by Ray Deeg
“Are you ready?” Gwen said from the other side of the cathedral.
“Ready.”
Gwen threw the bundle of rope, which hit clumsily on the balcony wall out of Tom’s reach and fell to the floor. She reeled it in and then bunched it together again. Her eyes met Tom’s in the faint light. She smiled. And with that, she placed one hand on the railing, nearly leaning over the balcony, and tossed the bundle of rope in a perfect arc. Tom caught it easily. Standing on a pew, he secured his end around the top edge of a large column. Once Gwen’s side was secure, Tom stood on the railing and fastened himself to the rope. As he stepped over the threshold, Gwen winced. Slowly, rappelling sideways, he moved out onto the ledge. He stared down, grateful that the darkness obscured the depths below. I must be fifty feet up. Gwen trained her flashlight on Tom as he shimmied toward the Rose Window.
“I see a dark brick,” he said.
Tom retrieved the small handheld drill that had belonged to Conrad’s father from his backpack and installed a thin bit. The tiny drill buzzed away as Tom punched small holes into the mortar surrounding the blackened brick, its high-pitched noise reminiscent of a mosquito buzzing around the massiveness of the cathedral. After drilling a dozen holes, he used a screwdriver to scrape the remaining mortar away. Finally the brick came loose, and Tom removed it cleanly from the wall. He examined the contents of the hollow brick while Gwen tried to make out exactly what was happening. Finally, and with all the drama of being illuminated by the beam of Gwen’s flashlight, Tom raised his head toward the ceiling, and his right arm came up. In his palm, a shiny golden orb with coils of silver wire sparkled. “Eureka,” Tom declared, gazing in awe at their new prize.
“Good Lord,” Gwen said out loud. The more she stared at the second coil, the more its existence set in, as did the inevitability of where all this was heading.
Tom could see the concern on her face. “What is it?
“To be honest, I never thought we’d find anything in Akeley’s diorama. I thought that would have been the end of it. But we did, and now this makes two. I’m starting to worry that my imagination isn’t big enough to understand what’s happening.”
Tom dangled on the rope for a moment, thinking on Gwen’s words, and then spoke. “If we’ve learned one thing from the history of discovery, it’s that the most daring prophecies can seem laughably conservative. Another Clark truism, and I promise you something: It’s OK not to know what’s ahead. It’s OK to be unsure. Always trust that the road will continue to unfold.”
Gwen’s contemplation of Tom’s words was disrupted by a man’s echoing voice: “Yes, the road will continue unfolding for you, Mr. Hartger.”
Gwen spun the flashlight around and down, and the beam illuminated a tall East Indian man. “As long as you make wise decisions, that is,” Esha continued.
Tom could see all three men and immediately knew their options were limited. He couldn’t make bets with Gwen’s life, or his own. “I’ll do as you ask,” Tom said. “As long as you’re civil. There’s no need for anyone to get hurt.”
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness is powerless against it,” Esha replied, smiling.
“No more chases. Give us the coils,” Ashok said in a tone that was dripping with desperation.
Tom felt the metal object in his hand and knew he was holding something grand. The cold metal burned through him, and he sensed its power pushing on his skin. He wondered what he’d be giving up and savored every millisecond of possession. He felt the buzzing in his ear, the boundlessness of those dreams, the power of infinity at his fingertips.
But the expression of fear on Gwen’s face brought him back to reality. “OK, OK,” Tom said calmly and made an underhanded toss. The coil sparkled as it arched across the cathedral’s nave and then began falling quickly toward the floor. Ashok caught it perfectly, an expression of awe washing over his face as he examined it.
Tom retrieved the other coil from his backpack and held it up. “I have your word you’ll leave us in peace?” Tom asked.
“You have my word,” Esha replied.
Tom tossed the remaining coil to Esha. Gwen could only stare in disbelief.
“You’ve made a good choice for yourself and your friend,” Esha said. “I am a man of my word. But before we go, I’m going to ask you a question. And if you lie to me, our deal is off. Where is the fourth harmonic coil?”
Tom looked into Esha’s eyes, which seemed to be burning a hole in his mind. “Neither of us knows, and that’s the truth.”
Esha shook his head, as if warding off an unwelcome thought, and then nodded. “And now you will give me the Edison Medal and the journal belonging to Loomis.”
“How do you know I have them with me?”
“We could come up and check,” Ashok replied.
Tom retrieved the medal in its case and the Loomis journal from his bag and tossed them down.
“I bid you farewell, Mr. Hartger.” Esha raised his hand in a circular motion, and the two henchmen followed him.
“I have to ask you something,” Tom said as the three Indians were passing beneath him. “How did you know about Ackley’s diorama, that we would be there? How did you know we’d be here now?”
Esha stopped and looked up. “I own a telecommunication company in India. We have contracts with American carriers—including yours, Mr. Hartger. We share much of the same technology infrastructure and can access all sorts of information. We tracked the position of your smartphone. Yours was a—how do you say?—a rookie mistake.” Esha held up his phone and pointed to a dot on the screen. “There you are right here, just a tiny little speck,” he said.
Tom was dazed at his own carelessness. He closed his eyes to make the guilt go away. The three Indians left through a small side door, which could only be opened from the inside. Tom pushed the now-empty brick back into its spot and then reconsidered, knowing it might come loose now. He brought the brick back to the railing and climbed over. Another donation I’ll have to make, he thought. He unfastened the rope and placed the tools in the backpack.
Gwen sauntered over, and the pair stared at each other. “If you’re feeling ungrateful,” she said, “just check your pulse.”
He did as she suggested. “Still there,” he said with a grin.
Feeling both grateful and defeated, the pair made their way out of the cathedral.
CHAPTER 42
TOM AND GWEN crossed the street, hardly looking up even to check for traffic. They moved without purpose along Amsterdam Avenue. Their pace was slow; it was the first time in four days there was nowhere to be. Tom couldn’t help but feel the backpack’s emptiness. His thoughts turned to abstracts as he searched for a reason. His thoughts swirled in the wind amid the sparseness of the empty streets and above the wheeling bright glints of stars beyond the grasp of this constrained little world in a vast universe where even the shortest distances are measured in light-years. He wondered how a man could separate all the thoughts and ideas trapped in his own mind from the great masses of people and things out here. How useless the last few days had been, he thought. Everything felt empty and meaningless. How could there be any supreme, all-knowing being? If there was some almighty judge presiding over all things, it must be playing chess with an unusually frigid heart, neglecting to tell its pieces that they’ll be traded without warning or reason for the betterment of the long game. Or maybe there was no great judge at all. Perhaps there was only what we could observe: vast, empty spaces teeming with cruel indifference governed by the unbiased—albeit unfeeling—laws of gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry, and the rest.
They passed a pastry shop, its front window overflowing with colorful delights: the site was akin to visual smelling salts. Fast-talking caffeine junkies filed its sidewalk tables, and whispers of life’s pursuits echoed as the fatigued pair claimed an empty table. In his newly disillusioned mood, Tom thought that the café was little more than an efficient marketplace, exchanging sugar and caffeine for money
. Tom ordered a plate of cherry strudel, scones, and coffees.
“We have our pulses and an amazing tale to tell,” Gwen offered as she leaned back in her chair. She rested her cheek in her hand, and her eyes moved no farther than the flowers on the table.
The two didn’t speak for a good while. Occasionally they glanced down the block at the cathedral, but mostly they stared at the moon; it seemed to grow larger and brighter from one moment to the next. It was surprisingly quiet on the street.
Oh, God. The GPS setting, Tom thought. He disabled the setting on his phone, feeling bleakly satisfied when he saw the icon turn off. He took inventory of the voice in his head; it was surprisingly quiet up there, too. “I’ve been thinking about your real-time lessons,” he said. “The squatter, all that chatter. It’s getting quieter. Knowing how things turned out tonight—the loss of the coils, the Edison Medal, Loomis’s journal—let’s just say I can’t believe the squatter isn’t screaming bloody murder and telling me how badly I screwed up. But it’s calm up here.”
“Now I have a great case study I can use as clickbait for my online marketing,” Gwen replied, perking up a little. “CEO achieves breakthrough of the mind…and you’ve been battle-tested under real-life conditions, too.”
“Just change my name, will you?”
“Now, to stay clear, it’s important that you realize the voice is still waiting. You’ve got a lot to figure out, and no matter what, the squatter’s plan is to inject itself into everything you do. You’ll see something out here, and right away it will start jabbering all over again.” A man walked across the street with a small dog on a leash. “Could be a random dog, like that one,” Gwen continued. “But the squatter will interrupt your life to tell you whether it’s a good dog or a bad dog, without a shred of evidence to form the opinion. It won’t let the dog just be a random dog.
“My squatter has been telling me what a waste of time the last few days have been, how badly we’ve damaged our reputations, what a mess we’ve made, that we failed. But we both know that’s just fear talking, just the voice trying to fit everything into neat little compartments. Truth is, we’ve had an incredible experience—at least I have.”
Gwen’s words were a relief. He watched her hands move as she spoke. “The squatter is like a spy, just waiting to intercept our thoughts so it can drag them through an endless sea of opinions based on our worst past experiences. And each thought gets bent and distorted and picks up all kinds of tags, categories, and qualifiers before the real you can process what you’re actually seeing and hearing and feeling. The most beautiful moments in life are when we can look at something or someone and simply see what’s there, let it be what it is without trying to change it into something else.” Gwen lifted the vase and flower to her nose.
Tom wondered if losing the coils and the medal was something he should be upset about, but he realized it wouldn’t help. He wondered how it was possible that he could have stumbled upon all of this in the first place. There was still so much confusion. “I was reading Loomis’s journal at Connie’s house. My squatter started commenting on the words I was reading, and I found it impossible to understand the words on the page over that dammed voice. I was reading whole paragraphs, but I couldn’t remember what I’d just read.”
“Next time, stop reading and just listen,” Gwen replied. “This may sound strange, but get to know your squatter and just listen. Don’t wonder why; don’t analyze it—just be silent and listen.”
The waiter returned with a plate of pasties and two coffees.
“That looks great,” Tom said to the waiter.
“You’re a CEO,” Gwen said. “What would you do if you had an employee who constantly criticized you, called you names, and told you to give up?” Gwen asked.
“I’d fire them, of course.”
Gwen took a sip. “Exactly, but you have to get to know your squatter first. Observe it while it comments on your life. Pay attention to how you listen and stop debating with it; you’ll never win. It wants to keep you engaged in an endless cycle of worthless banter. And once you understand the amount of grief it causes, you’ll realize that most of the suffering in your life has been the squatter, not you.”
“So tell me the secret, then.” Tom interlocked his fingers behind his head. “How does someone get to this higher plane and become clear permanently?”
“No, no,” Gwen said, shaking her finger like a mother to a naughty child. “You’re not going anywhere new; you’re returning to a place that always was. All of us form judgments, a sea of opinions. At around four or five years old, we stop seeing things in real time and start adding things to the live stream—things that aren’t really there. We try making predictions, and this is how each of our squatters is born.” Gwen cocked her head. “Tell me the very first sad or scary moment that comes to mind.”
Tom was getting lost in her deep-green angel eyes again. “One thing happened in kindergarten—it’s silly,” he said, shaking his head. “I brought my cat to school for show-and-tell. Her name was Fredericka.”
“Fredericka the cat,” Gwen said, smiling.
“Yeah, well, my mother put Fredericka in a box. I was excited to share her with my classmates, but when it was time to get her out, the children got excited and noisy, as kindergarteners do. I could see Fredericka was scared. When I opened the box, she sprang out, and the children screamed and chased her around the classroom. The teacher finally calmed everyone down, and I managed to get her back in the box.” Tom was staring into his coffee, grinning.
Gwen nodded. “I asked you to pick something scary or sad, but you have a smile on your face. What made you pick that story? What was the scary or sad part—not for the cat, for Tom?”
Tom’s face turned serious. “Well, this may sound a little silly, but the other kids could see how upset I was. They all stared while I coaxed Frederika out from underneath a bookshelf. I was young, and naturally I was terrified. But I was also really embarrassed. I should’ve known not to bring the cat to school, and I hated myself for doing something so stupid. After I got her back in the box, my sadness disappeared, and I remember feeling anger. I was angry at my classmates for scaring the cat and making me cry—and I suppose I was angry at myself for allowing it. Perhaps I’m overthinking it. Will I be getting a bill?”
“And what did that moment, so long ago—one of the first moments you can recall—teach you about other people?” Gwen asked sternly.
Tom straightened up. “It taught me that people don’t care, that they can’t be trusted with anything important to you because it’s not important to them, that they’ll laugh when they see you’re afraid…”
Gwen put her cup down and nodded. “Bingo,” she said. “And then you began the work of making judgments about people in your head, of being skeptical, of hiding who you are from the world to make yourself less vulnerable. You created the squatter, an untrusting, fearful cynic terrified of being laughed at or taken advantage of and blinding Tom to what was really happening out here.”
Tom sipped his coffee and listened. He wasn’t one to admit what he considered personal frailties or to overanalyze his emotions, but Gwen was making him less resistant.
“You’ll become better at recognizing the rackets you’re running and the barriers you’ve erected to keep anyone from seeing who Tom Hartger really is. You have nothing to hide, and you’re wasting a lot of energy maintaining those walls. Your brain is a computer, and you can’t be fully present when you have all those programs running in the background.” Gwen’s hair caught a breeze, and they heard the sound of dry leaves tumbling down the street.
Tom stared at the cathedral in the distance and thought about what could have been. The sweet and the sour; the last few days have been both. “I see why your patients need you. Thanks.”
Gwen rearranged the flowers in the vase. “You’re a quick study,” she said in a playful tone.
CHAPTER 43
TOM STARED AT Gwen, about to admit something rather p
rofound, when he noticed the man approaching them on the sidewalk. He was openly staring at Tom as he moved, and he didn’t break eye contact as he entered the cafe’s seating area and walked toward their table. A surge of energy coursed through Tom’s body.
“Tom Hartger?” the man said in a Scottish accent.
Tom nodded slightly.
“My name is Ian Heckie. I’m chief of police in New Hope, Pennsylvania. You know, Monty’s Oddities. We spoke on the phone Sunday morning.”
Tom wondered if the man might try to arrest him, although he hadn’t broken any laws—with the slight exception of some well-intentioned trespassing. Of course, he was no longer in possession of the harmonic coils, the Edison Medal, or the Loomis journal, so he had nothing left to safeguard. Besides, he was simply too tired to care. Tom pushed out his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Ian. Please join us and have some strudel.”
Heckie smiled. He shook Tom’s hand and seemed to relax. “You must be Gwen Pierce,” he said.
Gwen smiled back. “Hello,” she said.
“I saw your face and name on the news,” Heckie admitted.
Tom rolled his eyes. “She has nothing to do with this,” he said, politely pushing the plate of pastries toward Heckie. “And I hope you’re not here to arrest me.” Tom wondered how the cop had tracked them down. Could it be my phone again?
“No, that’s not my intention,” Heckie replied, selecting a choice hunk of strudel. “I’m investigating the murder of Monty Palomar and have reopened the case of Everett Lemily’s suicide. I’ve learned the two events are connected by far more than that machine. I’ve been gathering information, and some very strange things are happening. I was asked to meet you here—by someone, and I don’t know who that someone is.”
Tom cocked his head sideways.
“I know of no crime you’ve committed, but do be careful what ya say; I’m still a cop,” he concluded, channeling a detective in a dime-store novel.