by Neovictorian
But the track in the Universe remains.
There’s an old practice of looking at yourself in the mirror in a dim light, preferably just a candle, and if you don’t move your eyes, don’t focus, just keep looking at the shape of your face it only takes seconds before you start to see the most interesting things, yourself as an older man as a baby a skeleton an actor another color another race the other sex. I look at her this way, in the artificial gloaming, and the details begin to dim, her nose and ears begin to merge with her skull, her face becomes just a pale oval then begins to form into the face of the moon, I’m quiet and still as a living thing can be, the moon begins to change shape again and now it looks more and more like Anna, the face gets longer and narrower, the smile of simple joy begins to show, but now the face is changing again, cheeks puffing out and the chin receding and there’s more fat around the eyes and the smile begins to lose its joy, it’s a smile of the lips alone and the face is the face of Mother.
There’s a sound, a low growl coming from the bottom of a throat and I can feel myself again, feel a sharp pain across my chest like angina, the growl is coming from my own throat and Mother is looking at me with her look of sorrow, regret and guilt-inducing pain, oh God I’ve disappointed Mommy again.
“NO!”
It’s not a yell except inside my head, I don’t know if I make any sound at all, but the growl was real, I can feel the gone vibration still in my chest cavity, her face is her face again, Martha, and I’m sobbing, I haven’t cried for a long time and for an instant I feel ashamed to be crying in front of a woman, but she is perfectly composed, relaxed, she expresses no approval or disapproval or judgement still just looking, and I allow myself to let go the tears, and it’s surprising to me how little time it takes until they stop, a few seconds and my cheeks are wet and I rub them off with the sleeve of my shirt, and she smiles now, the perfect composure replaced by a genuine interest.
“My name’s not Martha,” she says. “I made that up on the spot, for fun. I know your real name, and you deserve to know mine.”
She uncoils, puts her feet on the carpet and holds out her hand.
“Karina Nowak.” She says it with a hint of Eastern European accent that’s not in her regular speech.
I lean forward and our hands touch, hers harder and firmer than I expect, there’s tough callus on the heel of it. And warm, so warm it’s almost hot, like she has a fever, she grips mine lightly now and I feel the warmth flow up my arm and across my chest and it’s life energy, the elan vital flowing out of her and into me, she smiles and lets go but the energy is still there, flowing down to my toes and up to the crown of my skull.
I look at her in a kind of awe, a respect for her simply as what she is, I don’t even know what. I can smell her now too, a faint mixture of woman and flower, a flower I know I’ve never smelled before, a flower you would walk through a field of, to lie down in and rest with that smell all around.
Without noticing the process I have got an erection like sword steel.
She sits back down, not folding her legs under this time. Her stockinged feet just reach the floor.
“I told you I’d give you a brief Cal, and I have some questions to ask you. In turn, you can ask me anything.
“Last year, Jim White gave you a short, mysterious talk about something, you probably deduced that it was some kind of organization, society. He also gave you a business card. Can you tell me where that card is now?”
“I memorized everything on it and put it in an extremely secure location,” I say. She laughs.
“That’s a good answer. Look, Dr. Lee is coming in a week and you’re set to meet with him and he has some very useful information that’s meant to assist you over the next few years, but there’s no rules about this sort of thing, we trust our judgement on the spot, in the moment.”
“Judgement about what?” I ask. “Mr. White really didn’t say anything about any ‘organization’ as such; he just asked me if ‘You feel that if it was necessary and right you could physically stop someone who was doing something bad and wrong?’ And he talked about friends.
“I can remember the whole conversation just about word-for-word. I thought about it enough, since then. There has to be some organization, some entity, if only to set up this emergency phone number thing. Which, honestly, sounds iffy. Call it and if it’s not ‘life or death’ you’re quietly taken off the list? Okay, you’re here now, I’m here now. What kind of thing are we really talking about?”
“Good for you, Cal. There’s a time for mystery, then a time for truth.”
She leans back, relaxed, rests her forearms on the arms of the chair.
“What we’re talking about, really, is what I’d describe as a ‘network.’ There’s no real organization, as such. There’s no leader, no followers, no written rules. There’s no official name. People call it different things. Personally, I like to call it “The Outfit.”
I laugh at this, a real “hahaha.” It’s funny, if you know. The more you know, it turns out, the funnier it is.
“The Outfit,” I say through the laugh, “The Outfit. The Mafia’s preferred term for themselves. Why don’t you just call it La Cosa Nostra?”
She’s laughing with me. Amused and relaxed, she makes a face: “This thing of ours.”
I don’t know why this is so funny, really, but the laughter feeds off of itself, she’s laughing hard now, too, the first time I’ve seen her out of control, her face is so young, we laugh for a while until it subsides naturally. I gasp a few breaths until I’m ready to talk again.
“Okay, we’ll go with The Outfit; it must do something, or Mr. White wouldn’t have asked me if I would do something to stop evil or wrong. I mean, what the hell, who wouldn’t?”
She looks a little more serious.
“Come on Cal, you may only be 18 but you’re highly intelligent, well read, you’ve got a sense of history. You know that 5 percent of the population produces 90 percent of the value, the things that keep everyone else fed and comfortable, the ideas that matter. Only some of those also have the vision to see beyond the end of their noses and the will to take action and do something about it.”
She squares her shoulders. “I call it The Outfit as my own little joke, and because it is fun, it’s joyous to have a big purpose and to associate with others like you. Most of us have felt like aliens here on Earth at times.
“I know you have, I can see it in your face.
“Call it whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s less than a thousand people around the world, is my best estimate, or maybe a few more, the real best and brightest, not the fakes they produce at Harvard and Yale who go straight to DC, and the fakes from the École nationale d'administration and fucking Oxbridge.”
She pauses, thinking, calculating.
“That’s what I’ve got for now, that’s what you need to know, now. It’s a network of Übermenschen—but of course I wouldn’t use that term except between us. It has no real name. Sometimes we do something good, or stop something bad. We can’t, obviously, stop everything bad. We do what we can. I don’t know everyone in The Outfit, and they don’t know me.”
She stands up, grabs her glass of bourbon, comes to stand in front of me, kneels at my feet and holds out the glass as if for a toast. I pick up my own untouched whisky.
“Everything we do in our little network is voluntary. And the truth is, every morning may be the beginning of our last day on Earth.” She moves her glass to mine.
“We drink to life,” she says, fiercely. “Aqua vitae!” The glasses clink hard, for a split second I wonder if they’re going to shatter, but they’re the finest kind, and they don’t. She drains the whole thing in one, and when I see this I do the same, it’s smooth going down but after a second my stomach begins to warm, then I can feel the heat in my face.
“You’ve had a huge hardon ever since I touched your hand,” she says. “I said we’d know what to do, remember? You know what to do, now.”
I
take the glass out of her hand and set it down, then I grab her wrist and pull her toward me, gently, but she resists a little and I pull harder. She resists strong for a second and I can’t help myself, I apply a lot more force and suddenly she gives up and I’m off balance, she adds to the pull in the opposite direction and I tumble out of the chair. Some real jiu jitsu.
I’m on my hands and knees and she laughs and tries to jump on my back and in a second more we’re wrestling around, she’s not using any of the things I think she knows, no chokes or bonebreakers, we’re both laughing and I outweigh her by about 80 pounds and I finally get her pinned face down and she slaps the floor, lightly.
“Let me up and maybe we can work this out,” she says, and I do and we do.
Wresting with her has transferred so much energy between us that I look at my hand in the dim and wonder if it’s physically glowing, but it doesn’t look any different. The feeling though, the feeling is of a vibration, it’s always there, every cell in our bodies pulsing with that Something that must have been present in the first billionth of a second of the Universe, or it wouldn’t be here in us now.
“Come with me,” she says, and heads toward the bedroom door, it takes me a second to completely get back into present time and follow her. She has a laptop open on the desk.
“I want to show you something, the thing I was attending to when you got here,” she says.
She taps a key and the screen lights up with an image of a wall, a piece of blue sky and minaret in the background to the left. The wall appears to be pocked with shrapnel or bullet marks—and bloodstains, many small drops and a large smear ending at the dusty ground.
“This was taken a few hours ago in Islamabad. A friend of mine, of ours, was there to stop something bad. That’s all I can tell you, now. Maybe someday you’ll get to hear the whole story. That’s his blood on the wall.”
She turns and looks at me, with no sadness I can detect. “He took three with him, including the target, a man who slaughtered innocents, tortured mothers and fathers in front of their children.”
She reaches her hands to her waist and in one smooth motion pulls her shirt over her head, tosses it aside. She isn’t wearing anything underneath. In the dim of the room with the closed curtains her skin glows with its own light, blue-white, and I blink, but the effect is still there.
“I would think you’re not a virgin, Cal, but how many women have you had?”
“One.”
“Did you have to lie to her? Did you compromise, make promises you didn’t mean to keep, tell her things you didn’t believe?”
“No.”
“I hoped, and expected not. Never do those things to have a woman. Maybe you never would, but I hope you remember what I’m saying now, forever.”
The purple contacts are still in her eyes and seem too bright for the little bit of light in the room, glowing, they catch and hold me and I cannot, do not want to look away.
“There is great pleasure, and joy, between a man and a woman,” she says. “And for most that’s all there ever will be, a bond, an hour, a moment when all their troubles are forgotten.
“But there can be more, there can be energy, energy created in defiance of what scientists think they know. Power and healing. A man and a woman can shape space, affect future history.”
She reaches for the button of her jeans.
“Take off your clothes Cal, slowly, with intention, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
11. 13 years ago, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California January 27, 1:58 pm
There’s nothing on the door or walls next to it to indicate that this is the office of Dr. Henry Lee, but the plaque says Room 314 and the door is wide open, so I walk in. It’s a sort of anteroom with an old gray metal secretary desk to the left, off to the right is a polished dark wood door, closed.
I look around the room for a clue what to do, and this time I spot a little blue sticky note on the far corner of the desk. In a tiny, neat hand someone has written “Knock and open” on it.
I stride over to the wood door and pause for just a second, thinking about what I know of Dr. Lee. He’s the first member, or associate, or whatever they call it, of “The Outfit” that I’ve been able to make any preparation at all for. The Cardinal had a brief squib about how he’d just arrived to tweak the equipment at the new Low-Temp Lab, nothing that Karina hadn’t told me a week ago. The Web had been useful; Dr. Hye “Henry” Lee had received a BS in physics from the Seoul National University, a Master’s from MIT and a Doctorate from Columbia University. By the time he received the Ph. D. he had already invented a new method of cooling tiny clumps of atoms using lasers. He’d gone back to Korea and put his genius for experimental physics to work at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, which in ten years since had become perhaps the best research university in the world outside of the US. He’d been granted over 30 patents. Bloomberg estimated he was receiving $25-30 million a year from the big Korean electronics conglomerates, and other corporations around the world, in licensing payments.
I wonder what he’s doing at Stanford. Maybe just a change of scenery, a new challenge? The lab coming online was, if things went as planned, going to be next-gen, produce new states of matter, Bose-Einstein photons, lay the groundwork for quantum computing. I’d read Feynman’s and Deutsch’s papers during the week. I had felt a bit intimidated by Henry Lee, then I’d thought about his herald.
Karina.
Her effect still hasn’t worn off after a week. I am sure it never will.
I knock firmly, three times, and open the door.
12. 13 years ago, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California January 27, 1:59 pm
The door swings open and lately I’ve become more alert to the formerly “unexpected” and I’m not surprised he’s standing there already, just clear of the door. It almost touches the end of his nose, but he doesn’t even blink.
I’m looking at a Korean man about five-eight, classic black-rim academic glasses and small bald spot in the back of his head that I can see from my six-five vantage point. I know he’s 41 but his face is firm and unlined.
He looks up, smiling, and I’m struck by the concentration in his glance, while he’s looking at my face that’s all he’s doing, looking at my face, he’s not thinking about the past, the future, appointments later memos to sign specs to approve plans to approve invoices to approve, he’s looking at me.
“Welcome Mr. Adler. Let me just take care of this,” and moving quickly and efficiently he closes and locks the outer door, picks the little blue note up off the desk and places it carefully in the institutional-issue black metal wastebasket.
“Let’s sit down in the office.” I follow him around the big dark wood door, which he closes gently, then firmly clicks a deadbolt on. He’s wearing a tight, thin black sweater over a white dress shirt. His chest and shoulders have a very un-academic bulk to them.
The office is surprisingly large, given the crowded little ante room. Big solid wood desk that’s probably 100 years old to the left, high window with thick drapes, closed, straight ahead and a seating area to the right, leather couch and three wing chairs rather randomly placed, not perfectly parallel to the walls. A large landscape of some New England farm scene is to the right of the window. It looks original, and older than the desk. Just the one floor lamp is lit.
He doesn’t say anything else, sits at one end of the couch, leaving it up to me where to land. I look at the angles, heights, power positions and take the other end.
I wait, to see if he wants to talk first. He doesn’t.
“Dr. Lee, thank you for seeing me. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I was told you had information that would be useful to me,” I offer.
“This is true as far as it goes, Mr. Adler. I also think you have information that will be of use to me.”
I can’t think of what that might be.
“Call me Henry, please, while we are in private. May I call you Cal?”
He has the faintest hint of a Korean accent—almost as if he’s kept it on purpose, or can modulate the amount as he wills.
“Sure…Henry. I have questions for you, naturally, but tell me what I might know that would be useful to you?”
He smiles at me, conspiratorially. “American, or more accurately, Southern fried chicken is my favorite food in the world. I’ve traveled to 26 countries, had the most exotic and expensive Korean cuisine, but now that I’m back in the States I need to find the best fried chicken in this area. Help me do that, and in turn I’ll brief you on the history of the organization, help you plot the next few years to your maximum advantage, and introduce you to people, the brightest, the ones worth spending time with.”
He looks at me for another second, seriously, then in an instant his face changes and he laughs loudly, puts his fist to his mouth.
“I wish I could have recorded the face you made there, Cal, but it is forever in my memory. Actually,” he says through his fist, “I’m going to do all of those things for you, because they’re the right things to do.
“In a way, however, I was not joking. Fried chicken really is my favorite food. I hope you will assist me in this matter. I’m far too busy to waste time eating bad fried chicken.”