The Atua Man: A Novel

An ISD officer stood outside the St. John apartment when Jason walked up to his front door. He was expecting something like this. Really, Tony, Jason thought.

“Hi, what’s your name?” Jason asked, knowing the young man was just following orders.

“Tommy. Thomas Parker, sir.” Parker was in his twenties—tall and muscular, newly promoted, with curly blond hair. He looked like a sweet kid and Jason was surprised he was a security guard.

“Well, Thomas Parker, since we’ll be seeing a lot of each other I want to be able to call you by name.” Parker blushed when Jason said his name. And when Jason entered his apartment, he saluted.

Lillian got up from the kitchen table when she heard the front door open. She’d been on the Internet looking at dozens of sites claiming inside information about Jason’s appearance at Marsdan Hospital and explaining how he’d done it. The ministry’s site had gone dark, overwhelmed with too much traffic.

“You’re all over the web with that stunt you pulled last night, and the Ministry’s site is frozen.” She drew him close and gave him a kiss, and then whispered in his ear, “What on earth is happening?”

He whispered back, “They want me penned up in here, out of touch.”

“I think our apartment is bugged.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think they’d go that far.”

“Perhaps they did it before we moved in, during the renovation. Perhaps the whole compound is bugged. Who knows?” Lillian whispered.

Jason held her tight and said in a quiet voice, “Okay. We’ll be careful. They have guards in the hall and in the parking garage.”

Lillian had tears streaming down her face. Jason hugged her and for the first time in his life he felt extremely vulnerable. He handed her the mobile phone.

“This is Melanie’s. I don’t think they can tap into it. I want you to call your father and see if you and Alex can stay with them for a couple of weeks,” He whispered.

She looked at the phone briefly and put it on the table.

“Oh, they’d love that, but how are we going to get Alex up to Chester?”

He reached into his pocket and gave Lillian the keys he’d taken from the garage. “Just drive up there,” he said in a very hushed tone.

“We’re just reacting, Jason. We need to think this through; meditate.” She put the car keys on the table next to the phone.

“You’re right.”

Hand in hand they walked over and sat in their meditation chairs. Jason quickly attained a complete mental stillness. Lillian closed her eyes and cleared her mind of the thoughts surrounding their situation. She tried to release the fear and speculation about what was happening.

Jason felt himself begin to merge with the fabric of life. slipping into the nonphysical dimension. Something in the back of Jason’s mind prompted him to squeeze Lillian’s hand.

Lillian opened her eyes and saw him dissolving into the atmosphere. He was like a digital photo that had been blown up and pixilated. She saw the spaces around the molecules, and what appeared to be solid looked like a holographic projection. She looked down at her hand in Jason’s hand, and it was as ethereal as his.

“Jason!” she said loud enough to bring Jason back into the physical.

He opened his eyes, looked into Lillian’s eyes and then down at their hands. They both watched their hands and arms come back to physical reality and spent a moment in deep silence and awe. And then they looked at each other’s countenance and burst out laughing.

“Okay, now what?” Lillian said.

“How about some music?” He smiled, got up, pulled Lillian from her chair—they had not let go of each other—and he led her over to the kitchen table. He tuned the radio to a soft rock station, and she turned it a little louder than normal.

“You and Alex have to get away from me so you can’t be used to force me to do something I don’t want to do. Right?” Jason said.

“Okay. But you’ll be a prisoner. They’ll control what the world sees of you. How will we know what’s really happening?”

“I’ll keep Melanie’s phone and use your computer.”

“You think it will be safe?” Lillian opened the phone and jotted down the number on a scratch pad.

Jason shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll be in the normal world up there and can get police protection if you need it. Tell them there are some issues at the ministry…”

“Dad will love that.”

“Yeah, I know. You can play on his dislike for me. You’ll have Alex’s computer and your mobile.”

“And Alex’s mobile.”

“So, we’re good.”

Lillian hugged Jason again, but this time without tears. “I guess I better get going.”

Jason’s mind was already elsewhere. “I guess I’ll have to redo the trust,” he said as Lillian left.

Outside her apartment Lillian walked quickly toward the elevator at the end of the hall. “I’m going to fetch Alex. Do you know if Donny’s in the garage?” she said to Thomas as she hurried past.

Thomas Parker thumbed the button on his lapel mike and gave this information to watch captain. Just as the elevator door closed he called out, “Wait. Donny’s not there!”

The elevator landed in the garage and Lillian looked at the collection of keys Jason had given her. She recognized the key to the Range Rover, the vehicle she and Donny usually used, and walked over to where it was parked. Two repairmen were fixing the door to the parking office that Jason had kicked in, and the regular guard was standing at the gated entry from the street.

Lillian unlocked the door to the Range Rover using the remote on the key, got into the black SUV, and started it. She immediately locked the door, adjusted the mirrors and seat, and looked to see if anybody was approaching her. The men working on the kiosk looked up briefly but immediately went back to work when they saw that it was Lillian. She backed out of the stall and drove toward the exit. Again, she looked to see if anybody was running toward her. At the security gate, Lillian waved to the guard and put her window down. “I’m going to pick up Alex from school,” she said.

“Where’s Donny?” the guard asked.

“I really don’t know, but I’m late. I don’t want Alex hanging around waiting for me,” she said and the guard opened the roll-up gate. As soon as she cleared the gate she accelerated up the steep driveway onto Wetherby Gardens. She turned right, away from the barricades and the crowds facing Stanford House, and drove quickly down the empty street toward Earl’s Court Road where she made a left and headed for the Thames.

Barbara hung up the phone and put on the large loop earring she’d taken off for her call. Her trademark was oversized jewelry, but it had its drawbacks. She was at her desk in the ministry’s media center and buzzed for her assistant. The ministry owned a part of StarSatellite, one of Tony’s first purchases. StarSat circled the globe with sports and news, but kept a third of its capacity for St. John Ministries programming. Hidden behind the Tudor parapets on the roof, unseen by the neighborhood, was an array of satellite dishes that kept the world informed of the St. John Ministries activities and programs.

Jimmy, a young Jamaican man in his thirties, leaned into Barbara’s office and said, “We’re back on line.”

“Far out,” Barbara said. Jimmy was about to go when Barbara motioned him closer. He smiled, and listened intently. “We’re a go. I just hung up with Bishop Eastman and we’ve got our panel for the show. Get the word out that we will be live this Friday, prime time at seven o’clock GMT. We’ll broadcast on all media. Build up anticipation on MySpace, Friendster, and the other social media platforms. Use the normal key words plus apparitions, sightings, Marsdan … whatever else you can think of to connect this to Jason’s appearance at the hospital. And make up a thirty-second promo to run on The Healing Hour.”

Jimmy nodded, still smiling, giving Barbara a thumbs-up as he headed back to his cubicle.

Gary Howell entered on Jimmy’s heels, and he wasn’t smiling. “You’re really going through with this?”

“The board voted, and Jason agreed. What can I say?” Barbara looked back at her notes.

“Tony wants to add another person to the panel, the Reverend Cyrus Germaine of Hope Chapel in Southwark.”

Barbara was stunned. “Are you kidding? He’s the most hateful man I know. Racist, too!”

“We need a balanced panel, and Tony wants Theodore Spencer to moderate.”

Barbara couldn’t believe this. “I thought Tony hated that little weasel.”

“He does, but who better to tell the world the truth about Jason, that Jason is a normal person like you and me, and that the world has nothing to fear from him or our ministry?”

“I thought we were going to talk about apparitions—the nature of reality, and how it can be misperceived.”

“We’re going to make sure the world believes that Jason was nowhere near Marsdan Hospital, and what that girl saw was an apparition.”

“Okay.” Barbara said skeptically. “You won’t be able to control Spencer. I get the feeling you want to sabotage our program.”

“You just keep to the script we give you and everything will go as planned.”

Barbara swallowed Gary’s condescending attitude with a smile of her own. “We’ve got that French quantum physicists interested but I doubt he’ll sit in the same room with Cyrus Germaine.”

“Fuck the scientist. Just make sure Germaine and Spencer get the invitations and passes they need. Everything else is arranged.”

Gary left. Barbara followed him out and walked over to another cubicle. She leaned in to talk to a young staffer.

“Joyce, tell me, what’s the word on Jason’s appearing to those girls?”

Joyce pulled up the current data on her iMac. “Twenty-seven percent believe he actually did appear, thirty-two percent think the girls were hallucinating, and that consistent twenty-five percent believe it’s just another sign that St. John is the Antichrist. The rest had no opinion.”