Morton woke up knowing it was the day. Today he would decide. After today things would change, one way or another. He was like a man teetering between two different falls. He would take the photos today and they would either be of another faked suicide, or they would be of a real one in progress.
He looked out the window of his apartment and said to himself, “If you’re going to find me Theo, today would be the day to do it.”
*I didn’t drive directly to Manhattan and to Greenwich Village where Washington Square Park was, instead I went to the South Bronx. When I was a kid, my mother had brought me there. Her mother had lived in the neighborhood and attended the Immaculate Conception Church. My grandmother, mother and I went to the church every morning during our visit. It was one of my fondest memories of my Grandmother and my childhood. I remember the church itself with its high ceiling, pipe organ and enthusiastic crowd. I especially remember the crowd of people who’d form on the sidewalk after the service. People smiling and slapping their friends on the back and bending down to mess with my hair. It was different than my childhood Boston. I felt like going there before continuing on.
The neighborhood outside the church was still bustling with people shopping in the local stores – Cookies Department Store across the street was a favorite – or just talking to friends on street corners. Over the years the faces of the people on the corner had changed a bit, but the energy and human spirit remained. Today, this was a neighborhood where English was most likely to be a person’s second language. It was colorful and exciting and saying I didn’t fit in was entirely unnecessary.
The neighborhood had a reputation for being less than safe. My grandmother had talked about the church being broken into several times before she died. I parked the Mustang and reached into the back seat for a piece of paper. It was a page I’d torn from one of the books the night before. I folded it and put it in my pocket. Then I left the car and nervously looked back to check on it twice before I got to the door of the church. The people on the corner of 151st and Melrose barely noticed me. I looked up at the brick structure. It was as imposing as I remembered from childhood. There was one thing missing from the top of the high bell tower, though. I recalled hearing the cross on the steeple of the tower had been struck by lightening one too many times and had to be taken down in the 1990’s.
I pushed on the church door and it was open. The morning Mass had recently finished, otherwise the door would probably been locked. I entered the church. The building was a classic Catholic church design. A center aisle led straight to the main altar and stained glass windows lined the walls. The building was nearly empty, with people slowly heading for the doors, as I walked up the main central aisle. I moved to the front, passing the Stations of the Cross that depicted the Crucifixion of Jesus. I wanted to see all of the elements of the altar so I moved to the front of the dark wooden pews, remembered to kneel and sat down. I looked around the church and thought about Donald Wren’s angels and Morton Petes’ serpent. The arrow in Wren’s diary showed Washington Square (if I’d decoded it correctly) as just another stop before the arrow moved onward. It was the last labeled stop, however, and my last clue.
I looked up to the white statues that surrounded the altar and lined the back of it. As the church was named after The Immaculate Conception, it was not surprising to find many statues of the Virgin Mary. In the center behind the altar was the depiction of Jesus on the cross and the altar itself was covered with a green cloth. I had always felt at peace in church’s and especially when alone.
Then, breaking the silence, I heard a creaking sound above me. I looked up to see a large circular stained glass window begin to open forty feet above my head. I heard a voice say “from up here you can see who’s falling asleep.” A man peeked his head through the window and I saw a lively face. “Oh, hello!” the man shouted down from above. I looked up and smiled and thought of the Donald Wren’s house and the strata of angels. I guess this man with the graying hair must be a seraphim I joked to myself.
“I’m Father Tom, sorry to bother you, I’m just exploring up here!”
“OK,” I replied smiling back.
The window closed after a few minutes and I was again alone in the church. I got up from my seat, remembered to kneel again, while facing the altar and then began to walk around and look closer at the symbols around the church. One symbol that caught my eye was on a stained glass window, above the altar and to the side. The glass depicted a bird, apparently a pelican, in the process of pecking at its own flesh to provide food for the mouths of the chicks beneath it. It was a powerful symbol. I thought about the sacrifice natural to animals. Would this level of sacrifice occur in humans as well? The last time I was in this church I had been with my mother. We were attending my grandmother’s funeral. Suddenly I remembered being in Morton Pete’s house with his odd benefactor. I wondered what Morton’s mother looked like. I wondered if she had sacrificed to get him into that house.
“You want to see an interesting painting?” The voice came from halfway down the main aisle.
“Hello. Sure.”
“It’s over here.” The man who had poked his head into the church from above, my seraphim friend, lead me to the right of the church.
“My name is Theo. I used to attend this church as a child when I visited my grandmother. Her name was Francis O’Connell.”
His face filled with recognition. “Francis was a dear woman. She was one of the greats. She is still missed here.”
As we walked, I heard the sound of bells ringing in the church and I looked to the priest, wordlessly asking what they meant.
“Those are the Angelus Bells. They ring in threes, three times a day. Three in the morning, three at noon and three at night. Nine bells in each day. It was an ancient tradition. You are welcome to come up and see the bells with me, although it’s quite a climb. I could go grab Father John as well!”
“Perhaps another time,” I said as we approached the side wall of the church and stopped. There was recognition in my mind from the explanation of the Angelus Bells. It was the number nine.
“Will you look at that one?” he said, not looking at me but staring at a painting behind a statue.
“Wow.”
The image, covered in plexiglass, and nearly hidden behind a statue of Our Lady of Providencia (the patroness of Puerto Rico) was of a priest holding up a chalice to celebrate Mass. It was the moment when Catholics believe the bread and wine in the hands of the priest become the body and blood of Jesus. The priest was facing the back wall and I recalled that this was the method of saying Mass when I was very young. The priest didn’t start facing the congregation until the 1970’s. The image showed the chalice held high in the priest’s hands and a beam of light emanated straight up from it. Most interesting, though, was the presence above the congregation. It was as if the beam shooting upward from the priest had cut an opening into another dimension. Floating above the living people attending the Mass were light colored spirits hovering to observe the consecration. They looked similar to angels.
“They are the souls in Purgatory,” Father Tom told me.
I remembered learning about Purgatory. These souls were the ones who had not yet been made worthy of a place in Heaven. They could possibly spend an eternity waiting to be released. I looked back at the poor souls trapped in the nether region and they began to glow with a hint of red. Something was coming to me. I glanced into the plexiglass and saw the reflection of Father Tom. Next to him, with his arm on the man’s shoulder was Morton. I nearly jumped. He didn’t look at me, though, just the waiting souls. I felt myself begin to feel detached as Morton turned his gaze toward the back of the church.
“Are you alright son?”
I nodded and managed to smile to show that everything was alright, although, I was far from sure myself. I knew one thing, though, and it was that a pattern was slowly beginning to unravel. I headed toward the back door.
“Come back any time!” Father Tom shouted, but his voice faded quickly.
I walked out of the building. I crossed the street and saw Morton, in the red, white and blue of Cookie’s Department store windows, behind the sale on flip-flop sandals. I continued to walk with the reflected Morton and down the street. I traveled a block before I saw him again. I was looking down into the dark stairs of the subway entrance. Red tinted in the reflection of the sign for the subway entrance, he spoke to me and a shiver ran through my body.
“Dante found himself in a dark wood. He was full of fear and considering ending his own life. He became assailed by three beasts and nearly lost hope. But his guide, the Latin poet Virgil, appeared to him to help on his quest into the underworld.” I looked to the reflection and he nodded to indicate that he to be my guide.
“Upon arriving at the gate Dante read the famous words inscribed above it. "
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate." The reflected Morton and I responded simultaneously, "
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Then we descended into the subway tunnel as Dante and Virgil had. Morton was speaking from the knowledge of something I had read years ago. It was from
The Divine Comedy by Dante. One section was about Heaven, another about the same Purgatory I’d just seen in the painting in the church, but this section of the story was called “The Inferno.” It was all about Dante’s descent into the nine circles of Hell.
Waiting on the platform, the faces of the other waiting riders seemed to glow in crimson and I kept thinking they were looking at me. Their faces were distorted and animal like. I stood against a wall and leaned against a shiny ad. Nothing seemed quite normal including me. I still felt detached and floating loose in my head. I assumed some part of me was working out a pattern. I couldn’t shake the feeling of fear within myself. Morton appeared in the reflection and began to speak again.
“The first circle was called Limbo. It was reserved for those who hadn’t sinned in an active sense. Unbaptized babies and pagans lived there. In this circle you weren’t actively punished, just held for eternity, unable to enter Heaven. The subsequent eight circles descended deeper into Hell. Their punishments grew more severe the lower one descended.”
As Morton said this, the train arrived with a thunderous sound and I stepped toward the blur of the slowing car. My hair and face were blown with hot sulfurous air. Standing beside me was my glowing red guide. His face was without emotion.
“Minos, the mythological king from Virgil’s poem The Aeneid, was responsible for deciding how deep you’d reside for eternity, depending on the severity of your sins.”
I slowly got onto the train and sat in a seat that faced forward and was next to a window. I wanted to be sure no one would sit between Morton, in the window reflection, and myself. The train began to move and I noticed Morton waited quietly. I looked out of the window and into the darkness of the tunnels around me. They glowed as if the cement was heating to a molten intensity. The normal sights and sounds of the train were distant. The train was cast in an unreal dim light and the sound muted. It was as if I was wearing dark sunglasses with my ears obstructed to the sounds of the other riders. Clearly, though, I could still hear the movement of the train and the voice of Morton in my head. The train lurched into motion with a metallic clunk. It hissed and then we began to move. Soon we reached our first stop on the way to Manhattan.
135th Street.Morton began talking again as a familiar feeling began to come to me.
“The lesser of the sins were those related to human weakness. The second circle was inhabited by those who were overcome by lust. They were trapped forever in an eternal storm, never to touch one another again.”
125th Street.I looked at the people around me and pictured them trapped in a storm forever. They actually didn’t look as though they were far from it already. Most were already trapped in their headphones waiting until the end of the line. It may have been my imagination, but the train appeared to tilt downward as it flew past dark blurred red shadows outside the window.
116th Street.“The third circle Dante and Virgil passed was reserved for gluttons. They were to spend the remainder of time lying face down in mud and were gnawed apart by Cerberus, the three headed dog. The next circle, the fourth, was reserved for the greedy and they were assigned to push gigantic rocks in opposite direction for the rest of time.”
More side tunnels passed us and I could have sworn to have seen shadows moving in them. Red shadows lingered and some got larger as if the caster was moving closer. The train rolled onward into the dark passage still seeming to tilt downward.
Central Park North.“The fifth circle was meant for the wrathful. They fought one another in the swampy water of the River Styx …”
For some reason I thought of the Pelican in the stained glass. I began to think of mothers and homes and then I thought of Morton’s home. I remember feeling as if a pattern was forming just before his benefactor shut the door to that odd home in Athens.
96th Street.I tried to recall the symbols on the doors I’d passed in the house. I concentrated and could nearly see them. I was nearly nauseous with the feeling of the train rocketing downward into the darkness.
“The sixth circle was full of heretics. This circle began the area of sins which were actively committed rather than just exhibited by human lapses. These poor bastards were trapped in flaming tombs.”
72nd Street.Dante had quite a disturbing imagination I realized as the circles grew worse and worse. He wrote “The Inferno” in 1300 and it held up against the horror works of the modern day. It may have even been worse. Then I remembered the image on one of the doors in the house where Morton had grown up. It showed two circles with people next to them.
“Next Dante passed the level modern thinkers would consider worst. The home of those who acted violently. The first part of the seventh circle was full of those who showed violence against their fellow man. The third part was for those who showed violence against God, nature and art.”
I looked at Morton in the window and he was looking at me sitting in the reddened train car as things grew darker still. The smell of sulfur intensified and unnatural sounds began to reach me from outside of the train car.
“The second section was reserved for the suicides.” He said it and then stared at me. I returned his look briefly, then looked away.
“I didn’t make the rules,” I mumbled to him.
Some of the people around me glanced up and then back to each other, their headphones or their books. Talking to yourself was not unusual on the New York Subway system. I wondered how many of the people talking to themselves were riding through the circles of hell. The thought made me shudder and the feeling of nausea worsened.
42nd Street - Times Square.I thought about the house in Athens. I remembered passing a different door on the way out. I began to recall it had a wavy symbol of water with a figure above and below it. What did these markers mean?
“The eighth circle was a crowded circle. Panderers and seducers ran in opposite directions for eternity. Flatters waited in human excrement.”
The nausea was nearly intolerable. One passenger, an old man, looked deep into my eyes and began laughing. The smell still hung in the air and the train still seemed to descend downward even faster between stops.
34th Street - Penn Station.It was our stop. We got off at 14th Street and walked to the platform for the F train from 14th Street heading Downtown. I felt my stomach settle a bit, but the fear did not. The walls were warm with a dark heat and my vision was still shaded from what I knew was the natural scene of underground passage.
Morton finished up the eighth circle with what I had to acknowledged was an impressive sense for completeness.
“… corrupt politicians: a lake of burning pitch. Hypocrites had to wear brightly painted lead cloaks. Thieves were chased by snakes until they were caught and turned into snakes who chased other thieves. Fraudulent advisors were trapped in flames.”
Morton finally went quiet. I thought about Morton’s house and began feeling more and more uneasy. Why had it come to mind on this horrible journey? The platform was dark in my red vision. Shadows moved all around me and I heard strange noises. Finally the train came with a serpentine hiss and I got on board. I couldn’t find a seat so I stood, staring out through the glass. I noticed, absently, that Morton was next to me again. The doors closed with a loud thump.
“Enduring much between each circle, Virgil and Dante were finally lowered in the ninth and last level of Hell. This circle was reserved for traitors …”
I stopped listening and focused. I brought my mind back to the house in Athens. I was there again, walking through the halls, trying to read the inscriptions on the ten doors. Yes. There were ten. In my memory I noticed from the entryway that all had keyholes and locks but one. All had circular symbols and numbers but one. There were nine marked doors. In my memory I pulled myself to one of the doors, with the image of Morton’s benefactor trying to block me as I walked. She looked at me with eyes now full of hate, set deep in his wrinkled head. I finally approached a door …
“… the traitors to mankind were held in an area named after Cain who betrayed his brother …”
I looked at the door in my memory and then looked across the hall to the other that flanked the hallway to the tearoom. I noticed numbers beneath each of the symbols on them. The one to my right showed the symbol including circles and figures. It also held the number four. I turned around in my memory. The door with the symbol of the water held the number five.
“ … and the last of the regions of the ninth circle is the area for traitors to God. This is where Satan resides, forever consuming the bodies of Judas, betrayer of Jesus and Brutus, betrayer of Caesar.”
And then the pattern in Morton’s home came to me with a sickening realization as the doors of the train opened at the Washington Square exit. I stumbled for my footing and made my way across the hall and crumbled to the ground my hair wet with perspiration. I looked back to the train as it pulled away and saw Morton looked at me in the moving glass. The door in the house with the number four was meant to represent the giant rocks forever being pushed. The fourth circle. The door with the number five and the water symbol surely symbolized the river Styx and the fifth ring of Hell. I shuddered as I thought about the life Morton had endured as a child. I got up and moved to the stairs. I passed a ticket window as I finally reached the light of day. I breathed in the clean air and watched as my vision returned to normal. Looking into the window I saw Morton. He was nodding his head. I had solved another of the patterns I’d missed on the road and saw into his private childhood Hell.
*Morton was dreaming. In it he was in the second room of the house. This meant they’d accused him of being gluttonous. Perhaps it had happened during a dinner or if they’d found food in his things. They put him in the room and told him to learn from his mistake. They wouldn’t come around to ask the questions for endless hours or sometimes more than a day. The questions revolved around the books that were placed in each room. The writing in the book was written by some people in the groups they associated with. These were people who hadn’t found any known religion or philosophy strict or painful enough. These were people who’d sought to bring discipline to a grander scale. They were single-minded, of limited education and half-crazed when they’d written most of what was in the books. And so he waited.
As he got older, the fear of the afterlife punishments bothered him less and less. What bothered him more was the isolation. He had even developed an acute case of claustrophobia from the rooms. Still, though, when he was dreaming he was often that young boy again. As such he came complete with the fear of landing faced down in the mud of Hell where he knew he would be left to wait for an angry three-headed dog to come and tear apart his flesh.
He awoke from the dream with the familiar sweat and gasps for air. He also woke, though, with the growing feeling that this would soon end. That was his small consolation. He thought about the seventh room. It was reserved who those who did harm to others of themselves. Or themselves. He told himself he didn’t care any more about the seventh room, even though in some ways it was the worst room of all.
He stopped and thought about Donald Wren’s house. He thought about Wren’s nine levels. He compared them to the own nine in his house of Hell. He thought about the ranks of the good. The angels. Then he felt sick. He wasn’t worthy of that sort of future. Maybe Donald was able to hear the songs of the angels where he was today, but that song wasn’t in his future. It didn’t matter that Donald suggested it might be.
He got up and walked to his window, at the end of his street he saw people standing in a park. All the time he’d spent in those rooms in his house he was waiting for judgment. The judges looked down on him. They controlled the keys to the doors. Later, Donald had taught him there were others who tried to hold the keys to doors. Those others had locked him in a missile silo and waited for him to die. Morton and Donald had things in common, they’d both been persecuted by those who’d assumed a role of authority above them. They were both judged by those who looked down with all-seeing eyes.
Morton sighed as he tapped at the glass. It was almost over. He almost felt calm. He looked at the door to his room and decided that today he’d go outside. He’d take a walk though the world he could never learn to love and the people that never learned to love him. He’d say goodbye to the whole mess. It seemed fitting to take a last tour of the world where he didn’t have any power before he exercised the last and greatest power he possessed.
*With each new pattern I discovered about Morton the more I could understand why he was as messed up as he was. He was surrounded by fear and hate all of his life and yet, it was the same fuel that kept him going. It was the same mix that lead him to murder the same man who’d taught him where to find his strength. It was the same mix that didn’t care what sort of damage it left in its wake. Only he knew what would come next.
I walked to Washington Square Park. It was a rectangle surrounded by buildings in the Greenwich Village portion of Manhattan. It was the size of a small city block and in its center stood a round fountain. On one of its side entrances stood a tall curved stone archway that was squared on top. It had ornate carvings related to George Washington all over it. On each end stood a statue of the first president and I am happy to say it showed no signs of freemason symbolism. Although perhaps if it had, I’d would have had a clue as what to do next. I walked beneath the arch and then circled back into the park.
The diary of Donald Wren predicted that this was the path that Morton would take back as he “went full circle.” Not knowing where someone started, it was difficult to know where their circle would complete. If I were to believe Morton had been in each of the spots on the diary map, though, then he might also be here. He mat at least have passed through here. I sighed. I was tired of the trail of Morton. What I needed was the man, so I decided to begin with the assumption that he was nearby and to follow the assumption to its conclusion.
I walked through the park for over an hour and saw no sign of him. There were hundreds of people sitting in the area or passing through. Some were playing music others were reading, others were staring off into space. It was complete randomness and none of the face belonged to Morton. I sat at the fountain next to a man and woman and looked into the water.
“Aren’t you supposed to be able to spot patterns?”
“Not in humans,” I mouthed into the water.
“Why not?”
“Human beings aren’t predictable, I learned that with you. Beside this is too important. Lives may be at a stake.”
“Could we please get off this dead topic. You were right about me. What did you learn about balance? You have a talent and you are afraid to fully use it. It’s disgusting. I’m tired of hanging out with you.”
The image of Morton moved out of the fountain. I sighed and looked around the park. There were so many people here. If Morton lived nearby, there was a chance he’d pass through. The chance was extremely slim, but it was not zero. I decided to start small. I slowly looked at the people next to me to see what patterns were there.
The two young people next to me were clearly not a couple. The man was sitting at a reasonable distance from the woman. They were laughing and staring around the park. He would occasionally point to someone walking by. It reminded me of my students raising their hands in class. That was something I was always able to predict. The young woman then removed her shoe and rubbed her foot. I decided to speak.
“How are you enjoying your visit to New York City?” I asked them.
The laughed. “We love it here. Is it so obvious we are tourists?”
“No. Not really, I mean, it’s not your clothes or anything.”
“Guess where we are from!” the man challenged.
I paused, then nodded and stood up. I smiled at them and looked them over in the exaggerated way a detective on television might. I tried to picture all the people I’d met across America. I thought about all the miles I’d covered. I asked them to tell me their names.
“I’m Jen.”
“And I’m Drew.”
I listened to their voices and tried to hear all the voices in my memory. I searched for the vocal patterns of each across America. The waves of sound were pictured in my head and quantified. I looked at their clothes and the way they moved. I looked at their posture. One person came to mind from the trip. It was C.J., the young woman I’d met briefly in Las Vegas before she, myself and her other two friends got chased into an elevator by a security guard.
“I’m guessing San Francisco.”
“Wow,” they said in unison.
“I was right?”
“How did you guess?”
“It was your San Francisco State t-shirt,” I said to Drew.
He looked down and remembered he didn’t own a San Francisco t-shirt. When he looked up I was walking away. It had gone was pretty well, but their lives didn’t depend on me getting it right, I thought. Still, though, it was a start. I turned back to the smiling pair.
“Thanks!” I shouted back to them as I looked around the square for the highest spot I could find.
I walked the perimeter until I found a church steeple. It was the bell tower of the Judson Church. The building was being renovated so most of the doors were unlocked to construction workers. Fifteen minutes later I was looking down on the entire Washington Square Park. I managed to lay across a platform such that I could rest as I stared down at the park.
I looked at my watch, it was 1:00 pm. It was a hot day, but I knew once I started concentrating, I’d probably stop feeling the heat. I looked into the watch and found Morton’s face. He looked tired and cheerless. He didn’t say a word, but his expression told me how serious this was.
I stared down at the mass of people. Men and women were playing catch with a frisbee. Homeless people were panhandling for change. Mothers and fathers were pushing their strollers. People were shouting political speeches to whoever would hear. But this was not what I needed to see. I scanned the park and began to let go of the identities. No one was a man nor a woman any longer. No one was old nor young any longer. Every person in my vision was a piece of information. Information had patterns. Nothing was random. As I watched, the faces blurred away, the area turned into a grid and each person became a glowing red symbol. I watched them in the park like an air traffic controler might watch planes, except instead of being told what was happening I felt it. I was letting myself fully see the patterns in people again and looking for the pattern that would match Morton Petes.
Hours passed. It was actually fairly exhausting work. When I allowed myself to take breaks, as short as they were, I noticed my shirt was soaked with sweat. Before long, though, I asked myself if that very moment might be the one where Morton decided to make an appearance, and I was back to scanning the park.
I predicted two pickpockets. I watched three couples on first dates. I predicted a break-up and then watched as I was proved correct. I predicted who would give to panhandlers and who wouldn’t. For a few minutes I thought I might have seen a pattern similar to Morton’s but after allowing myself to focus using my vision, I realized it was a woman.
I took another break at 3:30 and wished I’d brought water with me to the top of the tower. As I dried the sweat from my face with my shirt, I realized the pattern of data in my head had continued to play after I stopped watching. It was based on the continuation of the patterns I’d already started in motion just before the break. This was similar to the way a basketball player could take a shot and confidently begin running in the opposite direction before the ball flew through the hoop. Patterns continue after we stop watching. Based on the continuation, I realized I needed to look at a person near the archway in the park below. I looked back and focused on the spot. The data point, or person, was gone. I tried to recall what I’d seen. I concentrated on the symbol I assigned to this individual and then I tried something very difficult. I tried to play the pattern backward. The person had moved around the park in a manner such that he or she was interested in all things positive. The person had been subtly drawn toward all the symbols I’d registered as happy in the park. Examples were the couples in love and the blooming flowers of a garden and the fountain itself. This person almost needed every positive element he ro she could get and moved toward them. Now, though, they were gone.
I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see any new behavior. I visualized the park which was nearly burned into my mind. I took a deep breath and began playing the data backward from memory. The symbol moved backward through the stimuli in the park. The figure weaved between children and couples and sat down then got up and moved backward even further through time. Things were starting to blur as my memory grew uncertain, until I was sure only of the events from the open space closest to me. The person moved backward through the space and out of the entrance to the park. It had rewound to their arrival.
I knew the direction from which he’d arrived and for a brief moment, the red data symbol – possibly the same one I’d sought for three years – paused at a trashcan. I got up quickly and nearly lost my balance. The wood plank beneath me moved and I found myself waving my arms in the air trying not to fall from my perch. I kicked the plank in my flailing, though and instead of falling outward, fell down and onto the floor. I got up and made my way down to the street. I crossed from the front of the church to the trash can in question and began pulling trash from it. Even in New York City this is not going to go unnoticed, I thought. I looked down on the ground at the pile of things that lay before me. Much was food. Some was newspaper and bags, and few pieces were mail. I looked through most of it and didn’t find a thing. I looked and saw a magazine subscription application to what appeared to be a dating service for tech people.
I nearly flipped it back into the trash until something caught my eye. Someone had started to fill out the form. I looked at the name on it and read Theo Burnkey. Someone had started to sign my name to the application. The address on the form was mine back home in Boston. I looked for more pieces of mail from the same stack and finally found a gas bill. It was for a total of fifty dollars and had been thrown away unpaid. The name on the account was Phillip Morté and the address was three blocks away on 4th Street. Just as a police officer approached I grabbed most of the trash and stuffed it back into the can and started running to the address on the bill.
As I ran, I noticed more than one person having apparent trouble with their cell phone. “Something’s wrong with service right now,” I heard one say. I had, of course, more important things to worry about.
*Solar storms are like all those other things you read about happening in space. Words like
billions are often when they describe the amount of energy being churned up in the molten Hydrogen surface of the sun. In fact, the words
billions and
size of twenty earths and
thirty light-years are used so often that we start to glaze over.
This storm, though, had extended a wand of glowing solar flare a few hours ago, just in the direction of the spinning earth. An electromagnetic pulse left from that sun and began on a journey of note to the earth. It was heading for the Atlantic Ocean at the time it left. The earth spun round for the next few hours as the wave traveled and the ocean moved eastward with the rotation, though. The electromagnetic pulse finished its trip through space and reached the surface of the earth just as the city of New York rolled beneath it. Suddenly the big number that people always talk about when they talk about space took on a more personal nature as the waves bounced into the electronic equipment of twenty-one million New Yorkers.
*Morton entered the apartment and decided not to think about what he had to do any longer. The decision was made. He readied his cameras. The first camera was a still camera with a timer. The second camera was a video camera with a remote control. He lay on his bed such that he could look into the video camera’s display and then created the pose of what he believed he’d look like after an overdose. Once he was in his pose, he pressed a button on the remote and the video camera captured the image on the screen as a grayish ghost image. He got up, set the timer on the still digital camera for thirty seconds and then moved back to the bed. He lay on the bed in nearly the exact pose as before and watched his body align with the ghost image of the previous shot. By doing this he could be sure to lay in a consistent manner for each shot. When he heard the click of the electronic shutter, he got up, seemingly resurrected, and moved the camera to a new angle. He repeated the process until there were five different angles of the photo. Each showed dead Phillip Morté on the bed with sleeping pills strewn around and a bottle of Irish whiskey on his night stand.
He took the digital camera and connected it to his computer. In twenty seconds the photos were on his computer. He opened his browser and set it to the police web site. He logged into the private access page using the username and password he’d taken most of last week to discover. He typed them both in, beginning to feel uneasy. He was in. The screen of his monitor flickered as he clicked on the “upload crime scene photos” link. For a second he could barely read the page because of some electronic distortion, but then it corrected itself. He dragged the five photos into the browser’s upload pop-up and hit, “OK.” The photos headed to the precinct server. He thought he was going to vomit.
He thought about the seventh room in the home where he’d grown up, he thought about Donald, and all the man had tried to do to save him in the end, and then he thought about Theo. He looked at the next of kin option on the page and suddenly heard a buzzing. He wasn’t sure where the noise was coming from until he followed the sound to an intercom box. No one had ever rang it before. He pressed the “open door” button without waiting to hear who it was, then returned to the computer. The screen was flickering violently as he set to finish his task.
He clicked on the next of kin option and changed the phone number from his own, to one that was written on a post-it note on his desk. The screen flickered and wondered for a second if the connection would hold out. He clicked on the “Submit” button as a knock sounded at his door. The screen filled with static and he turned it off and moved to the door. “There,” he thought, “Nothing like a nice reunion.”
*I looked into the peephole on door 232 at the end of a nondescript hallway. Beside myself I saw the reflected version of Morton Petes. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door. I kept looking in the peephole. The image next to me slowly moved forward until the face of Morton filled the glass, then he move even closer until the peephole was filled by his eye. Another face appeared beyond the door and got so close that it became an eye as well. The two eyes aligned and I heard a lock turn. I would never see the reflected Morton Petes again.
The door slowly opened and when it did I was looking at a dead man. Morton Petes had died three years ago and yet had dragged his dead body across the country ever since. The last I’d seen him was in my MIT office, over three years ago. So much had changed since then. So much had been taken from me. Morton stared at me and I watched his eyes narrow and then relax.
He waited several seconds then said, “Hello, Theo. I guess you should come in.”
The room was a dark and small studio apartment. As such, I had walked directly into the bedroom. All of the drapes had been pulled shut and a single light was glowing on a nightstand and a second yellow glow came from the kitchen. The limited light still revealed dirty walls and paint peeling on the ceiling. In the corner was some camera equipment. The room smelled of something like sweat, but it was not unpleasant. It just smelled as if someone had been living very intimately with their furniture for a long time.
Morton looked worse than my imagination could have (or had) predicted. His face was drawn and his eyes were set deep in his pale face. His skin was taut and mottled. He should have been around thirty years old by now, but seemed twice that age. His body was hunched and he shuffled when he walked. He was wearing a pair of old pale blue jeans and a nondescript tan collared shirt. His breathing was audible and it filled the room when he wasn’t talking.
“I heard you were looking for me,” he started.
I felt suddenly stunned. Then I remembered giving my number to the woman in Georgia.
“Oh, from Athens?”
He nodded.
“I’ve been on the road a long time. I guess I left home for one reason and stayed on the road for new reasons. Eventually, yeah, I started looking for you.”
“And what have you learned?”
“Well, you not being dead was a big one. The more I learn the less I seem to actually know, though.”
Morton frowned as he sat down to a desk chair and motioned to offer me an upholstered chair near the entrance to the kitchen. I sat and waited. He was quiet. I looked at his hands. He saw me doing so.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just, I expected you to be spinning a pencil. You know, in your fingers.”
He looked at me very closely and then smirked, “Wow, I don’t know. I guess I stopped doing that. How deep have I gotten into your head?”
He had a point. I shrugged.
“Yes, maybe you got into my head. But, you know, my life sort of fell apart after you died the first time.”
“Yeah, I heard a few things about that. You couldn’t keep it together, eh? That surprises me. It’s not like we were friends or anything. I heard you lost your job and your wife? Is that true?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“Yeah, Morton things fell apart. A lot of shit has happened to me. I’m sorry if this was my first time handling a potentially preventable suicide and failing. Yes, I let my life fall apart a bit, but next time someone fakes a suicide, I’ll know better, because I’ve been practicing. Thanks for that!” I stood up. Morton stared at me quietly. I slowly let myself back down into the seat.
His body didn’t respond to my gesture of anger. He sat looking blankly at me. It made me even more angry.
“You know, Theo, it’s not really a good time.”
“You know …” I stammered, breathed, then continued, “Maybe it’s a good time for me. I think you owe me a few minutes. After all, you ruined my life.”
He continued to stare at me. His breathing was steady.
“And then you killed the only other person who ever cared about you.”
His head tilted and he inhaled deeply. His eyes narrowed.
“Yes, I did. I killed Wren,” he responded.
My stomach hurt. I guess I was holding out hope that it wasn’t true. There was also something about the way he said the words that made me think his emotions were in the wrong place. As if he was angry at me for what he’d done.
“Well, that was another reason I had to find you. To make sure you stopped killing people.”
He looked a me blankly for a second and then got up from his chair.
“I think you should leave,” he said as if I were a salesman who was failing to make his pitch.
“No,” I said evenly, trying to learn from his example.
He snorted into the air and then brought the palm of his hand up to his eye and began to rub it.
“OK. Look. You and your kind are supposed to be so superior. Why don’t you just go pick the lottery numbers and buy a new wife? Why don’t you just go out and reweave some veil of ignorance so that you can’t see the people beneath you? I have no sympathy for you. In fact, I blame you.”
His words were angry, but his body and tone remained even. He seemed like someone having a phone conversation after they’d just been awaken.
“You blame me?”
I turned my head to look at him from a new angle. As I did, a flash of light reached my eye from a pile on the floor. I noticed a broken picture frame and next to it was a familiar photo. It was the only photo I’d ever seen of Clifton Johns. Then, looking up from it, I noticed for the first time a picture of myself. It was printed from the web page I’d had at MIT when I worked there.
“Yes. You must know what Wren taught me. You must know how I grew up full of hatred for the arrogance of you genetic elite. If I were up to it, I’d kick your ass, but like I said, it’s not a good time.”
He sat down to suggest that he even though it was a bad time, the conversation could continue.
“Look, I know what you were taught, but I didn’t do anything to Donald Wren. I never started a cult. I was just trying to have a nice little life in Boston. Trying to figure stuff out just like you. That wasn’t me that tortured Wren, it was Clifton Johns.”
“Yes, but it was you who ignored my cries for help when I made it clear I was suicidal in Boston.”
“But, clearly you weren’t serious.”
“Wasn’t I?”
Ever since I learned that Morton was faking his death, I’d assumed he never had any intention of actually doing so. I assumed I was completely right in not seeing the suicide, because it was completely fake. All the while he kept staring into me with those eyes that I had once seen as so full of life. They seemed as if they were the most dead thing about him now. Now if he claimed to be suicidal, I’d believe him.
“I’ve never faked a suicide I wasn’t prepared to commit,” he responded. “It’s only my cowardice that’s kept me alive this long. That and Donald. And maybe even you too, Theo.” He looked in the direction of the photo of me on his wall.
“What did you learn about Clifton Johns in Steamboat Springs?”
“How did you know about that?”
“You left receipts in Donald’s house.” I scouted the room with my eyes and saw a small angel figurine sitting on a window ledge.
For the first time his face showed a change. He formed an expression of anger that reminded me of the faces of those waiting in Purgatory.
“You were in his house?”
“Yes. I learned about him in Athens, from Virginia, and I found his home in Chapel Hill.”
He ignored my reference to Virginia.
“Who said you could go in his house?” His body leaned forward in the chair and color returned to his splotched face.
“I was trying to find the truth. I found it in his house. I found the pattern he left behind.”
Now he looked as if he was more angry than ever, but that he was trying to pull it deep into himself. The result was a mix between anger and intense sadness.
“What pattern?” he asked.
“There was a pattern in the angels. It lead to a diary.”
He breathed deeply and with a raspy growl. I had inadvertently just pointed out my mathematical gift again and in a way that showed he didn’t measure up to Wren’s secret.
“Do you have it?”
“I don’t.”
He looked at me for a few minutes. He studied my face. He must have been wondering why Wren would leave a clue that I was more likely to find than him. I decided to change the subject slightly by repeating my question.
“Morton, what did you learn about Clifton Johns in Steamboat Springs?”
Morton considered the question for a moment, seemingly to decide if I was worthy of an answer.
“Clifton Johns died a few days after shutting those boys in the silos. He had a heart attack. I found his grave and medical records in a town nearby. I, for one, think he was going to free the boys in a few days. I guess he never got a chance to make the call. Don’t you find the answer that makes the enemy less perfectly diabolical is often the more true one?”
“And you told Donald this?”
“No. I told Donald that I found Clifton Johns shriveled up in that sulfur cave. It was what he needed to hear.”
Something wasn’t right. Why was Morton being so loyal to the memory of the man he’d killed, I wondered. I looked up and he hadn’t reclaimed his blank stare. It had been replaced with a broken version. He looked defeated.
“Look, Morton, I know why you have reason to be upset, I’ve been to your house.”
He shuddered, but didn’t respond.
“What was the tenth room for, Morton?”
“What?”
“The tenth room in the house where you grew up?”
He exhaled through his nose. “It was my room. It was where I slept when I wasn’t repenting for the latest sin I’d committed.”
It was my turn to be speechless.
“They were some really messed up people. They are pretty much the ones who started all this. Their rules and their belief that sparing the twisted rod would spoil the child. They were the sick ones and I caught it from them.”
Suddenly I thought Morton was right, I
should leave. But there was one thing wrong. There was one thing that didn’t fit. There was one inconsistency in what he was saying.
“But, Morton, what about your mom? Surely she could have done something about it? Surely she could have pulled you out of that home? I mean, I know she was the maid, but that kind of treatment was ridiculous!”
Then Morton’s face fell. He looked at me and his eyes asked me if what I’d just said was true and begged it not to be. I repeated what I’d said to myself until I realized the part that had hurt him. The woman at the door wasn’t his benefactor, she was his mother and as awful as she was, she denied that Morton was her son. A lifetime of abuse topped off by betrayal. She belonged in the ninth circle I realized and refocused on Morton. What I saw was the end of hope. A tear had fallen down his cheek. He slowly got up from the chair.
“Excuse me,” he said as he moved toward the bathroom.
He was in the bathroom for quite a few minutes. Eventually I stood up and looked at his laptop. The screen was blank and I moved the mouse to bring it to life. No windows were open. I looked into the list of running programs and saw that an image viewer was open. I clicked on it and up flashed an image of Morton Petes lying in bed. Next to him were a bottle of whiskey and a lot of pills scattered around the bed. It was a faked suicide image. He was going to do it again. I looked over at the bed and it was laid just as it was in the photo, except not completely. I looked on the desk and saw a post-it note. On the note was a familiar phone number. It was mine.
Just then Morton turned the handle of the bathroom door and opened it. I jumped back to my seat aware that he might notice his laptop had been touched. I looked at him and then looked at the screen. He walked toward me, again with the shuffle of his step, perhaps the gait had grown even worse. In seconds he would know that I knew about his plan. But then, he changed his path and passed in front of me and to my right. He sat on the edge of his bed, out of view of the screen. I sighed.
“Look Theo, I’m tired, would you mind, you know, leaving?”
I didn’t know what to do. He’d been hurt so much by his horrific parents and then disowned. His best friend in the world was dead, even though he was the admitted murderer. It didn’t feel like it was time to leave yet, though.
“Look, Morton, I’m really sorry.”
“Sure, Theo, why don’t we talk later.” His eyes looked tired.
“There’s one thing I brought you,” I said to him and reached into my back pocket.
I pulled out the page and handed it to him.
“This is from Donald’s diary,” I said.
He looked at the page and read it. The page was near the middle of the diary and just after Morton had left to go to MIT. It said:
Today Morton left for MIT. I am surprised at how much I miss the kid already. I have tried to teach him much of what I know, some of it has been touched by my beliefs and some by his own.
I worry about him in the world. He is fragile and I don’t blame him for being so. He has been through so much in his short life. His home life is possibly worse than what he even tells me.
There is one thing I would tell him, though, if we weren’t limited by our manly communication. I would tell him that having him around has made me feel less the need for revenge. I would tell him that he has had an effect on me. I would tell him that even though he has a father, I consider him a son.
That boy has softened this old heart of mine. I love him. I hope he knows.Morton laid down the diary page and his face contorted into a rare smile, his eyes were full of tears. He looked at me and something in those eyes sparkled for just a moment. Somehow I knew he was telling me something without using words. The look in his eyes said a simple message. His eyes told me that he forgave me.
“Do you think I’ll go to Hell, Theo?” he asked as he fell onto the bed.
Then I realized what was wrong with the photo on the laptop. The image was what I was seeing in the room, except in it there was a bottle of whiskey on the nightstand and pills on the bed. His nightstand and bed were clear. I looked to the bathroom door and got up to run to it, something tugged as I tried to move. I ignored the tug and jerked my body up from the seat. I moved to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet was an empty bottle of whiskey and on the counter were a only seven remaining tablets from a prescription of thirty-two sleeping pills. I ran back to the bed.
“Morton!” I shouted as I ran across the room to the bed.
I got to him and began shaking him. Somehow he was holding my cell phone in his hand and had removed the battery.
“Morton what did you do to yourself?”
His falsely aged body was limp. He was finally doing what he had threatened to do for years. I thought of a circle. This time was like his first. He had come full circle. I was there at the beginning and I was here now. Only this was the end.
I grabbed my phone from his hand to dial 911. For some reason he’d disassembled it. Perhaps he was trying to keep me from calling an ambulance I figured as I put it back together. I powered it up as I looked at his lifeless body in the bed. He had managed to fall in the exact pose from his photo. I dialed the phone. Static filled my ear and it was followed by a busy signal.
I jumped from my bed to his desk. I was looking for any phone he might possibly have. I started opening drawers in the desk. In the top side drawer I saw a land-line phone that had been placed there, the cord dangling out and leading to the wall. On top of it was a tan folder. I tossed the folder onto the desk and quickly dialed 911. As the phone rang I noticed the folder I’d pulled from the desk was a medical folder labeled “Donald Wren”.
“911 Emergency, please state your emergency …” the voice said from the phone.
“It’s the man who lives here. He’s tried to commit suicide,” I shouted looking back at Morton’s lift body in the bed.
“We’ll send someone right over.”
“OK.”
“Do you need to stay on the line?”
I looked down at the folder.
“Sir? Do you need to stay on the line?”
“No,” I answered staring at what I was reading in the open folder.
“OK. Someone will be right there.”
I hung up the phone and looked over at Morton. Foaming saliva was coming from his mouth. I looked at the folder and read about Donald Wren.
Patient’s Condition: Advanced lymphatic cancer.
Patient’s course of care: none
Notes: Patient claims to have been exposed to radioactive material in deteriorated missile silo exposure he had in his youth. It is believed to have contributed to the existing terminal condition.I moved back to Morton. I shook him.
“Morton! Morton! Hang in there!” I shouted.
His eyes opened.
“I know what you did for Donald. You gave him a painless ending. I know!” I shouted.
“Theo,” he murmured.
“Yes, Morton,” I said bringing my ear to his mouth.
“It’s … a good thing … you didn’t have my mom’s tea … she was a real bitch.”
He looked at me. I still had my useless cell phone in my hand. His eyes seemed to panic when he saw it. They looked at me as if now he were asking for forgiveness. His arm started to move for the phone again but it fell instead at his side. Then he passed out and I began to hear the sound of ambulances approaching. Morton was dying on my all over again.
*Thirty minutes earlier Morton stood looking looked at his face in the mirror in his bathroom. He looked like Hell, he thought. The pun wasn’t funny. After everything they had done to him in their quest to make him a “good person” and the nightmarish results, she couldn’t even own up to the fact that he was her son.
Before him were arranged three substances. One was a bottle of Irish Whiskey. He opened the bottle and began to drink from it. The next container held capsules of Phenobarbital, he opened it and swallowed five and chased it with more whiskey. The third item on the white shelf was a single narrow capsule. He only needed one of these he thought. He had found them in his mother’s house in Athens.
“Dad didn’t die from an accident did he!” he had shouted at his mother, holding one of the capsules he’d found in her room. “You killed him!”
“Your father was tired and his faith was slipping.”
“So you admit it!”
“I admit nothing.”
“It’s not like I’ll miss the old bastard, but it just shows how evil you are. If it’s not poison, then why don’t you take the pill,” he’d said holding it up to her face.
She’d turned her wrinkled face and refused.
“Spend your whole life torturing people and then kill them off when they’ve lost use, is that it?”
“I do what I need to do to preserve the secrets of this family.”
“Go to hell.” He’d shouted as he left the home. As he looked back he could have sworn that she was nodding to his last statement as he slammed the door and headed for Chapel Hill the pill still in his pocket.
He researched the capsule since he’d been in New York. It was truly deadly. It wasn’t going to show in any autopsy, and it wasn’t going to come out when they pumped his stomach. It absorbed far too quickly and then took too long to take effect. It wouldn’t kill him for at least two hours, but it would kill him for sure. The Phenobarbital and the whiskey were a diversion. He had thought about suicide for far too long, this was something he would get right. He looked at the deadly pill for a second and then popped it into his mouth. He drank more of the whiskey.
Then he remembered the other person in his apartment. The man on the other side of his door. The man who had let him die once before. The man who’d suffered greatly afterward. Did he really deserve to go through this all over again? He thought about the “Next of Kin” form on the web site. The police would keep calling him until he knew he’d let me die again. Did he really deserve that? He remembered how much trouble he’d been having with his internet connection. He remembered the static. Maybe the number hadn’t even been changed. Maybe the police database still held the number of Morton Petes. Maybe the phone in his pocket would ring in a few hours. It seemed that the burden of guilt and whether it would land on Theo again was up in the air.
In older times, when someone died, the announcement was proclaimed to their town by the ringing of church bells. This end too, would be announced by the ringing. This time it would be a phone, where it rang meant all the difference.
He threw a few more sleeping pills into his mouth and pictured Theo in Donald Wren’s house. He had desecrated it, he thought. He had gone there and made a mockery of the only man who ever really tried to save him. He remembered Theo talking to him in his office at MIT. Hadn’t Theo tried to help? Then he pictured Theo reading the diary of professor Wren. It was wrong, he thought as his hand shook with rage. Then his hand stopped shaking, but his vision became blurry. It was time to assume his position in his death bed. He opened the door and headed out. He hoped he wouldn’t dream.
*I sat in the waiting room as doctors ran around me. I had ridden to the hospital with Morton in the back of the ambulance. I was not going to let him die on me again. I was not ready to live with this for a second time. When the paramedics asked what he’d taken, I was able to show them the bottle of Phenobarbital sleeping pills. This information would probably help, they’d said.
I thought about Morton’s last exchange with me. I remembered the look of forgiveness and then him trying to grab my phone. I wondered what he had forgiven me for, or why he had felt the need to forgive me at that moment. Finally, what was that final look of regret he seemed to have as he tried to reach for my phone? I wondered if I’d ever know.
On the chair next to me sat the shirt he’d been wearing and his cell phone. They’d cut off the shirt and tossed it the side. For some reason, I grabbed it. As far as his cell phone went, it was handed to me by the EMT. Apparently the phones weren’t allowed past the waiting room. They had some sort of effect on the electrical equipment. “As if it weren’t acting up enough today,” he’d said.
I couldn’t believe Morton had finally done it. I had driven all the way around the country and had spent so much time searching for answers and what did it all mean when compared to a lost life. Not even Donald Wren, after all, had died for merciless reasons. Why did Morton have to die in an act of self hatred? Although I couldn’t think of a person with a life more worth hating. Once again, I realized with a shock, if he died, I would be partially responsible. I would, once again have to live with the knowledge that I arrived too late, or that I let him spend so much time in the bathroom doing whatever he was doing.
I looked at Morton’s phone laying in the stack of clothing. He was a man who had no friends in this world any longer. He was a man who hated his life enough to try to end it. Who, I wondered, would ever try to call him? Of all the people I’d ever met, he seemed the least likely to need a cell phone.
“Sir?”
I looked up to see a nurse standing over me.
“Did you come here with a Mr. Phillip Morté?” she asked.
“I did,” I responded, “is he OK?”
“He may be a very lucky man. The doctors pumped his stomach and tried to neutralize the remaining contents of his stomach. His vital signs are currently very weak, but the doctor feels he’s taken care of the overdose. He expects his vital signals to strengthen shortly. Your friend has most likely made it.”
My friend? I thought.
“Thank you, that’s good news,” I said and meant it.
Morton’s life had been sad enough. He deserved one more chance to make something good of it. He deserved one more chance to actually live. We all did.
Happy as I was, I walked out of the hospital with enough Morton Petes for one lifetime. I was driving to Boston as soon as I could. Morton could recuperate on his own. Our lives had touched enough.
I decided to take a taxi rather than the subway back to the Bronx. After the ride, I stopped into the Immaculate Conception Church and kneeled at one of the pews. I thought about Morton and how some souls were tortured so much in life that they should never have to go to Hell, if there was such a thing.
“Do you think I’ll go to Hell, Theo?” was the last question he asked me.
I decided to finally answer the question aloud, “No, Morton, not today.”
I thought about the rest of Morton’s life and something occurred to me. He should have Donald Wren’s diary. I got up and left the church and returned to my car. It was just as I’d left it. I grabbed the diary from the back seat and set it next to me.
I drove back to the hospital, parked in the emergency lane and ran into the waiting room. Morton’s shirt and phone were still setting where I’d left them. I looked at the clock on the wall. It had only been two and a half hours since Morton had emerged from the bathroom. How slowly it had moved, I thought. I assembled the stack of Morton’s torn shirt, cell phone and diary and handed it to a volunteer.
“Please give these to Phillip Morté,” I said, “He’s a patient.”
I handed her the stack and just then the cell phone began to ring.
“It’s not for me,” I said and turned to walk out of the hospital.
I was finally going home.
*If a beam of electromagnetic energy was racing to the earth, looking down from space, blue as the planet is, chances are one would expect it would hit an ocean. But if it didn’t hit an ocean, one might guess it would hit some desolate stretch of land. But if luck had it that it hit a populated area, a person might figure it would hit some suburban front yard or road. But if that weren’t the case and it were flying directly at an apartment building in Manhattan just as someone were trying to enter some data in their laptop, no one would expect it to actually hit the lap top and effect any computation. A wave of energy flying from the fiery surface of the sun. A phone number in a database. A man’s ability to walk out of a door and never look back.
The chances of it all happening, considering the size of space and the earth were highly unlikely, statistically speaking. It was not, however, impossible.
