by Jesse Jordan
James squeezed the brakes, and his tires skidded and kicked up microparticles of dirt and road. Then he stood, his legs posted on each side of the bike as he stared up at the monstrous building. This is a special place. James could feel—in his gut, in the place where you know you love your mom—that this was more than a building. This place is a thing. The thought didn’t make total logical sense to him, but he knew it was right. The way a rabbi sees a temple, the way a teacher sees a school, that was what James sensed in the dilapidated factory: weight, importance, sacrality.
He felt an urge that’d never before touched him: he wanted to go in.
Going into the ChocoMalt factory was a common dare/brag in Stone Grove, as well as a familiar source for cautionary tales. Of the factory, James had heard four main things:
1) Satan worshippers hang out there. They do animal sacrifices and stuff, and they’re all crazy and if they catch you there, they could do anything. Colin claimed that a friend of one of his older brothers had his ear cut off as a warning to stay away. Dorian said she heard that the Satanists raped a guy in the butt just to scare everyone else away.
2) Gangbangers hang out there. This is where they do their initiations.32 The factory is their turf, and if you show up, they will seriously mess you up. Maybe kill you, though there’s no way anyone would find a body.
3) It’s a deadly condemned building. You could just be walking and the entire floor could collapse, and you’d fall—maybe just onto the floor below, but maybe through that too, maybe onto some machinery. James heard one kid almost died when he opened a door and walked through it and there was just nothing there. It was an elevator shaft, and the kid fell into it. Luckily, it was full of water, so he didn’t die, but he lost a leg.
4) The cops are always watching it. If you go in at all, they’ll bust you. You’ll be in there, and they’ll just come out of nowhere. They know the place like the back of their hands, so there’s no way you can get away.
James rode around the factory until he was by the back.33 There was a small window frame with only a few shards pointing to the center. James laid his bike in the grass/weeds and walked over. He looked around, but everything was dark and still. He stood in the tall grass and put his hands on the stone windowsill, feeling a bit of grime and harmless glass under his palms. Then he leaned forward, until his head and chest were actually inside the factory.
There was very little he could make out. He could tell that the room he was looking into was long and tall, like a steel ballroom. The space directly in front of him appeared open, and at the far, far end was a mass that looked like some kind of manufacturing equipment. James remembered the lighter in his pocket and dug it out. It caught on the second attempt, and weak orange illumination filled the area directly around him. To his right he saw the main wall. It’d originally been white or gray, but now it was the color of snow by the side of the road, streaked with stains and covered with graffiti. A few signs, like the upside-down pitchfork and the crown and the five-pointed star, James recognized as gang tags, but most of it was indecipherable. He did see a pentagram, though, and a spot where, in big black letters, it said: THE PIGS WILLLLLLLL PAY!!!
James turned to look at the rest of the room, bringing the light around. It was like one of those postapocalyptic wastelands in the movies: barren but not empty. He moved the lighter slowly to the left. It didn’t shed enough light for him to see the machinery across the way, just a twenty- or twenty-five-foot arc. The floor was covered with cigarette butts and shards of glass and what looked like rust shavings. He noticed a broken desk and a filing cabinet without any drawers, and then as his arm swept past his own face, he saw something. Directly across from him, a ways off but not quite to the mechanical graveyard on the other side, was a . . . a shape. He squinted into the darkness, but while his ocular system was unable to clarify what it was, some part of James was certain—It’s a man. Standing there, unmoving, watching him. James immediately became aware of the sound of his own breathing, the way he must look with the little flame held before him.
Then something moved. There was a shuffle and a clatter and James leapt back, dropping the lighter. He fell on his ass in the weeds and scrambled up, two factions of his mind arguing about whether that had been a man, whether it had moved, what had actually happened. But all of that was only background noise. The operating system ran without words as he was on his bike and moving in a single motion. He replayed what he’d seen—didn’t believe what he thought he’d seen—but pedaled furiously nonetheless, checking behind him as he went, sure that someone would be there when he looked back. But there was nothing.
James rode south as the glow of the sun began to edge over the earth. He rode as fast as he could, until the burn made its way from his calves to his thighs, from his chest to his biceps and wrists, and then he rode over the hill and down to Haley Pond, where he collapsed on the grass.
The air hurt as it became his breath. James sprawled on his back and watched the sky turn orange-blue and yellow-purple. As he lay there next to the water, though, what he felt swelling through him wasn’t the fear that had propelled him from the factory. Nor was it the fear which he’d felt so much lately. It was anger. A shamed anger pointing directly in. His anger was a blade, and he sank it into his solar plexus. Tired of being suffocated by it, of being afraid, he hated that part of himself, hollered at it to do better, to work, to keep up, like one would a gimpy leg or a weak back. He begged and implored and threatened, but the only feeling that turned into words was I hate you.
He thought of Ezra’s words, of his promises, and he realized that his entire life had been about fear. His interaction with every person, his hiding of his own joys and loves and sadnesses, his timidity with strangers and bullies and the whole goddamn world. Even the moments in which he’d thought himself brave, he realized, the times he’d let bits of himself out, they were only pleas. It was him begging for someone—anyone—to notice him.
James stood up. The first light refracted off the dew, and Haley Pond sat before him like green glass. James felt the sudden urge to strip off his clothes and dive into it, to disrupt the perfect, splendid beauty of undisturbed water and to splash around and feel himself submersed in it. It was a powerful, cellular urge, and James even began to pull his hoodie over his head. But then he stopped. He looked around at the few houses which sat near Haley Pond. They could be up already. Some mom looking out her kitchen window at this weird boy. Or worse, someone he knew. The thought stopped him dead, and he pulled the hoodie back on.
Should be heading back anyway. Have to meet Ezra.
Of course, Ezra didn’t say where we’re meeting. James pushed his bike up to the street and threw a leg over it, but just then he heard a noise and stopped. It was soft noise, a wheel in need of oil, an oscillating squeak-squeak.
Ezra and James sat in The Omelet Shack, in a booth next to a window which claimed to seat four but would have been awfully tight. Single servings of butter and jam lay in a bowl between them as they slurped coffee. James had already eaten34 and his plate held scraps in the center of the table.
Ezra let out a deep breath, taking his coffee in both hands. “It’s hard to know where to begin.”
In the pause that followed, over the sounds of scraping chairs and silverware clinking plates, James said, “I read Revelations last night.”
Ezra smiled. “Good. I guess that’s as good a place as any. And what did you think?”
“Whatta you mean what did I think? I read it. I know what happens.”
“Really?” Ezra smiled and tipped the cup to his lips. “Because I don’t.”
“But . . . it says that Jesus opens the seals—seven seals—and then everything gets all . . . the four horsemen are the first—”
“I know what the Revelation says, James. I’ve read it. Though it has been quite a while.” Ezra pulled a quick sip and set the cup aside. “Let’s start with this, before we move on to anything else. There is no Jesus. At least not in the sens
e you mean or the sense that Christians view things.
“I wasn’t in the area at the time, but the impression I got from those who were was that this Jesus fellow was a revolutionary—a pioneer of nonviolent rebellion. A serious guy. One of those people who run wholly on their own internal moral compass—which is rare, James. You may not realize that yet, but it’s rare as hell. He, uh, he challenged the rabbis, the temples; he challenged the Romans; and, as you might expect, all of them were pretty happy when he finally got crucified. You have to understand, though, everyone and anyone who pissed off the Romans was getting crucified in those days. You couldn’t swing a Jew crucified for sedition without hitting a Jew about to be crucified for sedition. But there was something about this Jesus, something special, and the stories about him grew. As far as I can tell, he never said he was the Messiah, never came back from the dead, nothing. But people were looking for a Messiah and he got cast. That’s it. He in no way plays in to the events currently unfolding. He is not of our realm.”
The waitress, a beautiful girl who James had a hard time looking away from, with her two-tone hair and too-baggy skirt and too-tight top, swooped by, refilling Ezra’s cup and pouring James’s to the brim.
“Our realm,” Ezra continued, “was made before yours. I’m not sure realm is the right word here, but I think it’s probably the closest. You see, ours was made first and then yours, and the two have always been somewhat connected. Or rather, wholly and completely connected but in unseen ways. In a sense, we are your dreams and you are ours. We are your ghosts and vice versa.
“Now, as I said, for the most part we are each ignorant of the other. The difference is that we know you exist, and the opposite is not true. And so when we catch glimpses of your leavings or your traces, we see them for what they are. On the other hand, when you catch bits of us in the ether, you tend to assign it to wherever your personal belief dictates. This is the Voice of God, this is a poltergeist, this is artistic inspiration, et cetera, et cetera.” Ezra emptied a third of his coffee in a single gulp.
“I always think of it like an antenna. Artists and mystics and what have you—they tend to have the best antennas, but they also tend to be the most irrational, emotional, and predisposed to their own prejudices and ardent beliefs. So, now, let us look at John, the author of the Revelation. Now, this John was not the apostle of Jesus. That guy, from what I’ve heard, was a total schmuck.35 No, this John was a true mystic and a real steel-in-the-back believer in the tenets of Christianity. This was in about 100 AD. He was always proselytizing, always preaching, and often falling into a religious ecstasy, wailing, thrashing, speaking in tongues, all that stuff. In other words, he was about 60 to 70 percent crazy. He was one of those religious folks who most of us cross the street to avoid. However, he did have an extraordinarily strong antenna. He most definitely picked up things from our realm. There can be no doubting that.
“After a couple years of telling everyone that they weren’t pious enough and rousing the local rabble, the powers that be got sick of old crazy John, and they exiled him to the Isle of Patmos. There he found the solitude agreed with him, and—I bet—cleared away enough noise that he was really able to focus on what was coming through that old antenna of his. So he sat down and he wrote the story of his Revelation. But here’s the thing: the antenna doesn’t work like that. I’ve yet to find a human who could see or hear or feel clear, uninterrupted impressions of Taloon. No, what it’s like is—”
“Taloon?”
Ezra was frozen for a moment; the interruption had caught him off guard. “Yes, Taloon. That is . . . well, that’s what we call our world. I’ll get to that. Shortly, shortly. Let me just, ah, where was I?”
“People don’t get, like, complete things from your place, from Taloon.”
“Yes, thank you. Ah, excuse me, miss.” Ezra waved over the beauty. “My friend here has let his coffee go cold. Would you mind dumping this and bringing him a new one? Thank you.”
James felt a momentary embarrassment at being babied in front of this girl, but the feeling was quickly overtaken, because Ezra was off and talking again.
“Yes, see, that’s why I compare it to an antenna. The way impressions from our world are received is very much like listening to a radio station that you can’t quite get, or perhaps like having the receiver set halfway between two stations. You get a couple words here, maybe a sentence there, a half word, a bit of a description, then silence and silence and more silence, then a blurp and a beep and two words that couldn’t possibly be what you thought they were.
“Do you see what I’m saying, James? Old John on his island, he got some things from our world: the seals, the coming war, the Beast, and Michael. He got all that, but he assigned it the prejudices of his existence. He inserted Jesus, he made the Archangel Michael a good guy—a hero—and he wrote the ending he wanted.”
“How do you know?” James said, with far too much intensity for The Omelet Shack, and exactly at the same time that their waitress walked up and set his cup down. She gave him that look he’d seen so many times: brows scrunched, lip curled—What a weirdo.
Damn it, James thought as the cold hooks of shame sank into his gut. Go away! It was immediate. The sensation was so intense, as if the thought itself was electricity flowing from him to her. He felt it land in her, felt her shrink and back away. It was like she heard me.
He turned back to Ezra, whose face beamed with that proud-papa smile, and he remembered where he was. “How do you know he didn’t see the ending?”
“Because no one does, James. No one knows how it’s going to shake out, not in your world or ours. No, Old John simply saw the state of our world, which includes this prophecy. The prophecy itself, though, doesn’t say who will win, only that there will be war. Great and horrible war.” The thought didn’t seem to bother Ezra nearly as much as James felt it should. Ezra just slurped his coffee and looked out the window as if picturing the conflict there in Stone Grove.
James gave him his moment; he turned and saw the waitress watching through one of the little portholes in the swinging kitchen doors, and when he did, she ducked out of sight.
“This is just the way humans work,” Ezra continued. “They fill in the gaps with the information they have. Incomplete pictures make them anxious. Questions without answers enrage them. You see? Old John wasn’t lying. He didn’t think he was making things up. He thought he was just filling in the parts of the message that got lost. The antennas, they’re imperfect—and all different. Dante, for example, was very strong. His Inferno, as he called it, I wonder if you know what that was based on.”
The dream—a burp of fear-recognition scorched every synapse. “The Pit.”
“Exactly. He’s obviously seen it or, or felt it or something. He saw this place, the descent into the terrifying abyss, and those trapped within, and he naturally thought, Hell. But we know what it really is. A prison. Still, the picture is incomplete, so he fills in the rest himself. He fills Hell with local politicians, Florentines who have disappointed him, and while some of them definitely deserve to be in Hell if it exists, the list is a little Italy heavy.36 He has Brutus and Cassius—those are the guys who killed Julius Caesar—he has them in the bottom level of Hell, because they destroyed some idea he has of a unified Italy. Ach, it’s all”—Ezra threw both hands up as if waving away a fly—“but that’s what I mean. It’s all . . . half true. And the worst of it is the artists. They’re a thousand times worse than the crazies and the generals and the prophets. Old John on Pathos and Dante there, they figure they got the truth of it, so then they set about framing it in a good story. I mean, come on, the Revelation, that’s a story. Seven seals, seven bowls, seven trumpets. And, if I may add a little literary criticism here, it’s a bit heavy-handed about the power and the victory and all that. I think the lady doth protest too much, you know. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’? Come on. And that ending? Awful. Okay, everyone’s in Heaven, Satan’s destroyed—what, he’s back? What, th
ere are more people to kill? That hundred-pound hail after the fifteenth earthquake didn’t do it? Really? More judging? That’s a storyteller trying to frighten you into behaving, trying to convince you of the power of his hero. If I give you any advice that you heed, James, let it be this: do not trust stories. Stories can be very dangerous. Always ask why someone is telling you this story, because often when someone is telling you a story, their ultimate goal is to take a part of their mind and slyly sneak it into your mind. You think it’s entertainment, but it’s actually infestation. Remember that.”
“Uh, so . . . sorry . . . so what’s the real story, then?”
“Yes, the real story. Well, as I’ve heard it . . .” Ezra pushed his empty mug away and married his fingers. “In the beginning, there was the Creator.”
“God?”
“Ah, I think not. That word has a bit too much baggage here for what I mean. Let’s just say, the Creator.
“So in the beginning there was the Creator. Now, you understand, when I say the beginning, I mean only our beginning. Where the Creator was before this, what it was doing, what other worlds it may have made?” An easy shrug. “No one knows. But in our beginning, the Creator made our realm—Taloon. It was like a blank sheet of paper. The Creator made this world in massive strokes, and it lacked for detail or design. It was . . . unfinished. Then the Creator made two great beings, called Metatron and Morning Star. They were special, James. Brilliant and beautiful, with the eyes of poets and the hearts of warriors. The Creator told Metatron and Morning Star that they were free to make this world as they saw fit, and so the two of them set about the work together. They were closer than any two beings have ever been or will ever be, their love a heart-and-muscle bond of sibling and lover and parent all melded into one.