by Ray Deeg
Edwin’s Reflection
Edwin’s Reflection
A Novel
Ray Deeg
No part of this book may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form and by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without express written from the author or publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
© 2016 Ray Deeg
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9781523819553
ISBN-10: 1523819553
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901896
CreateSpace independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
Acknowledgments
TO MY WIFE, Michele: Thank you for all the things you do for us, for your love, and for the overwhelming patience you showed in the face of countless lost weekends, nights, and mornings when I was AWOL. To my mother, Nancy Marie Deeg: Thank you for my life, for your unwavering love, and for a lifetime of never-ending encouragement. I miss you every day. To my father, Martin Cosentino, architect, artist, and genuine Renaissance man: Thank you for your love and the smashing sketches that help elevate these ideas to new heights. Most of all, thank you for teaching me to see the divine in every design. To the talented editors and producers at Amazon Publishing who contributed to Edwin’s Reflection: You truly do superb work. All my gratitude goes out to the staff of the Waldorf Astoria, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. Thank you for answering all my silly questions. Lastly, my heartfelt thanks to friends, old and new, in Tuxedo Park for allowing me into your homes, for sharing your stories and secrets, and for allowing me to write about them.
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
Epilogue
Author’s Note
WHAT STARTED AS a simple plan to tell a story became an obsession to preserve as many actual and historic details as possible. Each character and person described in this story is real or based on a real person, and while some of their names have been changed or altered, most have not. Every setting depicted in this novel is real, and I spent a lot of time visiting each of them to ensure that each one was described with precision. The technology described here is genuine, as are its potential hazards—theoretically. From abstract concepts to patents and devices from inventors past and present, the science in this novel is real—including “the machine.”
Prologue
THERE CAN BE no more wretched a soul than one so filled with resentment that a biological reaction occurs within the body’s very tissue, precipitating the fundamental desire to watch the world burn. But on the grand stage of life, even the most loathsome soul can play a useful part. Just ask and any decent chess player will tell you that each piece on the board, when tactically traded, can swing a game’s outcome. Case in point: Randall Evans, a well-trained and highly intelligent man—yet a particularly nasty strain of resentment had become firmly rooted in his mind. He’d been so full of resentment for so long that it had become common to ostracize himself to that dark abyss where people go to dole out self-punishment—to examine the laundry list of their failures, to bask in the sea of their own flaws, and to stew about the general unfairness of this rotten place. He’d been fidgeting since he woke up, wondering about the type of life that might make him happy. That was nothing new, especially in the last few months—years, if we’re being honest, and he was.
Randall gazed down into Federal Plaza from his twenty-third-floor office window, his forehead pressed against the glass. Not a white puff in the sky, just light blue turning darker until it was nearly black in the west. The glass felt cool on his forehead, and he pondered a notion that had been ricocheting around in his mind for some time. As he stood watching the bridge-and-tunnel ant farm scurry around below, a thought that had been more shapeless and uncertain finally completed its metamorphosis and tore through its cocoon: He was miserable. He’d been that way for the majority of his life.
Randall’s childhood and adolescence had been terrific, truly the bee’s knees. Around his midtwenties, however, Randall’s life began changing. He hadn’t known it then, but that teeny thorn under his skin was born of his own sharp opinions. You know the ones: about what’s good and bad, about what’s right and wrong, about how things should be rather than simply what they are because of physics, inertia, gravity, distributed equity, human nature, and the rest. His disillusionment became irritation, frustration, and then intolerance; anger and rage followed. Now there wasn’t any youth left to mask all that ugliness. His former gusto was drained. Working full-time, like a hamster on a wheel, can do that if you allow it—and he had. All those tiny moments that had led him to the present were gone, and most hadn’t been all that spectacular in the first place, if he was being honest—and he was. All those forks in the road to all those other paths of possibility were gone, and he hadn’t taken any of them. I’ve squandered my life, he thought.
He’d spent so long waiting for that one special thing so that his life could finally start. But that thing had never happened, so he’d ignored the truth, shut down from knowing or sharing his authentic self. He didn’t listen and was seldom heard. He was strange now, absent and angry, and he was jealous most of his waking hours. Most of his energy was allocated to hiding the damage from himself by projecting his own worst qualities onto everyone else. He’d spent years stewing in that dark abyss, doing his penance, and turning in circles. How many times had he shaken off the obsession and begun the process of removing the blinders, only to become pathological all over again? The obsession—about his destiny, that secret thing in his head—had lodged itself in his psyche when he was a boy, but destiny isn’t what it used to be. His cloud’s silver lining had faded and cracked, and what remained was a visible mass of liquid droplets suspended in the atmosphere blocking the sun and casting a dark shadow everywhere he moved.
Having worked for the FBI for most of his adult life, Randall Evans had been drained of his creativity, his dreams, and, most of all, his goodwill. What little he did have had been gradually leached
out by ignorance, by the physics and economics of life, and the rest by the mind-numbing injustice and unchained bureaucracy of his soulless government job. Soon after joining the FBI, a much younger and more vibrant Randall Evans had quickly noticed the sharp contrast between the deviant criminal deeds he was fighting against and the fluorescent-lit, caffeine-fueled analytical methodologies that are the bedrock of the bureau’s operations. Living in that divide became his life. For a short time, it was exciting and kept him on track. He stayed out of the abyss for many years, hardly ever fidgeting or allowing resentment to form rot in his mind. But soon the work became routine, the colors faded, the corners turned up and cracked, and he realized his place—just another replaceable cog staring at his youth in the rearview mirror.
The idea of becoming an agent had come from his grandfather, Walter Evans, one of the very first agents recruited to serve in J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation way back in 1926. Randall and his grandfather had spent endless summer afternoons on the front porch of their Ridgewood, New Jersey, home where Randall spent his childhood and where Walter spent his final years. Randall adored listening to his grandfather’s soothing voice, punctuated by the creak of that old porch glider. It was the only time his mind felt still. He’d listen for hours as Walter spun grandiose tales of federal agents tracking the world’s most brilliant scientists in a bid to control the greatest secret of the universe. Walter’s stories captured Randall’s imagination, filling him with jubilation. And Walter did a hell of a good job filling the void for Randall’s absent father.
But at age eighty-seven, as all men do, Walter passed away. Randall was eleven and soon went back to killing bees and torturing small lawn creatures. But by then Walter’s stories had taken up permanent residence, deeply rooting themselves in the most fertile patch of Randall’s psyche. A day never passed when Randall didn’t lose himself for just a moment to marvel at Walter’s stories and the secrets his grandfather had confided. As an adult, those stories were Randall’s only solace. He’d even find himself smiling, just occasionally, at the possibility that even one of Walter’s tales could be real. And he never forgot about his destiny.
“Oh, you’ll finish what I could not,” Walter would say. “You’ll help find a way out of this maze, yes sir. It’s your destiny, boy, and it will be your legacy to the world!”
Randall didn’t understand all the things Walter said, but the love he felt for his mofa, his mother’s father, was profound—unlike anything Randall had known before or since. Walter had conjured pure imagination in the boy, awakening him and transforming him into an imaginative critical thinker, an energetic new life brimming with possibility. It helped drive a twenty-five-year-old Randall to push his physical and mental boundaries, to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, and to successfully navigate the bureau’s rigorous training program.
Never forgetting Walter’s tales about scientists in covert laboratories, government agents and cover-ups, the secrets of the universe, and his destiny, Randall became resolute, concealing his obsession in the back of his mind. He was methodical after graduating and becoming an agent and never told a soul about his grandfather being a bureau agent. Less than a year after graduation, Randall was authorized to access the bureau’s most sensitive case files. He searched with the patience and discipline of a cat burglar, but he only found ancillary references to the fact that an agent named Walter Evans had once served in the Bureau of Investigation—the precursor to today’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, which officially began in 1935. The last reference he found was dated in June of 1943, but there was a strange absence of retrievable references, few details about the cases Walter had worked on, and only one original case number. Case number seventy-four. That number became an obsession. Each time Randall queried it, no matter what terminal, the bureau’s case management system returned the same message: No Matches Found.
Life went on, and that feeling of youthful freedom, of warm sun shining on his skin as he swung on the porch glider listening to Walter’s stories, faded to a blurred daydream. He thought about it for so many years that he wondered if the memory was real or if he’d made the whole damn thing up. But the mind shifts much like the Earth’s tectonic plates, surfaces change and evolve, and things long forgotten emerge to see daylight once again. And so it was, one Thursday morning, that the most fertile patch of Randall’s psyche unearthed a detail.
Everett Lemily—that was the name of the kid from the secret laboratory. Everett Lemily.
Randall entered the name on the closest terminal, but the screen returned the now-familiar message: No Matches Found. He tried Everett Hemily, Everett Tenily, Edward Femily, Edmond Benderly, and dozens more, but nothing came back a relevant match. Of course, he knew that most of the bureau’s paper cases dating before the 1950s had yet to be digitized and simply weren’t accessible through the case-file database. Still other cases had been intentionally misplaced by bureaucrats worried about saving their own hides or protecting the status quo. And I may just have remembered it wrong. I was just a dumb kid.
As the years passed, Walter’s stories never found a window into Randall’s new reality. All those secrets, those amazing tales—Randall’s so-called destiny—were replaced with a wife named Cheryl and three daughters: Sofia, Amelia, and Liv. He was subjected to a daily regimen of soul-depleting torture running on the FBI’s criminal hamster wheel. He was forty-two years old, his forehead pressed against his office window while he stared down into Federal Plaza observing the world from an unknown station wondering whether the whole thing was a purgatory-like nightmare in his mind. He was barely holding on, and he didn’t care who knew. He wasn’t even pretending anymore. He was bitter. He wanted to exert his power over others, wanted to punish them for going about their happy lives while he was left behind. He wanted the destiny Walter had promised. But destiny, like evolution, moves intentionally and purposefully on its quest to become. It can be detoured, even stalled temporarily, but finding a way back onto its original path is inevitable.
CHAPTER 1
THE OLD MAN’S eyes followed the record label around as it spun. His hair was gray and matted, and the skin on his face and arms was scaly and dotted with liver spots. He hadn’t showered in some time, but there wasn’t anyone else around—and the thing was, he really didn’t give a damn. Using a yellowed fingernail, he lifted the tonearm and gently lowered the needle. After a light thud and some crackles, Mozart’s Requiem Mass slowly permeated the opulent, wood-paneled library. The gentle pulse of the bassoon, in between bursts of violin and trumpet, crept through the house. It was a composition he’d known all his life, and he listened intently, as if the sound contained life’s very meaning, connecting him with the people he’d loved and lost and who were now hidden between the notes and chords.
The slow rhythm of the composition was dark but matched the hopelessness that had grown in the old man’s mind at about the same rate the cancer had spread through his body. There is no stage five. He’d made mistakes in his life and had more than his share of regrets. He’d learned to hate himself for allowing the thing to come between him and any sense of normalcy this life could have offered. It’s a terrible thing being old and full of regrets, but his illusions about life had long ago been shattered. He had still been a child when he was afforded a glimpse of a powerful truth most souls never see or even hope to comprehend. I might have a couple months left here. As he pondered the bleakness of his situation, a feeling of nostalgia, followed by a glimmer of hope, washed over him. I have nothing left to lose, he realized. I might as well put my remaining chips on red.
The man gazed at a bulky object in the center of the library, covered by a thick, yellow tarp. He began dragging furniture to one side of the room, clearing a space around the thing. He flipped up the tarp, and a thick cloud of dust spread through the air revealing an ominous mechanical device about the size of a grand piano but not nearly as safe. He allowed his hands to brush along the machine, feeling the cold metal surface
with his fingers, fiddling with the wires, dials, and knobs. The thing’s copper pipes, tubes, and valves suggested an uneasy cross between the fantastic and the mundane. It wasn’t a cappuccino maker, a pipe organ, or a printing press, but its strange metal appendages hinted at something in between. A series of golden tubes protruded like a futuristic exhaust pipe or perhaps a robotic poinsettia. The man ran his fingers over the pipes, making certain they were solid. He grabbed a toolbox and removed thin strands of silver wire, which he coiled around four bulky vacuum tubes.
This will either work, or it won’t. Either way, my time is up. He thought this would be like one last spin at the roulette wheel—all or nothing. He turned his eyes toward his magnificent tray ceiling and spoke out loud: “Spiritus nunquam moritur.” He referenced a tattered blueprint littered with hand-scribbled notes, so long that even with his arms spread out, the schematic drooped in the middle like a clumsy length of paper towel. Over and over and over, he thought. Like a purgatory. The glow from the fireplace illuminated the blueprint with a warm shade of orange that flickered pleasantly. The crackling fireplace could be heard just under the music, and, for a moment, there was peace in the man’s eyes. The lifelong inventor realized the intricate maze of electrical wires had been connected properly.
He shook his head, pressing his chapped lips together, and flicked the blueprint in a nod to his own ingenuity. Mozart’s composition lifted the man’s spirits, and his hands and arms woke up just in time to conduct an invisible orchestra. He danced as he moved, following a thick cable lying on the floor. He spun toward the back of the room and then opened a sliding door to the backyard and the warm night air. The cable ran through the estate’s enormous backyard to a transmission tower carrying high-voltage lines at the back of the man’s property. He connected the large cable to a receiver he’d bootstrapped to the transmission tower—without proper permits, but never was the old man one to worry about rules. He’d known a truth far more powerful than man’s silly laws and had no patience for stop signs or speed limits. A warm August wind crept toward the man’s property, propelling leaves into tiny orbits. They descended around him as if he were a magnet. The wind pushed his gray hair back, freezing him in his tracks. He stopped and raised his weathered face to the starry sky, feeling a surge of energy deep in the marrow of his bones like the energy of a chemical reaction in its nascent state. It’s here. It knows. Oh God, it knows.