by Weston Ochse
“I heard there was a party. Didn’t want to miss it.”
Preacher’s Daughter joined Boy Scout on the left. “I hate it when our invitations get lost in the mail.” She glanced at the operator. “Tom, is that you?”
The operator rolled his eyes. “Hi, Laurie.”
“How’s the leg?” she asked.
“Might need a few stitches,” Tom the Operator said. “Through and through. Your boss knows how to shoot.”
“Hear that, boss? Compliments all around. Tom here was in 5th Group, or still is in 5th Group. He wanted to date me and I told him if he could outshoot me, then he could.”
“I take it you never dated, then,” McQueen said.
“No. Not even a pity date.” She grinned. “Good to see you, Tom.”
Tom the Operator knew when to shut up. He staggered in place and stared morosely at the sand.
“Now what?” Poe asked.
“We’re out of here,” Boy Scout said. He turned and caught Noaks’s attention, which wasn’t hard since they were the best show in town. He made a circling motion with his arm above his head and Noaks climbed into the cockpit and began to power up the helicopter.
“You can’t leave,” Poe said.
“You asking or telling?”
“Damn it. Boy Scout. Don’t force me to—”
“What? Shoot me? Lock me up?” He leaned in so that there were only inches between him and Poe. “I’ve had better than you try.” He shook his head. “I would have worked with you, except for Tom here. Once you brought him into the picture it became clear where your loyalties lie, and they aren’t with us.”
Poe held his gaze. “I’m loyal to the United States, as you should be.”
“How’s that working for you?” Boy Scout stepped back. To the others, Boy Scout said, “Come on. Let’s go.”
He turned and strode towards the helicopter.
Charlene walked beside him.
The other two had his six.
When they were all on the helicopter and heading away, Lore asked over her headset, “What’s the plan?”
Boy Scout stared at the wide, blue ocean and said, “I have no fucking idea, but whatever we’re going to do, it’s not going to be with Poe.”
Then he called Faood and let him know what was really going on. If he was going to throw Poe to the wolves, he might as well choose which wolves to throw him to.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Our Lady of Atlas in Exile, Again
AS IT TURNED out, they went back to the beginning.
De Cherge met them on the lawn of Our Lady of Atlas in Exile and welcomed them into his office. He didn’t inquire about their weapons, but he definitely gave them hard looks. Once in his office, he offered everyone a seat. He wore his brown abbot robes. His right arm was in a black, molded wrist-to-shoulder cast to protect the arm that Boy Scout had damaged earlier.
To Charlene, he held out his left hand and said, “I don’t believe I’ve had the privilege. I am Abbot Dominic de Cherge.”
Charlene blushed. “I’m Charlene Johnson. Pleased to meet you,” she said, on her best behavior. If she’d gotten any vibes from the abbot, she kept them to herself.
“Thank you for taking us in,” Boy Scout said. “How is your arm?”
“It throbs.”
“And the others?”
“Still too soon to know.”
“What about Sister Renee?” Boy Scout asked in as respectful of a voice as he could. “Are there to be services?”
De Cherge frowned and stared at the surface of his broad antique wooden desk. “She took her own life, and in doing so, cannot be in God’s grace.”
Boy Scout’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t realized they’d look at it that way. He felt the emptiness inside of him grow. “She didn’t take her own life. She sacrificed herself.”
“These are kind words, but we know the truth of it. I saw her body. I saw the razors. We’d hoped she would find the opportunity to heal, but for some it never comes.”
Boy Scout shook his head violently. “De Cherge, you’re the one who doesn’t understand. She was working with me in astral projection. She gave her own life to try and help me live. She’s no different than a soldier dying for his comrades in arms. She’s no different than a mother shoving her child out of the way of a moving car, only to be struck and killed herself. She fought for me and to do that, she had to sever her soul from her body.”
Boy Scout continued trying to explain, telling de Cherge blow-by-blow what happened.
All the while, the abbot became increasingly more agitated. By the end, he had tears in his eyes.
“I wished I’d known this before. Not that the church would understand, but I could have at least said mass by her grave.”
Boy Scout’s jaw dropped. “Grave? You mean she’s already buried?”
“The investigation was open and shut. She’s buried in a pauper’s grave on the edge of the property that’s normally reserved for those not in God’s favor.”
Boy Scout felt unusually emotional. His eyes were tight and he was almost crying. “Can we change it? Can she get a proper burial?”
De Cherge began nodding slowly, then picked up speed. “We can. Yes.”
Joy surged through Boy Scout, and it was at that moment he realized the emotions weren’t his. They belonged to Sister Renee. She was somehow influencing him. She was still in his head, just as Charlene had said. Bits and pieces. He needed to speak with her. He needed to do it now.
“If you can have someone show me to my room, Preacher’s Daughter will fill you in on things.”
Ten minutes later he was in a narrow room with a single bed. One of the plaster walls was adorned with a single, roughhewn wooden crucifix. Heavy wool drapes covered the lone, high window.
He sat on the floor in an Indian position and placed his hands on his knees. He tried to slow his breathing, but it was difficult considering the events that had so recently transpired. His mind went back to Poe and the way he’d acted. Had Boy Scout made the right decision in making the man and his unit their enemy? He supposed he’d never know. But the way Poe had acted hadn’t sparked any sense of loyalty. Where was the trust? Boy Scout supposed Poe had worked so long by himself that he wasn’t able to trust. And if he were to believe Charlene, and he had no reason not to, Poe and Special Unit 77 had plans for Boy Scout. Not only was the daeva to be the test subject of supernatural investigators, but Boy Scout as well.
Boy Scout noted that his breathing was actually speeding up. He lay back and rested his legs in front of him. He closed his eyes and brought his hands to his chest. Enough of Poe and Special Unit 77. He needed to concentrate on Sister Renee. He needed to return to the astral plane and see what it was she wanted before all that was left of her was erased.
He remembered her last words as the entity chewed through her essence. She’d discovered The White inside the entity as if it were an access point. Boy Scout knew he needed to go into it in order to have a chance at ridding himself of yazata, but he didn’t want to enter the thing that wanted to take him over—which was why he so desperately wanted access to the daeva. If the yazata was scared of the daeva, then he felt safer using it as the engine to enter The White.
It seemed an eternity, but he was eventually able to unlock each of his chakras and sizzle through his third eye into the negative universe of the astral plane.
The entity crouched like a child in the corner, facing away from him.
Boy Scout approached slowly and saw a tendril of energy leaking from it like a stray string. He knew immediately what it was and reached out to touch it.
“Sister Renee.”
An astral sigh. “I thought you’d never come.” The words were elongated and malformed.
“I’m here now.” He regarded the filament with an ache, knowing this was the last of her. “I’m told you have something you must say.”
“There’s not much of me left,” she said.
Her words were so stretched
he found them difficult to understand.
“I didn’t—I didn’t teach you to travel.” Another sigh. “It’s too hard. I can barely do this.”
“No, don’t go,” he begged, grabbing a bigger handful of the essence.
The entity stirred slightly, but otherwise didn’t move.
A word formed in his mind.
FLY.
LIKE.
WHITE.
Then another.
THINK.
FLY.
MOVE.
They repeated over and over until they were a single word.
THINKFLYMOVETHINKFLYMOVETHINK
But still he didn’t get it.
And then he did. I didn’t teach you to travel.
One immense astral face palm as he realized the universe he’d denied himself. He’d only been to the astral plane to confront his travelers, but there was so much more he could do—so much more of it—the astral plane.
Suddenly her words disappeared.
He heard her sigh.
BEFREE.
And she was gone.
He backed away from the entity and floated silently, remembering the moments in the grotto when they’d first met. He thought of her, from the young, guiltless girl traveling to Turkey with her father to rehabilitate a monastery, to the young woman who pushed an older woman in front of a train, to a nun who gave her life in an attempt to save Boy Scout from a fate similar to the one she experienced.
It was all too much.
She was too much.
He would not let her sacrifice go to nothing.
So, he turned and soared, flying through the astral plane with increasing speed.
Gravity was a construct.
Speed was an invention.
All that existed was thought, much like in The White.
He willed himself west and south and within moments found himself hovering above the Turkish Consulate. Thousands of sparks of light shone below, each one a person going about his or her business. It occurred to him that astral projection would make a great way to surveil someone. They could be followed without anyone ever knowing.
He lowered himself so that he was closer to the earth.
Streaks of light proved to be individuals in vehicles moving along gridded streets.
But, as expected, there was one light that made them all seem dimmer. A large rectangle, something made to store something immense, move something immense, glowing from the center of the consulate. This could only be the daeva.
He moved through the ceiling and the upper floors, through furniture and through walls.
Everything material was construct.
He was immaterial.
When he reached the now blinding entity, he settled for a moment. He’d never been awake when he went into a fugue. All the other times it had been when the dervishes had put him to sleep. But his intuition told him it was possible. He wasn’t entering the daeva, but using the daeva as an engine to enter The White.
Was it that easy?
Who was he kidding?
Still, he reached out with a single astral digit and touched—
What felt like an electric line.
Power surged through him, but he maintained the contact, thinking of nothing more than the undisturbed nothingness of The White and his desire to enter.
And just like that, he was there.
No ceiling.
No floor.
No walls.
Nothing.
Just white.
For eternity.
Boy Scout sent out thoughts, calling for Rumi to present himself. He shouted and screamed Rumi’s name, but the nothing of The White absorbed everything. Twice he saw something, dark and distant, and both times he moved away from it. The last thing he needed were more travelers. He was about to give up when The White shifted.
He was back in Vietnam and amid the noise and stench of Saigon. But he wasn’t there to see the Napalm Girl. He also wasn’t there to see the Buddhist monk immolate himself. He’d been there and done that. No, this was of a different image—an image from the same Time Life Book in which he’d seen the other two images. This one was of an execution, and he was in the wrong POV. He stood with his hands cuffed behind him. South Vietnamese soldiers smoked and laughed at him. He felt as if he’d been crying. A car pulled up and the soldiers snapped to attention. A sinewy man wearing general stars on his lapels stepped out. He was hatless and he wore his uniform with the sleeves rolled up.
Boy Scout remembered the image well. It had disturbed him the moment he’d seen it. It was the first death he’d ever seen—first in a long line of dead bodies he’d seen or caused to be dead.
The Napalm Girl stood for the hopelessness of the Vietnamese—their plight—being caught in the middle of a proxy war against competing ideals, north and south backed by competing philosophical juggernauts.
The Burning Monk stood for resolve in the face of that hopelessness—a stoicism no American could compete against. A man willing to burn himself alive just so there would be pictures to remind the world about what he did and why he did it.
Even the Falling Man was about something larger. September 11th. Jesus dying for our sins. It was an image of America’s youthful recklessness in the way it treated other countries, and how even a never-before-known group with few members could snap back and take a chunk out of the red, white, and blue apple.
But the Saigon execution photo had left him speechless.
In the end, it was the nonchalance that disturbed him the most.
And now he was going to witness it—or, to his horror, become the victim of it.
The general pulled a snub-nosed 38 out of his waistband. He waved it at his men as he said in Vietnamese, “Stand aside.”
They shuffled out of the way but remained close enough to watch what was about to happen to Nguyen Van Lem—to Boy Scout.
Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the head of South Vietnam’s National Police, stared coldly at Boy Scout.
I’m not him, he wanted to shout. Don’t shoot me, he wanted to beg. But all that came out was a whimper.
“You disgust me,” the general said, puffing on a cigarette, sweat beading his brow.
He should have turned and ran. He would have been shot, but in the back was so much more bearable than in the head.
“Do you have any last words?” the general asked.
Boy Scout tried to scream but nothing came out.
“Smile for the camera,” the general said.
Then the general brought his pistol to the side of the prisoner’s head and fired.
Boy Scout’s POV flipped. He was no longer the victim, he was the photographer.
He felt the man’s nervousness and fear. Would the general let him live after the photo?
He’d just snapped the picture of a lifetime, the nonchalant general firing into the head of a bound man, the bullet already on its way out the other side of the man’s head, the hair tousled, the face misshapen. The picture would go on to be plastered across the front page of every major newspaper in the western world, would win the photographer a Pulitzer Prize, and would stand to symbolize the savage horror of the entire war. It would go on to haunt the general until his dying breath.
The general lowered his pistol and turned to the camera. He smiled.
The photographer took his picture, but no one would ever care about this one.
“The Vietcong—they killed many of my men and many of your people,” the general said, then walked away. He paused to light a cigarette, then got in his car, and was driven away.
Lem lay on the pavement, blood pouring from the hole in the back of his head, forming a pool that was the color of deep black tar.
It was then that Boy Scout realized the entire scene had been played out in black and white, much like the picture.
Then Lem opened his eyes and spoke.
“You have these images inside of you that are terrible, yet you choose to remember them.”
“I
remember them because they are terrible,” Boy Scout said. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“That sounds like something I would say.”
“It was George Santayana. A Spanish philosopher.”
“In my day, the Spanish were always at war.”
“They discovered bull fighting and red wine and found peace,” Boy Scout said.
“Then you make peace with the universe. Take joy in it.”
From the fortune cookie comment, it had to be Rumi. “Tell me about the yazatas.”
“Do you think I am yours to command?” the dead man asked.
“We’ve met before. You told me you are studying the daeva. You’re the one who told me they were older than humanity. What were the words you said about the daeva? Maybe the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion, but a bullet shot out of a rifle. The question we should be asking ourselves is who fired the rifle? I can hear their echoes. I can see their writing on the sand of my dreams. I can even parse the memories of the sleeping daevawho remember a different place—a place with more dimensions, where they were many and moved quite differently than they do today. Then I said, Perhaps the explosion that created our universe destroyed theirs.”
“I remember this, yes. But was that before or after? Time flows differently here. The dimensions available to us through the daeva are mirrors of their own dimensions.”
“I ask again. Tell me about the yazatas.”
“I can see now why you ask. You have one inside of you. How I missed it before, I don’t know. It’s as if you’ve come fully formed to The White. What is my aspect?”
“You are the Viet Cong soldier lying dead in a black and white universe.”
Suddenly there was color, so blinding and so raw that Boy Scout couldn’t help but shield his eyes. Along with the color came the noise, only now the events were going backwards. He watched as Lem rose to his feet and the bullet slammed back into the gun.
The general turned to him and grinned.
“Where were we? If we’re going to speak, I might as well be the shooter rather than the victim.”
Boy Scout had given up wondering how things were done in The White.