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Big Questions and the Price of Curiosity. Kissing Fish.
Two Readings from the Chronicle Wall.
A Discussion of Svobodian Society.

When Rhonda pulls her Honda—which really is white after all—to the curb in front of my building, we both sit listening to the engine run. On the drive back, we haven’t said much. I told her I could see colors again and she said it was good. Later, she pointed out an egret spearing a fish. But mostly, we both kept thinking about what we weren’t talking about, the same thing we’re not talking about now. Rhonda’s hands fidget on the steering wheel. I reach across my wounded arm and unbuckle my seat belt. She looks out the opposite window. The dull sun sits low in the cloudy gray sky, but there is no rain. Apparently the summer storm we outran together hasn’t hit here just yet.

“Thanks for the lift,” I finally say. “Thanks for everything.”

“No problem,” she says. “Look. What you told me back there, beforehand. Those were good things for me to hear. Really.”

I nod my head, glad that my fake prophecy provided her with some comfort. “I don’t know what to say about the other thing. Me and Alix, we’re divorced.”

“Yeah.”

“Four years. That’s a long time.”

“Yeah.”

“It was really just—”

She holds up a hand. “It happened. It was a not-good moment. But it happened. So listen, am I going to see you again or what?”

For a moment I think she’s asking for another prophecy, but then I realize it’s a simple question, the kind normal human beings ask each other every day. “I guess that’s kind of up to us.”

Rhonda faces me and smiles at my response, the single best line of dialogue I’ve come up with in recent memory. She says, “This is a good thing to keep in mind.”

I climb out but linger inside the open door, leaning into the Honda. I want to stay in this moment, retain the fragile feeling of rightness that eye contact with Rhonda creates. I know I’ll head around back and up my steps, make some tricky phone calls to Quinn about tomorrow and Alix about Sunday before crashing on the brown couch. But for now I just want to stand here, savor the sensation, and try to imprint it on my brain. Oddly, I’m not worrying about the future consequences of my actions or the symbolic meaning of how Rhonda is supposed to fit in the big picture of what I’m caught up in now. I’m just here and feeling fine.

“You know my number, Seamus,” Rhonda says, looking over the steering wheel.

The moment I close her door she pulls away. I watch her turn down Market, and even after she’s gone I stand in the darkening street. Finally I walk over to my mailbox, stuffed with a week’s worth of free offers and bills, slip them inside the immobilizer, and head up the side walkway. Around back, I’m surprised but happy to find my pickup parked beneath my deck. Alix, I decide.

Across the alley a sharp crack, what could easily be mistaken for a gunshot, echoes off the three remaining walls of the Salvation Station. It’s followed by a second, then a third. Piled high outside the collapsed wall is a mound of bulging Hefty bags. A splotchy mutt scrounges through them. While I’m watching, a bag arcs over the crumbled wall as if catapulted and drops onto the pile. A grim notion takes hold of me: The city is finally making good on its demolition warning. Judgment day has come while I was gone.

I cross the alley and step for the second time today onto holy ground, scowling at the faded THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED notices stapled to half-rotted wooden stakes. With my good arm out for balance, I carefully pick my way up the collapsed wall. Just as I reach the top, another tossed Hefty bag nearly beans me. I dodge left and turn to confront what I’m sure will be a careless city worker. But instead I’m faced with a black man wearing raggedy painter’s pants and a red bandana. He’s raking debris into the mouth of a garbage bag being held open by another man, this one’s shirtless white back peeling with sunburn. Behind them, another homeless man holds up the arms of a red wheelbarrow. Clear across the church, a thin woman carefully pries stained glass shards from a window like a dentist removing teeth. In the corner, a pale man with a black wool cap drives a pickax into a pile of bricks. There must be two dozen homeless, all working away like content dwarves waiting for someone to start whistling. The marble altar, a week ago buried thick in muck, now rises up immaculate, sharp and bright. The Trinitron on top beams Martha Stewart, who’s hanging a white valance over pink curtains.

“You’re late!” the man with the red wheelbarrow complains. I tell him I’m sorry and cautiously descend into the church. The other homeless ignore me and I wander uninvited along the aisle, past pews that have been freed from ivy and crud. The wood of the first few rows glows with the dullest of shines, and I pause when I see why. Down one row, a ruddy-faced man kneels over a green bucket. He’s scrubbing the pew with a rag. “Hi,” he says. “I have a lot of work to do.”

“I see that,” I say back, then ask, “What’s going on here?”

“Big question,” he says. “Could you be more specific?”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning off these damn benches. I deserve a raise.”

Next to me, the red-wheelbarrow worker wheels his load over to the baptismal and dumps dirt and rocks into an area a pear-shaped woman just swept clean. I turn back to the man at my feet and ask him, “Who’s in charge here?”

He dunks his rag in the bucket of dark water. “I thought you were in charge.”

“No. I’m not in charge.”

He returns to his scrubbing and says, “We’re in real trouble then. Somebody has to be in charge. Right?”

“Well, who told you to do this?”

“It needs to be done,” he says, talking over his shoulder. “Who told you to interrogate me? Just do what you’re told. Curiosity killed the cats.”

“The cat,” I correct him. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

Disappointed, he shakes his head and says, “Son, you just haven’t been around long enough.”

Laughter comes from behind the altar, where Martha Stewart now holds a box and stands by a refrigerator. I ascend the steps, close enough to hear her say, “Don’t make the mistake of throwing away freezer-burned ice cream.” In the doorway of the sacristy stands a bald man wearing khakis and a white shirt. He’s talking to someone inside, swinging his hands and throwing his head back as he chuckles madly. I take him for some kind of city planner or an outreach activist, come to clean up our neighborhood, a community project he can put in italics on his résumé—and he’s figured out a way to draft some cheap help. He’s probably conned them into a day’s work for a few bucks or the promise of a warm bed. Later he’ll take a group Polaroid to prove what a swell guy he is. Meanwhile, I still haven’t seen any of the Brain Trust, which means he probably chased them off. Busted wing and muddy funeral clothes or not—for this, I will not stand.

I stride toward the stranger, lift my chin, and say, “You in charge here?”

When he turns, his eyes come directly into mine and he shouts, “At last—Dr. Cooper!” He charges into me with his arms out-stretched, and before I know it he’s got both arms wrapped around me and he’s squeezing me tightly, reigniting my shoulder.

From the sacristy, Dr. Gladstone steps out, wearing my WORLD’S #1 DAD baseball cap. And only then do I register the voice of the clean-cut stranger. Dr. Winston. Still embracing me, he says, “It has been so long. I drew comfort from the thought of you so often.” He pulls back and beams, radiant with joy. The last time I saw him, his shoulder-length dirty hair blended into his scraggly black beard. Now his head is shaved Mr. Clean-tight, and gray and white pepper his neatly trimmed beard. His mustard teeth have been cleaned. Beneath brand-new khakis slip the gold of Bull Invinso’s boots.

“Winston,” I say. “You look different.”

“Oh, Buddy,” he sighs, “I am different. I’m so much more than I was. I knew you’d see it. You were always gifted with such quick insight.”

Dr. Gladstone asks me, “Where the heck have you been?”

“I was sick,” I say, glancing at my immobilizer as proof. “In the hospital.”

“I was completely right,” Gladstone informs me. He turns to Winston. “Did you tell him I was completely right?”

Winston looks straight up at the steeple and nods reverently. “The proof of your faith is evident for all to see, Brother Gladstone.”

Gladstone bows his head away from the tower, as if he’s afraid to glimpse the face of God.

“Hey,” I say. “Where’s Dr. Bacchus?”

Gladstone and Winston trade glances, but avoid my eyes. “He’s moved on,” Winston says. “He didn’t believe in the work we had to get done here.” His arms spread out toward the workers in the church. “As you can see, we are rebuilding the temple.”

“The temple looks just great. But where’s Bacchus?”

“He expressed concerns that the government had kidnapped you,” Winston explains. “He mentioned Washington, Quantico, and a secret base in the Dakotas for political prisoners.”

I picture Dr. Bacchus hitchhiking across America in search of me. Sounds like an ABC TV series from the ’70s. Along the way he’ll help the oppressed. Of course, it’s more likely that he’s simply boozed up under the bridge or behind the Greyhound station.

“Wherever he is,” Winston says, as if reading my thoughts, “he is no longer our concern. Each soul falls as it should.”

Head bowed again, Gladstone parrots Winston’s tone. “Each soul falls as it should.”

“So what happened to you?” I ask.

Winston lifts his face again to the steeple. “I have been to a place few can conceive.” The faith in his voice reminds me of Snake and his encounter with Patsy Cline in the afterlife. But a near-death experience wouldn’t explain where Winston got the khakis from.

“Show me,” I say.

With his arm around my good shoulder, Winston escorts me past Gladstone, who keeps looking at the ground. In the sacristy we pause at the vault that once held chalices and Eucharists. Winston lifts a kerosene lamp from a shelf stocked with buckets of yellow paint. After lighting the lamp, he opens the door that leads up to the haunted room where we mounted Trevor’s satellite dish. “Choose now to follow me,” he says, “and nothing will be as it was.” He and the bubble of shifting firelight drift up the stairway. I start up the creaky steps.

As we climb, a flapping sound above grows louder. It makes me imagine a flag snapping in the wind. Winston starts mumbling under his breath, some kind of chant or incantation. Stepping into the room, I see a sheet of thick, clear plastic nailed over the window through which we both once climbed. The wooden slats have all been removed and the wind rattles one corner of the plastic sheet. Early evening light leaks through it, but not enough that we don’t need the kerosene lamp, which sends swinging glows sliding up the steeple, bouncing into the vast empty cone over our heads. The floor has been swept free of ash and bone, and the satellite dish sits exactly where I last saw it. Fresh yellow paint, ripe in my nose, dries on three walls. But graffiti covers the fourth wall, the one across from the window. Only when I move closer, I realize I’m looking not at graffiti, but at handwriting, tight black scrawls in rows like newspaper type.

Standing behind me, Winston stops chanting and lifts the lamp. “It took me almost twenty straight hours, starting on my first night back. My fingers cramped up. You can tell where I switched to my left hand. See how it slants suddenly? There was so much I wanted to get down, it was like my brain burned with the words. Have you ever felt like that, Buddy, where the truth felt like something alive in your skull trying to claw its way free?”

I consider this for a moment, then say, “No, Winston, but it sounds terrible.”

He sighs. “Quite the opposite, my friend. It is ecstasy.”

I lean in close and try to read the ecstatic truth. But I can’t understand the symbols, which look like the hieroglyphics Indiana Jones is always trying to decipher inside pyramids and on the sides of sacred artifacts.

“The Chronicle Wall details what happened to me,” Winston explains. “What I learned while I was away.”

Across one line I see an upside-down triangle, an eye inside a box, and what looks like two fish kissing.

Winston steps between me and the wall, raising the kerosene glow. He aims a finger at the symbols I was studying and begins to speak slowly. “While the probing pained me deeply I do not blame the Svobodians for that pain because it helped me focus. Just as intense fire burns but purifies. They did not realize the probing was uncomfortable for me. The pain of the probing, I believe, was strictly unintentional.”

He pauses and looks at me over one shoulder. My face remains blank. His hand floats across the scribbled wall and settles on a passage toward the end of the final column. “Ahh, yes,” he says. “I think I got this part just right: When they informed me that I was to be returned I wept bitterly, and seeing me weep they hummed to me in their way the songs that soothed. For they cannot stand the sight of discomfort in any sentient. Once I was calmed they revealed to me the truth of why I had to be sent back, and my mission was clear to me, and I stopped all my weeping, for weeping is for those lost and without hope.”

The wind picks up and the plastic rattles hard, snapping like it’s about to give way. Winston turns to it. Without looking at me, he says, “You think I’m crazy. Don’t you?”

“Crazy isn’t a word I would use,” I say.

“It’s OK. People thought Wilhelm Hoade was insane. The opinions of others do not molest the truth. That’s the third of the Seven Sacred Svobodian Tenets.”

I point at the strange symbols. “So this is Svobodian.”

“As close as the untrained human mind can comprehend it.”

“And you learned all this in the last seven days?”

“No, no. It took me about three months. Their language is very complicated. Conjugating is a nightmare, worse than Latin. But that has to do with the Svobodian concept of time. They don’t make the same kinds of hard-core distinctions we do between past, present, and future. Now and forever mean almost the exact same thing. Recall the seminal work of the French mathematician-philosopher LaPlace. He claimed that if given enough mathematical data he could reasonably calculate where you’d be for dinner and what you’d eat on any given day five years from now. Très Svobodian. They have no translation for words like might or maybe. No conditionals, do you understand?”

“So these Svobodians have no use for free will, is that what you’re telling me?”

“You’re free to make any choice you want. But that choice isn’t random.”

“Winston,” I say. “You have not been gone three months.”

He takes a deep breath and says, “Dr. Cooper, with God as my witness, I have been gone for almost two years. Inside the homeship dimension, time flows differently.”

I feel tired and heavy. Still, I can’t take my eyes off the symbols. I find the kissing fish in a few places, and I also notice a recurring symbol that looks like a four-fingered hand. Behind me, the plastic rattles with the wind.

“Once the Svobodians realized that they were right about me, a series of operations were performed. When my neural pathways were clear of debris, when I had the capacity to comprehend the vast amounts of poetic mathematical understanding with which they wanted to bless me, I was plugged into a huge living machine for three days and nights. On the third day I awakened and I understood. I achieved perfect clarity. I saw.”

I turn from the Svobodian words and see his eyes reflecting the kerosene flame, flickering and clear. I think of Hardy when he told me he was saved by a miracle, of Rhonda when she said there had to be a reason, of Snake in the back of the hearse, convinced he’d come back from the dead, even of Alix, when she told me she’d love me forever with all her heart. And I think of myself when I told Rhonda she was not alone, when I claimed to see her future as a thing rich with hope. The sensation of rightness that came in the field and out front in the car. But those moments were fleeting, and based on my pretending to be someone I no longer am, a man with gold boots and a sure dream.

I find Winston’s eyes and I whisper, “Tell me what you saw. Please.”

“What’s coming is nothing less than a planet-wide transfiguration of man. We’ll shake off these shabby skins and metamorphosize into beings of pure light, like the Svobodians.”

He lifts a hand to the plastic covering the window and snaps it away, like a man revealing a curtained painting. The wind tears inside and sends the lantern flame twisting and ducking. Staring over the city, Winston says, “Look at us.”

Eagerly, I leave the wall and go to his side. The wind rips at our faces but we stand and look together at the entire city spread out before us. The dull brick barracks of Simplicity Gardens, its windows blocked with plywood. The long corridor of Castle Street, where even the cops won’t go alone. The strip malls lining Market Street. The condos crammed in behind the MegaWal-Mart. The new franchise gentlemen’s club that was too powerful for even the Baptist. The five-mile run of chain stores along College. The giant bucket rotating on the roof of the Quicky Chicken.

Winston opens his hands, palms up, as if he’s displaying Wilmington for me. He says, “I’ve stood here for days and studied them, Buddy. I’ve mapped the straight lines they race in, driving from work to home to the bar to church to the shopping mall to home to work to the bar to church, scattering desperately past each other like rats in a maze, certain the way out was the way they came. All of them afraid to slow down for fear someone might speak the terrible truth: There’s no way out—this is just the way it is. And like those same dumb rats, so few of them with the sense to be calm and stop running and turn to one another for more than the diversion of biting or humping. It’s so terrible, Buddy, how can you stand it? How can any of us stand it?”

I want my remote in my hand, Alix beside me in bed, the mask tucked tight over my face, a beer and a pink pill, to be on my knees.

Winston, his voice cracking with tears, goes on. “All this. This filth and pain and regret. This is not how we were intended to live. We were meant for paradise. This has all been a big mistake. But the Svobodians understand and want to help us realize our destiny. Their world is a utopia, a place with no hunger, no disease. Since everything is as it was meant to be, there are no questions, no blame, no guilt, and no doubt.”

The thought of such a place washes over me like warm rain, and I say as a joke, “When do we go?” But when I hear my own voice I’m frightened by its conviction.

He pats my shoulder. “That’s the best part. I know now what NASA knows. What Donald Trump and the WTO have known for a long time, I suspect. We don’t have to go at all. It’s coming to us. Though the Svobodians are beings of pure light, they still require a physical host. Their homeship is the asteroid, Buddy. They live at the heart of its hollow core. They’re coming right at us.”