Chapter 16 - Las Vegas

I was lured to the bright lights of the Luxor hotel and casino like a moth. In fact, every spring millions and probably billions of moths are attracted to the light at the top of the pyramid-shaped hotel, the effect is like snow falling in the desert. The fact made me feel less than unique as I checked in. Four of us had been drawn to Vegas for the same reason, although none of us knew it yet.

Black Jack, as everyone knows, is the game of Twenty-One, only with money. The closest person to twenty-one, without going over, gets to double his bet. The smart way to think about Black Jack is that every card that hasn’t yet been flipped is worth ten points. Plan on it. This is because there are more cards worth ten than any other value. The King, Queen, Jack and Ten can each get you instantly from an Ace to twenty-one, the goal of the game. Tens are the currency of this game, the gold nuggets. Where they are hiding in the deck and when they are going to show their royal faces is the single most interesting piece of knowledge in the game. No one knows when the next ten is going to arrive, but some of us can give it a better guess than others.

Card counting is the process of watching the deck for the tens. If fifty cards have been dealt since you’ve seen a ten, then it is statistically more likely that a ten will be coming soon. If it is coming soon it might come to you, so it is time to raise your bet. If you have seen many tens in recently dealt cards, however, then it is time to start reducing your bet. Tens can only last so long.

In a card counter’s head is an on-going count of how likely he thinks it is that the ten will be coming back. This count is the number he has to hold on to despite the fact that he is being offered free drinks, talked to, distracted by flashing lights and cautious dealers. Not an easy task, but I can see the cards in my own way and that helps. Even with my gift, though, it wasn’t easy to concentrate when the girl next to me started to mumble poetry as she played her hand.

“Oh, Queen of Clubs. Matriarch. Mother. There you sit in the deck, there you wink to me. The King doesn’t hold as many secrets. Behind his gates and with his gold. He doesn’t even see you. Your real foes are the others, the Spade or Heart or Diamond …”

“Excuse me,” I finally had to say something.

“Sorry,” she said with a shy smile, “Sometimes I forget that I am talking out loud. I’m C.J.”

“Hi. I'm Theo. It’s allright, I could use a break anyway." It had been over ten minutes since I'd seen more than a couple tens. "And I’d suggest that you take a break as well, this table is going cold.”

“Thanks, but one more hand and perhaps the Queen will smile.” Then she smiled.

“Fine.” We both stayed in for another hand, and she placed ten times her normal bet, and so, breaking with patterns and my logical instinct, so did I. The other element to playing cards in Vegas is the bet from the heart. I hate these bets. I’d just made one.

The cards fell before us and we each showed ten. The dealer had a four. He then asked us what he already knew was true, whether we’d like another card, and that was when C.J. received her Ace. Black Jack. I received a nine, the ten’s weaker cousin. The dealer flipped an Ace (5 or 15), then another Ace (6 or 16), then a Six (12) as he slowly walked toward twenty-one. It was then that the rule of tens finally struck. The next card is always a ten. For the dealer it was. In fact, it was the Queen of Clubs from C.J.’s poem. It killed the dealer’s hand and we both won. I started to cash out and so did she.

As I collected my winnings, I turned to C.J. but she was gone. Only blinking lights and senior citizens powering slot machine wheels with retirement checks surrounded me. I decided to head to my room for a nap.

*

Across the Vegas strip, two women entered an elevator at the Caesar’s Palace casino. One was quite old, and was sitting in a wheel chair that the casino had provided for her. The other was middle-aged and wearing a “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas” sweatshirt.

“Which floor?” The younger woman asked.

“Eleven.” The elder responded.

“Me too.”

Then they both looked at the climbing numbers above them as they waited in silence. Something then made them turn to face one another, and a bit more of the reason that they were drawn to Vegas became clear. Joanne looked at Christine and saw something of her future and Christine thought that she was looking at a picture of herself as a younger woman.

“Hello,” they each began to talk, but then they realized that there was no need to speak.


*


In my room, I opened my laptop to take another look at the SenseUs program. A week ago I had run it, only to find the anomaly which I could not yet explain. According to the database there were two women in America, who for all purposes were or would be, exactly the same person. One lived in San Francisco and the other in Los Angeles. They were both born on March 15th. The Los Angeles version got married at the age of twenty-seven, and the San Franciscan was projected to do the same. The younger version was also projected to have the same number of children and stay within the same struggling income bracket. Most interestingly, though, they were both named Christine Joanne Ellis.

Then my phone rang. It was Polly.

“Hello sweetums.”

“Hello … rather … Hi, Polly. What’s new?” It can get warm in Vegas.

“I was thinking about your creepy little computer program and the mysterious Christine Joanne Ellis and I have news that you will not believe. Ready?”

“Yes.” Polly had a sense for the dramatic.

"I've been searching the internet like it's my job. I mean I've been really working ..."

"And."

“There’s a third woman. Christine J. Ellis, Vancouver, BC. She’s the oldest yet, and everything that our L.A. girl has lived, is already old news to the Vancouver grandma. They are a perfect match. She's not in your database because she's Canadian.”

“Her birthday?”

“March 15th, Theo. I said a perfect match, didn’t I? Initials CJE. All of them, all the same birthday. The Ides of March. Very Julius Caesar.”

“C.J.”

“Yes.”

“I should have recognized it. The girl should have practically called me ‘Daddy-O.’”

“Um, which girl would this be?” Polly asked, finally turning serious.

“I think that I met C.J. here at the Luxor, at a Black Jack table. She was mumbling some poetry like a beatnik. You know, Jack Kerouac, that 'On The Road' silliness. Anyway, her poem had a line ‘Behind his gates and with his gold’ which now seems like a San Francisco reference. I think that I met one of our Christines.”

“Was she cute?”

“That’s hardly important. How strange that she should be in Vegas. I wonder where the other two are.”

“Is this where my amazing internet research talent gets to shine again?”

“I don’t know. Can it shine?”

“Oh, Theo, it’s as bright as the girl working it.”

Then I was suddenly extremely embarrassed, thanked Polly and asked her to call me if she found anything more. I went to my window and looked across the Vegas strip. All this land reclaimed from the desert. Or invading the desert, depending on how you looked at it. The place had some interesting history. The Hoover Dam and the need for recreation from a stressful construction job. The famous Bugsy Siegal and his Flamingo hotel. The Dam powering it all. Casinos and hotels were built and then knocked back down into the desert, only to be replaced by bigger ones. The Dunes made way for The Bellagio, The Sands was now the Venetian. I wondered what things have happened on this sand and what was buried under it after all these years.

Still looking out my window, the lights of the Strip shown back to me from the landmarks of the world. Squint your eyes and you might think that you were in Paris, New York, Camelot, Venice, The Caribbean, Ancient Egypt or even Ancient Rome. I looked down at Caesar’s Palace and thought about the Ides of March and I thought about the other Christines. Something about C.J. had seemed sad. I wondered if I shouldn’t hurry in trying to find her. I headed down to the hotel’s front desk.

*

The three women made their way out of their hotels. As the two Christine’s moved out of the lobby of Caesar’s palace, they passed some actors dressed in ancient clothing. Julius Caesar was wooing his ancient love Cleopatra. Ancient Rome had met ancient Egypt. The two women smiled as they passed the display, they were on a convergence of their own. The two did not say a word while walking. They hadn't spoken since just after meeting, they simply moved south toward the Monte Carlo Casino in silence.

In the Luxor, C.J. took the elevator (called an inclinator because it actually moves diagonally down the leg of the pyramid) to the ground floor. She looked up into the ceiling. The hotel inhabited the outer edges of the building and one could look down the center of the hollow pyramid from the balconied hallway outside of your room. C.J. looked up at the squares coming together at a point as they moved upward. She remembered seeing this site in her mind when leaving San Francisco. She remembered feeling like she was going to find family, or something like family but closer. Now she knew. She was going to find herself.

Within a half an hour the three women arrived at the Monte Carlo Casino. They moved into a lounge and sat across from each other at a round table. The eldest Christine in her wheelchair, the middle-aged Joanne (she had long ignored the Christine part of her name) and the youngest member, C.J. just arriving. Upon looking at C.J., the others smiled to see themselves as they had once looked. A young woman. Seemingly with possibilities, but not really. Sadly, they knew that nothing would become of her. Their fates were not intertwined, they were identical. They had spent lives feeling like partial people. Not living as large as they knew they should. One, aging alone in a nursing home after an uneventful life in Vancouver. Another, not sleeping and feeling like a shell in San Francisco and the third, walking through L.A. like a ghost. In truth, not one them was a complete woman, and they knew why. It was because there were three of them in the world instead of one.

Over the past month, each of them had felt a surge of optimism and had a followed a landmark. Christine and Joanne had their Coliseums and C.J. had her Pyramid and they had strength then, but now, as they sat across from each other they felt that strength leaving them. They were returning to the people that they had been before leaving for Las Vegas, the sensation nearly made the elder Christine ill. They looked across from each other in panic. Now that they had found each other, shouldn’t they feel even more whole? They looked around themselves as the buzzing of the casino threatened to sweep them away with sound and light. They felt as if they were drowning and reached out for each others hands to keep themselves steady. Something was wrong. They felt a convergence had been scheduled, but something was missing. They realized at once that they were not at the correct spot, but yet that they were. Higher? They looked up, and nothing was above them but ceiling, and then they noticed a discrete employee door on the edge of the lounge. Lower. They all moved at once and headed for the door and stopped at the combination lock by the knob. They began to press numbers.

Not far away, a security camera and system alerted their behavior to security who sent a man down to see what was happening. The women frantically pressed numbers into the pad. Their ages. Their birthdates. Nothing worked. Then someone approached and the three froze with fear.


*


I had no luck finding C.J. The hotel had no record of her. Maybe she had checked in under a different name. For some reason I was worried and it might be surprising, but it made me want to gamble. I could find some peace in simple math. As stressful as gambling can be when you care about money, it can dissolve into simplicty when you don’t. At this moment, I didn’t care. Maybe this was how other people felt when they watched T.V. Sitting down to a game of Black Jack was my idea of relaxing. I made my way to a table with the Christines still in the back of my mind.

“Where you from?” It came from my right and I slowly turned to see a silver haired man in his mid-forties.

“Boston.”

“Far from home, my friend, far from home! I’m Larry.” We shook hands.

“Yes. Far. Theo.”

“Say, I’m in the construction business. How about you?”

“Census counter turned missile silo inspector and corpse exhumer,” I replied, hoping it might scare him into losing interest.

“Really! The census!” Then I remembered how far from scary I looked.

The man talked for nearly a half an hour as the cards fell on the table in front of us. I wasn’t really there to make money, but I couldn’t help but notice that I was losing and Larry was winning.

“You know my company bid on that new Coliseum over there at the Caesars.” He finally said.

My eyes lifted. “Coliseum?”

“Yeah. It’s on the far side of Caesar’s. You can’t see it from here. Here’s the brochure from the show we just saw there last night. You wouldn’t believe the capacity of this thing …Theo?”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he had to say. I was walking fast and shoving my chips into my pockets. I walked out of the Luxor pyramid and headed north toward Caesar’s Palace. I was looking at the brochure that Larry was probably just realizing was missing from in front of him. It described the dimensions of the new Coliseum and compared them to that of the original. The original coliseum’s dimensions were 156 meters by 188. I made my way to the walkway north.

A coliseum is an ellipse. To make an ellipse you can push two thumbtacks into a wall. These are called foci. Then, attach a string to the thumbtacks leaving some slack in it. Slip a pencil into the slack in the string and tighten it by moving away from the tacks. Now draw by moving the pencil around the thumb tacks with the string tight and what you get is an ellipse. Move the thumb tacks together and you have a circle, move them apart and the circle slow widens. This was the shape of the Coliseum, and the string within it formed a triangle, not unlike the triangle in the pyramid that I’d just left.

I walked past the Monte Carlo Casino as the shapes and numbers began to float in front of me. A pyramid is a triangle with equal sides. A triangle of string forms an ellipse. But why think in two dimensions? The triangle could become a pyramid. If the Luxor were one thumbtack and if Caesar’s Palace were the other, then the peak of the mathematical pyramid would be halfway between and above or below. I stopped. I looked in each direction and found the landmarks of the Luxor and Caesar’s Palace. I was roughly half way there. I entered the Monte Carlo, and walked around the perimeter looking for C.J. or any groups of three women. Finally, I saw an unlikely group standing near a secure door. They were trying numbers in the combination door. I approached and they froze.

“Hi. Christines. Could you each tell me your age?”

I entered the numbers into the combination lock, as men in dark blazers approached. The door didn’t open. Then I decided to place the bet that I hated most, the one that came from the heart. I remembered that a pyramid has four sides and entered my own age into the trigonometric equation floating in my head. The door opened. Somehow, I was part of the puzzle. The bet from the heart won again.

I pushed Christine’s wheel chair through and the door slipped shut behind us. I knew that it would only hold off security for a little while. An elevator door stood across a hall from us and C.J. pressed the down button. We all boarded the elevator and I noticed that the women were not looking well. In fact, if I had to describe the way that they looked, I might even have used the word translucent.

“Are you all OK?”

They didn’t answer. I was surprised to see that the elevator had a number twenty, indicating floors below the ground. C.J. pressed it, looked at me and then pressed nineteen as well. When the elevator reached nineteen, the doors opened to a cement bunker of a room. I turned and they all looked at me. The were weak and holding the walls for support. I could barely see them, but I knew what to do. I stepped out. It might have been some sort of fallout shelter left over from the nuclear test days in the area. Las Vegas and the split atom had quite a history. I turned to see the elevator doors shutting behind me.

C.J. whispered “Goodbye,” and the doors shut with the three women on their way to the twentieth floor below ground.

There were no unlocked exits in the room where I waited. It was nearly ten minutes before the elevator returned. When it opened, I was surprised to see what was waiting for me there. She smiled and let me on the elevator. We took it up to the floor just below the ground to avoid security, she led me to a stairwell and then an exit door and we walked out into the night. I looked up to see the Luxor and it seemed like snow was falling through the bright beacon at its peak. The woman from the elevator, now whole, walked in the other direction and then was gone.

Chapter 15 - Los Angeles

“Walk over to the Roosevelt Hotel. It’s just across the street and down a block. The place is just swimming with ghosts. You’ll know because you’ll feel cold spots.”

“What’s a cold spot?” The boy asked Joanne with nearly complete disbelief.

“Sweetie, a cold spot is a place in a room that is colder than the room around it because the supernatural energy is so strong there. In the Roosevelt you might experience a cold spot generated by the spirit of Marilyn Monroe or Montgomery Clift. They each have reasons to haunt the hotel. Look on the mezzanine level. You’ll find a mirror that was once in Marilyn’s suite and that some have said has revealed her image. Maybe it will for you!”

“Oh.” The boy tugged at his sagging socks, slightly intrigued.

“Yeah. So run along to the hotel and I’ll be there soon.” The middle-aged woman turned and walked in the opposite direction.

The boy, along with his mother and brother, began walking from the Mann Chinese Theater. On their way, they stepped on the stars of the Walk of Fame. They walked over Johnny Depp, then Glenn Close and Hugh Hefner until they were at the end of the block and could see the Roosevelt Hotel. They were incredulous, but that was normal. Few people took the Haunted Hollywood tour very seriously.

Joanne went over to the small tour office, which was made of plywood and snuggly held only one person. The side of the structure read “Haunted Hollywood Tour! See the specters that linger on after THE END.”

She opened the door, nearly causing her co-worker’s carefully balanced chair to spill him.

“Henry, can I get the keys to the van?”

“Sure, but Joanne, are you sure that you’re up for this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She flicked at the hair that was constantly falling in her eyes.

“I dunno. I mean, you’ve been giving the tour for two months now, and you’re very good with all the facts, but please remember that there’s more to it. You are the personality of the group. You are the believer.” The old man said believer like it was a sacred role.

“I will scare them, Henry, I enjoy this job.”

“Good. Please scare them. I like you, and don’t want to be a jerk, but there are other people who have shown interest in scaring the public if you can’t.” With that, he handed Joanne the keys.

Truthfully, Joanne knew most of what she was telling the guests before she even took the job. She had long been a fan of the secret stories of Hollywood, the dirt behind the glitter. Somehow she could relate more to the things that went wrong in people’s lives than to the fairy tales that were sold as the truth. She could even relate to ghosts.

She lived on the east side of L.A. near the old sports arena, the one that had hosted two Olympics. Nothing so spectacular happened there lately, though. A mother of two, she often felt like the kids floated through that east-side home, rarely even saying hello to her and leaving cold spots behind. Her husband at least gave her the courtesy of an insult or two before ignoring her. The truth, though, was that she didn’t blame them. When she looked in her mirror, rather than seeing Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, she saw her own silver hair and pretty features. She looked good for her age, but everything that she saw seemed nearly transparent. Like a Hollywood visual effect, she was slowly fading. How could she expect her family to see something that she didn’t see herself?

She reached the empty van and sat in the driver’s seat. “Welcome to the Haunted Hollywood tour! Boo!” She nearly shouted the words and then produced a ghoulish cackle. These things were part of the job. She looked at her hands; the skin was pulling a bit tighter than it once had. The veins were a little more apparent. Some day, she would pass into the beyond, but she was sure that part of her was already there.

She took a deep breath, got out of the van and walked to the Roosevelt hotel to gather her tour group. The group had grown to a total of seven. A mother and daughter from Texas, two girls on spring break from Alabama and the trio that she had talked to at the Chinese Theater.

“Feel any cold spots?” She asked, but didn’t wait for the answer. A big part of the job was to consistently suggest that there were ghosts, but to dance away from the hard questions with answers that were light on facts.

“OK. Let’s head to the van, folks.”

She led the group across the street and to the van that was parked in a nearby turn-around. Just before getting on it, though, she asked the group to form a circle.


“OK, folks, we are about to embark on the Haunted Hollywood tour. This is a tour full of sites of tragedy and loss in Hollywood. Many spirits have not yet come to peace with the lives that they left behind in this city of dreams and so they walk these homes and streets and parks seeking peace, and hoping to be seen. By you.”

What Joanne said next was the best part of the Haunted Hollywood tour’s logic, according to Henry, who had written the script.

“In order to see the spirits, you need to clear your mind of doubts. Become a believer in the unexpected. Allow yourself the option of the supernatural mixing with what you believe to be natural. Are you ready?” She raised her voice in a frenzy of excitement until by the last question, she was nearly a cheerleader.

A chorus of “Yeah,” “Sure” and “OK” followed her question as a response. They were good sports. Thank God. That was always easier. A funny thought entered her mind, though, as she climbed into the bus. Maybe today they would see something.

The van drove past a string of sites of overdoses, murders, suicides and even deaths by natural causes. The goulishness of your death had no bearing on your status as a Hollywood haunter.

The van drove down a back alley that led to Chateau Marmont, Bungalo Number Three where John Belushi had overdosed. There was no mention of a ghost here, but the story fit the mood. She slowed the van to a creep.

“Did I just see a light turn on in that window?” Joanne asked the group through her microphone. They didn’t answer. “I think I did!” She hit the brake hard enough to make the group gasp. Then she drove on.

Next the van passed The Viper Room where River Phoenix had died. His overdose occurred right on the sidewalk visible from the van. She slowed the vehicle as the group stared at the concrete slabs.

If someone in Hollywood had claimed to see a ghost, it was on the tour. If they hadn’t, though, Joanne never mentioned it. They were honest about the facts and the sightings, her job was just to present it all in the most encouraging light.

Jayne Mansfield was rumored to have been involved with a satanic cult. Joanne mentioned it in a creepy voice. Lucky Luciano was believed to have killed many innocent people in Hollywood, which she stated in a Brooklyn accent. George Reeves, the original Superman, was killed by a self-inflicted bullet wound. Insert “faster than a speeding bullet?” remark. John Barrymore’s body was allegedly stolen from the Hollywood morgue and brought to the home of Erol Flynn where it was propped up in a chair to await Flynn’s return home. He would never be the same after the incident.

Then she told one of the most tragic stories of Hollywood, the story of the Black Dahlia. It was one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in the city. In 1947, the body of Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in East L.A. The woman who first found the naked body initially thought that she had found a mannequin. Then upon looking closer, she discovered that it was a woman severed in half at the waist and with a smile carved into her face. As Joanne said this, the tour group grew quiet.

“Tough town.” She whispered.


The tour group snickered at some of her remarks, but overall were entertained by the shtick. Joanne drove and joked and told stories that she new better than Henry who’d written the script, but something was different. Something new lingered in the back of her mind. It was the ghost of possibility.

They pulled into the Westwood Memorial Park cemetery and Joanne walked them to each of the interesting gravestones within. Dean Martin’s stone said “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.” Jack Lemmon’s gravestone simply read “in”, suggesting that this last credit was just another credit. Rodney Dangerfield’s stone said “There Goes The Neighborhood.” These departed stars rested among Roy Orbison, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood and finally Marilyn Monroe. It was standing in front of Marilyn’s stone that Joanne broke from the script forever.

“You’ll notice the surveillance camera that is constantly monitoring the vault,” she began and pointed to the panel that held Marilyn’s name. Standing there with her hand pointing to the camera, she thought about Marilyn’s life. She thought about poor Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. Then she thought about her life. She thought about the slow fading and decided that it wasn’t OK. She thought about her home and her kids and her husband, then, still pointing at the camera, she let her arm drop to her side.

“You know, folks, the camera is not watching for ghosts, it’s watching for vandals. I’m sorry. I just don’t think that Marilyn is coming back to hang out in this pretty, but empty cemetery. It’s empty, you know, except for the hearts of the people that come here looking. Where are you ladies from?” She pointed to the girls in front.

“We’re from Alabama.” The surprised blonde responded.

“Well, you’ve got more spirit, young lady, than this place has on Halloween night.”

The group laughed, but the mood had changed.

“Hollywood has a lot of great history, and this tour will show you how a lot of the people that are attracted to the bright lights are also likely to have strange ends. Rather than glorify these souls any longer, though, let’s enjoy the rest of the tour as a cautionary tale. And if you see a ghost I’ll give you my next paycheck.”

Joanne had never talked this way to anyone. She didn’t know where the words were coming from. She finished the tour by taking the group past the site of the Manson murders which she called idiotic and senseless and then on the way back to The Chinese Theater she took a detour. She stopped in front of a restaurant.

“Folks, this is the former site of the Knickerbocker Hotel. Once a year after the death of her husband Harry in 1926, Bess Houdini would gather a group on the roof of this building for a séance. The reason that she was optimistic about the return of the great escape artist was that he told her that if there were a way to escape from the afterlife and get a message to her, he would. Psychics lined up for the opportunity to channel Harry back to Bess. The Houdinis were smart, thoug. They had arranged a password that Harry would give from the afterlife to prove that he was who he said he was. Part of the password was the word “Rosabelle,” which was inscribed on Bess’s wedding ring. The rest was an encrypted phrase “answer – tell – pray –answer –look –tell –answer, answer –tell. No medium ever passed the secret message back from Harry to Bess and after ten years she stopped trying.”

The group was now completely quiet as the Hollywood Blvd. traffic rolled past the van.

“I guess that the best messages are the ones we give to the people we love while we’re still here.” Joanne said. Then she drove the van to its parking space and quit her job.


*

I arrived in Las Vegas in the dark. As you drive across the desert, you can see a single light beam rise over the dark hills and you know you’re close. The glow comes from the top of the Luxor Casino and is the brightest light in the world. The cylinder of light was built to hypnotize and attract tourists from all over the world. It’s worked. So much of what you see in Las Vegas is designed to attract you, steal from you and then, rudely, to get you to leave. That’s why the best gambler to walk into Vegas is blind and deaf. I guess that they’d try to get him with smells, though.

My point is that you can’t get distracted in this land of distractions. It’s asking a lot, but I have some training. Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I hung with a few of the famous Black Jack card counting team from MIT. They developed a system of card counting that Vegas never saw coming and they made millions. While they employed it, though, the casino would throw free drinks, hookers and even phony gamblers at them. The trick was not to lose your focus and not to lose your count. Sitting in the apartments of fellow MIT grad students, thousands of miles from Vegas, we’d practice, and we’d even practice at ignoring distractions. The apartments had drink servers, loud music and even girls that would touch the back of your ear when you’d least expected it.

I suppose I was the best counter that they ever had, but I never let them know it. I saw the undealt deck float before me and the cards arranged themselves before my eyes, along with the probabilities of the next card. It was natural for me, but I had a wife and a promising career. That wasn’t the right time for gambling. Now I am alone on the other side of the country. Now, I am driving a rusted old Ford Mustang and my cash supply is low. Don’t ask about my savings, let’s just focus on this moment. Back then wasn’t the right time. Now is.


*


Two weeks after Joanne quit her job, her car was packed. She didn’t bother to explain to anyone why she was going to Las Vegas, and that was probably for the best. She didn’t know the answer. She barely heard her husband tell that she was going to fail and would be back within a week- he was just a ghost to her now. She knew that she was finally doing the right things. She knew that she was finally acting rather than reacting and that she could see a clear image when she looked in the mirror. She slammed the trunk of the car and then climbed into the open driver's side door. Sitting in the driveway, she fished through her glove compartment for a map. She found one and began to open it when she realized that it was not the U.S. map, but the L.A. map that she had once used to train for the Haunted Hollywood job.

On the map, she saw something that made her decide to make a quick stop before leaving Los Angeles. She rode though the intersection where Elizabeth Short’s body was found and then headed for Route 101. She was still thinking about how the poor girl from Medford, Massachusetts could cross the country to follow a Hollywood dream only to have it end in a vacant lot. She knew that after she got on the highway she could say that Los Angeles had not claimed her like it had Elizabeth. As she drove east on Martin Luther King, though, something made her stop short of the highway. She parked the car and got out to lean against it and to see what she had failed to notice for years. It was only three blocks from the house where she’d lived all of her adult life. There, like something from a dream, stood the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. As she looked at it, she felt more at home than she ever had with her children and husband. An older part of her felt at home with its arches reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum. Then she got back in her car, got on the highway and soon was well on her way to Las Vegas.

The other three had already arrived.

next chapter

Chapter 14 - San Francisco

It wasn’t easy to sleep in the apartment on the corner of Market and Fourteenth. People getting out of San Francisco bars, or heading to the grocery store, walked past C.J.'s window and they didn’t seem to care how loud they were or how long it had been since she had slept. It was as if someone had placed a podium below her bedroom window and people were being called to speak their minds. She rolled herself over and over again in her bed until she rolled herself into the next day. And she rolled from that day into the next.

When she felt her lack of sleep was starting to effect her work at the magazine, though, C.J. would slip down to the Muddy Waters coffee shop. It was a few blocks from her home and easy for her to walk to before and after work. If she had the time, she’d listen in on the loud conversations that took place at the chairs set up under the awning, outside the front door.

“The whole fucking government is subjective.” A man in a white t-shirt named Robert would shout. “A ridiculous experiment and still in its infancy. We’re talking Petri dish here, folks, and the whole thing could easily get tossed off the lab table with a random flail of the arm.” He flailed his own arm for effect.

The middle-aged men’s opinions were more solid than their facts, but the debate was a reasonably informed one. It was one that you could listen to most any day outside of the coffee shop, since many of the men were either retired or unemployed. As she sat and drank her after-work coffee, C.J. would refute the things that they’d say. “Listen Robert, Thomas Paine told us that while government at its worst is an ‘intolerable’ evil, he also added that at its best it’s a ‘necessary’ one.” They didn’t hear her, though, because C.J. only spoke the ideas in her head. Sitting at her table, the cute girl with the short straight red hair and tired brown eyes looked only into her cup of coffee. No one would even have guessed that she might have rendered many of the men into agreement, if only she had spoken.

She had moved to San Francisco from her parents’ house just two years ago. She worked as an assistant to the editors of a technical magazine, but in her heart she loved the breathtaking language of poetry. Her favorite night of the week was Thursday. That was when she walked to the corner of Mission and Sixteenth to listen to the street poets. The corner was near the site of a newly remodeled MUNI subway station, colorful and shiny, but the colors weren’t fooling anyone. An urban concrete park surrounded the exit from the underground, and as waves of people re-emerged to the surface, they were met by junkies and winos. The loiterers would ask them for money and grew insistent if they failed to offer a few quarters. The smells and sounds of the corner were the sort that most commuters hurried past, except on Thursday night. That was the night that C.J. would quietly sit next to the troupe of poets who filled that corner’s air with words and ideas.

“The city is alive!” One man with a goatee shouted. “But does being alive mean that you are living? I look up in the sky every day and I see the blue of heaven and I let my eyes drop down to this city by this Bay. This Gate, Golden. And I ask, why me? Why? Why here? And then I remember. Because our bodies can leave this place, but as the man said, we’ll leave our hearts behind.”

Another young man played an upright bass, a third shouted his poems and swung his arms, as if by waving them, he could convert his word into matter before they rose into the stale air. C.J. loved each floating word. Very few women performed, and when they did, it was even harder for them to shout out the words and compete with the consistent drunken heckling of the regulars on the corner. Still, they came every Thursday and so did C.J. And as she sat and watched the faces that were by now quite familiar, though in her pocket she held a poem that if read, might have quieted those drunken hecklers, she only smiled and watched.



*


I called Polly from outside Salt Lake City.

“Polly, it’s Theo.”

“Sorry, I don’t know a Theo.”

I paused for a second to see if I had dialed the right number. I looked at the face of the cell phone from a distance of about six inches, and even then I could clearly hear her shout the next words, “Just kidding, Theo! How are you?”

“I’m doing well, Polly, I’m about half way to Vegas.”

“I still don’t understand how you think that by going to Vegas you’ll be able to luck your way into gas money. I would have thought that a person who knew so much about math would be wiser.”

“I know enough to do alright. Trust me, back in Boston, beating Vegas was a hobby on the MIT campus for a while there. I wasn’t squirreled away in my office every night of the week. Some nights we practiced.”

“Practiced? Should I stop picturing four guys with taped glasses drinking cases of Mountain Dew?”

“Yes. Some of us preferred beer. Anyway, Polly, how are you dealing with things in Portland?”

“I’m doing better. I had to cry for a few days, but much of it is out of me now.”

“I’m glad. You can always call me.”

“Any time?”

“Of course. Polly, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Something here with me. It’s something odd that I discovered on my computer the other day. Something that shouldn’t ever happen.”

“You sound serious. What is it?”

I told her about the software that I’d written, and how SenseUs had found something quite unexpected in the latest batch of data.

“Playing God, how unlike you.”

“Funny, Polly, seriously though, this is really creepy. But first I have to ask, do you believe in reincarnation?”


*

Day after day, C.J. made her transition from work to the coffee shop, and from one side of the bed to the other, still trying to sleep. Each week’s reprieve was the poetry of Thursdays nights. One particularly enjoyable session sent her to bed with her pillow in its usual spot over her head, when inexplicably, the next thing she knew, it was ten in the morning. She called her boss, who was sympathetic of C.J.’s sleeping in, as she had a nearly perfect record of attendance. She hurried to the bus, and couldn’t help but smile as she ran. She felt as if her eyes had been unlocked from the chains that had rendered them heavy and cast downward. She had slept!

The next night was not one of perfect sleep, but a positive trend began to develop. The amount of sleep that C.J. was getting steadily increased. She found herself grinning more and more, and her head began to hold new ideas as well. She found herself starting to arrange her things in her room. She had formed small piles of clothing, her deodorant, underwear and toothbrush on her floor for no apparent reason. Once the piles were well-formed, it finally occurred to her that she was taking a vacation. She went to a travel agent downtown and without expecting to do so, said the words “Las Vegas” to the smiling blonde woman in the cramped office. And so it was that C.J. had tickets for the first vacation that she had ever planned in her life. As she walked out of the agent’s office, she looked up at the forty-eight stories of the white TransAmerica building and something within her shouted recognition. The triangular building now had a different meaning than the tourist landmark it had always been to her, how it had changed, though, she couldn’t yet say.

Her now regular sleep began to be colored by dreams. In them, she was looking up at very high ceiling of concentric squares. She was talking to someone and they were discussing what she had to do next. She had a feeling of foreboding as she looked upward, and that her life was about to change forever, but she knew that what she had to do was necessary.

On the morning of her flight to Las Vegas, C.J. took the Bay Area Rapid Transit train to the airport. As it glided her out of the city she turned to watch the skyscrapers come into view. Last night had been Thursday night and she had finally spoken her first poem to the people of Mission and Sixteenth streets. No hecklers had shouted and she had managed to read the entire poem without her voice hesitating. It was called “Sleep for the Shell of a Girl” and when she looked up from the page, the crowd looked back with sad eyes. Then they clapped and shouted support for her courage. She walked home and knew that she had spoken her first and last poem to them.

Looking back on the BART train, nearly at the airport, she saw the sharp spire peaking from the clump of downtown. The TransAmerica building was a white point in a mass of grey rectangles. Then her eyes zoomed in on it and soon she could see it large in front of her and in perfect detail as if she had flown to it, and for the first time, she realized that it had the shape of a tall pyramid. It reminded her of a dream, but also of something much older. Something older than herself. She felt light-headed as she walked in to the airport, but soon the feeling was replaced with the excitement of the trip ahead. She boarded the plane for Las Vegas and remembered the poet with the goatee shouting to the crowd on the corner, “Our bodies can leave this place, but as the man said, we’ll leave our hearts behind.”

next chapter

Chapter 13 - Vancouver

The Vancouver public library stood on the east edge of town. As the rising sun hit the building, Christine Ellis stopped her slow walk to the bus stop. The structure was designed to look like the Roman Coliseum. A seven-story tall outer ring of offices represented the highest viewing area of the Roman arena and a round inner portion of library stacks corresponded to the inner seating and field. Christine stopped to admire the attractive building, but also because the newly built structure made her feel something. What she sensed was that she had once been in the original Roman Coliseum long ago. Lives ago.

Christine was the quiet daughter of a lumber industry family, and her life walked the subtle line of what was of her, with occasional flirtations into what she might have wanted to be. A wife, then mother, then widow, she wasn’t the sort to carry the things she had lost or gained along the way. She traveled light. Today, for example, she carried only a medium sized vinyl Canucks gym bag as luggage. As she finally approached the bus stop, probably unknown to her, three other people began to prepare for travel. One of the people was in San Francisco, another in Los Angeles and the third was me, in Seattle, realizing that I was nearly out of money. All four of us were heading for Las Vegas. Ten days from now, only two of us would remain.

Christine climbed onto the bus carefully. She was careful because she was now quite old, and partly because this trip was just too important. She made her way to her seat, put her bag in the space above her, and then sat down with a long breath. She looked out the window as the Coliseum-Library disappeared around a corner and she mouthed the word “goodbye.” As the bus rolled through the streets of shops lined in Chinese, Japanese and Arabic lettered signs, she felt a lightness in her stomach. At her age she felt a number of sensations in her stomach, but rarely was lightness one of them.

Christine had lived in her small retirement home apartment for nearly twelve years. She remembered a few good years at the beginning followed by more that felt like they were slowly darkening, but then, unexpectedly, came February. That was when, as the frozen rain fell outside her window, in the grey shadow of the looming Rockies, Christine began to feel a change. It was as if a different version of her self was slowly growing from within. At first it was a bit frightening, but soon she could only feel the warm excitement of its presence. The inner version grew larger,and larger, until one day, it was the size of her, and so she was new. This new version of herself came complete, not only with optimism, but with a plan. It was because of the plan that she knew that on June 12th, at exactly 6:00 a.m. she would pack her bag and leave the nursing home. The attendant at the front desk would be asleep and she would be free to leave.

The plan worked exactly as she somehow knew it would and now she was on the bus. Since February, Christine had also had dreams. The dreams were so clear that she really didn’t think that the term “dream” applied. They seemed more like memories of things she had yet to do. In most of the them she was surrounded by flashing lights, music and people. The people near her were familiar to her, almost as if they were family. The word family, however, had never meant very much to her. So it was strange that she should pick this word to describe these people. After all, what could she say of the children that she'd raised or the man that she'd married? The children had left and now never spoke to her. She'd stood by her man until his unfortunate, but not devastating, death. The people in the dream felt closer than any of these others who'd been called family; they reminded her of herself.



*



There is something else on my laptop. I have taken so long to mention it because frankly, I’m not sure if I should have made it. The census bureau doesn’t know about it, and I doubt that they would condone it. Even though I learned with Morton that it was wrong to ever try to apply pattern predictability to humans in any real way, I still wrote some software. In those days at home, sitting in my underwear, talking to Fibo as he rolled around on my floor waiting for food, I programmed. The question was simple: How did human beings progress, on the average, over their lives? I didn’t want to know by personality or anything else so random, though, I wanted to know numerically. And so I decided to watch their numbers change. Incomes rose, then declined. Children were born, more in certain areas than others. People married, then separated, then married again, and they all lived in places and had incomes and ages.

The part that I don’t like to mention, and that the Census Bureau would likely not approve of, is that I tried to predict what would happen next. I took the real data and projected how the numbers would change over time. Then, when more data was gathered, I compared the numbers to see if the real human had done what my simulated human counterpart had predicted. If they hadn’t, the equations were modified to learn more from the new data. Then the projections continued. On the screen, all that anyone would see were numbers changing, but what I see, past the numbers, is the person: in their house with their car and their wife and dog and their baby and the whole thing. Click and slide the mouse and watch the numbers move backward in time; divorced people become married and then single and then dependants again. Slide it into the future and what comes next? And why did I want to know?

I took a break on my own drive to Las Vegas to pull out the old laptop. Sitting in my car in a coffee shop parking lot near the highway, I turned it on and ran the software. I was able to get an internet signal from the shop and so I decided to download newer census data. The data arrived and I hesitated, then clicked on the program that I had nicknamed SenseUs. The program processed the new data and formulated projections with this newer information. This often took up to twenty minutes. I decided to buy a coffee. When I returned, a pop-up message was on the screen. Something was wrong. What I was seeing was statistically impossible. I double-checked the numbers. Numbers rarely lie, though. Somehow, there were two very special people living in America. I would have to think more about them later, though. I was down to the fifty dollars in my wallet and I had a long drive left to Las Vegas, where hopefully luck would be a lady and chip in for gas.


*


Christine switched to the Greyhound bus on the southern edge of town and then watched as it crossed the green fields that lay between her country and The States, as most Canadians called it. She showed her passport and answered the standard border questions.

“Where are you going today, Mrs. Ellis?”

“To Las Vegas, of course.”

“Of course, and how long will you be staying there?”

She knew not to tell the truth. “Just one week.”

“Do you have anything to declare?”

It was then that she looked the young man in the eyes, his chest covered in a bullet-proof vest and said, “Just that life is a bigger mystery than you’ll ever know, but that by knowing this, you’ll enjoy it so much more.”

The man’s blank expression turned into a smile. “I’ll try to remember that, Mrs. Ellis.”

“Good,” she replied and soon the bus was moving again. It approached the stone monument that marked the actual line which is often dotted on maps. Then, first the driver, then Christine, and finally even the portable bathroom at the back of the bus, were in America. It wouldn’t be too much longer. She smiled and fell asleep.

next chapter

Chapter 12 - Seattle

Polly’s underwear was showing. I think what she was wearing was called a thong. She was leaning over the lookout railing at the observation deck of the Space Needle, taking in the tourist-eye view of Seattle, when the underwear appeared. I had no idea what to do. I wondered if you were supposed to tell someone when this happened. Chloe always told me I should tell her if there was something in her teeth. She said that the initial awkwardness was better than being embarrassed in front of other people. The pink strap that looked up at me from her hip seemed different than lettuce in a bicuspid, though. I decided that if I got her to face me, the thong would turn to the other tourists for their enjoyment.

“You know Polly, you seem to be pretty strong.” Happy that I didn’t say “pretty thong.”

“How is that, Mr. Burnkey.” She smiled and turned to me, moving close enough for me to smell the mint of her chewing gum.

“After Morton died, I fell apart. I was essentially rolled up in the fetal position, figuratively and sometimes literally for the first year.”

She pulled back a few inches. “Do you do small-talk? Ever?”

“I’m not known for my small-talk. No. I can try …”

“BE YOURSELF.”

“I’m trying …”

“That’s what the sweatshirt said.”

“What sweatshirt?”

“The one that my mom made for me when I was fifteen. Back in Detroit. My mom was a strong woman in a tough situation, her second marriage. My dad was no great catch. But she somehow managed a positive attitude and all this was years before the age of daytime self-repair television. The sweatshirt also said ‘YOU ARE STRONG’ and ‘KID POWER’ on the sleeves, and ‘I’M THE BOSS OF ME’ on the back.”

“She sounds like a cool lady.”

“She still is. Yeah. She lives down in Tacoma now. She got out of Detroit before I did. Anyway, after Jake decided that my services were no longer needed, and chose to check out the underside of the dirt, I thought about that sweatshirt. YOU ARE STRONG. And so I became strong.”

“It was that easy?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“OK. Your underwear is sticking out.”

“I know.”


We’d checked into a nicer hotel than any I’ve used since I’d left Boston. I realized, as I produced my credit card, that I should probably start to take a look at the status of my funds. Polly had offered to share a room. I laughed. She wasn’t joking. She looked at me and told me she made a good roommate, that she would stay on her side and everything would be cool. She told me that if I was cool, that she would be cool. The situation came down to how cool Theo Burnkey could be. One room or two. Twenty minutes later, I knocked on her room door. She had a better view of the city than me.


The reason that we were in Seattle instead of Detroit was because even though Jake killed himself in Detroit, the records showed he had grown up in Seattle. So the body would be flown back here for burial. On the drive here, Polly told me she pictured the coffin on the plane. She said that even though she had never met Jake, and had only heard his voice, she could picture him. And so, she pictured him, blue skin in a black suit tilting as the plane took off, then climbing to cruising altitude in the cargo hold. She picture his face calm, although the tie he wore would be covering the neck wound. She could see icicles forming on the glossy parts of his fingernails, then she pictured him slowly descending into Seattle, as the rain fell. So he fell from the sky and back, nearly to the ground that would soon hold him.

“But I won’t know if I even pictured him right until I see him.”

“And why is that so important?”

“Because of Jake’s pet cat Linc. Because I’m very good at what I do. Because I can read people, and because I was wrong. Because people who express that level of concern for a pet, aren’t ready to die. I misread the signs. Now, to begin to forgive myself, I need to see Jake and let him die before I can start my own process.”

“But isn’t it a bit morbid?”

“Theo, Jake is not alive. Morbid thoughts are those forced on the living. Imposing something on Jake is like imposing it on this piece of luggage,” she said, kicking the case at her feet. I winced.



Medical examiners can keep late hours. We were lucky this one’s assistant told us we could still see him the night we arrived in Seattle. In the glow of the phosphorus lights, you could tell the building was painted in that shade known as Government White, but that the paint wasn’t holding up. His office was at the end of a row of labs, and his name, Paul Dante, M.E. was on a placard outside of his door. My dad used to watch that program “Quincy” when I was a kid. Quincy was a medical examiner, and in the title of the show it actually read “Quincy M.E.” As a kid, I always thought it should be read “Quincy, that’s ME.” I wondered if I should ask Dr. Dante if he ever saw Quincy, but before I could even shake his hand, Polly was talking.

“Oh, thank God we’ve finally made it to your office.”

“Yes, and you are?”

“On the trip up from Tacoma I nearly cried the entire way, although I’m fine now, and my husband Theo, strong as a rock, just kept saying ‘there, there, pumpkin, Jakey’s gone to a better place.’ Didn’t you honey?”

“Well, actually, I … never … liked the way you called him Jakey. He was Jacob. Strong, like from the Bible.”

“Oh, you must be here to talk about an exhumation? Jacob Phillips? I was rather surprised to hear the request you’d started on this.” He held a paper, whose apparent purpose was situations just like this.

“Well, Dr. Dante, can I call you Paul?”

“I guess.”

“Can I tell you the story of Jakey’s life back in Detroit? And how it was that my brother lost hope enough to end his tragic existence, even though his sister Polly and brother-in-law Theo were, themselves, experiencing the hopefulness of new life, even as we speak, nestled within the whom of yours truly?”

Dr. Dante’s eyes widened, and he leaned back in his chair to listen. I think that I must have had a similar expression on my face as I listened to the story Polly was beginning. The tale, it turned out, was of Jake in the military, his Purple Heart award, his time as a fireman and his struggle with dyslexia. After she was finished, if I were a medical examiner, I’m not sure if I would have granted an exhumation or a Tony award for acting.

“And that, you see, Dr. Dante, is why I need to see my brother’s face one last time.”

She had managed to produce tears by this point. He offered her a box of tissues, then stared at her for a few seconds, it seemed he was unable to figure exactly what had just happened. Then the spell was broken, and he looked around the room and straightened a few objects on his desk.

“That’s a remarkable story, about a remarkable young man. I don’t know what to tell you. We just can’t authorize an exhumation, though. The rules are very clear. If we could, I might even help you myself.”

“Thank you for your time,” I said getting up.

I looked at Polly. She looked defeated, as if the race she’d been winning had just been cancelled. She looked at me, and then forced a smile. I realized how deep this ran for her. She was not so different from me. We got up to leave the office.

“You know, it’s a shame they didn’t even give Jacob the Purple Heart distinction on his monument.” Dante was looking at a file that had lay closed on his desk the entire time.

“The Tranquil Rest Cemetery has a lovely monument just for war heroes, you should mention to them that your brother was a veteran.”

I looked to Polly. Some aspect of her face had returned to life. Her spirit exhumed.

“Yes. Really? You know, we were also heading there to talk to them doctor. The Tranquil Rest Cemetery, you say?” He nodded. “Yes, that’s where we were heading first thing in the morning.”



Polly insisted we celebrate. Somehow, she thought that learning which cemetery held the body of Jacob was an excellent start. We drove around Seattle for a little while until we found a place called the Sunset Tavern. A band was playing. They were a bit loud, but that made Polly all the more interested.

I order two beers and brought them over to Polly as she danced in her spot, her eyes on the band. They were three girls performing in red dresses. A singer, bass guitarist and drummer. I believe it was technically called punk rock, although I’m no expert. The name on their drum was “The Hot Rollers” and Polly danced like it was her favorite band.

When she saw I’d brought her a beer, she slid her arm behind my back and I felt her hip move toward my own. She was touching me. When her movement continued, I understood. We were dancing. Beside the guitars being one-quarter out of tune, the band was fun. The crowd was so happy to hear them, including Polly, that I started to enjoy them as well.

Later, I entertained Polly, by telling her which of the couples in the room were likely to go home together. It was innocent enough. I’ve sworn off finding patterns in people, but these were innocent enough: the mating ritual of self-concern. I could sense a lot by the way they touched their ears or shifted their bodies. Many couples in the room showed only one-sided interest, a few were mutual. I pointed them out and we watched the mutually interest sets leave together.

“What about us Theo? What’s our pattern?” Polly asked with a smile and widening eyes. I didn’t answer.


Later that night, at the hotel, I stood near Polly’s door to say goodnight. Both of us smelling like beer and cigarettes. I found the edge of the doorway and held it with my hand behind me. Polly leaned in to kiss me and she succeeded. It was a short kiss and then she turned to go into her room.

“What ever happened to the sweatshirt your mom made? Do you still have it?”

“Theo honey, that thing was ugly. I threw it away years ago. It makes a better memory than a clothing option.”

I made it to my own room and bed and then fell asleep.



I awoke to a persistent knocking on my door. For some reason, the pitch of a knocked hotel room door in the morning, whether it be a friend or a woman shouting “Housekeeping” was particular offensive to the ears.

“You’ve got ten minutes,” Polly said through the door.


The Tranquil Rest Cemetery was near the Arboretum, on the north side of town. Set on a hill, it offered a lovely view of the lake below. Seattle, I was discovering, was actually full of rather steep hills. So much so, that I wondered how San Francisco, with its reputation for hills, could be any worse.

The management office of the funeral home offered us a printed out map of the plots and how to find “our loved one,” and we looked down from a small hill to compare the map to the plot that lay before us. The style of the cemetery was newer, it was less crowded with monuments than the ones I’d seen on the East Coast. Polly was visibly excited. Why, or what she expected to do next, I had no idea. Her finger was set on the map, and beneath it was the name Jacob Phillips. After a minute she pointed off to a corner of the valley, green and dotted with granite.

“Over there.”

I looked at the map then at the terrain and something in my senses started to react. It surprised me. A pattern? Here in a cemetery? I decided to stop the sensory process. I followed Polly. She ran to a plot on high ground near the back corner of the area and under the boughs of a fir tree. There, a rectangle of bright green grass grew before a stone marked “Jacob Phillips.” The stone was flat and rose three inches from the ground like a shoe box and on it showed the passing of Jake’s thirty-one years.

“There he is,” she said. “He’s really dead.”

I was surprised to hear her say it. Had she doubted the fact? I put my hand on her shoulder. Her face was blank.

“Well, that’s over then.” She let out a deep sigh as if the ghost of Jacob Phillips were passing out of her lungs, and she bent down and slapped the stone.

“You shouldn’t have quit so early, my friend. I’m sorry you did. But, it wasn’t my fault.”

I looked at her, amazed. She wasn’t looking for something to believe, she was just looking for Jacob so she could tell him the truth. Polly knew she hadn’t killed Jake, but the symbolism was important. That’s why what happened next was so hard for me.

We walked back to the small hill where we’d looked down on the cemetery earlier and Polly pulled out the map again.

“So many dead people!” She laughed. “Where would you be buried in this place, Theo, if you had a choice?”

I looked at the land, and then I looked at the map. My sense started to engage and I didn’t see how any good could come of it. The printout contained the years the deceased were born and when they’d passed. The numbers glowed through the paper as if the ink were ignited. The digits floated into my perception and then lay themselves across a geometric representation of the land before me. Something was wrong. The cemetery followed a strict pattern. I guessed it was to prevent settling of the ground in the rainy climate or to best handle earthquakes. Whatever the reason, over the years, they had consistently placed heavier crypts on higher ground. This meant that the older the person, the higher the ground they were placed upon. Children would be less likely to settle, their vaults containing less cement. Less weight. Thus, they occupied the lower ground. The difference between birth and death dates confirmed the pattern in every plot except one. Jacob Phillip’s plot should have contained a child, or an unrealistically small adult. I knew at that moment with surprising certainty that Jacob wasn’t in his crypt.

A few minutes earlier, Polly had claimed that his death wasn’t her fault. Would she still be so sure if this wasn’t the body of Jacob? I decided she deserved to know.


That night I slept in Polly’s room, but only to try help her stop crying. It was as if the quest to find Jake was the only thing that had been keeping her going, from Detroit to Portland and now to Seattle. If the body of Jacob Phillips were propped against a door, its absence had allowed that door to swing open and reveal everything that Polly had feared.

It is horrible to know that you may have let someone die. To know that in your arrogance, you decided for them by not taking them seriously. I knew exactly how Polly felt, and I knew why Mike Vestal had called to send me here. Polly was like me, and she was trying to do something about her pain. Her method was to hunt the actual body of her demons. I wasn’t sure where my demons lived or how I’d find them. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem like Morton Petes was finished with me yet either.

next chapter

Chapter 11 - Portland

Morton Petes started everything the day he pushed the blade against his wrists. As the blood drained from him, pluming into the bathtub water, it began to drain from my life as well. Morton Petes started it, but I was probably due. I had a beautiful wife. I had a promising position at MIT. My research was going well, and I was special. I had something that made me different, and in a good way. And I thought I could control it. I wasn’t throwing bottles down staircases. I thought I was doing fine. Then, with Morton’s cut, probably diagonal and toward the body, it all began to unravel. He showed the loose bolts in the machine, and then they began to spin and work their way free until the whole thing just lay in pieces. Me. Alone. Pulled deep into myself on the floor of an unfurnished apartment that was in a neighborhood pulled deep away from other houses. That’s how the fall began.



“Theo, it’s Mike. How are you?”

“Mike? I’m sorry, who is this?”

“It’s Mike Vestal from Detroit. We talked in my office about the death that you were close to.”

“Oh, hi Mike. I still have your number, I was considering calling you soon. I’ve had a bit of a rough time since I left Detroit, but I think that I’m doing a little better now. I’m in Colorado, if you can believe that. What’s up?”

“Well, I was just reviewing our caller records and I found something that reminded me of you. One of our operators had a similar case to yours. Her name was Polly Simms. She worked here for a little while after the case, but then she moved on to Portland, Oregon. The case was a failure. She blamed herself.”

“Portland. I’ve never been, but statistically speaking, suicide prevention must be a harder battle in the Northwest.”

“It is. Maybe you should give her a call, the case I mentioned. The one like yours, it really shook her up. I’m a little worried about her.”

“Mike, I was actually considering heading back to Boston.”

“Theo, I think that talking to Polly could help you. You may find that you have more in common than you think.”

“I’ll think about it Mike. Thanks.”

“Sure, Theo, be careful. Tell Polly I said hello, if you see her. Here’s her number …”


When I was a kid, every summer, my dad insisted on dragging the family to Dixieland music festivals as our summer vacation. The only thing that could look more unlikely at a Dixieland music festival than my awkward father were his wife and child standing behind him. Mom swore that the music was just silly, but she secretly tapped her toes as the banjo and bass guitar played. I waited patiently for the band to make mistakes, then I, usually alone in spotting the mistakes, smiled at the break in their musical pattern. Charming kid. These were our summer vacations, but the Dixieland festivals pretty much stuck to the eastern United States. As such, I hadn’t seen the West or West Coast at all. Ever. Now, in my recent Boston exodus, I had driven about seventy-five percent of the way across the USA. Why should I stop so short of crossing the country? I dialed Polly’s number into my phone and then headed the car toward Portland.



The drive from Colorado to Oregon is a beautiful one. The world around you is like a giant rumpled green carpet, the hills look soft and touchable. And in a trick of perspective, they seem to be just about at arms length. I couldn’t make it all the way to Portland, so I stopped to sleep in Boise, Idaho. Boise is a town that keeps you waiting for its arrival. As you drive along the interstate, the signs say that it is fifteen, then ten miles away, but still there is no sign of it. Just rolling green hills. At about four miles from downtown, you start to see some city, then you’re downtown. I checked into a hotel, got a good night’s rest on sheets that were softer than any I’d felt since I was married and Chloe took care of things like that.

Fresh as I was in the morning, I headed out for breakfast. A pleasant fellow, sitting beside me, without warning, began explained the weakness of gun laws and the nature of human violence. He looked at me with a sincere smile from beneath a baseball cap. It was unexpected and I enjoyed the conversation. He ended with him offering his card.


Shawn Nelson, Sheriff’s Deputy, Boise, Idaho.

“Being a mathematician, as you say you are, if you are ever interested in the numbers behind guns and ballistics, just give me a call.”

“I will,” I said expecting never to make that call, but then I remembered the way that the past few weeks had gone and placed the card in my wallet. “I will,” I repeated.



Portland Oregon was a city that defied all the patterns I’d seen in other cities. I loved it. Neighbors modeled their yards in any way they want: from beautiful gardens that extend to the sidewalk, to gravel centers for car repair. Anything seemed to go. Expensive homes bumped up against smaller ones and neighborhoods changed dramatically in the space of a few blocks. If the town were to be famous for anything, I would guess that it would be its defiance of convention. I expected to enjoy my stay.

While driving through the Northeastern edge of town, I noticed a sign that advertised “Camping in the City, Ten Dollars a Night.” Curious, I inquired. A young artist named Ben, allowed people to sleep in the 1950's era camper that he kept along the side of his home. The back door to the house was never locked and the shower was on the second floor. He was an athletic fellow with lively blue eyes, a tattooed arm and consistent smile.

“Help yourself,” he said and then wandered off. I made my way to my small and cozy camper and called Polly.


“Hello, is this Polly?”

“It is, and who is this?”

“My name is Theo Burnkey, I’m an acquaintance of Mike Vestal in Detroit. He suggested that I talk to you.”

“I see. About anything in particular? Sports? The unfair treatment of children? Sex?”

I felt my face pull into a smile, “Well, how about we talk a little about your job, first, and then you can pick from the other three topics as you feel comfortable.”

“You’re a fair man, Mr. Burnkey, but I quit my job today. Portland is a town where most people have had more jobs than bumper stickers on their car, and that’s saying something. If you’re a friend of Mike Vestal, though, I’ll talk to you tonight. How about 7:00 at a place called Pasta Bangs on Mississippi.”

“Sounds good, Ms. Simms, sounds good.”


I dressed in my nicer pair of corduroys. The pair that hadn’t yet worn smooth on the butt. I splashed some Old Spice aftershave on my face in the upstairs bathroom of Ben’s Camp and Shower Community then looked at myself in the mirror. I saw my smiling face, with a towel draped around my shoulders. The smile dropped. What business did I have in a flirty conversation or with 7:00 dinner plans? I had had a perfectly great woman in my life and now she was gone. I had blown it. Now I stood in front of my mirror, smelling of Old Spice and thinking that things were somehow going to be different. I looked down to the sink and for a second thought about balance. Chloe hadn't been perfect. We had both made mistakes. I wasn’t all-bad, and she wasn’t all-good. Life and people rarely break down as easily as TRUE and FALSE or one and zero, I told myself. Then someone knocked on the door and asked if the bathroom would be free soon. I responded that it would and then hurried down the stairs. It was nearly 6:30.


Polly Simms had long blonde hair and a smile that easily moved into a smirk. She had a nicely curved body that made a man my age think of nothing he was proud of, nor that he'd deny. Her eyes were bright and animated, but something in the way that they darted around the restaurant suggested an unease and possible sadness within. She was an attractive girl and I wondered if Mike had concerns for her that extended past their work.

As I walked up to the outdoor seating of the restaurant, she was talking to a man who had been rolling by on the sidewalk in an electric wheel chair.

“Do a three-sixty!” she said to him.

The man smiled, then turned the motorized chair around.

“That was great,” she shouted. The man returned the smile and rolled on.

Unsure how to top what I’d just seen, I introduced myself and sat down. Polly immediately began entertaining me with stories about herself and her new life in Portland. I noticed, though, that she never mentioned the work at the suicide prevention hotline or any gloomy topic for that matter. I also noticed that she smelled nice and that her skin was soft as she shook my hand. The softness, I figured, went deeper and potentially so did some pain.

“So, I don’t get it. You’re friends with Mike Vestal, but why are you here?”

The while truth, in this case, seemed like a bit more than I’d like to present or than was smart to offer. “I’m on vacation,” I replied.

“Welcome to PDX, home of coffee and the hippie dream.”

“Thanks, I like it here so far, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about what happened in Detroit, with your work in suicide prevention. Mike said that there was a particular case that led to you leaving Detroit. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“I understand, but that’s a big part of why …”

“But I will. He called himself Jake. At first I thought that he was for real. You see, we get people that call just because they are lonely. We need to limit the time that we give them because they can become addicted to the conversation, and we aren’t a friend service. We are there to help people that really need help.”

“And did Jake really need help?”

“I thought so at first. He would call in every Tuesday when I was on my night shift and talk about his life. How he was single and lonely, and how he was considering suicide.”

“Do people usually just come out and say that?”

“Sometimes. We have to treat every caller as sincere, at least at first. But there was something about Jake that, over the weeks that he called in, made me think that he was more of the type that needed attention. I didn’t think that he was serious, but he was.”

“What was the thing that made you think he wasn’t serious?”

“It sounds weird, but it’s because he often mentioned his pet cat. Its name was Linc. I remember that, like the guy from that old cop show. Anyway, the way that he talked about Linc was just too fond. Too loving. I don’t know. It didn't seem like he was ready to go. It didn’t work for me.”

“The reason that Mike suggested that I call you, is that something very similar happened to me. I was a teacher’s assistant at MIT and I had a student named Morton.”

I went on to tell her about Morton, the resulting suicide, and life afterward. She sat and listened and I noticed her patterns before long. Every sip of wine was followed by a crossing of her legs. Every sentence that ended with a noun had to be started with a sentence that started with a verb. Little things.

“What was your wife like?”

I produced a nervous laugh, “I’m not sure that I’m comfortable talking about …”

“Was she pretty?”

“Yes. In an unconventional way, but pretty. To me. I guess that she was beautiful in a way that my eyes liked beauty to be projected.” I looked up and she was smiling. “But that was years ago. How about you? Drive anyone away with your personal failures?” I asked.

“By the hundreds.”

Then we ordered a bottle of wine and talked about other things. I realized before long that I’d stopped noticing her patterns. The Portland rain began to fall, and the night slipped by.



Later, after we’d said goodbye, I impulsively called her from her trailer.

“You know Mike is worried about you.”

“Mike is a sweet guy, he worries about a lot of people.”

“Does he have reason to worry about you?”

“Well, he thinks that I’ve become obsessed. Obsessed with Jake.”

“Is he right?”

“He may be. He thinks that I’ve gone to far, now that I’ve requested an exhumation.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. I need to see him. I need to put a face, morbid as I know it is, to the name. Jake won’t be able to rest in my mind, and I won’t be able to get a decent night rest until I dig the bastard up. I am going to try to convince the Medical Examiner that there was foul play in the case. That’s why I’m going to Seattle tomorrow. Wanna come?”

“Ask me in the morning.”

“I will.”


I lay in the camper looking at all the little ways that Ben had decorated it. A string of cowboy-themed lights were strung along the wall. Glowing cowboy boots, hot peppers, hats and cows. I thought about the things that people accumulate in life. I had accumulated Morton. Morton had accumulated Heaven and Hell. Polly had accumulated Jake. Jake had accumulated Linc.

The image of Morton came to me again, the one that I saw outside of the missile silo. It came to me from memory, though, not in a vision. He was laying the bathtub. His eye opened. Maybe I should have had Morton exhumed as well, I half joked to myself. I wondered where he was even buried. Why didn’t I find out? Maybe Polly’s version of obsession was, as morbid as the outcome, more healthy than my own. At least she was trying to find answers in the world. I had just sought blame within.


The phone woke me the following morning as I rolled over in my camper bed. I reached onto the mini-refrigerator, next to the mini-stove and grabbed the phone.

“Are you coming to Seattle?”

“Yeah. Just, let me brush my teeth first.”

next chapter

Chapter 10 - Steamboat Springs

I called Adam from my car as I headed up to Steamboat Springs, the poor Ford engine struggled in the thin air. He was shocked, then disgusted, then relieved to hear what I had to tell him. The Masons weren’t his friends, but they were the fathers of some of his friends and by this time, their families would most likely just be relieved to have the bodies. He was also starting to guess where the body in Minneapolis might be found when I lost cell phone coverage and began to climb over Rabbit Ear Pass and then into Steamboat Springs. The incident in the silo hadn’t entirely sunk in, possibly because it wasn’t over yet. I imagined that once I found out the fate of Clifton Johns, it would all hit me and I’d try to sort things out, but not just yet.

I parked by a river and decided just to walk around and enjoy the sights of the cute ski-lodge town. Funny how in some way or another, most of the rent around here was paid by recreation. Sure, there were still coal mines and the occasional rancher, but skiing had eclipsed those industries years ago. My guidebook explained that in 1947, of the 1700 residents, 1685 were skiers. Was it a case of who was drawn here, or how the sports claimed you regardless of your supposed free-will, I wondered.

By the river I stumbled upon a skateboard park. Of all the sports that I’d observed over the years, done around MIT and on the courts, fields and rinks of Boston, few had the finesse of skateboarding. The act of making the board hop into the air was an apparent bit of physics-defying magic that most police or parents probably didn’t even credit their sons and daughters for mastering. Friction plus torque, flex and timing made the board hop, and when it was done right, it looked like they weren’t even trying. I walked up to one of the kids.

“Hey, what’s up, my G.”

“Err, hello, can I help you?” he responded.

“Oh, yes, sorry. My name is Theo. I’m from Boston. Just visiting your little town here on vacation.”

“I’m Alex.” He shook my hand.

“Say, Alex, are there any weird legends that you’ve heard around here? I am sort of following a story, and if the story came here, chances are that you’d have heard of it. Does the name Clifton Johns mean anything to you?”

“No. This town is pretty normal, actually, the only unusual thing is the springs. Sulphur springs, sulphur caves and stuff. In fact,” and he pointed up the hill to the now green ski terrain, “the sulphur caves are right up there. There’s a story about Indians or cowboys, I forget which one, throwing the other in their to suffocate.”

“Not cool.”

“No, G, not cool. Good luck.” Then he skated back into the park and I expected that he’d soon tell his friends about the big nerd in the corduroys and striped shirt, but he didn’t. He just worked on his particular skate trick. Delightfully unexpected.


At the Steamboat Spring Museum, you can walk through an entire house that has been built to model an early settlement from the area. It’s creepy. I’m not sure why it is, but stuff that dead people used, setting around a house, has always been creepy to me. I imagine that someone someday will look at something that I own, whether it’s my breakfast dice or my Beowolf-clustered Linux Workstation and find it creepy. No. That’s won’t happen.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, hello, I am a bit of a history buff and I was wondering about a certain figure from Steamboat Springs history.”

“Well, ask away! My name is Gail.”

“Hello Gail, I’m Theo.”

“Have you ever heard of a man named Clifton Johns?”

I was disappointed when her face stayed unaffected.

“No, sir, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. That’s too bad. Can you tell me something about the sulphur springs?”

Gail proceeded to politely explain that the Ute Indians had been the first people to seek a therapeutic value in the springs. And that later, white families had moved in and attempted to turn the area into a giant spa and recreation center. They had succeeded. The area was probably fifty-percent larger than when Clifton Johns would have passed through. Construction was booming and there was no end in site. I thanked Gail and walked through the display on skiing throughout history.

I was just about to politely leave the museum when the reflection of Gail’s face appeared on the glass case where I was half-interestedly looking at photos of early ski lifts.

“You know, the Utes thought that the sulphur springs did more than therapy, they thought that it gave you visions of spirits and things. They called it being sighted.”

Then Gail pulled her head back to her counter and the photo that her reflected face had been covering shown through to my open mouth. In a black in white photo, several skiers were standing near a cave, about to make a descent. On the bottom of the photo, drawn in fading pen but barely visible was the symbol of the all-signing eye.

Gail had never noticed it before, but she had helped me find it. I thanked her and nearly left before she asked me to check out there gift shop. I returned to the Mustang with a bag full of pioneer themed goodies.

I couldn’t wait until full sunlight tomorrow. I had to make my way up to the sulphur cave tonight. It was a bit of a hike, but I grabbed my flashlight and started the muddy trek. They call this Mud Season in Steamboat because it’s not quite snow and it’s not quite hiking season. Except for me, that is.

I knew that I was nearing the cave as I started to smell the strong smell of sulphur. Several signs informed me that the air was toxic and that I should leave the area. It was also private property. Didn’t they know me? I got to the edge of the cave and was certain to be standing where Clifton Johns had stood fifty years ago. The all-seeing eye. The ability to be sighted. It must have been all too much for Clifton Johns to avoid. I stood at the mouth of the cave, as sulphur pored out, nearly choking me. I couldn’t believe that the Indians had enjoyed this stuff. Weren’t they supposed to be wiser than those of us who followed and ruined the land? Within the billowing smoke, on the cave wall I thought that I saw a letter. I shined my flashlight, but the billows of steam obscured it. Then I saw it again. The letters Y, O … maybe U. I couldn’t see any more. I started to enter the cave, but my eyes were watering and I could barely breath.

Then, I walked out. I turned toward fresh air and walked. I felt entirely calm and I started to hike back down the hill. I knew it. I knew what it said. I said nothing. It was either written by a madman, or it was written by a kid, but it meant nothing. And by walking out of a potentially lethal mixture of air, I had proven something to myself. I felt a good sort of insight that didn’t require smoke or lights or codes. I was sane. I headed for my car.

next chapter

Chapter 9 - Fort Collins

The wind swept up again, and again my body was the only thing for miles trying to slow it. People say that the prairie night wind can cut right through your clothing. Even under my clothes, I felt like my skin was a layer that was poorly advertised for its protection. Colorado is wide-open in its eastern third. The sky is still big out here, and the Rockies stand on your left like a patient, but quietly irritating stranger. In that capacity, they watched in mock-curiosity as I climbed the barbed wire. Trespassing seemed like a small crime compared to the possibilities that awaited me under ground.



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