The Manhattan Prophet

by Jake Packard

  The armored door shut behind him and he was alone in the outer office. It was eerie, quiet. Unusual that there was no security present. Leaving the mayor unguarded, one of the most important people in the free world, seemed like more than just an oversight. It seemed like a breach of policy--like a desertion. But everything that made sense in this already mixed-up world was turned topsy-turvy in the last few hours. He had to get out of there.

  Like everyone else, he saw the miracle clip over and over again. To say that he was stunned would be a pure understatement. Also like everyone else, he wasn’t prepared for all the forces this event unleashed. Before he could say “human nature” three times and whistle Dixie, reports of the looting and riots began leaking in. Of course, he couldn’t see any actual footage of that, live or otherwise, because the general browned out the entire city. The browning was so complete, so dark; it was black. Creepy black. Where were the alliance partners? Wouldn’t they want to know? Or did they already? He wouldn’t put it past the general to have his own covert systems in place, in case he had to bypass the mayor. This made Milos shiver from within, so severely his body shook. He missed the warmth and comfort of his wife’s sweet body more and more with each passing moment.

  When he went through the deserted outer security post leading from the inner office to the administration rooms, he didn’t notice the squirrel killer hiding in a doorway down the hall, who let loose a burst from the AK-87 that sent six bullets through his heart and lungs, killing him instantly before he could even feel any pain or greater fear.

  * * * * *

  In Bed

  Maria could never avoid her answering machine for too long, so after boiling water for some tea, she took the familiar place at her desk and punched the listen button.

  It was her mother. Frantic. Shoot, she forgot, Mom probably thought she was dead. “My God, Maria, where are you? Your father and I have been crazy. We thought for sure you were gone. And now this. My baby, I am so glad you are okay. What happened to you? Is this thing real? Did you really meet Salem Jones? What is he like? I have so many questions. I have to talk to you, but we have to run. That nice General Pellet sent over an armored truck to take me and Daddy over to the command post where he said I’d be able to see you soon, so I’m running out the door. I’m so excited, being chaperoned by all those handsome soldiers and all. I’ll see you soon, probably before you hear this. I am so happy. Love you.”

  Maria’s state of mind was more than just a little discombobulated. Her mother’s message seemed upbeat, confident, and genuinely happy. Maybe it was a good public-relations move on Pellet’s part to reunite them. Probably he was using Maria’s connection to Salem to get as much public sympathy as possible for himself and his policies. She still couldn’t reach Herbie by cell and she really wanted to talk with him. It felt strange to feel like she needed him.

  She climbed onto her soft bed as if it was the first time, like she was a complete stranger to her luxurious bedroom and her privileged life. Her mind was such a confusion of feelings. These events left her dazed; everything she took for granted was turned upside down by Salem Jones. Too tired to take off her clothes, she lay on her big bed, not troubling to turn down the covers and take advantage of the world-class silk sheets.

  She laid eyes open in the dark, perturbed, but tired and wanting sleep. Her hand slipped under her pants and lingered above the short well-manicured hairs as if to pleasure herself, as she had been doing all her life, especially at times when her wandering mind was trying to make sense of a mixed-up world from which she needed reprieve. She thought of Herbie in so many new ways now. The smell of his sweat, so protective and sweet the way it covered her in the street from certain death. That could have been the last sensory comfort she would ever feel in this world. Now that memory signaled to her the readiness of the warmth and pleasures her own body could provide.

  That connection seemed as powerful a sensation to her as Salem’s glorious act of compassion in the ghetto. Herbie’s aura, his presence, was so reassuring as they drove through the fantastical streets of Manhattan, as if in a fairy tale, with people in motion, slow motion, passing across the windshield, members of a cast of dreams in a movie that could save the world. Now the presence of his smile, in her mind, as if he were actually there in the flesh, surfaced as the predominant sensual stimuli to this simple physical release of tension she always enjoyed at the ends of unusual days.

  Her free hand grazed through the thick hair on her head and she thought about what it would be like if he was doing the touching. This was truly virgin territory she mused, no pun intended. Before while masturbating, she never gave faces to her fantasies. They were always some anonymous super male or males who were in worship of her wonderfulness. Basically it was sex turned on by success. She was the winner, the victor, so naturally she received the rewards and never gave them back. That couldn’t work now, because there was a sexual feeling emerging that was directly linked to a certain man with an identity.

  An identity. A mass of atoms that have been afloat in all corners of the universe since the beginning of time and, from across the unimaginably infinite, had somehow directed themselves to this lonesome part of the galaxy and incubated here on earth for billions of years in order to moleculize into this human being called Herbie. It was the vision of his face, with its hard, angular good looks, etched through time by thousands of prior exchanges of chromosomal matter, and then seasoned by the favors and scarred by the traumas of his individual life, that excited the nerve endings in her own body itching now to be attended to.

  In her mind she saw his soft golden brown eyes flecked mosaic with those tiny tan tiles she never noticed before. She never could have. Now they cause her to excite, and to want that which she had only dreamed about before, and in such a puerile and undernourished way.

  A tear rolled out of her eye, down her cheek onto her pillow. In the universe there is a conservation of all energy and matter; that which is destroyed is created in other forms. Her body, a reservoir of inspiration, realized its gain of spirit through the evolvement of an experience into an emotion, and loses some salt from an ancient sea to mark the spot of transmutation from one self to the next.

  Even as that tear evaporates, her inner being propels her mind to someplace further. Her rhythmic breathing sounded to her in this semi-subconscious state that indeed she could be falling asleep, mercifully so, twenty-two floors above an island where millions were turning in equally as many directions towards a focal point in history that everyone could call their own.

  This made her struggle. How could she sleep with all that is going on? Every now and then she forced her eyes open to glance at those incessant red digits blinking on her alarm clock, changing at whatever speed they chose.

  She drifted in and out of a state of being that lifted her little speck of protoplasm into a photonic state where she could witness herself from the starlight streaming through the unknown void towards earth, able to observe the outcomes of battles large and small being waged between good and evil. Who was she now, watching that silly little clock with the elastic incandescent numbers, her fingers lying so near her vagina?

  The curtains rustled and rippled in the dim and she sensed a presence in her room.

  “Jamal is that you?” She thought she heard herself say, her conscious mind stretching for some reason practical. Maybe he woke up scared looking for some safety, some consoling words to ameliorate the horror that she could only imagine harassed his little brain. But how could her naiveté born into such advantage ever possibly relate to him and the depravity from which he sprung? Or perhaps he was just thirsty, looking for a glass of water or milk to pacify and settle himself back into a more secure uncertainty so he could go back to sleep.

  “Hello, Maria.” He stood by her bed, his body haloed by a soft golden light that seemed to be coming from within.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I have been all around this world.”

  “Is
it Jamal? Is he all right?”

  “He is.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  He took off his trench coat and laid it gently upon the floor next to her bed. He kneeled down before her, his face close to hers. She turned her head sideways on the pillow to look into his eyes. Even in the opaque light she could see how boundlessly clear they were. This time they were amber, a golden luster, the color of sand as the sea washes over the beach reflecting the rising sun. Was there a sadness there buried deep into his unfettered life of faith without fear?

  The next thing she knew his mouth was upon hers. Was this a no, no, a silly no, no, like catching Mommy kissing Daddy in a Santa Clause suit? Or was it a real sin, like the priests in the shadows of the confessionals, wrongfully turning the inquisition against the innocent? Was she frenching a ghost, making out with a phantom, having a paranormal hallucination of her own narcissism gone berserk?

  She could feel the soft short hairs of his beard as they tickled the corners of her mouth. The tips of their tongues darted in hesitancy around each other’s, as his fingers smoothed the hair around her forehead, her ears, her neck, and slowly on down, removing her blouse and pants and bra and panties. She lay there before him fully naked, resplendent, as if she was the source of her own light from within the spotted urban dark.

  His mouth moved off hers and down her neck tenderly, kissing its lean and strong velvetness. He moved lower along the bounty of her chest and up the voluptuous hillside of her breasts, finding the creases with his lips and locking onto the firmness of her hardened nipples, gently tugging them in.

  She heard a soft timeless moan and imagined it came from her own satin throat.

  He stood up and removed his clothes. His long lean body silhouetted in the sparkling night. He was erect and strong and pushing forth. She reached out and touched him and felt it was smooth and warm and lightly explored the gentle hairs around it with her fingertips and nails.

  He climbed onto her bed, kneeling before her between her legs. She massaged the lips of her vagina with the tip of his cock, slowly rubbing the head of his penis against her vulva.

  Moistened now, he entered her, and for a long undetermined amount of time he lie motionless within her, rigid in place, as if in prayer. Her mind was in a form of holy immersion, acknowledging that some body was inside hers and it seemed so unexpected yet so natural who it was.

  They were enjoined there where they lay, and she thought that if time ever could stand still, this was the moment it had to.

  # # #

  Herbie finally arrived at her corner and stood down the street from the high-rise, trying to figure out which window was Maria’s. He counted twenty-two floors and scanned the windows of that level, thinking he saw some movement in the curtains of one with a terrace overlooking the river. He knew he shouldn’t try to enter now, not with the contingent of squirrel killers stationed at the entrance and guarding the perimeter of the entire building. He settled in for the duration in an alley behind the shadows of a stoop and took the vintage Martin out of its new case. He began to tune the guitar, with care, so the good soldiers he thought of as bad dudes wouldn’t hear. Over his head, in the cloud enshrouded New York night, a helicopter roared into what was left of Christmas Eve, 2047.

  * * * * *

  Henry

  Henry Lipton was an enigma from birth. Grandma thought he was born angry, said she thought he was looking for his dad from the gitgo, but only encountered some stoned ex-cheerleaders from the Boston suburbs who were acting like hellcats on Halloween. They strutted and whirled around like they were the ancient Hebrews on their first day of out Egypt, as Grandma lay there like a stoic and squeezed him out.

  Bullmoose was in a cabin in Maine snoring off a Grateful Dead concert he attended the night before in Bangor, grooving with Pig-pen who was smoking the doobies tossed up to him on stage from the down east girls topless in the audience. He didn’t think Grandma was going to deliver so early. Probably he didn’t want to deal with the dancing she-devils he knew were going to dominate everything going on that day. He said they weren’t really her friends, just fly-by-night wenches looking to get high and say angry, mean things about the men they really wanted to fuck but couldn’t get because they made themselves so visually and psychologically undesirable. Within a year Grandma never saw any of them again.

  The doctor, who her mother forced her to see the next day, said his constant crying and uncomfortable disposition was caused by a meconium plug in his lower intestines blocking his first crap. Bullmoose thought meconium was a houseware product you used to seal kitchen floors. Grandma, who never trusted doctors, knew this one was dead wrong. It was the distance between her two men that was to be a theme for the rest of their lives. In any case Henry howled bitterly for the first forty-nine hours, thirty-two minutes and nineteen seconds out of the womb before he fell asleep.

  Henry was a born rebel. Except that he was a rebel born to born rebels, and rebels must have something to rebel against. That was a problem to the kids born to the counterculture. As he grew up he polarized from his dad, Bullmoose, and became ever more conservative, which was the enigma to his singularly Zen mom and his here-again-gone-again future rock-star dad.

  He was one of those boys who you didn’t hear too much about when he was growing up, probably because he didn’t cause too many problems. He got straight A’s, was a decent-enough athlete to make varsity soccer and tennis, didn’t do drugs or alcohol, didn’t get any girl pregnant, and never got into a car accident or had huge barn-burning house parties when his parents were away. To the outside world he was a good kid, kind of a nerd, but very bright. So, good at school in fact that he graduated second out of Cambridge Latin straight into MIT. Grandma was so happy, thought of him as a genius and knew he had great things ahead of him in the scientific world.

  However, his relationship with his dad was a cold one at best. The two never really got along and never shared the usual hallmark father-and-son activities like playing catch, going fishing or building model cars together.

  He hated hearing the hippie stories Bullmoose reminisced over with Uncle Pranan and Aunt Lorraine, especially the ones about India and their not-so-glorious escape from the clutches of the evil Durga. He couldn’t believe his mom was not disturbed by the fact that Bullmoose was having sex with some pre-Bat-Mitzvah-age Hindu girl.

  The deepest conversation they ever had occurred one day when he was turning fifteen. It was about women and went like this: Bullmoose asked Henry, “Do you know what a condom is?”

  “Yes.” Henry said.

  “Use ’em.”

  Chalk up another bit of Bullmoosian perspicacity to live forever in the full and complete manual of practical and operative matters for all men.

  Even though he went to school only a few miles from the house where he was born, Henry decided quickly and without question to move into an MIT dorm to escape the disdain he felt for his dad and those unannounced comings and goings of his, which, although they never bothered his mother, genuinely outraged the young Henry.

  After a year of campus life, he moved into a studio apartment in Kendall Square that Bullmoose never visited, but Grandma came as frequently as he would allow, to decorate and help keep it clean. Regardless of her motherly devotions, the small apartment was spartan at best. It was just big enough for a queen-size bed covered with the afghan comforter that Grandma knitted herself, and a desk shoved into a corner with piles of paper and books surrounding Henry’s monster computer and keyboard. Dingy linen-like curtains were always closed over a window whose only view was the tracks of the subway that ran above the Charles River. Passing trains shook the building at night. As pathetic as it might have appeared to others, it was a magic kingdom for Henry.

  When Henry finally found that special girl, it was no surprise that Bullmoose was left out of the equation. She was a dark-haired beauty that he spied early in his first year at MIT. He watched her in the computer lab, the reflections of the LCD
on her black horned-rim glasses cast spells of enchantment on the inexperienced Henry. After class, he often positioned himself behind a tree near the sidewalk where he could admire her from a distance as she waited for the bus that took her back where she lived with her mother in Dorchester amongst the working-class immigrant Portuguese families.

  It took three years of being in the same advanced theoretical physics pipeline for them to finally have the courage to simply say hello to each other. Finally, Henry got the nerve to ask her to share a bagel one day after they counted pions and bosons and other antiparticles during their afternoon session with the atom smasher. Afterwards they careened back to his Kendall Square pad under the premise to study the uncertainty theory and its historical implications in the discovery of black holes. Instead they fell madly onto the afghan comforter Grandma had knitted to keep Henry warm through the lonely Cambridge nights. Together they played out years of mutual longing and withholding by making the sweetest of sweaty and pungent love all through the night and into the next day. Needless to say, once initiated, that activity continued as often as possible. From that moment on they shared everything together. They were a couple now, both slated for abstract mathematical history, on a mutual march through academia, towards their intended destination into the small but highly coveted membership in the international club of theoretical physicists.

  Of course, it was a club Bullmoose had no regard for whatsoever. He was the true nonbeliever in anything scientific. In his opinion, it was arrogant that physicists dared to give answers to those things he felt were outside the ability of human beings to understand. He believed the attempts of science to determine exactly when the universe began, were feeble at best, even though the most dedicated scientists say they can trace the beginning of time back to the first millionth of a second. Bullmoose would scoff and say it’s obvious that the closer we get to the beginning with these dubious theories, they all break down in failure. Therefore, the question looms so large. What was before that millionth of a second, man, and what was before that?