Rodin snorted what sounded like feeble agreement.
“I just want to give us a chance to grow up emotionally, so we can catch up with our big brains, now that we’ve stuck PhDs inside them, and actually learned to pray in the direction of Mecca no matter how turned around in the desert we get.”
The peyote was kicking in. The conversation grew sparser, responses more delayed, and the obelisk drew more and more of their focus.
“Shit, that thing looks more ominous by the minute,” Dogon said, after noticing the obelisk get bigger and bigger as the earth movers made real progress clearing the mountain away.
“Shush. Prick up your ears. The sands are singing.” Rodin sounded frightened.
Dogan listened to the wailing whistling of the winds. “They say the dunes do that.”
“We’re miles from any dunes.” Rodin bolted upright; gone was the peyote-induced relaxation. “It’s the obelisk.”
“Nonsense. You’re letting the aura of the thing carry you away.”
“The aura, huh?” Rodin took another bite of peyote and released whatever he was holding on to. “It definitely has one hell of an aura.”
They listened to the mournful cries, as if the souls of the dead were welling up from whatever underworld to which the obelisk was keyed.
Dogon and Rodin gazed in the direction of the growing helicopter noises. Despite the blinding sun, they could make out a swarm of ultra light planes coming in for a landing virtually right on top of them.
Moments later, the flock landed. “That’s pretty cool,” Dogan said. “They’re real, right? I’m not hallucinating this shit?”
The array of colors of the individual craft made them look, from their perspective, like a giant peacock spreading its tail.
The leader, the one whose craft landed in front of the pack, looking like the head of the peacock, footed it over to them, map in hand. “Darby Gillis,” he said, shaking their hands. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Darby appeared to be trying to discern which of the two of them looked less high, and more likely to give the right answer. He settled on Dogan at last. “Hate to do a Devon Loch right in front of you, old man, but we can’t seem to tell one patch of terrain from another in these parts. Maybe if we had a few more of those things to point us in the right direction,” Darby said, eying the obelisk in awe.
“You’re not another one of those crazy sects looking for the Promised Land, are you?” Dogan said. “We’ve had two through just in the last week.”
“We decided on a whim to travel round the world. Bit of a sticky wicket considering we average about fifty miles at a stretch before needing to refuel. But you chaps don’t seem to be short on gas.”
“You need to get your asses out of here, man,” Rodin said. “This is Iran. These bastards catch you, your ass is going to jail.”
“We were hoping to fly around you for just that reason. But these ultra-lights are like birds caught in the prevailing winds and, about as helpless.”
They spied the military pulling up. “This doesn’t look good,” Darby said. “They’re very dog in the manger, aren’t they?”
The military boys yanked the pilots from their planes.
“I’ll see what I can do to convince them you’re the team of consultants I ordered flown in,” Rodin said. “Digging up an obelisk is about as easy as raising a pyramid. You won’t be particularly pleased you landed, but it’s still a milder form of torture than what they have in mind.”
“Sold,” Darby said, scrutinizing the formidable soldiers.
He directed the pilots to the obelisk with hand gestures. “Better play along, mates.”
***
For the next few hours, the Englishmen shoveled dirt and watched their ultra-lights being re-equipped with machine guns, small-sized bombs and rockets. “What the hell?” Darby said, as Rodin trudged up to him.
“They’re going to use them against the Israelis. They’re ashamed no one thought of it before. Suicide missions, of course. They’ll all be shot down. But the ordinance used to knock them out of the sky will be worth far more than the planes themselves, helping to tank the Israeli economy, and bringing them one step closer to their endgame. Not to mention the havoc the kamikaze pilots that do get through their defenses will generate.”
“Bloody marvelous,” Darby said, shoveling another scoop of dirt. “I freed myself from a nine-to-five grind so I could put an entire country out of commission.”
“Don’t suppose you’re of any real use to us here,” Rodin said.
“We have Stonehenges all over Europe.” Darby gave the shovel a rest. “I think we have a few geomancers in the group, a couple tour guides who’ve fielded every kind of question imaginable on sacred sites. Some British Society scientists. I wouldn’t count us out just yet.”
“All we can really offer you is peyote, grown on the down low in the shadow of the obelisk to keep everyone happy and slaving away in this accursed heat, and stale bread and cheese, I’m afraid,” Dogon said, having hoofed it up the hillside in his Birkenstocks to join the party. “Not nearly enough water. Of course, dehydration helps with the hallucinations.”
“How do you think we found the Stonehenges scattered around Europe?” Darby said. “We’ll get along just fine. I was getting tired of all the rain back home, to tell you the truth.”
THREE
Abbas and Asád trudged through the snow, Abbas wondering, if this was the end of the world, why didn’t it just end already, put them out of their misery?
Moments later, they stopped, as much to catch their breath as to catch their bearings.
“Do you see it?” Asád gazed through the field glasses.
Abbas wiped his goggles with his gloves. The winds were gusting so the snow fallen to the ground around them was swirling as badly as if they were in a storm. “In this weather,” he said shivering, “Could be a damn mirage.”
“No, it’s the HAARP site. Acres of radio towers spread out like that. In the middle of nowhere. What else could it be?”
The towers were firing up. Emitting a strange, eerie electrical hum. The dishes changing their configuration. Asád followed the arc of the dishes to a point in the sky.
An overflying jet was knocked out of the air like a bug zapped by an ultraviolet light. There was no actual concentrated beam directed at the craft. Instead, there was a force field extending over the entire sky that, once penetrated, sounded the craft’s death knell.
They watched the plane crash and burn.
Jeeps were already heading to the crash site to make sure no one walked away.
“I guess it’s true what they say, about it being a force field against alien invasion,” Abbas said.
“Just one of many purported uses, depending on the exact nature of the harmonics being utilized, and the dishes’ trajectories. At a different frequency, it can send shock waves through the Earth to trigger earthquakes anywhere on the globe. As the story goes: Haiti’s earthquake was meant for Castro’s Cuba, but they were still learning to focus the beam. I’m guessing they were recently testing it again, and that’s what got them on our radar.”
“We’re starting to sound like a couple conspiracy nuts.” Abbas checked the ground around the towers for human activity, and the base station controlling the towers, as well.
“Amateur astronomers have discovered most of the interesting Earth-like planets over the last few years. Just because they lacked official credibility, didn’t make the work they did any less profound. The people tracking the emanations coming from this station are no different.”
“So, what do we do? This place is as much tactical survival in case of an alien invasion as it is tactical threat.”
“Alien invasion? Yeah, right, now who sounds like the conspiracy nut?” Asád rubbed his gloved hands together in an effort to warm them, and batted his ears, already covered with earmuffs, to get additional circulation going to them.
“Don’t look now, but the last time there wer
e this many reported UFO sightings in history was World War II, when things were looking dicey, as well, as to the future of civilization. Things go in cycles. And I’m betting not all of those aliens doing the sightseeing are here to wish us well.”
Asád sighed. “I guess we hang out and freeze our nuts off until we get further orders. One thing for sure, this place may have been built for a good many things; splitting the planet in two isn’t one of them.”
Asád bit into his falafel sandwich, and drank Turkish coffee from his thermos.
Abbas reached for his hookah. The glass water-bong had cracked under the shifting of the backpack’s items. Luckily, Abbas thought to bring some crazy glue along, which he used to fix the two ends of the pipe back together, before lighting up.
Taking a hit and exhaling slowly, he relaxed, despite the bone-chilling cold. “A couple of Arabs in Alaska. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. What did the first Arab say to the other?”
Asád laughed. “Chill out?” He coughed up blood. “Nearly forgot about the TB. Passion for causes is hell on the health.”
“Why are Arab soccer teams so shitty?” Abbas asked, playing the comedian to distract Asád from his medical problems.
“Why?”
“Every time they get a corner, they set up shop.”
Asád laugh so hard, the coughed up more blood. “You’re going to kill me.”
“I should be so merciful as to save you from freezing your ass off.” Abbas crumbled the frozen moisture from his eyes between his fingertips to unstick his eyelids. “When is the only time you can spit in a Persian woman’s face?”
“When?”
“When her moustache is on fire.”
Asád laughed, and coughed up more blood, only less this time.
“See, I cleared your lungs for you. Why is the Afghan air force so easy to train?”
“Why?”
“You only have to train them to take off.”
This time Asád coughed—no more blood. His face brightened; he showed Abbas his hands.
“I expect to be paid for the therapy.”
“Seriously, what the hell are we doing out here?” Asád asked.
“I joined the underground to escape persecution. I was tired being looked at as if I was here to blow up America. Figured I’d have a tight group of people around me who’d appreciate me for me.”
Asád dusted the snow off his hair. “Don’t look now, but blowing up things is what we do.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” He slid up his pants legs, patted his Flex-Foot Cheetah carbon fibre transtibial prostheses. “When I lost both my legs from the knees down, figured I’d come to America, get a couple bionic replacements, go play superhero fighting in a war that actually made sense; that wasn’t just some feudal rivalry dating back to when man discovered fire.”
“Kids?”
Asád lowered his jeans over his bionic legs. “That’s the other thing. Thought it might be nice to have some kids I actually outlived. The three I had died strapping bombs to themselves. I made myself an authority on the Koran so there was no twisted argument they could use on me that I couldn’t twist back on them. A lot of good it did me. Parents are nothing compared to peers.”
Abbas fought to catch his breath after taking a hit off his bong. “I have a wife. She teaches English at Yale. Still keeps herself covered up in protest of what we do to women in Afghanistan. None of her students know what she looks like. They fall in love with her and feel the pain of never knowing her beyond the eyes they can discern through the slits of her veil. Being as it’s English at Yale, she rarely has to explain the ass-backwards logic of her stance.”
Asád laughed. “Why are you here instead of with her?”
“It’s difficult for an Arab man to be upstaged by his wife, even one who knows better.”
Asád took another bite of his sandwich, and talked with his mouth half full. “Explaining why I haven’t made much progress on finding a wife and settling down. How can a man be undone by his prejudices, even when he knows they are ridiculous?”
“The same way a man can crouch freezing his ass off in the snow at the edge of the world for some idealistic cause he can barely articulate. It matters less the form of madness, more the fact that habits take less mental energy than constantly changing how you come at the world.”
FOUR
Drew gazed at Robin in the backseat of the roadster, still frozen into a painful position.
The car was making its way along the dirt road at a decent clip, and the bumps did nothing to jar Robin, taking much of the fun out of the ride.
“Robin,” Drew said, finally, “I don’t know how much further I can follow you down this road you’re on. I know you’re convinced the truth shall set you free. But—”
“The truth shall set you free?” Toby said. “All due respect, sir, that’s just not the Harding way. We believe fervently that lies are the glue that holds society together. We worship subterfuge when we aren’t busy worshipping denial about all our failings.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Drew said, as he took a hit of vermouth off his flask.
Toby said, “Maybe you need to go further down the road you’re on, sir.”
Drew glared at him. Then the lights went on in his head as if he had been caught in the middle of an air raid, and no amount of darkness was going to keep out the blinding flashes of the bombardment outside. “Out of the mouth of babes.”
“Not you, too.” Toby said. “I have enough people hitting on me.”
Drew kept a firm hand on Robin so she wouldn’t be bounced out of the car, and dialed his cell phone with the other.
“Who are you calling?” Toby asked.
“One of my girlfriends.”
“You live a double life?” Toby surveyed Robin’s current state by craning his neck. “I guess that isn’t such a surprise as all that. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, eh?”
“Yes, it does,” Drew said, waiting for Seriana to pick up.
Seeing that Robin didn’t fly too close to the sun and, like Icarus, burn up in the process, was proving a Herculean task beyond Drew’s mortal abilities. Time for his own man into superman regimen. Maybe then, he could pull off what was being asked of him.
He prayed the other women he kept close to him would prove powerful enough catalysts to procure his transformation.
Considering what truths Robin had dug up already, moreover, tapping her infinite potential, Drew could only hope he wasn’t the only one getting religion this late in the game.
He had to hope the man-to-god metamorphosis was a more widespread, even global, phenomenon.
FIVE
Grace Addley blew into Ezra’s life like a strong wind, spinning the compass on the roof of his house.
It was the end of his day, and he was in his office stuffing his students’ papers into his backpack for when he got home. A couple of brandies should adjust the print, which his eyes could no longer bring into focus, back into sharp relief. He swore she waited until he was at the far end of the room, hunched over the water cooler, before she opened the door and strode across the floor. He said as much. “Rehearse that act, have you? Just how long does it take usually for the hypnosis to kick in, if you don’t mind me asking?”
She smiled. “I never enter rooms smaller than this one. Too risky.”
It was his turn to smile. They had been trading smiles ever since.
“You see, I’m a reporter.”
“You want to interview a middle school teacher? Let me guess, another one eager to disseminate more misdirected notions about how to save our kids from a broken school system. Let me save you the time, they can’t be saved.”
She winced. It was the first clue he had she actually cared; this wasn’t just a hot topic article for her that might make her career. Even more disturbingly, she cared about him, and seemed genuinely hurt life had reduced him to this broken down man at the ripe
old age of thirty-five. He was certainly playing his part well, hunched over, barely able to keep his head up.
“Maybe if I could just shadow you in class for a couple weeks.”
“Let me save you the trouble. Five minutes, or five years, it’s the same shtick.” He pointed to the fiberglass chair with the jail-bar stripes cut into its back. Ezra took a seat for himself on the swivel hardwood desk chair, a mistake, considering its propensity to squeak disagreeably with every pronouncement, as if the institution itself was every bit as biased as he against the idea of reformation doing much good.
“I’m Ezra Middleton, though I prefer you made up some other name for your article.”
“Grace Addley,” she said, extending her arm. He touched it gently. The lightning strike portended stormy weather ahead. He hoped it was just the excitement of a weak heart too long denied love.
She retrieved a recorder from her purse, and set it on the counter.
“In an effort to rise to the poetry of the occasion, we’ll call this: ‘A Day in the Life of a Middle School Teacher,’” he said, trying not to sound flippant. “I am standing at the door of my classroom. It is seven twenty-four a.m. in Los Angeles, and my homeroom students trickle in listlessly.
"Good morning. Please get your book out," I say to each group as they wander in. "Good morning, please get your book out. Good morning, please get your book out.
“I say it about ten times. It is school policy to use the twenty minutes of homeroom for silent reading, to set the right tone for a day of schoolwork, and add to the amount of time they spend during a day reading rather than watching YouTube, listening to iPods, playing video games.”
“Does that really work?”
“No,” he said, and immediately regretted the brusque answer.
“Once they’re seated, they talk to each other, ignoring my directive to please begin reading. If I’m lucky, a quarter of the students actually have their book out. I go around urging each one by name, and thanking those who have done so, also by name. I have found that barking orders at the group avails nothing. They do not recognize that anything I say is directed at them unless I stare them in the eye and say their name.”
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