BEING AROUND RELLY made me feel very strange. Like when I watched a magician, I knew it was all fake and still I wanted to believe. Card tricks, pulling coins out of midair, sawing a lady in half. It's all bogus, of course. Still, part of me wanted to believe there was such a thing as magic.
Sitting in the cafeteria with Relly, or hanging around his attic after practice, I felt the same way. He talked about the magic four thing, how we had to be "four and no more." Like North, South, East, and West. Or the four Gospels in the Bible. Or the Sex Pistols, who my dad grew up listening to. Or the Four Winds, or the Four Seasons, or the Four Stooges, if you counted Shemp.
"It's always four guys," Relly said. "Every real band is four: bass, guitar, singer, and drums. That's all you need. Orion Hedd and Metallica and Sabbath and the Who. Superheroes, too: the Fantastic Four and those guys in the Tales of Asgard comics. The Ninja Turtles and the Four Horsemen at the end of the world. War. Conquest. Famine. Death."
It was like those crazy old men in the library downtown who smell bad and babble to themselves for hours. Aliens, secret mind control, werewolves, messages from heaven. It was all a bubbling stew of weirdness.
Yeah, Relly read a lot of comics and watched way too many Videos about wizards and warlocks. Yeah, his mom sure didn't discourage him from thinking that way. Yeah, he'd stay up sometimes three days straight with no sleep, which makes your brain do some very strange things.
But still, I never thought his talk of the fourfold gods was a put-on or a figment of his fevered brain. He really believed it. And the more time I spent with him, the more I did, too.