns above his desk. He stared at them until the hatred became strength.
It was around this time that a young student came into his classroom seeking math tutoring. It was not Wren’s specialty and he didn’t have time, but the student was persistent. The boy, Morton Petes had a fascination with the all-seeing eye that hung above Wren’s desk. His fascination wasn’t that of hero worship, however, it too was one of a fear he seemed to be fighting. Wren suspected there was something about the eye that was personal to Morton.
The two would play chess in his office or at Wren’s home. Wren was the superior player and Morton had a propensity to quit when the games got difficult. Wren told Petes the game had both black and white pieces like the battles in life. He wrote that he worried about a boy that couldn’t stand to lose or to finish a battle he was beginning to lose. “What kind of adult will he be, if he quits every time things get tough?” he’d written. I set down the book for a moment to remember Polly calling Wren a Clifton Pawn, the chess connection was amusing.
The boy progressed, but not without regular setbacks. Morton became obsessed with the idea of Hell. Eventually Wren started to worry the boy was suicidal. He commented on the rapid aging that the boy seemed to be experiencing. He decided to give him a stronger dose of the strength he had, and it was founded in revenge. So Wren taught Morton that even revenge was a purpose and that everyone needed a purpose.
One day Morton told Wren that he’d discovered another like Clifton Johns. He’d been on campus and he’d overheard a student who’d transferred to the University of Georgia from MIT. The student was talking about a grad student “with a freaky sense for patterns.” The girl was telling the story of how this Theo Burnkey could call on students before they even knew they were going to raise their hands. Morton recognized it as a pattern sense and had run to Wren’s office. He needed to learn more about this Theo Burnkey and he’d even decided while hurrying across campus that he’d enroll at MIT the following year, just to meet “this freak.”
The two read all of my writings, but apparently Wren’s interest didn’t match Petes. Wren was possibly starting to lose his interest in revenge after a life of single-minded hatred. He was starting to realize his life had never truly been his own, and that he was looking “to the other side” for some answers. It was then that Wren began his research in Pythagoras and St. Thomas Aquinas. In the end, it seemed he had come to some peace, although the house full of angels showed a continuing talent for the dramatic. It was scary to think Morton never really did have an even tempered mentor, and then he met me.
By the time he was ready to leave for MIT, Wren wasn’t sure if he could call what had happened progress or not. Everything about Morton was amplified, the talk of Hell, the fear and even the depression. Wren was comforted that he was, at least, stronger, though. He wasn’t afraid that Morton would become someone’s unknowing disciple as Wren had become to Johns. He never pointed out the fact that Morton was, in fact, a disciple of his own.
The second to last entry mentioned Morton was stopping in Steamboat Springs as he crossed the country from Seattle to Athens. He was determined to finally put an end to the question of what had become of Clifton Johns. He’d told the professor he’d purchased some breathing equipment and he was going to enter the cave and finally put the ghost of John’s to rest, “a ghost that surely wanted to return to Hell,” he’d said.
I closed the diary and continued the story of Morton in my head. He’d gone to MIT to find me, but he also showed a real interest in math. It showed that Wren had taught him much and it was clear that he was only attending my help sessions because he wanted to talk to me. He wanted more out of me, but I may have disappointed him as an evil figure. I also tried to help him, this must have confused him even further. He had no friends at MIT and he was desperately lonely. I thought about Morton quitting a chess game and wondered if his time in Boston was nothing but a game to him. One he could quit at any time.
I recalled him talking to me about suicide and the Catholic provision against such souls being admitted into heaven. I didn’t realize at the time that he probably knew much more about the stipulations of entry into Hell than I did, my mother being the only strong Catholic in my life. It was interesting that suicide followed Petes wherever he went, and even Wren had worried about that.
I looked up to the mirror, but Morton was gone. How much was Petes a con man, and how much was he actually hurting? He never let anyone know. I decided he’d become much more complex and that he probably did have a reason to hate me all this time, but that my reasons for finding him were not invalid either. He was still a murderer and now one who knew the fate of Clifton Johns. With that in mind I turned my attention back to the drawing on the last page of the diary.
“G. Washington,” was supposed to be the first stop on the arrow map. This time when I looked at it, though, I focused the “G.” In fact, I noticed there was no period after it suggesting it might not actually have been an initial at all. My hand moved back to the diary and opened it. There, on the first page was the freemason symbol, complete with the letter “G.” Was Wren possibly making a freemason reference? I grabbed my laptop and search for freemasonry in the Washington area and was suddenly reminded that George Washington had been one of the most famous American freemasons of all. As such, staring at me from the laptop was the largest freemasonry monument I’d ever scene.
It was the George Washing National Freemason Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia. I was looking at a photo of a gigantic monument reaching upward from a hill in Alexandria. It reminded me of drawings of the Tower of Babel. It had a central tower rising in three stages, each more narrow than the one below. At the top was a triangular peak and in the front were six columns. Unmistakably, in the garden in front of the structure, though, was a gigantic sculpture of the freemason square, compass and letter “G.” I knew where I was heading in the morning.
It was strange to have all of the energy I’d focused on finding Morton Petes get complicated by the fact that, misplaced as it was, he might have had reason to hate me. Maybe the image of Morton was right when he said I was oversimplifying things. This was the train of thought that kept me awake for most of the night. I was torturing myself over the complexity of my quest, and exactly why it had become so important. Like Donald, my taste for revenge had decreased. I saw the evolving mission as one to keep Morton from causing more problems across America, to determine if he killed Donald Wren and lastly, curiosity. Morton may be the only person who really knows what happened to Clifton Johns. I believed things would be clearer after finding him.
“The sighted are blind, and will go to hell with a sense for the pattern of death they’ve brought in their arrogance. But I am free.”
“Good morning to you too,” I said to the image in my rear view mirror as I entered Alexandria. I could already see the Washington Memorial tower in the distance.
“You are blind and arrogant. Blind because you choose only to see the patterns that fit with the image you have of the world and arrogant because you assume you are right.”
“Look, I’m doing my best.”
“Are you?”
“I think so.”
“I should add one more thing you are Theo Burnkey … afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“You are afraid of yourself. You are afraid of your talent, and actually, really using it.”
I looked into the mirror. He was right.
“Why are you so afraid, Theo?”
“Because when I relax and use my talent, people get hurt. Numbers and humans don’t mix.”
“The only person who ever got hurt, didn’t even get hurt, though. Did he? It was me, Theo, and I never really killed myself, so why are you still afraid?”
I was running late. I’d slept in and barely got out of the hotel before the cleaning person barged in. As I drove up the hill to the Washington Memorial, the driveway passed the giant freemason “G” before it curved up to a parking area. I pulled into the lot, got out of the car and checked the time. Before I shut the car door, though, I noticed the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from the seat. I slowly pulled it out from where it was lodged. It was cryptic but familiar. The paper held a symbol and I suddenly remembered where I’d received it. It was the drawn for me in Chicago. It was the letters of the word BALANCE arranged into a symbol to guide me. I put the paper in my pocket.
I walked to the entrance of the museum area of the memorial and checked the hours.
Saturday: 9:00 – 2:00
It had just closed. I couldn’t get inside. This felt like a setback, but I had to admit I didn’t really think Morton was ever much into freemasonry. I think this was just a marker on the route to finding him. Wren had drawn the map which led me here. Wren was the freemason. I would turn my attention to the “Washington L,” clue from the diary next, but first I decided to walk around the grounds of the memorial.
I walked to the front of the stone building and up the stairs to the six-columns in the front of the structure. Freemason buildings are rather plain on the exterior by design. They claim not to want to draw interest to themselves, and yet by being so secretive the reverse is often true. Also building gigantic towers like this one, I thought as I looked up, were not exactly subtle. I walked down to the garden in front of the building and finally to the giant freemason “G,” compass and square.
I turned around to see the see a wide view of Alexandria. It was a picturesque. I wondered if I could see the Washington monument from there. A warm haze was hanging over the valley as I looked around. I couldn’t see it. I looked back to the gigantic “G” and suddenly had a impulse to climb the small fence and get closer to the letter. I looked around, vaulted the small fence, climbed onto the “G” and lay there. I held up my watch to see what time it was and there in the reflection was Morton laying next to me.
“It’s time to stop being afraid, Theo.”
“I know,” I replied.
Then, possibly inspired by the panoramic view beneath me, I decided to let myself go and to see what patterns I could see in my head. I lay back and closed my eyes. At first nothing came to me, but then a feeling of calm fell over my body and my vision went red. I was floating up from the ground into a dark plane that held many things. It held Morton’s home in Athens. It held Wren’s home in Chapel Hill. Floating there, too, was Morton Petes spinning his pencil. An all-seeing eye was there and a gigantic oroboros snake surrounding the entire scene. The snake was holding its own tail in its mouth and its eyes were staring into mine. All the symbols I could think of were there.
Then they started to fade. I felt myself becoming afraid of facing the big patterns around me. Why? Why was I so afraid? In the distance, though, a new object started to move toward me. It was a young girl and I soon knew it was Barbara Arnoff. Next to Barbara were all the other missing children forming a line. Then the rest of the Clifton Johns Six formed a line next to them. The three women I’d met in Las Vegas were there too and finally, next to them was Polly. They were all smiling at me and I wasn’t sure why. Then it occurred to me. I had helped them. I had helped them all. I had used my talent to help them and none of them had been hurt.
Next I saw the letter “G” and floating next to it was the piece of paper from my pocket. On it was encrypted the word BALANCE. Then I remembered Virginia in Athens reminding me to balance. Finally I remember what the letter “G” stood for. It stood for God and it also stood for Geometry. The two were balanced. One didn’t need to exist without the other. Heaven and Hell. Hatred and Fear. Angels and Devils. A talent for patterns in math and also people. This was what I had been looking for since I first left Boston. I had been looking for a way to balance things. The final answer was rarely in the extremes, but in the compromise between.
One crucial element I had failed to consider were the patterns in myself. I had never turned the tables and taken a close look at me, perhaps if I did, the patterns there would be less than flattering. So now I resolved to. I watched myself driving across America, I saw myself embracing randomness, but consistently following a pattern of running. I was actually rather boring and predictable half of the time. My patterns were founded on the fear of hurting and the fear of being hurt. All of this was blamed upon my senses and Morton Petes. Maybe it was time to consider forgiving both.
Then the original images of Morton, his home, Donald Wren’s home and the oroboros appeared before me again, this time even clearer. I knew I had to go to the one place I feared going most: into Morton’s head. I had to see patterns in a person and not be afraid to trust what I discovered. I pulled closer to him and saw his aging face and his eyes. He was scowling at me. I saw his hand spinning the pencil and as it moved it left an arc of circular light in its path. I looked closer at his eyes and they didn’t seem bright any longer. They seemed sad. His face was angry, but his eyes still looked sad. They had never seemed this way when I knew him in Boston. In fact, they were the reason I knew he was faking, but now I wasn’t as sure.
The names came to me again. Morton Petes, Peter Jacobs, Jacob Phillips and Phillip Morté. Oroboros. Why had Morton always faked his death? Why had he always tried to con the world, unless the real answer was more complicated. Then I saw the last name he’d chosen: Morté. I’d never noticed before, but it was the French word for death. I saw the oroboros begin to bite its own tail as blood flowed from itself and then, with a grotesque completion, it was severed. The cycle was going to end. The pencil in Morton’s hand stopped, the circle it formed ended. I saw Morton’s eyes close and then I heard a voice.
“Sir, you are trespassing.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll leave.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. The freemason’s really don’t appreciate disrespect of their property.”
I climbed of the giant letter and hopped the fence to the side away from the large security guard. The blonde man was probably six feet tall and over two-hundred pounds.
“Can you come with me sir?”
I took a stop toward him, but then remembered Morton and all the time I’d spent getting to where I was. I also had the new belief that Morton was close to doing something very drastic if he hadn’t already. I looked at the security guard then turned and began to run.
I ran up the hill as the guard shouted for me to stop. My thin legs stretched out to catch the steps as I heard him call into his walkie-talkie for backup. Backup? For a skinny dork taking a nap on their precious letter? Give me a break, I thought. I reached the parking lot when another security guard emerged from the memorial. I turned my path right to avoid him and reached my car. I unlocked the door, got inside, and turned the key as I pushed the car into gear. I heard a loud thud as the second guard swung his baton onto the trunk of the Mustang. I took off and sped down the driveway.
As I drove down the driveway, I glanced back at the symbol I’d just jumped from. At the angle I was passing it, the “G” seemed to be surrounded by two interlocked copies of the letter “L.” One was the compass and the other the square. Square. Then I realized that Washington L was actually another freemason reference. Washington L was Washington Square, which I remembered being a park in Manhattan.
I looked into the mirror and saw Morton. He was nodding his head at me.
“Better, but you’re not finished yet. There’s more inside of you, now find it before it’s too late.”
I noticed he had the same sad eyes I’d seen in my vision as he slowly faded away.
There is a concept in the universe known as chaos. It was in fact, the same field of study that Theo Burnkey was writing his thesis on before he left MIT. Chaos theory does not dictate that everything that happens in the universe is happening without purpose. Rather, it suggests that everything that happens in the universe is so complex as to be impossible to predict. When things happen as a result of chaotic events, it is easy to assume they are completely random. This is not necessarily true. For our purposes, though, it can be approximated as true without much debate.
If during this time in the summer, a predictable event were to occur that were random in its exhibition. And if this event were a solar storm and it were to be moving toward the earth in waves of electromagnetic energy, the chances of it effecting Morton Petes or Theo Burnkey would be astronomically low. But, as we all know, everything thing that is going to happen must happen somewhere.
Morton was having the dream again. He was fourtten years old and in the small room. The ceiling and walls were painted in a dark grey. The room had only a small table and chair and on the table was a book. He was reading from the book, but the words he read made little sense.
Forgive only the forgiver, for you who are weak will never leave. One must rise in levels from the abyss to reach perfection. To reach perfection one must let go of all things of greed and all things of the world. Never see what is not meant to be seen. Never complete what is not from the divine.
“I think I understand!” he lied, shouting toward the door, his face full of sweat and tears.
“Then explain it to me,” a man’s voice replied from the other side of the door.
But he couldn’t. It never made sense. He never understood, and when he moved to the keyhole, he saw it once again. The all-seeing eye was waiting for him to understand and explain the words that had no pattern or sense. Despite how much he tried, he could rarely give them the answers they wanted.
“Think about it more. I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” the voice said and he started to cry as he faced another night in the small room. He put his face into his hands and realized they looked even older than he had remembered. What was happening to him? Why did he deserve this? And most importantly, how could he make it all end?
The following morning he got out of bed and thought about step seven on the list on his desk. Answer your phone. The way it worked was sublime. He placed a call to the police, declaring that he was working at the morgue and that they had the body of Phillip Morté. Then he hung up the phone. A few minutes later the same phone rang again, a voice spoke saying something like “Morton Petes, we have some bad news for you.” He was his own next of kin. He handed off his life to the next of kin, if it was himself by a different name the cycle continued, otherwise it might be the end.
It was time to face step five, though, the step where he died. The hardest part about step five was that he was never sure if he was going to go through with it or not.
The only thing he seemed to be hanging on for was the last of the anger. The last of the rage and desire for revenge. He thought of the dead professor Wren and then he thought about Theo Burnkey. He felt warm with anger and hate again and had the strength to wait at least another day.
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