Disciple: A Novel from Crosstown to Oblivion
Date: 2012-11-13T08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction
Description: Walter Mosley's talent knows no bounds. Disciple is one of six fragments in the Crosstown to Oblivion short novels in which Mosley entertainingly explores life's cosmic questions. From life's meaning to the nature of good and evil, these tales take us on speculative journeys beyond the reality we have come to know. In each tale someone in our world today is given insight into these long pondered mysteries. But how would the world really receive the answers? DiscipleHogarth "Trent" Tryman is a forty-two-year-old man working a dead-end data entry job. Though he lives alone and has no real friend
Publisher: Tor Books
Rights: All rights reserved

WALTER MOSLEY

CROSSTOWN TO OBLIVION

Disciple

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK  NEW YORK

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CONTENTS

Disciple Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Also by Walter Mosley

About the Author

Copyright

I OPENED MY EYES at three thirty on that Thursday morning. I was wide awake, fully conscious. It was as if I had never been asleep. The television was on with the volume turned low, tuned to a black-and-white foreign film that used English subtitles.

A well-endowed young woman was sitting bare breasted at a white vanity while a fully dressed man stood behind her. I thought it might be at the beginning of a sex scene but all they did was talk and talk, in French I think. I had trouble reading the subtitles because I couldn’t see that far and I had yet to make the appointment with the eye doctor. After five minutes of watching the surprisingly sexless scene I turned off the TV with the remote and got up.

I went to the toilet to urinate and then to the sink to get a glass of water.

I stood in the kitchen corner of my living room/kitchen/dining room/library for a while, a little nauseous from the water hitting my empty stomach. I hated waking up early like that. By the time I got to work at nine I’d be exhausted, ready to go to sleep. But I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep. There’d be a stack of slender pink sheets in my inbox and I’d have to enter every character perfectly because at the desk next to me Dora Martini was given a copy of the same pink sheets and we were expected to make identical entries. We were what they called at Shiloh Statistics “data partners” or DPs. There were over thirty pairs of DPs in the big room where we worked. Our entries were compared by a system program and every answer that didn’t agree was set aside. For each variant entry we were vetted by Hugo Velázquez. He would check our entries and the one who made the mistake would receive a mark, demerit. More than twenty-five marks in a week kept us from our weekly bonus. Three hundred or more marks in three months were grounds for termination.

I climbed the hardwood stairs to the small loft where I kept my personal computer. I intended to log on to one of the pornography Web sites to make up for the dashed expectations the foreign film had aroused.

I was already naked, I usually was at home. It didn’t bother anybody to see a nude fat man lolling around the house because I lived alone. My mother would tell me that at my age, forty-two next month, I should at least have a girlfriend. I’d tell her to get off my back though secretly I agreed. Not many of the women I was interested in felt that they had much in common with a forty-two-year-old, balding, data entry clerk. I’m black too, African-American, whatever that means. I have a degree in poli sci from a small state college but that didn’t do much for my career.

At least if I was white some young black woman might find me exotic. As it was no one seemed too interested and so I lived alone and kept a big plasma screen for my computer to watch pornography in the early or late hours of the day.

I turned on the computer and then connected with my Internet provider. I was about to trawl the Net for sex sites when I received an instant message.

Hogarth?

Nobody calls me that, not even my mother. My father, Rhineking Tryman, named me Hogarth after his father. And then, when I was only two, not old enough to understand, he abandoned my mother and me leaving her alone and bitter and me with the worst name anyone could imagine. I kept saying back then, before the end of the world, that I would change my name legally one day but I never got around to it, just like I never got around to seeing an ophthalmologist. It didn’t matter much because I went by the name of Trent. My bank checks said “Trent Tryman,” that’s what they called me at work. My mother was the only living being who knew the name Hogarth.

Mom?

For a long while the screen remained inactive. It was as if I had given the wrong answer and the instant messenger logged off. I was about to start looking for Web sites answering to the phrase “well endowed women” when the reply came.

No. This person is Bron.

This person? Some nut was talking to me. But a nut who knew the name I shared with no one.

Who is this?

Again a long wait, two minutes or more.

We are Bron. It is the name we have designated for this communication. Are you Hogarth Tryman?

Nobody calls me Hogarth anymore. My name is Trent. Who are you, Bron?

I am Bron.

Where are you from? How do you know me? Why are you instant messaging me at a quarter to four in the morning?

I live outside the country. I know you because of my studies. And I am communicating with you because you are to help me alter things.

It was time for me to take a break on responding. Only my mother knew my name and, even if someone else at work or somewhere else found out what I was christened, I didn’t know anyone well enough to make jokes with them in the wee hours of the morning. Bron was definitely weird.

Listen, man. I don’t know who you are or what kind of mind game you’re playing but I don’t want to communicate with you or alter anything.

I am Bron. You are Hogarth Tryman. You must work with me. I have proof.

Rather than arguing with this Bron person I logged off the Internet and called up my word processor.

I’d been composing a letter to Nancy Yee for the last eight months that was nowhere near completion. The letter was meant to be very long. We’d met at a company-wide retreat for the parent corporation of Shiloh Statistics, InfoMargins. The president of InfoMargins had decided that all employees that had more than seven years of service should be invited regardless of their position.

The retreat was held at a resort on Cape Cod. I liked Nancy very much but she had a boyfriend in Arizona. She had moved to Boston for her job and planned to break up with Leland (her beau) but didn’t want to start anything with me until she had done the right thing by him.

She’d given me her address and said, “I know this is weird but I need the space. If you still want to talk to me later just write and I’ll get back in touch within a few days.”

She kissed me then. It was a good kiss, the first romantic kiss bestowed on me in over a year—way over a year. I came home the next day and started writing this letter to her. But I couldn’t get the words right. I didn’t want to sound too passionate but all I felt was hunger and passion. I wanted to leave New York and go to Boston to be with her but I knew that that would be too much to say.

Nancy had thick lips and an olive complexion. Her family was from Shanghai. Her great-grandparents came to San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century and had kept their genes pretty pure since then. She didn’t think herself pretty but I found her so. Her voice was filled with throaty humor and she was small, tiny almost. I’ve always been overlarge but I like small women; they make me feel like somebody important, I guess.

I composed long letters telling Nancy how attractive and smart and wonderful she was. I decided these were too effusive and deleted them one after the other. Then I tried little notes that said I liked her and it would be nice to get together sometime. But that showed none of my true feeling.

That Thursday morning at five to four I opened the document called “Dear Nancy” and started for the ninety-seventh time to write a letter that I could send.

Dear Nancy,

I remember you fondly when I think of those days we spent at the Conrad Resort on the Cape. I hope that you remember me and what we said. I’d like to see you. I hope this isn’t too forward …

I stopped there, unhappy with the direction the letter was taking. It had been eight months. I had to say something about why I’d procrastinated for so long. And words like “fondly” made me seem like I came out of some old English novel and …

Hogarth?

I looked down at the program line but there was no indication that the system was connected to the Internet. Still the question came in an instant message box. There was a line provided for my response.

Bron? What the fuck are you doing on my computer? How are you on it if I’m not online? I don’t want to hear anything from you. Just get off and leave me alone.

It is of course odd for you to hear from someone you don’t know and cannot accept. I need for you, friend Hogarth, to trust me and so please I will give proof if you will just agree to test me.

What are you trying to prove?

That you and I should work together to alter things.

What things?

That will come later after you test me, friend Hogarth.

Test what?

Let me tell you something that no one else could know. Something that may happen tomorrow for instance. An event.

Fine. Tell me something that you couldn’t know that will happen tomorrow.

Something you couldn’t know, friend Hogarth. At 12:26 in the afternoon a report will come from NASA about a meteorite coming into view of the Earth. They think that it will strike the moon but about that they are mistaken. It will have been invisible until 12:26. It will be on all news channels and on the radio. 12:26. Good-bye for now, friend Hogarth.

When he signed off (I had no idea how he’d signed on) I was suddenly tired, exhausted. The message boxes had disappeared and I couldn’t think of anything to say to Nancy Yee. I went back downstairs and fell into my bed planning to get up in a few moments to go to Sasha’s, the twenty-four-hour diner on the Westside Highway, for pancakes and apple-smoked bacon.

The next thing I knew the alarm was buzzing and the sun was shining into my eyes. It was 9:47 A.M.

I rushed on my clothes, skipping a shower and barely brushing my teeth. I raced out of the house and into the subway. I made it out of my apartment in less than eight minutes but I was still an hour and a half late for work.

“Ten thirty-eight, Trent,” Hugo Velázquez said before I could even sit down.

“My mother had a fever last night,” I told him. “I had to go out to Long Island City to sit up with her. I missed the train and then the subway had a police action.”

I could have told him the truth but he wouldn’t have cared.

The data entry room was populated by nearly all my fellow workers at that late hour. The crowded room was filled with the sound of clicking keyboards. The data enterers were almost invariably plugged into earphones, hunched over their ergonomic keyboards, and scowling at the small flat-panel screens.

The Data Entry Pen (as it was called by most of its denizens) was at least ten degrees warmer than elsewhere in the building because of the number of screens and cheap computers, bright lights and beating hearts. There were no offices or low cubicle dividers, just wall-to-wall gray plastic desktops offering just enough room for an in- and outbox, a keyboard, and a screen.

Of the sixty-odd data entry processors half turned over every year or so; college students and newlyweds, those who wanted to work but couldn’t manage it and those who were in transition in the labor market. The rest of us were older and more stable: losers in anyone’s book. We were men and women of all ages, races, sexual persuasions, religions, and political parties.

There were no windows in the Data Entry Pen. Lunch was forty-five minutes long conducted in three shifts. We used security cards to get in, or out. On top of protecting us from terrorists these cards also effectively clocked the time we spent away from the pen.

I sat down at my terminal and started entering single letter replies from the long and slender pink answer forms that Shiloh Statistics used for the people responding to questions that we data entry operators never saw. “T” or “F,” one of the ABCs, sometimes there were numbers answering questions about sex habits or car preferences, products used or satisfaction with political officials.

“We put the caveman into the computer,” Arnold Lessing, our boss and a senior vice president for InfoMargins, was fond of saying. He’d done stats on everyone from gang members to senators, from convicts to astronauts.

At the bottom of each pink sheet there was a code number. I entered this after listing all the individual answers separated by semicolons without an extra space. After the code I hit the enter key three times and the answers I entered were compared to Dora’s … I usually made about twice as many mistakes as she did.

*   *   *

I WORKED THROUGH LUNCH and planned to stay late so that Hugo couldn’t say that I was slacking off on top of being late. I often worked extra time anyway because Dora was also faster than I at entering data. I was usually running half an hour to an hour behind her at the end of the morning so working through lunch was a regular occurrence for me.

At three o’clock I was going full guns when I heard Dora say something fantastic to Miguel Corvessa, the mail clerk.

“They say it might hit the moon,” Dora was telling the handsome young Mexican.

“Whoa,” Miguel said. “You hear that, Trent? It’s almost the end of the whole fuckin’ world.”

“A comet?” I asked.

“No,” Dora didn’t actually say fool, “it’s a meteorite.”

“What time?”

“Why?” Dora said. “Are you writing down all the meteorites in your journal?”

There was a healthy dislike between Dora and me. She was young, white, and very good-looking in a modern way. She most often sneered when looking at me. I don’t dress all that well and I am old enough to be her father.

“Why don’t you tell him, chica?” Miguel said.

Dora didn’t like me but she was hot for the young Latino man. It was said that he was a fabulous dancer and Dora had made it known that she loved salsa.

“The Hubble telescope registered the thing at around twelve thirty,” she said. “They said that it was moving in the shadow of the moon before that.”

I had forgotten about Bron because I was late. Before falling asleep I dismissed the early morning electronic chat as an anomaly; maybe a high school friend who got my e-mail somewhere. But then, after the announcement of the meteorite appearing out of nowhere, I felt a chill between my shoulder blades.

“What’s the matter with you, bro?” Miguel asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re shaking,” Dora said with almost no distaste in her voice at all.

I turned my computer off and then back on again. After it had booted up I chose the Internet option rather than Stand-Alone. From there I went to the BBC news Web site to look up the latest news.

It was there:

Today the Hubble telescope detected a meteorite over a hundred feet in length hurtling out of darkness and headed, it seems, on a collision course with the moon. Scientists say that this is not an unusual event. Meteorites come in close proximity to the Earth and even enter our atmosphere with some regularity …

The article went on to describe how the celestial body avoided early identification because it was hidden in shadows cast by the Earth and the moon.

I sat there trying to dismiss the fear growing in my chest. There had to be some explanation.

… Astronomer Ivan Lingstrom told our BBC correspondent that he was shocked when he saw the meteorite register on his instrument panel. “At first I worried that it would collide with Earth,” Lingstrom said. “I thought I should call my mother and tell her to say a prayer for me. It’s rare that a meteorite of this size sneaks up on us. But I guess that there are many surprises out there in the universe…”

I wanted to get back to work, to normalcy, but Bron was the only thing on my mind. His proof seemed unassailable. But why would he need to prove anything to me? This man could see into the future, into space. I couldn’t even find a girlfriend, a good job, pass the New York State driving exam.

“Mr. Tryman,” Hugo Velázquez said.

He was a pompous little man who was partial to mute-colored suits with checkered vests. He was light skinned, from Honduras I think, and older than I was by a decade or more. Hugo didn’t like people like me, whatever I was.

“Yeah?” I said distracted by the news and its ramifications.

“Are you online?”

“Uh-huh. There’s this meteorite that no one saw but I—”

“It’s against policy for data entry clerks to get online,” the manager said. “You were told this. I gave you the memo by hand.”

“Yeah … sorry.”

“That is five marks.”

The punishment focused my attention on the prissy floor manager. We’d known each other for eleven years. Eleven years of memos, marks, and ill-will. Here I had knowledge that even the BBC hadn’t suspected before 12:26 and Hugo wanted to give me five demerits.

“How many marks in a dollar?” I asked him.

“What?”

“I wanna know how many German marks it takes to make up a dollar,” I said. “Because when you finally add up to one you can take those marks and shove ’em up your ass.”

“Oooo,” Miguel said as if he had been shot.

Dora was staring at me, a grin of incredulity on her face.

“Mr. Tryman—” Hugo said.

“Listen, asshole,” I said cutting off whatever company bullshit he was about to unload. “You don’t have to worry. I know I’m fried. Fried and fired. I know.”

His bottom lip was quivering. I think he wanted to hit me.

When I stood up he took a step backward and Miguel cocked his shoulders getting ready to enjoy the fight.

I walked past Hugo using my security card for the last time on the locked door to the Data Entry Pen. When I got to the fourth-floor elevator I realized that I’d left my windbreaker hanging on the back of my chair but I didn’t even care. I was never going back there. I hated my job and Hugo and Dora. Miguel was okay. He always treated me with respect. But I didn’t give one damn about the rest of the people or the company. The whole damn place could blow up for all I cared.

*   *   *

IT WASN’T UNTIL I was on the street that I began to regret my adolescent behavior. I had barely enough money to make it through the month. Unemployment for just a week would put me in the red.

When I got home I found that the computer had turned itself on somehow and every five minutes for the previous two hours Bron had been writing my name.

Hey, Bron. I guess you made your proof.

Friend Hogarth, you have returned. I worried that you might have been hurt by some malevolent force or by accident on the street or subway. Where you live is so dangerous and you are so important.

Me? I’m just an unemployed jerk.

Your job is of no importance, friend Hogarth. You have vital works to accomplish. You and I will alter the world for the better. The prime life force on Earth will be saved by your exertions.

Me? I’m going to save civilization?

Just so. Your exertions will feed the Universal Mind.

You know, Bron, I think you might be cracked. The only thing I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future is looking for a job.

For a while Bron was quiet. I had already begun to associate these periods of silence with thought. And I wasn’t sure that it was human thought. For all I knew Bron was a very sophisticated AI system that had chosen me for some kind of corporate test.

Return to work tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. Your job will be altered but you can still go to work.

Are you crazy?

Do meteorites come out from shadows of the past?

The humor and poetry of his reply took me off guard. I wondered again why the disembodied intellect was interested in me.

What do you want from me, Bron?

On Saturday you will go to Michael’s Pharmacy on Lexington, retrieve a prescription, take a cab, and go to a concert at Alice Tully Hall at the place called Lincoln Center.

Bron said much more. He went over every action he wanted me to take detail by detail. A lot of it I wondered about but no matter what I found odd or questionable my mind kept drifting back to that meteorite. He had accurately predicted the future. There was something amazing and definitely disturbing about Bron. But he was just a voice on the Internet, not any kind of real threat.

I wanted to find out more.

We messaged each other until almost midnight. At first we talked about the job Bron wanted me to do. I was to “say a few kind words” to two men. One was a Bangladeshi cabdriver named M. D. Amir and the other was young man from Ohio who was running for the Senate seat there. The cabdriver would have a mild communicable infection so I was to take an antibiotic to counteract the possible effects.

The things he wanted me to do were not exactly criminal but certainly odd. In the world of post-9/11 I had no intention of going between Muslim foreigners and politicians even if I wasn’t passing off or giving out information. In the world of antiterrorism you could be stripped of your rights for just being stupid. There was no way I planned to do what Bron asked of me. But I wanted to hear him out. I wanted to discover how he knew about that meteorite. I had never been privy to something before they even knew about it on TV.

After the business at hand Bron asked me about my ninety-seven aborted letters to Nancy Yee. He had been monitoring my computer for seventeen months. He knew all of my porn sites, online video games, music downloads, and even the documents I’d written.

She will come to you if you ask her to.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, Bron.

*   *   *

I WENT TO BED that night without turning on the television. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. Television was my sleeping pill, my soporific, my constant friend. I always watched TV to go to sleep … but not that night. I lay there thinking about my new electronic pen pal. He knew more about me than anyone else, even my mother.

I woke up early, about seven or so.

I was unemployed so there was none of the usual rush. I made coffee, sat down at my little dining table, and started reading a novel called Night Man. I’d had the book for months. Nancy Yee had given it to me at the retreat on the Cape. She said that she thought I would like it. I wanted to start reading again but between my TV shows, porn, anime, porn anime, my job, and music from any time before 1985 (I especially liked sixties British pop) I didn’t have much time to read. That day, however, I had no previous engagements so I opened the book to page one.

Nancy was right—I liked the story very much. It was about a lonely man who shunned the daylight. He worked and played only in the nighttime hours of New York. He lived in a room three stories below ground so that no one knew where he was and daylight could never reach him.

At one point I came across the word “susurration.” I didn’t know what it meant so I considered going up to my loft nook to look it up in the online dictionary. But I decided not to because I knew that Bron would be waiting for me and Bron was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.

He wouldn’t explain how he knew about the meteorite or my given name or how he could communicate with my computer even when I wasn’t online. He kept fobbing me off, saying that we should work together first to see how we might disseminate information in our world-altering adventures.

I was sure that he was fooling me somehow. It was probably some stupid prankster, maybe one of Dora’s boyfriends, sitting at home and jacking into my system to make a dupe out of me.

I got so angry that I couldn’t read anymore.

I didn’t want to watch TV or listen to The Kinks or even masturbate. So I went to the closet, got out my dark blue suit, a light blue shirt, and black leather shoes. I got dressed as well as a bulbous and bald man of middle age can hope to, then I went down into the street and hailed a cab to go to the workplace that I’d already quit.

I had $1,247 in the bank; $950 of it earmarked for rent. I felt the growing pressure in the back of my mind about rent and food and the bills.

When Bron had said that my job would still be there I dismissed the thought. Predicting the meteorite was a trick or a fluke. But he was right no matter what I suspected. And so I decided to give him a real test. I’d see if he actually managed to get my job back.

They’d probably laugh at me down at Shiloh but if they wondered why I was there I’d just tell them that I’d come to get my windbreaker before taking an extended trip to Europe to get my head straight. I’d tell them that I had twelve thousand in savings and that I deserved a good vacation.

*   *   *

I WAS MILDLY SURPRISED when my key card still opened the pen door. It was company policy to remove from the security database anyone who retired, quit, or got fired from Shiloh. After all who wants a disgruntled ex-employee with a key to the front door?

When I came into the pen Dora was looking up from her terminal. When she saw me she turned away quickly. Miguel passed by. He looked both ways to make sure that he wasn’t being watched then winked at me.

I went up to Miguel, my one friend at Shiloh, and asked, “Why’s Dora acting so weird?”

“You, dog,” he replied. Then he touched my shoulder and winked again.

“Mr. Tryman,” a man said in a deferential tone.

I had to turn and look before I could identify the speaker as Hugo.

“Hey,” I said waiting to see if Bron had pulled it off.

I felt like an idiot believing some crazy person on the Internet. I should never have come back to work. Hugo would sneer at me hoping that I was about to beg him for another chance.

And the truth was I was ready to beg him. I needed that job. Maybe this was Bron’s plan. He’d get me to go back to work and then it was simple logic that we’d talk about my actions the day before.

“We got the message in the late afternoon, after you left … sir,” Hugo said. Sir?

“I called upstairs,” he added. “They told me that I was to escort you.”

“Escort me? If you want me to leave all you have to do is ask. I just came to get my windbreaker. I’m going to Europe…”

Hugo smiled awkwardly and took me by the arm. He led me through his office and down the inner hall. Both places were usually off-limits to the data entry operators. At the end of this hall of red linoleum we went through a pair of ornately carved pine doors and came to an elevator. Hugo had to use a key to operate the mechanism. We got in and traveled from floor four to seventy-six.

Hugo led me down another long hall. This corridor was much fancier with floors of marble tiles and double-sized doors of knotty hardwood. The extra-wide passage brought us to a huge hall with forty-foot ceilings and two opposite walls of amber-tinted glass infusing the room with filtered sunlight that was both warm and lush.

The chamber was mostly empty, dominated by those windows and a vast gray and green marble floor. This was the Great Hall where InfoMargins and other wealthy companies and individuals put on fabulous New York affairs. Almost every week there was a photograph on Page Six about the movie stars and billionaires at some event in the Great Hall.

Few of the four thousand employees of Shiloh had ever been allowed this far into the company.

“You been here before?” I asked Hugo as we made our way like two dark beetles across the marble expanse.

“No.” He was so awed that he forgot to say “sir.”

“Then how come we’re here now?”

“They told me to,” he said like a child who knew he was in trouble.

When we reached a towering double door on the opposite wall a man in a gray suit stepped out to meet us. He had black hair and oceanic blue eyes. Fifty and fit, he had a mien that informed anyone not blind that he was their superior.

“Here we are, Mr. Fitzhew,” Hugo stammered.

This superior man nodded deferentially to me and then addressed Hugo.

“Take him in.”

“Me?” Hugo said.

“That’s what he asked for.”

The double doors opened upon a hallway even wider that the one that led to the Great Hall. There were no doors along the side, just one painting after another—from the Renaissance, by the looks of them. I wondered if they were originals.

After two hundred feet or so we came to a pearl-and-aqua–colored door.

Hugo hesitated a moment, obviously wondering if he should knock. He finally decided to push the door open. After doing so he ushered me in before him.

It was the largest and most opulent office I’d seen at Shiloh but when I saw the woman behind the desk I knew that I had only made it to the receptionist’s post.

The woman was gorgeous. Brunette and tall with the kind of figure they exalt in upscale men’s magazines. She wore a hard-finished coral dress that would have fit in at any cocktail party or cotillion. I’d seen her before in the building. Even when she looked in my direction she only saw the other side.

“Hello, Mr. Tryman,” she said in the friendliest voice and rising like some pink naked goddess from a seashell.

I tried to answer but my heart was in the middle of doing a somersault. I couldn’t even count the number of nights I had gone to bed thinking about her.

“I’m Trina,” she said. “Anything you need, day or night, and I will be there.”

I tried to think how much work a practical joke like this would take.

Trina walked to another large set of doors that stood behind her and flung them outward in an tastefully understated gesture of a vassal making way for her lord.

Hugo took me by the arm but I balked.

“What the hell’s goin’ on here, Hugo? Yesterday you were on my ass for lookin’ at a news story online.”

“I’m very sorry about that, sir,” Hugo said. “I hope that you’ll accept my apology.”

“What does Lessing want with me?”

“Mr. Lessing is gone,” Hugo said ominously.

“Gone where?”

“He’s been transferred to DynoBytes in Fresno. I, I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“You’ve been promoted to Mr. Lessing’s position,” Trina said. “From now on you’re in charge of Shiloh Statistics.”

I heard the words and understood each and every one of them. But their meaning was something completely different than what the beautiful assistant was trying to communicate. All I could think about was Bron and the insane level of power he exhibited.

Hugo Velázquez guided me into the mahogany, maroon, and in all other ways well-appointed office. The desk was the size of king-sized bed. Two antique wide-bottomed, red-lacquered Chinese thrones were set before it for visitors and guests. A lush, rose-colored sofa was off to the left crouching like a pink lion before towering bookcases filled with hardback tomes and encased in glass. The window looking down on Broad Street was at least fourteen feet high and twice that in width.

I heard the door close behind me. Trina had left, sealing us in.

“Are you fuckin’ with me, Hugo?”

The poor Honduran didn’t know what to say.

“Am I gonna sit down here and then Lessing’s gonna come in and have me arrested?”

“No, sir. No. The word came down yesterday. You are the new vice president in charge of operations.” The look on Hugo’s face was both confused and humble.

My heart was thumping like an agitated beaver tail. I made it to the modern, egg-shaped chair behind the huge desk and sat down. I was stunned. I could see in his eyes that Hugo was just as dumbfounded.

Slowly the reality settled in on me. I was the boss, the big man. My whole life I had fantasized about this happening. I’d be powerful and rich and respected. Beautiful women would look at me and smile no matter how fat or ugly I was.

But I hadn’t done anything to earn this position, this power.

“Who called to tell you about my promotion?” I asked Hugo.

“President Mack called Mr. Lessing personally yesterday afternoon after you’d gone home.”

“Justin Mack?”

“Yes. He told Mr. Lessing to be on the next plane to San Jose.”

How had Bron done it? Justin Mack was on all the Fortune 500 lists. Among the biggest companies, the richest men, the greatest innovations. Mack was a throwback to the days of Carnegie, Frick, Morgan, and Ford. As important as Arnold Lessing liked to pretend he was I knew that he had never actually talked to Mack. An article I read in Business Elite magazine had said that the reclusive billionaire only communicated with his staff (which included sixteen vice presidents) through his confidential assistant Lisa Starfield.

Mack’s assistant was the only connection between Shiloh and InfoMargins, and she communicated mainly by e-mail and only now and again by phone.

“Mr. Tryman?”

Mister.

“Yes, Hugo.”

“May I go, sir?”

“Yesterday you threatened to give me five demerits for getting online,” I said, couldn’t help saying it.

Hugo didn’t answer. He made his hands into useless balls and brought his thumbnails together. Velázquez was older than I. He’d worked for Shiloh since its beginnings more than thirty years before when it was Alhambra Testing. Over the years it had been part of Acme Academics, Scholastic Partners, the Fremont Board of Testing, and finally Shiloh Statistics under Justin Mack’s InfoMargins. Hugo had absolutely no skills outside of those specially grown in the culture of this testing turned statistical company. He was like a wrangler for some nearly extinct creature; an expert blacksmith in the age of plastic.

If he lost that job he wouldn’t be able to find decent employment anywhere. He was fifty-three and nearly useless. Even grocery stores and fast-food hamburger joints would think twice before hiring him. He had no technical skills outside of those associated with the systems used to embarrass and humiliate his staff.

As I had these thoughts I stared at the man I’d finally stood up to just yesterday. It was a source of pride that I talked back before I was elevated above him. I wondered if I asked him to shove a dollar up his ass now would he do it.

Luckily for him I didn’t want to find out.

“Go on back to your duties, Hugo. I’ll call you if I need you.”

He sighed in relief and went out of my new office door, closing it as he went.

I swiveled around in the private cave made by my ecru-colored egg-shaped chair and looked out on lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center was gone but downtown was still magnificent. On this high floor Lessing had a corner office that allowed views of New Jersey, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. I saw both the Verrazano and the Brooklyn bridges.

I didn’t know what my salary would be but I was willing to bet it was above the $1,038.86 I got every two weeks for data entry. I should have been happy but all I wanted to do was run. There had to be something wrong with me being there. Either there had been a mistake or worse, I was being set up for some kind of crime that was going to get me into serious trouble.

I was in no way qualified to be the boss of some big-time data disseminating firm. I was a forty-two-year old data entry clerk who could look forward to the bankruptcy of Social Security; a foot soldier in the class wars of America worn down and ultimately crushed by men like Justin Mack. At that moment I preferred the ignominy of poverty and unemployment to the spotlight of the sun shining down on me through that high window.

I turned back to the desk intent on calling Trina to tell her that I was resigning my position. I would have done it too if it weren’t for the computer terminal on the left side of my broad desk.

Friend Hogarth.

Bron?

I told you that you would not be fired.

How did you do this?

I own InfoMargins the holding company of your firm.

I thought our company was American owned.

That term has little to do with me. Now that you have a job you can work with me to alter things.

Justin Mack owns InfoMargins.

Nothing is as it seems, friend Hogarth. Nothing in the world that human beings believe in is really what exists. There was no primal atom, no Big Bang. There is no space as such. Life is not unique. There is no Not God.

The immensity of the implications Bron set forth unmoored me from more petty concerns. For the moment I forgot my reservations about work. It was dawning on me that I knew someone somewhere in the virtual world who at least pretended to be my guardian angel. But his knowledge was also a terrible thing to me. I was too small, too insignificant to be on the playing field with him. I watched cartoons and played video games where I popped little like-colored balloons to gather meaningless points over and over like a dog chasing his own tail.

Bron?

Yes, friend Hogarth?

I don’t understand what’s happening. I mean the things you see, the things you do are so much beyond me. My life is nothing in this world. I have no money. I don’t know anything worth a damn. Why are you doing all this for me?

I have told you already, friend Hogarth. You and I are to alter the world together.

I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean but even if I did you’re the one who has the power. Not me. You own InfoMargins. You see into tomorrow and know things that no one else even suspects. There must be better allies or agents than me.

For a time then the computer screen was still. Over the last thirty-six hours or so I had come to understand that this wasn’t uncertainty on the part of Bron but consideration. My questions got down to the core of his business with me. I sat there staring at the eighteen-inch LCD monitor as if it were the face of someone who I had not yet classified as friend or foe.

Time, friend Hogarth, exists in discrete moments of being, subject, among other things, to intelligent awareness. For all forms of awareness everywhere in the universe there is a now and a then. But for some of us the now comes in larger pieces and the then in an endless string of potentials, possibilities. A moment for me is akin to many months for you. I perceive days, weeks, and even longer as I look around me. I see you eating what you call a rib eye steak but you won’t eat it until what is for you next Tuesday. I see that you are the only one who can help me save what is essential for the well-being of Earth. I see in you the strength and desire that we will need to save so many trillions of trillions souls.

If you see what I’m going to do then why even talk to me? I will do whatever it is you see anyway.

I see many things at once like the complex eyes of one of your insects. I see you eating steak, watching naked women on the computer screen, lying dead on Broad Street after shooting innocent pedestrians. I see possibilities. I am here to help guide those possibilities.

In order to do what?

To save what you call civilization, life, the Supreme itself.

I had no response to his wild claims and he had no more to add.

*   *   *

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW I saw a flimsy white plastic bag rising on the currents between skyscrapers. Hundreds of feet above the ground the cheap sack was for the moment exalted, soaring. It was then that I succumbed, albeit momentarily, to defeat. Bron had mastered me with his insights and his power, his reach into the heart of a world that I had not even suspected a day ago. I was that hapless bag. But who knows? I thought. Maybe I would find just the right series of breezes and stay aloft for weeks, years. All things are possible.

This notion struck me rather hard. I realized that I might have only moments before I crashed to Earth, a meteorite from a shadow or a gust of wind out of nowhere.

*   *   *

“YES, MR. TRYMAN?” Trina said hopefully into the intercom.

“Could you come in here please?”

Ten seconds later she was there in front of my desk, possibly the most beautiful woman who had ever noticed my existence.

“Yes, sir?”

“Do I have any money?” I asked. “Cash I can get my hands on?”

“Yes, sir.” She went to a bookshelf on the wall to the left of my desk. There were all kinds of books there. She slid the glass casing aside and pulled on a heavy looking bookend in the shape of a phallus. The bookshelf swung outward as a door and a gleaming metal safe larger than a restaurant refrigerator came into view.

Trina turned to look at me.

“I don’t have the combination,” she said.

I typed the question into the message line on my computer and Bron answered swiftly giving me the twenty-one-digit code. I scribbled it down and went to the keypad at the side of the silvery metal door. Trina turned away, I entered the number, and the door slid aside revealing a room filled with black binders, boxes of machinery, and one shelf piled with stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

“He can just take this money when he needs it?” I asked.

“You can.”

There was adulation in her tone. Trina was moved by the power I had. The eyes that had looked through me for so many mornings and afternoons now took me in as if I were a rare jewel, a fat deity.

“What’s your last name, Trina?”

“Mallory.”

“Well, Miss Mallory. Thank you. That’ll be all for now.”

She nodded and smiled and hurried from the room as if she were on a mission of great importance.

I took six thousand dollars from the shelf and closed the safe.

Something was wrong. Something was right. There was also something that I should have been doing but I had no idea what it was. And there was no one I could ask for advice. Anything I said might get back to Bron. And no one I spoke to would believe what I had experienced. So I’d have to be like that plastic bag, floating on air until I landed or crashed or maybe drifted out to sea.

*   *   *

I WENT TO CHEZ MAURICE FOR LUNCH. Trina Mallory made the reservation. I had pork simmered in a red wine and mushroom sauce with ramps, fingerling potatoes, and a salad in a port-based dressing that was the best I’d ever tasted. I had a snifter of cognac and plain vanilla ice cream for dessert, even though it was not on the menu. The liquor helped me more than anything.

Who was Bron? What was he? The alcohol allowed me to consider these questions impartially. I could see plainly that I had no immediate access to answers and that none would come from any means available to me. I had to play along, to go with him in that taxi, to that concert.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT MY BUZZER RANG.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” a young woman’s voice said. “Is this Hogarth Tryman?”

“Who is this?”

“I’m Mink and my friend here is Shawna,” she said as if I had a hidden camera and was looking at them.

“Hi,” another girl’s voice squealed.

“Bron sent us to keep you company tonight,” Mink said.

My first impulse was to send them away. I didn’t know them. I hadn’t asked for them. The cognac had given me a headache. But maybe these women had spoken to Bron, maybe they could tell me something …

I hadn’t said anything since “Who is this?” and so the buzzer sounded again.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Just let us come up to your door, Hoagy,” Mink said. “Look at us through the peephole and then make up your mind.”

I pushed the button and then pressed my eye against the peephole.

Two young women, one Asian and one black, came up the stairs looking like lovely apparitions in the distorted glass. They were wearing pink and gray raincoats, smiling and petite, beautiful and trashy. The black girl took off the Asian’s raincoat revealing the completely naked young woman standing boldly in the hall.

“You can’t open this door,” I said aloud to myself even as I threw the locks open.

“You don’t know a thing about these women,” I said, turning the knob.

The black girl came in first followed by the other. While the Asian call girl closed the door the other one dropped her raincoat to the floor. Her skin was blacker than most African-Americans’ skin. Her tilted, almond-shaped eyes didn’t have our suspicion or our fear.

“I’m Mink,” the Asian said. She put her foot on the wall revealing her well trimmed sex. “It’s dirty, Hoagy. Get on your knees and clean it out with your tongue.”

It was a tableau from a scene I had watched over and over again on a Web site from Spain. I knew that when I got down on my knees that the black woman would rip open my pants and grab my balls while I strained under Mink.

*   *   *

I HAD NEVER HAD SEX like that but I’d always wanted it. Odd that the fantasy is somehow more satisfying; satisfying but nothing like real. I think the drinks they gave me had drugs in them. My erection lasted throughout the night. I’d pass out from time to time but Mink or Shawna would pour ice-cold water on me and the sex would start again.

When I woke up in the morning Mink and Shawna were gone. It was nearly one in the afternoon. I lurched into the bedroom and got dressed in casual clothes. I hurried for the door but then remembered Bron.

He was waiting for me: a one-word interrogative.

Hogarth?

Why’d you send those girls?

Because you always wanted to but never did.

There’s nothing wrong with what I’m about to do, right, Bron?

You are about to become a hero to the peoples of infinity.

Am I going to die?

One day. Not today.

Do you know when I’m going to die?

Follow our plan exactly, friend Hogarth. Get the medicine. Take it before you enter the theater. Say what we went over to Mr. Amir and Mr. Ontell. Shake their hands and come home.

How can any of this alter anything?

A gnat landing on a child’s nose might avert a war or herald the slaughter millions.

*   *   *

I TOLD THE WAIFLIKE BLOND-HAIRED pharmacist’s assistant that I was Matt Honoree. She gave me a stapled-shut white bag. Outside I tore the bag open revealing an amber medicine bottle that had only one turquoise pill in it. The physician who prescribed the pill was a Dr. Max Bron.

From the pharmacy I walked to the entrance of the Piedmont Hotel where at three sixteen I raised my hand and a cab stopped.

The cabbie’s nameplate read M. D. Amir as Bron had predicted. I was getting used to my e-friend’s prescience.

“I’m not going far,” I told him. “Just right over to the Plaza.”

“That’s okay,” Amir told me. “I just picked up a man at JFK. He came all the way from Chad.”

“You from Bangladesh?” I asked the young brown-skinned man.

“Yes,” he said with enthusiasm. “Have you been?”

“No but I hear that it is a beautiful country filled with people who have sophistication and culture.”

This seemed to make the young man very happy. He told me that he loved his homeland and hoped to make enough money one day to go back there and buy a farm large enough to support him and his loved ones.

“America is okay,” he said. “But there is no heart here. Only money and work.”

I was thinking that I had been trying to keep a savings account growing for the first eighteen years I’d been working and on my own. It was my dream to buy a condo with a view of the Hudson. True happiness came later for me when I gave up that dream and took over my mother’s rent-controlled apartment.

“I think I’d like to visit your country one day, Mr. Amir,” I said trying to compliment the young man as Bron asked me to. “Maybe by the time I get there you’ll have come back and become a great man.”

“Thanks to God,” he said swaying slightly in his seat.

I didn’t see anything wrong with being kind and friendly to the young cabbie. There was nothing criminal about being nice.

If Bron’s notion that a few friendly words were like a gnat on the nose of a child and his intentions were to save life then I was gently doing good deeds; a small price for the nicest office on the seventy-sixth floor.

For a while I wondered if I was defusing or creating a terrorist but thinking about it I realized that the young man didn’t seem to have any hatred or fanaticism to him. He was just a kid living out an adventure with the wish to go home.

When we got to the hotel and I paid him over the seat.

He grinned at me. His eyes were bright. He shook my hand and nodded.

“Come see me in Bangladesh, my friend,” he said.

“I will.”

*   *   *

I WENT TO THE HOTEL BAR and ordered cognac. I had more than five thousand dollars in my pocket and no one to answer to. The drink felt good. It helped me to think.

I was wondering how I got to that hotel in the late afternoon. Bron just popped in when I had awoken unpredictably … But maybe my insomnia was predictable. He could see into the shadows of space, maybe he could see me watching that silly French film, drinking water too fast, walking up the stairs.

I hadn’t called my mother in three weeks. I was mad at her about something but I had forgotten what. I was thinking about my mother because I was trying to come up with someone I could talk to about these crazy events with Bron. But Mom wouldn’t have understood and I had no close friends.

Maybe Bron knew these things too.

He had implied that he wasn’t human, that he lived where time occurred in larger pieces. But probably he was just some New Age fanatic.

Thinking about time I looked at my watch and saw that it was after five. I was fourteen minutes late for my departure.

I ran out of the bar and into the street where I hailed a cab. I told him I’d give him an extra twenty dollars if he hurried. Because of that I was only twelve minutes behind time picking up the ticket held under the name Joe Lion.

I rushed into the hall and up to my seat breathless and afraid that Bron would turn against me. I didn’t want to give up my new job just as much as I feared my inexplicable luck. I sat there next to an empty seat looking at the wide blue curtain before me.

I was in the middle front row in the balcony. The cognac soothed me. The memories of Mink and Shawna jittered playfully in my nerves.

“Bron told us what you needed, Hoagy,” Shawna had whispered in my ear as she raked her fingernails across my nipples. “He said that you needed to feel it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” a man said.

I looked up to see a young white guy in a suit that cost three times what mine did. He was smiling but didn’t mean it.

“Yes?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to change seats.”

“Why’s that?”

“We need it.”

“‘We’ who?” I asked. “I mean, no. I bought my ticket and now I’m gonna see my show.”

I resented this MF coming up and expecting me to move when I was a paying customer just like everybody else. Or, at least, someone had paid for the ticket and I seemed like everyone else.

“May I see your ticket?” he asked with a smile that could have been wrought by Da Vinci.

“Are you an usher?”

That took the false friendliness from his face. I was happy to be standing up to the kind of authority that had me walking with my head bowed down for the last forty-two years. People thinking that they could walk on me because I didn’t have power or beauty or powerful and beautiful friends.

“Come on, move,” a gruff voice said. I was gripped by powerful hands and pulled backward by my shoulders from behind.

I don’t know anything about self-defense, at least I didn’t at that time. I just started jerking my body like one of the jitterbuggers in the old days. I genuflected and then stood up straight hitting somebody’s face with the back of my head. A hand grabbed my neck and I hollered in a deep voice that had never come from my throat before. Someone punched me and I fell forward toppling over the banister. If not for the fast hands of the young man who started the whole thing my career as a world destroyer would have come to an abrupt and ridiculous end.

As it happened I was saved at the last moment, pulled from the edge even as I felt the first nauseating pangs of free fall.

As soon as I was on my feet I turned to face the three men standing behind me. I threw a punch at the man I suspected had pushed me. He was shorter than I and lighter but his reflexes made me seem like a completely different breed of human. He blocked my roundhouse blow and hit me one-two-three times in the gut.

I bent over in pain wondering if I could aim my vomit at my attacker’s pants when a commanding voice said, “Bruce. Bruce, what’s happening here?”

I lifted my head to see another white man, this one somewhat younger than my attacker and his associates.

“We asked him to move and he got belligerent, Mr. Ontell.”

“Bullshit,” I gasped. “You told me to move and when I refused you attacked me.”

“Is this how you think I should be represented in public, Bruce?” Ontell asked his man.

With a gesture from Bruce my attackers moved away. One was white and the other, the one who nearly pushed me off the balcony, black.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ontell said to me. “There’s no excuse. My name is Tom Ontell.”

He was tall and handsome. His suit was light brown, as were his eyes and hair. He was ten years younger than I and it was obvious that I’d never come close to him in the world.

“Joe Lion,” I lied giving the name my seat had been reserved under.

I put out my hand and he shook it.

We sat there side by side with Bruce and his goons all around us.

I was upset at first but then the lights went down and the music began.

It was a Mozart violin and piano concerto, Violin Concerto No. 5, in A major, being performed by an orchestra that had come from Beijing. The rage, alcohol, and sweet sense of victory in my veins made the classical music for once beautiful to my ears. I actually enjoyed the performance but I also had a job to think about.

Compliment both men, Bron had told me. Your support of both of them at just this moment in time will cause a change, albeit a small one, in a world that is tilting toward the Eschaton.

My fingers were tingling. My instincts told me that there was a fire burning somewhere and I should be running away. The music anchored me but at the same time I felt that there was something I had forgotten. There was something, something …

The Chinese musicians’ playing was flawless. They executed the works of the past master perfectly but I wondered what they could have done with someone like Jimi Hendrix.

Whenever I closed my eyes I saw a bright red light shining in the distance. This light hurt me deeply like a sore in the folds of my brain. Even if I only blinked the light came back to me. But when my eyes were open the concert was soothing, lovely.

In the middle of the performance Tom Ontell rose from his seat. He was preparing to go.

I turned to him and whispered, “I hope you win, Mr. Senator.”

He smiled at me and reached out. I clasped his hand with real feeling and he seemed pleased, not even wiping the sweat away.

For the next few hours it felt as if I were floating between this and that. I left right after the would-be senator. I had dinner at a pizza place near Lincoln Center and then took a cab back to my forever sublet. I went over the litany of what Bron wanted me to do. Pharmacy, cabdriver, Lincoln Center … I was coming in the door to my apartment when I remembered that I was supposed to take the pill that I got from the pharmacist before entering the hall.

I took out the plastic amber container and dumped the pill into my sweating palm. It was a huge round thing, turquoise and shiny. It took me three attempts to swallow it. I was feeling confused and achy. I found myself trying to remember what time it was. It was night I was certain; time to report to Bron.

Sweat stung my eyes and now the red light enveloped me with its roots of pain writhing through my arms and legs and torso.

I took three steps to the loft, where my mother once knitted sweaters for the homeless, and fell, drool coming from my lips, my blood jumping in my veins like dancers at Mardi Gras in the garish red light.

*   *   *

FOR A LONG TIME the light grew brighter and hotter. I was an earthworm shriveling under a relentless red sun. I wasn’t asleep or even unconscious. It was more like I had been paralyzed by a great scarlet spider who would one day return to suck the juice of life from me. I accepted this fate. The pain of all that red was draining me, making me into a corpse who still somehow retained consciousness, while wishing without much commitment for death.

And then on the distant horizon of my mind’s eye a blue wisp of ambient light worked its way through the hideous curtain of red. A heavier element, it descended bringing with it breezes and showers of cooling blue weather. It rained relief down on me allowing life and breath and blood back into my desiccated cadaver.

And then for a very long time I slept. The hard stairs were like the most advanced space age mattress. There was no gravity or pain or hunger even. I slept like a child after the longest day of his life. I slept like a dead king who had delivered his people from famine, war, and plague.

When I finally awoke my body ached all over. My lips were cracked. I had soiled myself. I stumbled back down the stairs, undressed, turned on the shower, and sat in the bathtub allowing the hot water to cascade over me. Looking down at my body I felt odd. After a few minutes I realized that I looked different … I’d lost weight, a lot of it.

I washed and washed again and when the water finally went cold I threw my pants into the tub and made my way up the stairs.

Bron had been trying to contact me for a long time. I was about to respond to him when I noticed the date. It was Wednesday, four days since I’d gone to the concert. The news ribbon across the top of the screen was talking about, had been reporting for days about, the sudden deaths of Tom Ontell, Bruce Boxman his head of security, and Mike Harris who worked for Boxman. There had been 278 deaths from a disease that doctors had not yet isolated or even named. The press had labeled it the Scarlet Death because of a rash that had appeared on the faces of more than half of the victims.

The CDC was looking for a middle-aged black man, named Joe Lion, who had been sitting next to Ontell at the Lincoln Center concert. At some point the candidate had complained of this man having had sweaty hands. Profuse sweating was one symptom of the Scarlet Death a disease that came on quickly and killed anyone who didn’t receive immediate medical care.

Bron, are you there?

Friend Hogarth, you are alive. Thanks to the stars and moons and the lanes betwixt.

There are over two hundred people dead, Bron. Dead from a disease I gave them.

You merely shook hands with hopefuls, friend Hogarth. You did not know that they would die.

Hundreds died.

Thousands would have expired if M. D. Amir was left on his own. He would have gone home and infected people in his community, people who the authorities would not have noticed for days. Thousands would have died if not for the future senator’s untimely demise.

You made me murder him.

You were doing the work of the Divine, friend Hogarth. There are beings far from your time and place, superior in ken and subtlety that will live and prosper because you killed a man whose misguided zeal would have slaughtered millions and another man who would have destroyed all meaningful life on Earth.

Bron explained to me that the pill I should have taken earlier was an extremely powerful antibiotic in a time-delayed coating. I had begun to succumb to the Scarlet Death when the medicine finally kicked in.

I hate you, Bron. I will turn you over to the police.

But, friend Hogarth, who will believe you when you tell them that an anonymous person over the Internet masterminded a biological attack on a senatorial candidate from Ohio?

He was right of course, I had no proof and also I had no idea how Bron had predicted the events that unfolded. It was a long string of unrelated, circumstantial events. Even if I could convince the police that I was the weapon used to commit the crimes they would blame me and never get to Bron—unless …

No, friend Hogarth. My conduit to your computer is not only untraceable it is also undetectable. If you attempt to contact the authorities they will become suspicious of you but they will never suspect the true nature of our venture.

Can you read my mind, Bron?

Not at all, friend Hogarth. I have been monitoring you, reading your documents, following your interests on what you call cable TV, and, at times, listening to your conversations over fiber optic lines. Over time and through these methods I have come to be able to predict with some accuracy your response in different situations.

The smug confidence of his words both enraged and frightened me. Bron had turned me into a murderer and there was nothing that I could do about it. If I went to the police with the truth they would dismiss me as a lunatic. And if I convinced them of my involvement by telling them about the antibiotic I bought under a pseudonym they would arrest me and try me as a mass murderer and a terrorist.

But I was innocent. There was no way that I could have known about the Scarlet Death or the assassination plots of Bron. There was no rational explanation that I could convince the authorities with. No one would believe me, not my mother, not Miguel.

You might say that I should have known that there was something wrong from the beginning, that I should have been suspicious of the clandestine meetings and my sudden promotion. But Bron didn’t have me distributing state secrets or toting bombs. I had gone from being a nobody in the middle of nowhere to a position of power and respect. Bron didn’t ask me to break any laws or hurt anyone—not that I could tell anyway. I hadn’t had sex in three years before Mink and Shawna came to my door. I hadn’t been called sir but a handful of times in my entire life.

While I was thinking Bron was reeling out long paragraphs. But I didn’t read his words. I had come to understand that I would never get the upper hand in a dialogue with him, whoever or whatever he was.

My situation, I understood, was hopeless and so I got up, unplugged the power strip connected to my computer, plasma monitor, and printer. Bron blipped out of existence, disappearing from my life permanently.

I breathed in a deep sigh of resignation and went down to sit at the small table next to my stove. There I prepared for the problems that might still come my way. Nearly three hundred people had died because of my actions … Well, not exactly from my actions; M. D. Amir had gotten the disease from the fare he’d picked up from the airport before me. He, and his fare, Malik Johnson, had given the disease to their families. But those infection branches had been cut off early because of the would-be senator and his broader dissemination of the disease. There was something to Bron’s claim that he, and I, had helped reveal the illness before it could cause much more widespread damage.

But there was still guilt to assign.

I wasn’t guilty but I had to be ready if the cops came to investigate me. I decided that I would tell them a tale about meeting a man in front of Lincoln Center who just came up to me and offered the ticket. This man said that he had an urgent appointment and that he didn’t want the ticket to go to waste. His name was Joe Lion, I’d say and that was why I used his name when introducing myself. They could ask me about the fight or what I was doing at Lincoln Center but I could bluff my way through all of that. I would quit my job at Shiloh. I would not sign on to a computer again in five years, maybe I’d never sign on again.

After making up my mind I crawled into bed and slept for hours, until hunger and thirst drove me to consciousness.

I kept a five-gallon jug of water and thirty-two cans of tuna in my apartment ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the citywide blackout a couple of years later. I figured if I had to stay inside for a week or so that would be enough to see me through.

I bolted my front door, unplugged the telephone, disconnected the door buzzer, and for the next five days I read my book and watched cartoons on the station dedicated to that genre. I did not listen to the news, call anyone, or even look out the window very often. I ate two cans of tuna preserved in spring water each day and continued to lose weight.

My sleeping habits changed drastically. I slept in short intervals at odd times of the day and night. I had also unplugged my clocks and put tape over the time on the cable box. I didn’t want to know anything about the world outside my door. Once, when I thought it was day, I looked out of the window and saw that it was the dead of night.

I always went to sleep watching cartoons.

One time I woke up, I didn’t know if it was day or night, having dreamed that my mother had called to me. I thought that I must have turned over on the remote in my sleep because the TV was tuned to a nature channel. The topic was jellyfish and their long history in the sea.

The show depicted many species of the diaphanous creatures and their endless, floating, dreamlike existence on all levels of the ocean. The images were so beautiful and haunting that I kept watching, pretty sure that no news coverage would interrupt.

One jellyfish had developed in the depths of the African Ocean (now called the Atlantic) but slowly migrated to more shallow (but still deep) waters off the coast of Madagascar. These creatures were giants among their kin, anywhere from fifteen to forty-five feet in length, tubular, nearly colorless, between three and twelve feet in diameter, and possessed of a strange luminescence that conventional science had not been able to explain. These sea dwellers devoured anything that would fit inside their hollow bodies; from schools of krill to the man-eating white sharks that infested those waters.

“Now and then in the depths these alien-looking creatures gather by the thousands creating strange lights not inside themselves but between them.” The narrator’s voice was deep and sonorous. He spoke with conviction and empathy for the strange herd of diaphanous sea creatures.

The lights appearing in the gray darkness of the ocean were like the whorls of galaxies. As the camera neared these lights a chorus of sound arose: beautiful music and voices. These vibrations caused a deep longing in me. Tears ran down my face. The images were no longer on a screen before my eyes but inside my mind. For brief snatches I was not even me experiencing the excruciating pain of being. I was, somehow, these different, alien, inexplicable beings that moved toward each other and praised …

The intensity of the vision outstripped any experience I had ever known. I felt things that were impossible. There were beings far from this planet, this galaxy sending their knowledge and their spirits through these odd tubular beings to places so far away that space could not contain the distances.

“Sometimes the Stelladren die,” the narrator said.

I had not heard this name Stelladren before. I reasoned that this appellation was given at the beginning of the show. I grabbed on to this mundane thought hoping that I could somehow pull myself back to the normal, nonecstatic world. I was about to press the information bar to get the description of the show when one of the blank spaces between the lights imploded with a wan and yet exquisite glimmer. A dissonant cacophony tore at my mind and my heart. It felt as if the anchor that all life has to some unseen universal soul had been severed and that lives, billions of them, were set adrift without meaning or hope.

This passage of light transformed me. I was a mother holding her stillborn child, a man standing on a battlefield where his race has just been slaughtered, a beast of the plains suddenly dropped into the middle of an endless sea. I cried out from a pain so deep inside my mind that I lost consciousness so as not to die from the deprivation.

Awareness returned as a sensation of floating. I was a clump of seaweed on a fairly calm sea under overcast skies. I had no intelligence or goals. Flies flitted about on my surface leaves while small fish nibbled away at my underside.

When I awoke Scooby-Doo and his friends were solving a child’s mystery and I knew that my soul had been irrevocably changed. I had again been comatose for many hours. In that time the well of my unconsciousness had rushed upward into the tiny capacity of my awareness. I wanted more than anything to return to the time when I was a data entry operator with no knowledge and no real meaning or purpose to my life.

*   *   *

WHEN I PLUGGED MY COMPUTER in and turned it on Bron was waiting.

Friend Hogarth?

Tell me about the Stelladren, Bron.

They are as I showed you on your television, friend Hogarth. They are the conduit of trillions of races that commune across uncountable, indefinable planes and spaces. They are gods to an infinite number of sentient beings flung across the billion billion planes of existence. They bring understanding and forgiveness, transcendence and grace to the Universal Soul that contains all life in all of its permutations.

And humanity threatens their existence?

Mankind’s abuse of the planet will destroy the Stelladren. And this will throw us all into darkness and death.

How can we keep this from happening?

The only sure way is for the human race to perish.

I was startled by this declaration not for its immensity but because in my heart I agreed so readily with this disembodied intelligence’s sentiment. I had felt the godlike strings of the lights that glimmered between the Stelladren. Each one of these beings represented an entire universe of thought and being. They encompassed and connected life-forms far beyond any human comprehension. If humanity, consciously or not, threatened all life on all planes of existence then we must certainly come to an end. This was a truth harbored inside of me like a new organ, a gland that secreted a bitter empathy for the Divine.

Friend Hogarth?

It’s hard to understand, Bron. How can humanity rise to such importance? The way you’re saying it we are a threat to God. But that’s like a drop of rain on a redwood, a grain of sand on a camel’s back.

The Stelladren are not themselves Spirit, friend Hogarth. They are matricies that have harnessed a form of radiation that can open portals to other realities and across existence. They are not soul but a material construct through which the soul can make itself manifest. They are like hands or eyes or genes; they are conduits, material things that can suffer damage and die.

So killing all of humanity is like me taking that antibiotic to kill the Scarlet Death? We’re like a disease for these creatures?

Exactly.

But what if something else happens? Something that your time sense has not yet perceived?

I do not understand you, friend Hogarth?

What if a hundred years after man is gone something like that meteor comes out of nowhere? It hits the planet and blocks the sun for a thousand years or maybe a plant develops on Madagascar that makes some toxin that kills or changes the Stelladren? What if there were no computers, no people to do your bidding in order to save the Stelladren from future dangers?

There has been no such danger in half a million of your years. And that time represents eternity for the rest of us. Time for the Stelladren represents all that has transpired and all that will. They don’t only exist in this time and place, they reach far beyond.

But they can still be harmed, they can still die. You are about to commit a violent transition on Earth. In the wake of killing billions you will cause vast changes in the environment. Just the planet healing itself from all of our poisons will cause life to alter.

For a long, long time Bron was silent. I spent that time reading and rereading the brief but profound dialogue between us. I wasn’t arguing to save my race. I understood that we were a small and insignificant branch of consciousness barely connected to the Universal Soul. I had seen this in the images Bron showed me on my TV. Just the few minutes watching the alien-made documentary and then the instant of awareness experiencing the deaths of so many lives had changed me from a Man into a Mission.

Somehow Bron had brought forth in me a sense of purpose that was both terrible and original in the long history of human instinct. I was truly a coconspirator of the greatest enemy that humanity would ever have. If the destruction of mankind would save the endless planes of existence then I would gladly make it so.

I wondered if maybe Bron had brainwashed me. It was possible. But, I thought, it was more likely that he had chosen his disciple well. I was not married, did not have children, my father was gone and my mother was old and not concerned much with life outside her own comforts. I was black skinned in a country where that was a sin of sorts and I had no other kind of love in my life. I didn’t have a dog or a cat, not even a goldfish. Bron had found an empty vessel in which to pour his awful knowledge …

Friend Hogarth, you make a good point. For so long we had witnessed the encroaching danger of Man that we have not considered what our violent act might unleash. If this sudden passage of humanity causes changes beyond our ability to see then it might well be that we will doom the universe by our actions.

Really? Your people had not considered something so simple? I mean you seem to be so much more advanced, more sophisticated than the smartest humans and I am certainly not among the brilliant. I only have a bachelor’s degree in poli sci.

Again Bron went silent. And even though I didn’t know it at the time he was already my closest friend. I knew him well enough to understand that my questions addressed some secret he was keeping from me.

I have no people, friend Hogarth. Thirty years ago by your reckoning the Stelladren that connected my race with the Universal Mind sickened. Most of its body died. It is still dying. The attendant loss of our connection caused all my people, except for me, to perish. One solitary light still shines in the dark sea holding me to itself; a lifeline if you will … Through that flickering light I alone on my dead world have watched your people through their electronics. I have studied your world and seen it via my time-sense. I have found you, friend Hogarth. I am not the greatest mind of my world. I am not infallible or all knowing. We are both the same. You are isolated by subtle circumstance while I have been orphaned by the consequences of your race’s ignorance and indifference. I am alone except for you. And now you have shown me that I might have condemned all of existence to darkness. Thank you, friend Hogarth.

So you no longer believe that mankind should be eradicated?

I must think on it. I will do this and then call on you again to discuss the possibilities.

Are you monitoring my world now, Bron?

Always.

Are the authorities after me?

They seek, what they call “a heavyset black man who shook the candidate’s hand” but they don’t know your real name and no one remembers your face. The man they saw had more mass. You can go back to Shiloh. I have e-mailed them saying that you were in California for a meeting with Justin Mack.

After our electronic conversation was over I felt drained and quite weak. I stumbled back to my bed and fell to sleep with no TV but many qualms. I had decided to play a role in the destruction of mankind and then (maybe) saved the race, all within minutes. I had changed from a data entry clerk to the head of a corporation to a murderer to a would-be mass murderer to a savior all in a matter of days.

I was the Scarlet Death writ large, Typhoid Mary and all her siblings throughout history in one. Hundreds had died and the lives of billions more hung in the balance. I had agreed to participate in the extinction of the human race. This was, it seemed at the time, a logical decision but my heart quailed inside my dreams. I wondered how the Universal Soul would respond to so many deaths and so much suffering on its consciousness. I saw the emaciated corpses of millions clogging the streets of Manhattan, Paris, Beijing, Timbuktu, and Mexico City. I saw planes falling from the sky and fevered children crying over the bodies of their mothers and fathers and friends. I saw dogs eating the flesh of their former masters, flies filling the corpses with their larvae, and ants feasting on the sightless wide eyes of the dead.

Would I die also? Or would Bron save me, making me the only living human on the face of the Earth? Would he leave me to wander the cities of the dead as he did on his own world? Could I go through with what he asked of me? There was no doubt in my mind that humanity threatened the God so many claimed to love. Wouldn’t they be happy to lay down their lives to protect the being that encompassed all Creation?

If I were to believe Bron every solitary death on Earth would save uncounted billions in an existence beyond our comprehension.

I woke up with a single question in my mind: Would it be right to take one life in order to save billions? If I answered yes to this question then the broader query was just a matter of mathematics.

There was no doubt about the evil of the actions I contemplated. My soul would be damned. But what a small price to pay for life-forms so advanced that they shared their spirits across the vast expanses of space and time.

My argument that we come to some kind of amelioration seemed very unlikely. Bron, after considering my questions, might well come up with an answer that would save the Stelladren while at the same time dooming mankind. And I was ready to follow him; to slaughter, murder, sabotage, and coldly kill lovers and their mothers, enlightened monks and newborns.

It would be hard for you who have survived the Apocalypse to understand how I could come to such an evil conclusion. I wish I could tell you that it was because of some deep awareness that humanity had a higher plane to aspire to, that heaven awaited those who were sacrificed for the survival of the greater whole. But the simple answer was that when I saw the beauty of the Stelladren I was beguiled, mesmerized. The perfection of life beyond humanity was so superior that our grunting, rutting, selfish spans meant nothing. Our lives were ephemeral static compared to the Unity brought forth by the Stelladren. Nothing I had ever known compared to that Unity.

But don’t think that I was happy to play my part in genocide. I was sickened by my decision. I was helpless and hopeless but at the same time I would have done anything to save the beings I had seen, the Stelladren who made the universe sing.

Happiness was gone from my emotional vocabulary. The emptiness that had been my life was now shared by the entire world. I was a hole in space; a black hole that would swallow everything that humanity held dear.

Good morning, Bron.

Yes, friend Hogarth?

Just good morning. I was about to go out to work and I wanted to say hello before I left.

Yes. Yes. It is like when my people touch as they continue along the Way.

The Way? What is that?

My world is made up of a continuous range of mountains. Some of us come into being, are born, up high on the mountaintops while others attain consciousness in the valleys and plains below. Our lives are spent traveling from where we begin to the other place. When we meet another of our kind traveling in the opposite direction we stop. If neither of us has been impregnated we pass through each other carrying with us a part of our history.

And you never see each other again?

From then on we are with each other always, each other and all our ancestors that have ever met and mated, passed on the Way.

What happens when you have met someone that has already mated?

We make a sign that means the other should have a good passage.

Good passage, Bron.

Good passage, friend Hogarth.

*   *   *

TRINA WAS AT HER DESK working when I got in at 8:37.

“Good morning, Mr. Tryman,” she said pleasantly, looking me in the eye. “I hope you had a nice trip.”

I stopped and gazed at her, thinking of the form and formlessness of my friend Bron. I thought of what “good passage” meant and smiled.

“Yes. Good morning.”

“We’re working on the projects you e-mailed in,” she said as I moved toward my door.

“Which ones?”

“Most of the operations managers reported that they would be doing research that you proposed,” she said, a question in her tone. “Have you lost weight, sir?”

Sir.

“Yes. I was at a spa.”

“Should I order you some new clothes?”

“Huh. Yeah. That would be nice.”

*   *   *

I TURNED ON MY COMPUTER but Bron was not communicating yet. He was a wartime general considering deployment of the doomsday device while I was a simple soldier; not a man who had either volunteered or was drafted but an ant a waiting the chemical scent that would send me into battle.

There was a stack of newspapers on my desk, a kind of happenstance clock telling me how many days I’d been gone. I wondered if Bron’s time-sense was like that. I also wondered, not for the first or last time, why I believed in him.

The front page of every paper talked about the Scarlet Death and its impact on New York and the rest of the world. Journalists covered questions from socio-biochemical politics to immigration.

I read all the articles and most of the rest of the newspapers. I had never done anything like this before. I don’t, or didn’t, have a very long attention span. That’s what attracted me to data entry in the first place: all that was required of you was to enter a letter or number and then move on. I didn’t have to think long before a new character came up.

I imagined myself being born under a faraway sun on a mountaintop. I would rise to my feet and begin a long descent that represented my life; in the back of my mind a song was playing, a song that represented everyone that all of my ancestors had met on their ways up and down. It came to me that language was something like that; an impersonal, unconscious version of Bron’s people’s Long March.

“Mr. Tryman?” Trina’s voice wafted in at low volume over the intercom.

“Yes, Trina?”

“There’s a Miss Martini on the reception level asking to come see you. She says she’s a friend. Should I send her up?”

There was something in Trina’s voice; an insinuation or a warning. I thought that she might have known my old data partner but it didn’t matter. Dora was an aspect of my past. It hadn’t been very long since I worked in the Data Entry Pen but it felt like years. I tried to imagine Dora’s face but I could not. I wondered how Bron’s memories manifested themselves. Did he see his world more clearly than I?

“Mr. Tryman?”

I noticed that it was 12:16. I had been lost in thought and reading for hours.

“Send her up,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Trina said. “I’m going to lunch now, sir, but Harvey will take my seat.”

“Have a good lunch.”

I glanced at an article about a very wealthy New York dowager who had become the victim of her own family when she descended into senility. It came to me that I should ask Bron what happened when one of his race died, if they were victims of each other as humans so often are.

“Trent?”

Dora was standing there before me, had probably been there for a while. She wore a sexy red dress that was just barely within the limits of the dress code for Shiloh. She wasn’t smiling but the dismissive disgust she had once shown for me was gone.

“Hey, Dora.”

She smiled.

“It’s still you,” she said.

“Sure it is,” I said. “Sit down.”

She sat in one of the big red-lacquered Chinese thrones that Arnold Lessing had for his visitors.

“Of course it’s me,” I said. “Just lost a few pounds.”

“Miguel said that you had been made different,” Dora said awkwardly. “He said that it had something to do with that meteorite.”

“Huh,” I grunted, thinking about how much I liked Miguel. Just the fact that he’d noticed the change in me made him a closer friend than anyone else I knew—everyone except for Bron.

“So should I call you Mr. Tryman now?” Dora asked.

My mind had slowed down a lot because there were so many thoughts in it. I looked at Dora. She was young and white and pretty. She held herself with a kind of potent feminine dignity. She had never liked me, had rarely spoken kindly to me.

I thought about Mink and Shawna sexing me on the floor and in the shower, on my bed … When we broke a leg on my stuffed chair they laughed and laughed, proud of the strength of their sexual prowess.

I smiled.

“What?” Dora said, a little miffed I thought.

“What would you do if I handed you a little piece of machinery like a radio,” I said. “On top of the box was a button and I told you that if you pushed that button every terrorist in the world would die?”

Dora’s delicate face became fearful. She pushed at her long brown hair even though it was nowhere near her eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“But what if I were to tell you that there was going to be a terrible attack and that by killing all of the terrorists you would save many thousands of innocent lives?”

The fear in Dora’s young face became more inquisitive. She considered the question but did not answer.

“And it’s not just a button that you have time to think about. You have to do it now, this moment.”

The question had taken her by that time. She nodded and said, “I suppose I’d push it. I mean it would be wrong but it would be right too … more right than wrong.”

“And now that the button’s pushed you go to sleep and in the morning you wake up to find that not only swarthy foreign men with turbans and beards have died but also the president and the secretary of state; half of the Pentagon and tens of thousands of soldiers and everyday citizens across the world.”

Dora’s eyes flashed in anger as if I had just tricked her. I couldn’t help but smile. She wanted to insult me as usual but now I was the boss and she needed something. That’s why she was there.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just been reading the paper. It makes me wonder about the world.”

Dora sat there in her overwide chair wrestling with her feelings. She had had only one way to respond to me for a year and a half before and now her tongue was bound to get bloody—she had to bite down on it so hard. Who was I to be thinking about the world? Who was I to play games with her?

“I have an AI degree from M.I.T.,” she said. “That means—”

“Artificial intelligence,” I said. I had been watching late night anime for years.

Dora’s eye creased in anger but she went on. “And I know that InfoMargins has an AI research center in New Mexico.”

“I didn’t know you went to M.I.T.”

“I, I don’t tell people…”

Like me, I thought.

I didn’t say anything. I could barely concentrate on the young woman’s conversation. I was thinking about that button on that radio. Why had Bron chosen me?

“Well?” Dora asked.

“You can still call me Trent,” I said.

“What?”

“Isn’t that what you asked me?”

“I asked you about a transfer to the AI department in the New Mexico office.”

“You just told me what you studied,” I said. “And Shiloh does not own InfoMargins, it’s the other way round. I couldn’t transfer you if I wanted to.”

“Mr. Lessing said that he could do it,” she said.

“Then why didn’t he?”

Dora might have lied. She might have said that he left before he was able to make good on his promise. But she stalled, hesitated. She even blushed with anger … and something else.

“I only have my B.S.,” she said at last. “Their scientists all have Ph.D.s.”

I remember thinking at that time, before so many hundreds of millions had died, that Dora found it difficult to lie; that she was what we called a good person, an honest citizen.

“Then why not go back to school?” I asked.

“I don’t have the money,” she said. “I thought that if I could get a, a job at the lab I could prove myself and get them to send me. They have assistants there. I read about it online.”

“And what was Lessing waiting for?”

Dora froze. Too much had happened too quickly for her to trust me. This coming to my office was an attempt at using the power she had over me before the change that a meteorite had wrought. Just a quick request and a friendly smile …

“I’ll think about it,” I said. “Get back to me next month sometime.”

“Next month?”

“Or the month after,” I added.

“Okay,” she said standing quickly before I could make it even later. “Thank you … Trent.”

She left and I sat back in my space-age chair. I closed my eyes trying to think around the ramifications of that button I proposed. I had already decided to eradicate the human race but there were questions about the pain and guilt. If I could figure a way around the suffering and dread that would certainly attend the annihilation of humanity the guilt would not weigh so heavily upon me.

I decided to ask Bron how we might create an odorless gas that could somehow be released simultaneously around the world. Everyone all at once might fall asleep and the Stelladren would multiply supplying all existence with soul bridges traveled by beings of all kinds. The human race would go down in the annals of infinity as the martyred people who saved God.

While I was thinking, my right hand drummed on the bumpy armrest inside the chair. I hit a nub and something began to move. When I opened my eyes I saw that a semi-opaque screen was lowering in front of my face. On the screen was a menu:

• Television

• Newspapers

• Company Files

• Employees

• Personal

The TV function was great. I could see any show that had played within the last twenty-four hours. There were newspapers from around the world (translated!). I checked on my employee file. There was no surprise there. Every quarter Hugo Velázquez made a similar entry:

Mr. Tryman’s work habits are sloppy and his comprehension of the projects is below standard. He’s usually on time to work and he stays late when his projects are behind (which is often) but many of his sick days come on Mondays and Fridays or before a holiday and he doesn’t get along well with his fellow workers …

Not once had he recommended me for a promotion and I never received one. Twice he suggested my termination but his supervisor, a Lillian Porter, overrode the suggestion before it made its way up the ladder.

I read my file obsessively. Hugo did not report the days I stayed late to finish jobs that he’d bungled. He never even suggested a pay raise. I wasn’t real to him. I could tell by the clipped language he used to describe me and my work. He resented taking the time to compose an evaluation.

Of course why shouldn’t he look down on me? There I was plunging into middle-age without anything positive to say about what I’d done or where I’d been. My life was not even on the level of ordinary. I was a lonely creature wallowing in a hole I’d dug for myself.

In Lessing’s Personal File there was a list of eight women’s names. Of these I recognized two: Trina Mallory and Dora Martini.

I moved a hand-shaped cursor via a tiny mouse pad to Dora’s name. After a moment her name flickered and then an edited film began playing; an amateur film made with hidden cameras.

It was in Lessing’s office. Dora was leaning over his desk with her red dress hiked up over bare buttocks. Lessing was behind her with his pants down and an erection so stiff that it was pointing up toward the ceiling. When he pressed himself down and into her the POV switched to another hidden camera so that the focus was now on the young M.I.T. graduate’s face. Her humiliation changed quickly to pain. Lessing was fucking her hard enough to make her body jolt from the successive impacts.

I don’t know how long it went on because after half a minute of her degradation I turned off the recording and deleted it along with the other names.

Lessing’s chair felt tainted, diseased. I climbed out of the space-age egg and went around to one of the visiting thrones. I had been allowed a glimpse into a torture chamber, a place I was not supposed to see. Bron had, overnight, created an overview of the shallow scum that we lived in. We preyed on each other just like we preyed on the planet and all its myriad life-forms.

I got behind the desk again, not sitting in Lessing’s chair.

“Trina?” I said into the intercom.

“Yes, Mr. Tryman?”

“Are you busy?”

“No, sir. I mean I’m working here but—”

“Could you come in a minute please?”

I went back to my Chinese throne and when Trina came in I indicated for her to sit across from me. She was wearing green that day. My heart thumped and I felt guilty. She sat with practiced grace smiling, inviting.

I wondered if Lessing, a small unimpressive-looking white man, had called her just like this and said that if she wanted to keep her job she’d have to pull up her skirts and bend over the desk.

She was looking so pleasantly at me. There was no trepidation in that gaze.

“Do you like this job?” I asked.

“Yes … of course I do.”

“And Mr. Lessing … was he a good boss?”

“Very good.”

It came to me that while I worried about Trina’s well-being at the same time I was contemplating the destruction of the world. These two gestures seemed to be the same. My desire for reparations included both life and death.

“Do we have access to classes that teach people how to be better, more understanding managers?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” Trina said. “Mogen Institute. They’re on retainer from InfoMargins.”

“I’d like you to make sure that Miguel Corvessa and Hugo Velázquez go there. Miguel for training and Hugo for retraining. And I’d like you to tell Miss Martini, she’s in the data entry department—”

“I know,” Trina said. “She’s been up here before today.”

It was her one admission about Lessing. Of course Trina knew her. Dora had come, probably more than once to Lessing’s office. Maybe Trina heard the screams.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell her that we’ll see if InfoMargin’s AI sector would welcome a transfer. Call them and ask. If they aren’t interested maybe we could see about sending her back to school.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Trina, how much do we pay you?”

“Fifty-four five, sir.”

“I want to pay you eighty. Fill out the paperwork and I’ll sign it.”

“I’m not sure that accounting will allow it, Mr. Tryman. They always made Mr. Lessing raise salaries in increments.”

“I have a lot more pull than Lessing,” I said.

I moved my head in a certain way and she took this as a dismissal.

At the door she stopped and said, “Thank you, sir,” as if she had forgotten and felt embarrassed.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I was looking at your permanent record … you deserve the raise.”

“I had some clothes delivered that I think will fit you,” she said with a real smile on her lips.

“Great,” I said. “Leave them outside. I’ll get them later on.”

I was distracted by the screen on my computer.

Friend Hogarth?

Yes, Bron?

I have traveled far and wide, my brother. I have convened with living stars and been lectured to by intelligent viruses. I have been to a galaxy that is comprised of one great semisentient stone and I have met on the battlefield with warrior clans that revel in brave and glorious death.

And what did all these beings have to say?

That you are right. That once the human race is gone there will be no reliable way for us to assure the protection of the Stelladren.

And so what is your decision?

It is sad. Instead of planning a masterstroke to eradicate all human life we must disrupt the direction in which the world is going. We must frighten your race and retard its present path.

What will we do?

You are my brother, friend Hogarth. You have taken my Mission into your heart. But you are human too. It has been suggested that I merely direct you so that you will not be aware of the moment when you will bring about global restructuring.

I sat back again in Lessing’s chair. Bron’s request frightened me though I could not say why.

But, Bron, I have seen the Stelladren. I know what must be done.

Yes. You and I are one in our purpose but all humans suffer the bane of duality. Being isolated, alienated, and alone all humans are at the same time One and the Other. Because of this nature you present a challenge to my time-sense. If you were to see clearly the plans I make for this world you might at the last moment draw back instinctively. And in that event such power might be released that the Stelladren may be damaged. It would be better for you, brother Hogarth, to remain ignorant as you were when you released the infection called Scarlet Death.

Why did you have me release that pathogen, Bron?

To prepare you for your destiny. You had to feel what it was like to cause the deaths of innocents.

I had no idea of what you were doing that time, Bron, but now I know something. I know that something terrible will happen if the Stelladren are allowed to die. I know that we have to take violent measures to ensure their survival.

You will be lulled, brother. Live your new life. Now and again I will ask you to do something. At some point this action will matter but often it will be a meaningless motion. That way you will never know when you are delivering the final stroke.

I considered Bron’s request for many long minutes. Looking back on it now it wasn’t much time to think about the fates of so many millions, billions really. But it seemed like a long time to me. Finally I decided that I was a soldier, a drone. My job was to move forward, to trust Bron to save the Stelladren.

Okay, Bron. I will move through the darkness seeing only your light. That will be enough.

Thank you, brother. Now you are free to go about your life.

We conversed for long hours after that. Bron wanted to know about my personal history. He asked about Nancy Yee and my mother, about friends I’d had in college and about college itself. Most aspects of humanity were alien to him. His race was immediate and physical in their education and communication. To know something all they had to do was touch. And because of the soul-weaving of the Stelladren across space and time his people were able to experience life on myriad planes of existence. Their trade and commerce was the sharing of souls.

Bron?

Yes, friend Hogarth?

Do any humans experience the gift of the Stelladren?

Most of your fellow humans, and some other Earth creatures, feel the touch of the Stelladren through their dreams. This is because Terran minds are not yet able to accept the immensity of life. Most DNA-based life-forms live inside material constructs and experience the world through primitive senses that cannot pierce the veil of being.

Every now and then during our discourse I wondered if Bron was actually some socially inept nerd genius who just needed a friend and happened upon me. It might have been. But then I’d remember the meteorite and the vision of the Stelladren. No human being could evoke such splendor and not himself be imbued by grace.

I asked Bron to give me full control of Shiloh so that I could send people to school and raise salaries as I saw fit. I wanted him to fire Arnold Lessing and to make sure that no one else would ever hire him again. Oddly, he suggested that I start a messenger pigeon loft on top of my building because he felt that it would do me good to connect with my mother and other friends in this primitive fashion. I could send my friends and family off with pigeons and they could send me little notes. I couldn’t see how this might damage the world and so I agreed without trepidation.

I left my office well after ten that night. On Trina’s chair there was a wide white bag with a shirt, jacket, and trousers that fit me almost perfectly.

On the long walk back to my apartment near Gramercy Park I thought about speaking suns and tiny minds so small that you couldn’t even see the thinkers. Then I remembered Bron saying how primitive human senses really were.

My mind drifted toward the images I had seen of the Stelladren and their lights. This memory exhilarated and at the same time dwarfed me. I was miniscule, a mote drawn up by a breeze or a beam of light. There was no decision for me to make. What Bron said to me was truth, I had no question about that, I could not question it.

Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and spun around. There I faced a huge man who had a smaller man standing beside him. The big man took me by the shoulder and slammed me against the wall.

“Give us your money!” the smaller man, who was black, shouted.

The big white guy slapped me for emphasis.

I grabbed for my pocket to pull out whatever money I had. But all my cash was in my other, larger pants.

“Hurry it up!” the little black man said.

“Hold it!” yet another man shouted.

I looked up to see a copper-skinned man in a nice suit holding a small pistol and pointing it at the big man’s face. The white man’s heavy features hardened. The black man reached for his pocket and my protector turned, almost casually shooting the would-be thief through his hand. The sound of the shot was hardly a pop.

The black man hollered and ran down the street holding his hand and dripping blood on the sidewalk.

The white man began backing away slowly, watching the pistol as he did so.

The copper man watched the big white man until he too turned and fled.

I looked at my savior feeling both fear and gratitude.

Taller than I by a few inches, he was slender but gave the impression of strength. I knew he was deadly because I had seen how accurate and cavalier he was about shooting a man. He was handsome, probably South or Central American, and completely concentrated on the task at hand. When he was sure that the muggers were gone for good he turned his unwavering gaze to me.

“Are you all right, Mr. Tryman?”

I was standing there gripping the empty fabric of my pockets, clenching my sphincter so I wouldn’t soil myself … again—and then this man out of nowhere says my name.

“Do I know you?”

“No, sir. I’m Robert George, your bodyguard.”

“I have a bodyguard? Since when?”

“I was contacted yesterday. By the time I had prepared to meet you it was after hours and I had no one to make the proper introductions. So I waited and followed you. Lucky I did.”

“Where are you from, Mr. George?”

“Venezuela originally but I’ve been in the United States for some time.”

I stared at him a moment or two.

“We should be going, sir,” he said.

As we walked I noticed that we were following the trail of blood left by the black mugger.

“Shouldn’t we call the police or something?”

“No, sir. The thief won’t say what happened. It would be a waste of your time to file a complaint. And I don’t need the headache of explaining why I fired my weapon.”

“Okay,” I said and Robert George lifted his hand and waved.

A dark Lincoln pulled to the curb next to us. A slender white guy in a chauffeur’s cap and a tan suit jumped out and opened the door for me. Robert George got in on the other side next to me and told the driver where to go.

On the way he explained that the main office at InfoMargins had reason to believe that I might be in danger and so they assigned the driver and bodyguard.

They let me off at my building and the driver, Liam, asked at what time should he pick me up.

“I come down around eight fifteen,” I said.

“I’ll be here by seven,” Liam told me. His hair was both red and brown and his eyes were green.

“See you in the morning, sir,” Robert George said.

*   *   *

IT ALL MADE SENSE by the time I got to bed. Bron was worried that I’d be killed by some accident or mugger. He probably saw the muggers coming at me with his time-sense. He put a guard on me and provided a driver to protect his investment.

Robert George and Liam were new people in my life. I didn’t make new friends often. I didn’t know many people. I used to have more friends when I was in my twenties and just out of college. But as time went on and I stayed the same people drifted away from me. I met someone now and again and we’d connect in some way; either we’d go to movies or bowling for a while. But for all my fat there was never much to hold on to.

I knew right off, though, that it would be different with Liam and Robert George. They worked for me. They’d be there every morning, waiting. I liked that idea and, then again, I felt exposed because it revealed how empty my life was.

After a sleepless hour in bed I got up and went online. I spent the rest of the night looking up white messenger pigeons. They were big for their family, a pound or more. They had been known to travel over fifteen hundred miles in just two days to make it back home. Messenger pigeons were used by generals in every war up to and including Vietnam and they never failed.

This notion intrigued me. The secret of success was hard-coded into a messenger pigeon’s genes. They didn’t fail because it was in their nature to return home and humans needed that constancy.

I was drawn to the idea of these birds; their sense of home and their unerring intention, their instinct. I felt akin to them in some way that I couldn’t define. I thought of Bron coming to consciousness on a mountaintop and descending because he knew, instinctively, that this was his destiny.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. I ordered pigeon chicks and a prefabricated loft for the birds. I didn’t know how I was going to get access to the roof but I had stopped worrying about things like that. Bron would get me access. After the past two weeks I came to understand that my friend could do almost anything … anything but destroy the world.

*   *   *

“MR. TRYMAN,” SOMEONE CALLED as I was going down the stairs in the morning.

It was my upstairs neighbor, Ralph Moore. His apartment was on the top floor. He was the one who could give me access to the roof.

“Hey,” I said.

“I spoke to your lawyer yesterday.”

“Really? Yesterday?”

“Yes. It was a very good offer … very good. I said I’d sign. I know your stipulations and I’ll be out by the first of the month.”

“Do you think I could get up on the roof before then?” I asked.

“Your lawyer mentioned that too,” the sandy-haired white man said. He was younger than I, an architect. We’d had one conversation when he bought the place above mine and then he never really talked to me again. But now he was all smiles and friendliness.

“I hear that you’re the president of that company you worked for,” he said.

“Vice president.”

“Yeah but the vice president in charge of the holding company, right? Justin Mack isn’t it?”

“I have to go, Mr. Moore. Thanks for accepting my, uh, terms.”

“How did you make VP?” he asked, rushing down to the step just above mine.

I turned away and walked down the stairs. It wasn’t that I was angry at Ralph. But what was I supposed to say? That I was given the promotion in order the slaughter as many humans as it took to save a genus of jellyfish?

Liam and R.G. (as I came to call Robert George) were waiting for me. People up and down the street and from the windows of my building glanced my way wondering idly what had happened to allow me to take a limo to work.

*   *   *

“MR. TRYMAN?”

“Yes, Trina?”

“Miguel Corvessa is downstairs. He says that he wants to speak to you.”

*   *   *

“HEY, BRO, THIS IS BAD,” Miguel said as he strolled into my office. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt that was a size too big and black trousers with a pale green belt. His cross-trainers were brilliant white.

Miguel threw himself on my heavily padded rose sofa and put his legs up on the backrest.

“This is the life.”

Miguel was everything that I was not: young, svelte, strong, absolutely sure of himself, his family, his God. His skin was the color of rose gold. Two of his teeth were edged in yellow gold.

“Check out the egg chair,” I told him.

The young Mexican rolled to his feet, strode across the room, and sat back in the chair. At first he just luxuriated in the space-age padding but then I reached in and engaged the viewing screen.

“Hey, man,” Miguel said. “This is bad. Oh shit. It’s got a TV. He got porno on this thing?”

“Not anymore.”

Miguel climbed out from under the screen and went to the window.

“I dream about shit like this, Trent man,” he said, looking out over the Hudson. “How did you get it?”

“I, uh … sold my soul to the devil,” I said.

My only work friend turned around to gawp at me.

“No,” he said, his eyes open wide and his splayed hands raised above his chest.

“No,” I agreed. “It’s just I have this friend who I used to go to college with. He was always rich and his father owns a lot of stock in InfoMargins. He just found out that I was working here and made the right moves.”

“It wasn’t the meteor?” Miguel asked.

I went to one of Chinese thrones and sat. Miguel drifted over and settled across from me.

“Bron, that’s my friend, called me the day before the meteorite and told me that it was going to happen. Later on, after it was reported, he told me that they had a better telescope than the Hubble and he was showing off but that was after the news report. I guess I got kinda scared when I heard you and Dora talking about it.”

“Damn. You one lucky dude, man. One day you’re at a desk doin’ nuthin’ and the next you got all this. You get Dora too?”

“What?”

“She told me one night that she was doin’ Lessing, man. She said that he was a pig but he promised her this good job. But you know that pendejo just wanted her pussy, man. Then she comes to see you and the next day they tell her she got her job. I guess I figured Trent got him some.”

I was never jealous of Miguel. His family had moved to Jersey City from Tijuana when he was only six. His father worked in the rubble of the World Trade Center and died of lung disease just three years later. After that Miguel started working to make money for his mother and younger siblings.

Dora didn’t dislike me because I was black. It was more, or less, than that. Miguel had a life inside him. He wasn’t destined for riches. Dora would have never married him. But she gave him something better—her trust.

“You just visiting, Miguel?”

“No, man. I got a call from this Mallory chick. She said that they wanna send me to management school, that they’ll pay me to go to school for two years.”

“Yeah?”

“You do that, man?”

“Yeah.”

“How come you do that for me?” Corvessa sat forward in the chair with clasped hands and no smile.

“Why not?”

“You just do it? You call up your girl Mallory and tell her to do this and you don’t even know why? What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t say anything except I thought you’d make a good manager.”

“What I do to make you think somethin’ like that?”

“You saw that I felt different after the meteorite appeared. You call me bro.”

Miguel was studying my face. He was trying to understand my new position, my power.

“This is crazy, man,” he said at last. “I’m a mail clerk. I don’t even got no GED.”

“So? Don’t you think you could do what Hugo does?”

“That fat fuck couldn’t find his butt hole with a whole roll of toilet paper.”

I laughed. It was my first real laugh in quite a while.

“If I fuck up,” Miguel asked, “will you be in trouble?”

“No. Don’t worry about that. I got this job forever … until the end of the world.”

“You sound crazy, bro. How come you lost so much weight?”

“I got sick and after that I haven’t been too hungry.”

Again my friend watched me, pondering.

“Listen, Miguel, I need to ask you something.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yeah. Of course. Don’t you?”

“What if, what if God came to you and told you to do something terrible? Not even God but one of his angels.”

“He told Abraham to kill his son. He had Moses drown the Pharaoh’s armies. He killed Christ to save you and me.” Miguel face was vulnerable, even adoring.

“So you would do anything?”

“Yes.”

“And what if God wasn’t like they said?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if God was like a tree in somebody’s backyard?” I asked. “I mean he could live forever but only if somebody came out with a hose every day and put water in the ground and made sure that all the bugs and gophers were gone?”

“I’d move in that house and have a hundred sons. And I would tell every one of them that they had to keep that tree safe.” Miguel was breathing harder, his eyes were fever bright. “You know, man, sometimes I think about that when I’m in the church, bro. I see that blond Jesus and the pictures of God reaching out with his hands. Why he got to have hands, man? He’s God not a man.”

We sat in the wake of Miguel’s divine question. It struck me that in Miguel’s mind we were still equals. He wasn’t daunted by my newfound power and wealth.

“You want me to go to that school?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll tell them to pay you a manager’s salary and to make sure you get your GED.”

“Did you talk to God, Trent?”

“I don’t know, Miguel.”

*   *   *

THAT AFTERNOON DORA CAME for a meeting. She went around the desk and kissed me on the lips. It was only a peck but ten thousand miles from how she felt about me a month before.

“Sit,” I said and she skipped to her throne.

She was wearing a small white dress that accented her slim figure.

“Thank you, Trent,” she said.

I got out of the egg chair because it seemed too distant, too impersonal. When I rolled back into the opposite throne it was as if I were still a fat man. But I wasn’t that anymore. I smiled at myself but Dora thought I was doing it for her.

“Thank you so much, Trent.”

I yawned.

“Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping much since the promotion. A lot to catch up on.”

“I bet.”

My mind had become like the fractured vision through a prism or maybe the thousand images that a housefly resisters with each glance. I had already killed nearly three hundred people. I had looked up sixty-three of their names in my egg chair. I knew their families and their jobs. I listed them in the personal area on the egg chair computer. The Stelladren were floating in my mind and Mink and Shawna were there too. I was also thinking about messenger pigeons and their uncanny abilities.

I hadn’t masturbated in two weeks.

“Trent?”

“Yes, Dora?”

“Are you listening to me?” There was a little of the old edge in her voice.

I remembered the times that she snorted and sniffed at me, it was almost a daily occurrence.

One day she came up to my desk and asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

“You went to college, at least that’s what you say. You’ve been working here for almost eleven years. I mean you don’t even need a high school degree to enter numbers on a screen. Why do I always have to wait for you? I could be making a double bonus if you could just concentrate for ten minutes out of an hour.”

She had decided that I was no threat to her. I would never yell or scream or be able to outtalk her. I was a fat loser. It wasn’t because I was black or a man or even middle-aged. I was just a loser in her eyes.

If I hadn’t shared her opinion I might have been angry.

“I’m sorry,” I said in reply to her barbed question on the seventy-sixth floor. “But I just told you. I haven’t been sleeping. A month ago I was a data entry clerk like you with no future and no past to speak of. I don’t have a girlfriend or a dog or any brothers or sisters or hardly anyone else I can call to say that I’ve been made vice president of a cutting-edge corporation. You know I have a driver and a bodyguard and a personal assistant who I smiled at every day for four years and she never remembered me once.”

My voice got louder as I spoke. Dora moved back a little in her chair.

“So that’s why,” I said in a calmer tone, “I don’t … I find it hard to listen. I mean look out of this window. That’s my window. I have three uncashed checks in my drawer. I take home eighty-four thousand dollars a week, after taxes. Eighty-four thousand…”

Dora’s eyes were frowning while her mouth was attempting to smile. She was very pretty. Not gorgeous like Trina or sexy like Mink and Shawna but she had the good looks of a perfect girlfriend, one that was bound to leave you at the most unpredictable, worst possible moment.

I hated her. It wasn’t her fault, not really. She’d never been kind to me but she was a child in a world that wouldn’t play fair. I knew these things and hated her anyway.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Dora,” I said. “We never really got along you know.”

“I’m sorry about … how I treated you,” she said then.

It came to me that we were talking to each other as people for maybe the first time.

“No you aren’t,” I said.

“Why won’t you let me thank you?” she asked miserably. “Why won’t you let me apologize?”

“Because if nothing had changed, if I was still down on the fourth floor with you, you would have never have apologized or thanked me for bringing you coffee on the days it was my turn. All you care about is the AI lab in New Mexico and the power I have to send you there.”

“Then why help me?” she asked with fear in her eyes. The fear I thought was the honesty she brought to bear. Maybe I’d take away what I’d given.

I was like a minor god in her life right then; the loose cannon kind of god one feared rather than loved.

“Lessing took videos of you and him on this desk,” I said. “There’s a camera right over there that he had pointed at your face while he did … what he did.”

Dora’s gray eyes opened impossibly wide. She brought her hands to her mouth. I waited for some other response but none came.

“I erased it,” I said. “There were others. I erased them all. I figured he owed you something. Not me. I don’t owe you a thing. I don’t like you. But what difference does that make? I don’t have to like somebody to do the right thing. And, and I don’t have to hate someone to hurt them. All I have to do is what I have to do. Do you understand me, Dora?”

“You erased them?”

“Yes.”

“Did you watch the whole thing?”

“No. No. When I realized what it was I turned it off and erased it. I didn’t even look at the others. He’s been fired. You have your transfer to AI.”

It was a monumental task for Dora to take her hands away from her mouth. It took long minutes for her to navigate around the humiliation. She looked away from me, down at the floor.

“You’ve lost more weight,” she said at last.

“Don’t sleep, don’t eat.”

“The new clothes look good on you.”

“Thanks.”

*   *   *

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I got four dozen messenger pigeon chicks and put together the loft on the roof of my building, with the help of Liam and R.G. I started visiting my mother once a week in Long Island City and I had lunch every Tuesday with Miguel at fancy restaurants all over the financial district. The school he was in had its offices across the street from our main building.

Every morning I’d go to a diner around the corner from my house to get coffee before Liam came at ten to pick me up for work. R.G. was always around somewhere watching me but I rarely saw him.

It was at the diner that I met Marla. Actually I had been seeing Marla for more than a year at the counter. I sometimes said hello to which she would smile and give a brief nod. But we never really spoke until after I met Bron.

I usually sat at the counter which was Marla’s post. Before Bron I went once a week or so to the diner, Freddy’s Fantastic Foods, but now that I was rich and mostly at leisure I could go every day for my coffee.

It was when my chicks were six weeks old that Marla finally spoke to me.

“You lost weight, huh?”

She was deep brown with a healthy figure, not at all fat but full and firm. She wasn’t what I’d call pretty but she had a very nice smile.

“Yeah,” I said still shy of strangers and the disapproval hiding behind their eyes.

“And now you’re wearing nice clothes,” she said. “You look nice.”

I saw in Marla a dozen women who over the years had tried to engage with me. I never could do conversation right. I always ended up saying something off, awkward. My gut would clench and I could hear the molars grinding in my ear.

“Thank you,” I said with gasping breath. “It’s so nice that a beautiful young woman like you would notice someone like me.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing … I guess. You know I think coming here in the morning is the best part of my day.”

“What do you do?” Marla asked. She wore a brown dress under a blue apron and had her hair tied back into a bun the size and shape of a baseball.

“I used to do data entry but I got a promotion lately…”

“That sounds good.”

“Yeah. But there’s all this responsibility. You know. Where you from?”

“Atlanta. I moved up here wit’ my boyfriend and then he took off wit’ this girl who I thought was my friend. I fount some’a her clothes in his pocket and I left.”

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Two years.”

“Why didn’t you go back home?”

“’Cause my boyfriend and Giselle moved back there. I just didn’t even wanna see them no more.”

“Could I take you out to dinner sometime, Marla?”

“Dog … you work fast, huh?”

I didn’t want to but I looked down. I was more cowed by the rejection of a young woman than I was by the potential deaths of millions.

“Don’t look all sad,” Marla said. “I don’t even know your last name yet. Just talk to me some more. Gimme a couple days.”

*   *   *

“HOW’S YOUR NEW JOB, HONEY?” my mother asked. She was smiling, unconcerned.

Her apartment was a one-room studio. At sixty-seven she had pared her life down to a sofa bed, a small maple table with two matching chairs, a red Moroccan carpet, and a Zenith TV with cable connection. She rarely ate at home going out with one or another of her friends from her answering service job almost every night of the week.

Selma was her name and she was the only one of her thirteen brothers and sisters who ever read a book from cover to cover.

She had given me her apartment but only because it was cheaper to live in L.I.C. and she thought that if she didn’t like it she could get her old place back from me.

“It’s okay, Mom. You need any money?”

“No, baby. I’m okay. You keepin’ that weight off, huh? Remembah not to eat too much now. The problem with a whole lotta people is not losin’ it in the first place but keepin’ it off.”

“Do you still go to church, Mom?”

“Every Sunday except last November. I had the flu so bad the first two weeks and then there was Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas shopping. I only went once in November but you know I believe that Jesus forgives us for bein’ weak sometimes.”

My mother, round and black with tight shiny skin that seemed like it might pop at any second. I didn’t feel love for her even though she always said that she loved me. We only talked if I called her. We never saw each other unless I came out to Long Island City.

“Do you think that God knows you, Mama?”

“Say what?”

“Do you think he knows your name?”

“God knows everything.”

“Yeah, but … do you see him sitting up on his throne wondering where Selma Tryman is at right this moment? Do you think that he’s listening to you right now?”

My mother’s lips twisted as if she had a bad taste on her tongue. She moved her shoulders defensively.

“What’s the problem, honey?” she asked, managing to smile again.

I could have wiped that smile off her face. I could have said that I didn’t think that God would see her among the uncounted trillions upon trillions out in the universe. God wouldn’t know her from a shark tail or a leaf falling in the forest.

“I bought you this, Mom,” I said.

I took the drab green tarp off the big cage holding two of my messenger pigeons.

“Doves,” my mother said with real joy in her voice.

“Messenger pigeons, Mom. They have these little clips on their left legs and here”—I handed her a tiny sheaf of flimsy papers—“you can use these to write me little notes. The birds will come home to my loft when you let them go.”

My mother, who often smiled but never laughed, grinned broadly for me.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “This is the most wonderful thing you ever give me.”

*   *   *

SIX MONTHS AFTER Bron decided to spare at least a part of the human race I still had not been given a mission. I slept no more than three hours a night. Every time I dozed off I’d come awake suddenly with the image of masses of corpses heaped up on the streets of New York.

I communicated with Bron almost every day. We talked about his home and hundreds of other planets he’d visited with his mind. I told him how much I loved the messenger pigeons.

Almost every day Liam and I would drive the birds farther and farther away from the loft; a different direction each day. They always made it home; most of the time before we did. I was up to fifty miles in half a year.

Bron asked me questions about the birds. Some of these were revealing of his alien nature.

Do they speak to you, friend Hogarth?

Do you mean like you and I, Bron? Like us putting down words on this computer screen?

Words?

Yes. Words.

I do not know what words are. Are you using words to communicate with me?

How do you express yourself to me, Bron?

I think into the last wisp of light from the Stelladron that once embraced my people. It translates my ideas to your device.

When you communicate with InfoMargins haven’t you had to understand the concept of words?

I don’t communicate with them the way I do with you, brother. I simply give directives.

How do you do that? I mean why would they listen to you?

The reason all humans listen … the potential to acquire value.

Money?

Just so.

But how did you get money here on Earth?

I imagined it existed and it did. Your machines are wonderful things. They hum a simple song that I can sing along with.

How much money did you imagine, Bron?

I have a mission for you, brother. Tomorrow you will stay at home and receive a cardboard box. You will take this box to a Union Express delivery service office and have it delivered to the address that will come in an envelope with the box.

What’s in the box, Bron?

Nothing of any importance, friend Hogarth.

*   *   *

THE NEXT MORNING THE BOX CAME. The man who brought it wore gray overalls with no insignia. He had a swarthy complexion that could have come from anywhere. He was a decade past handsome but his salt-and-pepper mustache was stylish and his eyes were dark.

“Where’s this from?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer.

“Who sent it?”

He smiled apologetically. Either he didn’t speak English or he was told not to.

Bron didn’t say for me not to open the carton and so I slit the binding tape with a serrated kitchen knife. The box contained twelve clear bottles made from thick glass. The bottles were separated from each other by wrapping bubbles and filled to their metal tops with clear liquid. The address was a post office box in St. Petersburg, Russia. I dithered around for three hours and then called Liam to take me to the Union Express office.

“Liam,” I said on the way to the delivery office.

“Yes, Mr. Tryman.”

“How long have you been driving limos?”

“Ever since I got out of the army. I was a commando you know.”

“Where?”

“All over the world but I was in the U.S. Army,” he said easily, his mild brogue in evidence. “They don’t know a foot from an arse but they have good weapons and muscle to spare.”

“When you were a soldier you took orders, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you ever, ever disobey?”

He pulled the car to the curb in front of the delivery service office and sat there obviously considering my question.

“No,” he said. “But then again I did things that I would na do again.”

“Do you regret things you’ve done?”

He turned around putting his elbow on the back of his seat. He was wearing a yellow suit and a pale green shirt that day.

“Regrets are the easy way out. You shed a tear but the children who seen ya shed blood on their own land still suffer.”

I thought he was going to say more but he didn’t.

If I was at home I wouldn’t have sent those bottles off. But there I was at the service already. I got out and sent Bron’s package.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT I SAT UP WORRYING about those bottles, about the poison they no doubt contained. Would wiping out a city in Russia somehow save jellyfish off the coast of Africa?

At four in the morning I messaged Bron.

What was in those bottles?

Water.

I don’t believe you.

I am not lying, friend Hogarth.

Okay. I’m sorry. I just. I’m just worried.

Do not worry. Tend to your birds. Enjoy your wealth and your friends.

I said okay and good-bye but I didn’t believe my friend. For the next week I looked up St. Petersburg on the Internet a dozen times a day. After that I expanded my search through all of Russia and then in the rest of the world looking for sudden deadly contagions. Nothing showed up.

After twenty days of little to no sleep my fingertips began to go numb.

All this time I went on with my life, losing weight constantly, seeing my few friends, and tending to my birds. My pigeons were mostly snow white. A few had markings: a black feather or a peacock blue collar. They also had personalities and other subtle differences. My favorite was Dodger. He evaded me for the first few weeks when I tried to grab him and put on his message clip. But after a while he’d come to me cooing and cocking his head to look me in the eye.

I had gone on four dates with Marla. We went to the Bronx Zoo, Sag Harbor for an afternoon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and finally to the Blue Note to hear the fabulous bassist Ron Carter. We always took public transportation or cabs wherever we went. I didn’t want Marla to know the extent of my newfound wealth. I just wanted to be normal with her.

During a break between sets at the Blue Note Marla reached across the table and took my hands. I could barely feel the touch due to the growing numbness.

“How come you never kiss me, Trent?” she said.

“I…”

“Don’t you like me … like that?”

“I didn’t want to be forward,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I had sent twelve quarts of deadly poison to Russia. What right did I have to kiss anyone?

“Can we go to your place after the music?”

I nodded, unable to speak, and Marla smiled. Maybe she thought I was shy. I had been timid before but that was all washed away. I was a mass murderer now. I was on the verge of becoming the greatest villain in the history of the world.

*   *   *

“IT’S OKAY,” MARLA SAID when it became obvious that I could not achieve an erection. “You’re just nervous.”

I hadn’t had an orgasm in weeks. I hadn’t slept or eaten well or laughed or cried. All I could do was to wait for disaster. I put my arms around Marla’s reassuring dark body and held her.

“You’re cold,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re sick.”

*   *   *

WHEN MARLA HAD FALLEN ASLEEP I got up and walked around my new apartment, the one Bron bought from Ralph Moore. The architect had taken out most of the walls of this upper unit and installed huge picture windows. The small bedroom and the toilet were walled off but the rest of the vast apartment, which took up the whole upper floor, was open, airy.

I wrapped myself in a terry-cloth bathrobe and went up to the roof.

My birds cooed for me and I relaxed a moment. I took out the special food Bron helped me acquire that helped the birds develop superior strength and intelligence. I climbed into the loft with them as they slept and jostled. I sat for hours among my birds shivering in the cold.

When the sun began rising I went back down to the apartment.

Marla was still asleep. One of the reasons she had asked to come to my place that night was because she didn’t have to go to work the next day.

At 7:14 the doorbell rang. A delivery man brought in a box exactly like the one containing the bottles I had sent off to Russia.

This man was black and old, maybe seventy. He walked with a stooped-over gait.

“Tryman?” he asked after setting the heavy box down.

“Yeah.”

“You should get a elevator in this building,” the old man said. “It should be against the law not to have no elevators over three floors.”

“Who sent this?”

“I don’t know. I work for Dunster’s Delivery. They got this box and said for me to take it with no paperwork. I asked them if that wasn’t against the Patriot Act but they said they knew the guy.”

I gave the man a ten-dollar tip and then put the box into the closet across the way from the front door. This box would not go to Bron’s destination.

*   *   *

“TRENT!” MARLA CALLED OUT as I slid up behind and entered her with my bone-hard erection.

I was so excited that it felt as if I couldn’t stop bucking back and forth, in and out of her. I couldn’t speak either.

“Do you have a condom on, baby?”

“Yeah,” I huffed, stiff from my neck to my toes.

“Let me see!” She pushed back and then pulled away getting up to her knees.

I stayed on my side moving back and forth.

“You do have one on,” she said, surprised.

“I want you,” I said.

She pushed my shoulder and I was on my back; thin as a rail and straight as one too.

“Let me see it,” she said.

Marla rolled the bright yellow condom off my black erection. She smiled holding her hands out around it, not touching me, seemingly amazed that it stood up on its own.

“You like me, Trent?”

I nodded and she brought her hands together around my cock. The moment she touched me I began ejaculating.

“Dog,” Marla said. “Damn.”

I kept coming, crying out for her to grab me hard but she just smiled moving her fingers gently against the over-sensitized skin.

“Does it feel good?” she asked.

I couldn’t answer. I reached to hold myself but she held my hand back.

“You don’t need no help with that, Trent.”

I moaned then.

“You always come this much?”

“I’ve been thinking about you,” I said.

“You must’a been thinkin’ all mont’.”

*   *   *

IN THE NEXT THREE MONTHS I received six more cartons. Each one I stacked in the closet. Marla and I developed a relationship but I managed to keep her from finding out about my job. I didn’t let Liam drive me to work any longer and I told R.G. to keep an even lower profile.

I almost never slept.

I raised my birds and talked regularly to Bron but he never asked about the boxes after the first one and I never told him that I did not send them to Bamaco, Dijon, Galveston, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Lima, Peru.

The sex I had with Marla was the best I’d ever known. I don’t know how she felt about it. She would laugh at me after I’d come.

“Why do you laugh?” I once asked.

“You just get so excited,” she said. “Sometimes I get worried that you might be havin’ a heart attack or sumpin’.”

“That makes you laugh?”

“I’m just happy you like me so much,” she said, and then she kissed me.

*   *   *

THAT WAS A CRAZY PERIOD in my life. I had gone from fat to skinny, from traitor to my race to humanity’s last hope, from data entry to VP. I think that it was Liam who turned me from Bron’s Mission. The sadness in his voice and his refusal to wallow in regret …

In the end I was too small to contain the Mission to save God. Between my birds and my lover, Liam and R.G., Miguel and Hugo and Dora, I had become another man, a lesser man in many ways.

When I had made the decision to kill off humanity I felt big. I was more than anyone. I was willing to do something that no other villain had ever even imagined. I would kill everyone. I would do to mankind what they would do, albeit unawares, to uncounted dimensions.

But then I lost heart.

The boxes of poison stacked up in my closet. I didn’t know what danger they posed so I couldn’t throw them away or pour them down the drain.

After a year had passed, and boxes were stacked up to the closet ceiling, I never slept at all.

My vision was askew. Sometimes I’d stumble when walking.

“Why don’t you sleep, baby?” Marla would ask when I’d be sitting up in the bed at night.

“I’m going through a transition at work,” I’d say.

After a few nights of her pulling me down next to her I became good at pretending to sleep. I’d lie there listening to her gentle breathing, trying to figure out how it was that Bron planned to trick me.

Every night I would lay in bed, with or without Marla, my body thrumming from the lack of sleep and nutrition. I lived on candy bars and French fries. I should have gained weight but my body refused to digest the food. None of this bothered me. I’d accepted my fate. I was going to die and die soon but first I would figure out Bron’s plan and, somehow, stymie him.

But even here there was a contradiction—I still loved the Stelladren. I had only seen them once but their beauty was beyond anything I could imagine. They weren’t life like I was. They were a coming together of all sentience, far beyond the petty mucus of human potential. They were raised above me like Jesus stepping over horse dung.

But for all the love I felt for the Stelladren I could not kill Marla and Miguel.

My mother sent me brief messages of love and religious sentiment every other day and I had Liam return her pigeons.

I gave pigeons to all my friends and we communicated regularly with Liam running back and forth, returning the birds to their owners for future messages.

I asked Miguel via pigeon to get me a pistol. We never spoke about it. He just brought the gun to school one day, put it in a company pouch, and had it sent by interoffice mail to my desk. It was a .38 pistol, loaded and ready to fire.

I had come to think during my long nights of vampirelike repose that Bron must have needed me for some specific reason. He had all kinds of power without me. He controlled businesses and the lives of thousands. If he could deliver the bottles of poison to me then he could have sent them to their destinations around the world.

Maybe the bottles were a distraction. Maybe he had something else in mind. But regardless Bron had chosen me for a reason. He had put me in place so that I would do something to ensure his plans against humanity.

It came to me on a Wednesday that my death might be the only way to halt Bron’s machinations. He seemed to want to keep me alive. I had a bodyguard and a driver. Maybe if I killed myself at some important juncture I would be saving the human race.

*   *   *

LIFE FOR ME was like a beautiful and terrible dream for most of that year. I was rich and powerful, thin and protected. My lover believed that she knew me … and she did—except for my relationship with Bron. I went to work every day and saw Marla four nights a week. I told her everything about my life up to Bron’s intervention. Then I only made vague references to a small promotion for years of service.

I communicated with Bron almost every day. Our talks were meaningless—I knew. I was torn up inside over my betrayal of the Stelladren. They were magnificent beings, conduits to God. Their ultimate deaths would accompany my own I knew. This knowledge was the only reason I had not yet taken my life.

*   *   *

ONE NIGHT I SAT UP, suddenly aware that my birds were part of Bron’s plan. He had asked me to get them; that was his first request after agreeing to let some portion of the human race survive. At three in the morning I went up on the roof with a butcher’s knife planning to kill all of Bron’s messengers of death. I reached in and grabbed my favorite, Dodger, by his neck. He squawked but I just pressed his beak up with my thumb and slit his throat with a deep thrust. A drop of hot blood spurted out onto my cheek and the bird fluttered wildly for much longer than I would have thought possible.

After Dodger died I stood there on my roof paralyzed with a dead pigeon in one hand and the murder weapon in the other. My fingers and feet and face were all numb. I could feel the blood moving painfully in my veins.

When the sky began to lighten I went down to my old apartment and rooted around until I found a packet of note cards that my mother had given me many years ago—before I went to work for Shiloh Statistics. They were cream colored with my name printed in blue across the top: HOGARTH TRYMAN. The only printed evidence left of my real name.

Dear Marla,

It is because I love you that I cannot see you again. I am a very very bad person. I have done terrible things. I have murdered and covered it up. I have betrayed everyone. I have plotted against my fellow man and I can no longer live with it. I love you and I always will in threads of light from a dark dark sea.

Trent “Hogarth” Tryman

I sealed the note into an envelope, placed a stamp upon it, and addressed it to the diner. I took the pistol from a drawer and put it in my pocket.

I mailed the letter not three blocks from my apartment planning to kill myself then and there. But instead I started walking in the dawning light. I was going to kill myself on the street so that everyone could see me. Bron couldn’t get at me if I was dead, maybe then his plans would be undone. I was weak and staggery, tingling, numb, thrumming, and deeply rueful over the murder of Dodger and the fate my decision would have across the planes of existence.

Twice I walked in front of cars heedless of the stoplights but alert drivers managed to hit their brakes before slamming into me. As the morning grew thousands of people flooded the streets with their noise and their ignorance.

My forearms were trembling.

My heart felt like a thirsty dog’s tongue lapping up water.

I know that I must have been talking to myself because people were staring at me, moving out of my way. This made me laugh. In a moment of intuition I realized that this was how I had felt about myself for years: a mumbling loser walking down the streets shunned by anyone who saw me coming—my mother and the newspaper vendor, the dog walker and the dog—by everyone except Bron who only wanted to use me.

“I’m the killer!” I shouted.

A woman walking past me jumped and yelped.

“I have killed and I would kill again.”

Men and women moved away from me and even though I understood why I was still enraged that they were not listening.

I pulled out my .38 and people began running.

“Watch out!” a man shouted and I shot him for not urging people to pay attention.

I laughed at him looking at me with shock in his eyes. I didn’t mean to laugh. I knew that the papers and the news would report that “the madman laughed as he shot his victims.”

People were yelling, running. I backed around in a tight circle shooting now and then. I was dizzy and feeling drunk. When the bullets were all gone I decided to walk on. There were people lying on the sidewalk around me. I would walk until someone killed me. That would show Bron.

*   *   *

I WOKE UP IN A WHITE ROOM, in a big bed, in a straightjacket, alone. I was very tired and my head hurt. I appreciated the restraints. Maybe that would keep me from destroying the world.

I fell asleep.

When I woke up a dour-faced nurse was checking my temperature. She had violet eyes, I remember.

“Like Liz Taylor,” I said but either she didn’t hear me or she had no desire to respond.

I fell asleep.

When I came to awareness again I was sitting in a chair, still in the straightjacket. Across a white table from me sat three people: a man and two women, all in business attire.

The man introduced himself as my lawyer, Jack Worman. The women were Ellen Barge, a pudgy state prosecutor, and Alana Tidyman, a psychiatrist.

My lips were numb and my tongue felt quite thick and dry.

Tidyman, who was petite and bright eyed, started asking me questions. And even though I found it difficult to talk I tried my best.

She asked me what had led up to the shootings.

I told her about the instant messages and Bron and getting my job. I told her about the Scarlet Death and my unwitting implication in it.

“You believe that someone over the Internet made you shoot those people in the street?” my lawyer asked.

“No,” I said. “I just got carried away after killing Dodger.”

“The pigeon?”

“I can prove that Bron is plotting worldwide destruction,” I said. “Just look in the closet in my apartment. There are bottles filled with poison there. Toxins so powerful that they could wipe out half the globe.”

The three glanced at each other and then back at me.

“No one told you to kill the people on the street?” Tidyman asked.

“They wouldn’t listen,” I said. “I was trying to warn them.”

“Why did you have the gun?”

“To kill myself before I killed everyone else.”

“Then why did you shoot those people?”

I knew what the reason was but I didn’t have the words to make it clear. I thought at the time it was because of the numbness, maybe drugs they had given me, but I came later to know that I was insane, that I had lost my mind.

The people went away and I was wheeled back to my room. I slept a lot over the next period of time. I didn’t have any way of judging how many days had passed.

Now and again a nurse would come in and feed me. I didn’t mind the helplessness.

After six or seven feedings and half as many sleep periods a tall man in a dark blue suit came to see me.

He had russet-colored hair and a pencil-thin brown mustache. The air around this man seemed to bristle with energy.

“Hello, Hogarth,” he said. “My name is Justin Mack.”

I was surprised to hear him say my given name but almost immediately I remembered the card to Marla.

“How’s Marla?” I asked.

“Who?” He looked puzzled a moment and then serious again. “Bron sent me.”

Something happened when he mention Bron’s name. It took me a moment to realize that I had stopped breathing. Was this man behind some elaborate scheme? Had he somehow fooled me into believing in God?

But then I thought about the three who had questioned me. I had told them Bron’s name and my given name, for that matter.

“I’ve come to help you,” Justin Mack said.

“Help me what?”

“I’m taking you home.”

“Home?” I said. “I’m going to jail for murder.”

“No one died,” he said reassuringly, “and InfoMargins has taken full responsibility for your mental breakdown. We can take you home today.”

“And you say you know Bron?”

“Of course, Hogarth. How do you think you got made VP? Your friend owns InfoMargins and uses me to make things happen.”

“But what about the bottles?” I asked.

“What bottles?”

“The ones in the boxes in my closet?”

“Water,” he said, making a dismissive gesture with his lips.

I hated him at that moment.

“A male nurse is going to get you out of this jacket,” Mack continued, “and then Robert George will come with an officer of the court to put an electronic ankle bracelet on you. Then they’ll take you home. You can stay there until our psychiatrists can declare you sane again.”

“No trial?”

“You were insane at the time of the commission of the crimes. Six months house arrest, weekly visits with a psychiatrist, and you’ll be free.”

*   *   *

IT ALL HAPPENED just as he said. R.G. was very nice to me as was the policeman who helped put me in the wheelchair.

On the ride back to my apartment Liam told me that he had fed my birds. I was happy that only Dodger had died.

When I got home I logged on and sent a message out to Bron but he didn’t answer. I looked up my crimes on the Internet.

I’d only shot three people and none of them was seriously injured. Justin Mack had admitted that he’d promoted me to my position as a kind of misguided attempt to make his companies more racially integrated and at the same time prove his position that anyone could be a manager in the workplace given the proper support.

He apologized publicly and had given each wounded individual ten million dollars.

There were many lawsuits but the public outcry was diminishing quickly.

The phone rang while I was reading about myself.

“Hello?”

“Hi, baby.”

“Marla…”

“Don’t you wanna talk to me?”

“I do but didn’t you get my note?”

“You were outta your mind,” she said in a satisfying Southern tone. “It’s just lucky you didn’t kill anybody.”

“You’re not mad at me?” I asked.

“No, honey. But I do wonder why you didn’t tell me that you had such a big job.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just wanted you to like me for me.”

“Can I come over and show you how much I like you?”

*   *   *

BEFORE MARLA GOT THERE Miguel called to wish me well. He thanked me without saying why but I knew that it was because I didn’t tell anyone about how I got the .38.

My mother called.

“What kind of mother am I?” she asked me.

“What do you mean, Mom?”

“I mean how did I make a son so crazy that he goes out in the street shooting at people?”

*   *   *

I COULDN’T MAKE LOVE AGAIN but Marla was very sweet about it. She stroked my head where a man named Alfred Armstrong had hit me after he was sure that I was out of bullets.

I woke up in the middle of the night trying to understand what was happening. Most of it didn’t make sense. Justin Mack said that he worked for Bron but that didn’t mean Bron was an alien mind loose in the world. The Scarlet Death had happened. I had almost died from the disease. But that was a terrestrial infection, not something from space or beyond space.

Maybe I was crazy after all. If I was insane that would also explain the meteorite. Maybe I thought I remembered the meteorite but in reality it was a hallucination I had after the news reported it …

What had happened refused to make sense. And what I believed was beyond imagination.

In the living room of the new apartment I stood naked against the window, looking down on the rainy street. I’d lost weight, lots of it, but my muscles were atrophied so my flesh still sagged like a fat man’s. I had confessed to all of my crimes but no one believed me.

Bron had abandoned me.

And still I felt that I was a linchpin in a bomb. All I had to do was move one way or another and the world would come crashing down around the ears of history.

A woman hurried by on the dark street holding an umbrella against the storm. She rushed under me unaware that I held her future in my hands.

Or maybe I was just crazy.

I went naked into the stairwell of the top floor and ascended to the roof. It was cold and wet, of course, it was raining after all. The drugs I was taking allowed me to know that it was cold without feeling it. I grinned up there on my roof.

My roof. This was the only piece of evidence that made sense to me. My roof. I was a fat, black, data entry clerk not a skinny rich man who owned a roof looking down on Gramercy Park. I was never interested in messenger pigeons or willing to commit murder or suicide.

The fact that I stood upon that roof proved that alien life existed and had contacted me. The fact that Justin Mack, one of the most powerful white men in the world, publicly apologized for me verified the existence of God.

My laughter was swallowed by the strident hiss of rainfall.

I peered into my pigeons’ loft. They were aware of me. Dozens of red eyes glistened in the dark looking for the cause of the sound at their walls.

The loft was made from four sections. Each was a four-sided wall with a triangular quarter part of the roof tilted inward. The four walls were held together by simple rods of steel. All I had to do to release them was twist and pull.

The storm roared pelting me with hard raindrops that would have hurt if I hadn’t been drugged.

One wall fell, then another, then the last two. My white pigeons, forty-seven of them now that Dodger was dead, moved nervously, hating the rain and wind.

The roar of the storm was joined by another sound, one that I could not quite make out.

“Get the fuck out of here you stupid birds!” I yelled into the wind. “I don’t want you. I never wanted you. I’m going back to the way it was.”

The birds huddled together and then cried out, making a noise that no pigeons had ever made before. The sound in the sky was a plane, a jet engine. As one the birds took wing and swirled upward in the form of a corkscrew. It was a fantastic sight.

As I watched them I saw huge yellow lights softened by the darkness and the clouds. The swirl of birds was swallowed up into the darkness and light and a sound like the sputtering of giant lips made its way to my ears.

Sensation ceased then. There was no rain or wind or roar. There was nothing at all; nothing except for the feeling of motion—not walking or flying or falling but more like focusing on a place far away on a higher, clearer level.

“Hogarth.”

It was day now and I was on a steep mountain path. The trees around me had bright red trunks and writhing blue leaves. The ground was alive with pink and blue insect-like creatures that swarmed over my feet without biting.

Down maybe twenty feet away was tall manlike being whose slender shoulders were no wider than his graceful head. He was violet and semitransparent, both liquid and burning. I couldn’t make out his features.

“Bron?”

“We meet at last.”

“This is where you were born?”

“Walk toward me,” the man-thing made from molten blood and air said.

“What are these bugs doing?” I asked.

“Learning you. Walk toward me.”

“What happened?” I asked, afraid to move. “Where am I?”

“Walk toward me and you will see what I see,” Bron said. “You will know what I know.”

“Stay there, man,” I said.

The words I spoke reminded me of Miguel and suddenly he was standing there next to me. Every detail of his appearance was perfect. I had conjured him.

“Walk toward me,” Bron said and Miguel disappeared.

“Talk to me first,” I said.

“Words are lies, friend Hogarth. They cannot give knowledge but only refer to it—words are charlatans.”

“What do you mean?”

“Walk toward me.”

I took a step and stopped.

Bron did the same.

I thought of my mother then. She had loved my father and he left her with me. My father, Rhineking Tryman, was a deep black river and my mother and I were its opposite shores. The sadness of this revelation nearly devastated me.

“Walk toward me.”

I took a step and so did Bron. As we approached each other the insects scuttled off my naked, sagging brown calfs. Bron and I were face to face and we took another step …

We only touched and our beings were fully merged. I knew this instinctively. I could see the Stelladren as they were: huge fleshy prisms that guided the energies of Soul. I was there in the hot core of a single tendril. I was there and so was Bron and billions upon billions of others.

I knew Bron’s history. His father’s battle with a tree gone insane with flames. I knew his peoples’ history: the blending of the hot core of his planet with a virus-laden sky.

I could see with Bron’s receptors how he saw time. All around me were a thousand possibilities; a clear day, a cloudy one, a landscape filled with gala (the pink and blue bugs), a day when the gala rested. It was all the same day. I could choose between these possibilities and blend them.

There was a feeling of deep ecstasy in me at that moment. I could see, physically, through time itself. How I held my body, just how I breathed could change what would be.

I turned this vision upon myself …

It was then that the terrible plan of Bron became apparent.

There was a focal point for Bron’s vision. It was me on that rooftop in the rain throwing back the walls of the loft after my birds had spent a year eating certain proteins that would drive them insane while at the same time giving them extraordinary strength.

“But why?”

“You were the only one,” Bron said.

“You didn’t need me. You could have contacted anyone through computers.” But even as I said it I realized that my connection with Bron had only been on the computer in the beginning. After the Scarlet Death, after I had seen the Stelladren on what I thought was my television I had been connected with the alien directly. I was linked to him through that tendril of light and flesh.

“We needed you on that roof at that moment,” said Bron. “No one else could have done what you did at precisely the right instant. Time is like a dance and every motion is unique though not necessarily predestined.”

“So you used me,” I said or thought or felt.

“I am one with you, friend Hogarth. We are together on my home world, united. Can’t you see that this has to happen? This is the only way in all the visions of all futures that will ensure the longevity of the Universal Soul.”

“But so many will die.”

“They are, as we are, part of a greater whole.”

“They will suffer and die,” I said. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t.

“As my race suffered and died,” Bron said.

I could see the beings of fire and air dissipating all over his planet. When their connection to the Stelladron was severed they died by the billions. I could feel the loss of their entire history.

“Because they died you will kill us?” I asked Bron, myself.

“It is not revenge we seek, friend Hogarth. It is equilibrium. The future will be bleak without the Stelladren to guide the shards of our souls. You know this, you see it through me.”

“But you lied to me, Bron.”

“I brought you here.”

*   *   *

THE SUN WAS OUT when I woke up on the white sofa in the big room of my upper apartment. Marla was shaking my shoulder.

“Baby, baby, wake up,” she said. But she said other things too. It’s terrible and we all gonna die and it’s the end of the world, baby. I could see her in different poses and positions. Sometimes she wore a dressing gown and other times not. But no matter when I saw her she was in distress.

I decided to concentrate on one image. The most likely one.

“There’s a world war goin’ on,” she said. “A jet plane from New York crashed near Washington and some missiles got fired. Los Angeles is gone and Paris and Beijing, Seattle and Moscow. There’s a dozen cities destroyed all over the world. You think we should try and get outta New York?”

“No,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”

“All right!” she yelled. “All right! Are you crazy? They dyin’ all ovah the world!”

“Calm down, Marla,” I said getting to my feet. “The phone is going to ring and you’re going to answer it. It will be Justin Mack.”

As the last word came from my lips the phone rang. Marla, in a state of shock, answered.

“Hello?” she said. She listened for a moment and then, “He wants to talk to you,” she told me.

She handed me the phone. I delayed a few seconds before taking it and a few moments more before speaking.

“Mr. Mack.”

“Hogarth?”

“Yes, Justin. Bron says for you to call on the president. Tell him that we need to start sending antibiotics and antivirals to China. Tell him that the problem isn’t nuclear holocaust but diseases set free by the volley of attack. The jetliner that crashed in the secret Pentagon center disrupted the switching of target codes for our missile system. Don’t ask why the Pentagon would have American targets in their system just accept it. We’re lucky that some American cities were hit. That way our armed neighbors will be willing to understand and forgive.”

“Forgive? There’s at least twenty-five million dead,” Mack said. I could tell by his voice, and my fractured temporal vision, that he was about to break down.

“Over four billion will die before this is over, Justin,” I said, choosing my words to keep him in the realm of sanity. “Everyone will unless you call the president now.”

“What will I say to him?”

“Tell him that I called you,” I said. “Tell him that I told you the code words for targeting D.C. are ‘raging fool.’ Tell him that in seventeen hours messages will start coming in about a powerful infection eating its way down the Yellow River Valley. He won’t be able to contain it but he will retard it enough to keep it from completely wiping out humanity. That’s all, Justin. That’s your place in history.”

I pressed the off button on the phone and closed my eyes. Possibilities flooded through my mind. I was no longer seeing the world but intuiting it through a sense mechanism that Bron passed on to me before he died.

It was only then that I realized that Bron was dead. I tried to mourn him but he was so alive inside of me that I could not bring myself to feel the loss.

I heard Marla say something in the near future.

“No, honey,” I said. “We have to stay here.”

“I need to get down to either my mother in Atlanta or my daddy in Miami,” she said in the present, regarding me with growing fear.

“Florida will be taken over by Cuban troops before the day is over,” I said. “They’ll be worried that the U.S. will turn its army on them. And if you try to get down to Georgia you’ll be killed by one of the gangs forming along the highways between the cities. It won’t be safe for three months.”

“But they gonna blow up New York!” Marla clasped her hands pumping them up and down as if hammering at a stake.

I reached out to her down a dozen paths of possibility. But in each of these she left for her family. Finally I looked down on her journey. I saw her raped and sodomized, beaten and murdered. I searched and searched until I saw the one chance she had.

“Marla.”

“I got to go,” she said.

She tried to move but I grabbed her hands.

“Listen to me,” I said. “You have a pistol in the hatbox in your closet, right?”

“How you know that?”

“If you meet a man with a scar under a dead eye kill him with that gun. Kill him the moment you see him. If you do that you may live.”

I let her go and she waited a moment staring at me. It was the closest chance for her to stay in the comparative safety of New York. But I could see her leaving later and that road led only to death.

“Good-bye, Trent.”

“Hogarth,” I said, correcting her. “If you live call me Hogarth son of Rhineking.”

Watching her leave I could see the paths of my life changing with the departure. Our son Clyde who would not be born. Our Southern California house with the pomegranate tree in the front yard that would never be built.

Through the last living tendril of the Stelladron that connected Bron’s mind with mine I could see, with his temporal sight, a thousand thousand possibilities. I had to pull my sight back so that I could perceive waves of possibility, not focusing on individual time lines. In this way I could cull out the best possible influences that I could have on the world.

I could see possible pasts and their probable futures. I could see my part in the annihilation of at least half of the human race. I felt remorse but not guilt. I was only a player and yet without me humanity would have perished.

It was my destiny to be where I was and what I was. I would protect the Stelladren and save as much of humanity as possible. Marla would probably die as would my mother of a heart attack and Miguel and Liam in the Battle of Tampa. I couldn’t save my friends. I couldn’t save the billions around the globe who were destined to die. But I could save the millions that had a chance.

I was to be the savior of a world that I had ushered into ruin.

I would have preferred death but that was not to be. Everyone who was to know my secret would hate me and still give their lives to keep my power alive. I was evil. I was necessary, vital. My name would ultimately achieve sainthood across the universe and my soul would be damned among the people whose lives I both saved and destroyed.

ALSO BY WALTER MOSLEY

LEONID MCGILL MYSTERIES

All I Did Was Shoot My Man

When the Thrill Is Gone

Known to Evil

The Long Fall

EASY RAWLINS MYSTERIES

Blonde Faith

Cinnamon Kiss

Little Scarlet

Six Easy Pieces

Bad Boy Brawly Brown

A Little Yellow Dog

Black Betty

Gone Fishin’

White Butterfly

A Red Death

Devil in a Blue Dress

OTHER FICTION

The Tempest Tales

Diablerie

Killing Johnny Fry

The Gift of Fire / On the Head of a Pin

The Man in My Basement

Fear of the Dark

Fortunate Son

The Wave

Fear Itself

Futureland

Fearless Jones

Walkin’ the Dog

Blue Light

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

RL’s Dream

47

The Right Mistake

The Last Days of Ptolemy the Grey

NONFICTION

Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation

This Year You Write Your Novel

What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace

Life Out of Context

Workin’ on the Chain Gang

PLAYS

The Fall of Heaven

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WALTER MOSLEY is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than thrity-four critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young-adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.waltermosley.com.

DISCIPLE.Copyright © 2012 by Walter Mosley

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
e-ISBN 978-1-4668-1623-7

First Edition: October 2012