by A. W. Hill
SOMEONE YOU LOVE IS MISSING. CALL STEPHAN RASZER, INVESTIGATOR OF SPIRITUAL CRIME.
This being Hollywood, capitol of religious flim-flam and a place where people came to be lost and then found, the ads were answered. He walked through fire for each client, and with each gig, the heat cauterized his old wounds. It was bliss while it lasted, it was redemptive, and it didn’t hurt that he’d gotten a nice house in the bargain.
Just beyond the small plots of mint, mandrake, and Salvia divinorum was a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, carved from coral by an old sailor on Santorini. On the pedestal, beneath her drawn bow, Raszer had placed a small, jeweled box, and in the box was a lock of wheat-colored hair. It had belonged to the only woman who’d loved him for all he was and wasn’t, unconditionally and to death in his service. She’d been beheaded in the Moroccan desert by a man Raszer had pursued, and Raszer had in turn disemboweled the man with a seven-inch knife.
He picked up the box and held it as tenderly as if it housed the clockworks of the universe, and as he opened the lid, a single tear fell from his eye into the little nest of human hair. From a nearby live-oak tree came the offended squawk of a California blue jay, whose nesting routine he’d intruded upon. On the ground beneath its perch lay the beakful of twigs and fennel stalks it had been carrying. Raszer set the box down and walked softly to the place. To his eye, the twigs formed a rough pattern of long and short, as meaningless as tea leaves to anyone not looking for meaning. He saw for an instant a connection with Scotty Darrell’s plight. Advanced Gauntlet players were not allowed to take maps, compasses, or written directions on the road. The only navigational tool permitted was the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle of broken and unbroken lines. The Gauntlet’s guiding philosophy was drawn from the text accompanying hexagram number twenty-five: “It is not favorable to have a destination in view.” Raszer looked for a sign in the scattered twigs, but saw only confusion.
He tossed his cigarette onto the saturated ground and cursed. Raszer’s divinatory powers, which could be considerable when he was at his best, went to shit when self-doubt came to town—his goddess abandoned him.
He felt a tug on his trousers. It was Brigit. She’d been nosing around his library again and come up with a gold-leaf Tantric text that he’d bought at auction two years earlier for $350. It had first been translated for the English-speaking world by Sir Richard Francis Burton, and was highly prized for its scandalous full-color plates. Brigit had happened on an illustration of the “plow” technique of sexual intercourse.
“Is this . . . ” Brigit asked with artful innocence, “what sex looks like?”
“That’s the sacred union of Shiva and Shakti, the joining of male and female energies. Powerful mojo.”
She cocked a chestnut-colored eyebrow. “That how you and Mommy did it?”
“If we had,” said Raszer, taking the book just in time to dodge a raindrop, “things might’ve gone differently.” He indicated the hand-stitched binding. “And this, Pandora, is a very rare book. If you’re gonna browse, stick to paperbacks.”
“They don’t have pictures,” she replied, then tossed her head and went back inside, leaving Raszer a bit lighter. He could see the woman in her already in that little toss of the head—or, rather, he could see how her greatest charms as a woman would be those qualities of childhood she retained. After a moment’s pause, he followed her inside and went to return the volume to its stall.
Raszer’s library commanded the largest of three bedrooms. Although it contained nearly three thousand titles, the library was devoted to just two subjects: the history of man’s fevered pursuit of divine secrets and cosmic truths, and the lesser history of how that desire had been manipulated by darker agencies. There were selected volumes on forensics, criminal psychology, and international law, but these were subservient to the grand topic of spiritual hunger and the lengths to which human beings would go to satisfy it.
Raszer had at first tried to organize the whole in subsets—alchemy, astrology, Buddhism, Catharism, and so on—but found so many overlaps and cross-currents that it worked better to arrange them associatively, that is to say, in the manner of his thought processes, which were those of a detective. Thus, each section of the library became a history of the cases he’d taken on, and of the person at the nexus of each case, and this system gave him a convenient mnemonic device for locating any volume at a moment’s notice.
The categories dealing with world religions and wisdom traditions were so broad that they merited their own shelves, but individual books had a way of migrating to the matter at hand. The entire library had been ingeniously and continuously cataloged by Monica, who was not only his researcher, dispatcher, and de facto publicist, but the woman who knew his mind and methods best. Her organizational method utilized links that, in aggregate, yielded more than 462,000 cross-references.
Natural light in the library was provided by a set of north-facing French doors. These opened onto a cloistered patio and an herb garden, within which a number of the species owed their cultivation to the library’s small but definitive section on the husbandry of medicinal and psychoactive plants. Although Raszer was a coffee drinker by nature, he was also celebrated among close friends for his teas.
To Raszer’s hard-won erudition and reckless curiosity were added a set of categorically feline physical attributes. He’d been a somewhat awkward and ill-adapted boy, but had managed to overcome his handicaps with a punishing regimen. He was a reasonably skillful rock climber, could handle a combat knife well, and had managed to collect a black belt in karate before bridling at the sensei’s authoritarian mindset. At this stage of his life, the youthful ugly duckling had at least now achieved the grace of a swan. The sharp features that had seemed too roughly sculpted in youth had emerged from the stone, chiseled by both his Celtic and his Semitic ancestry.
He was still no Adonis, but the women Raszer desired were not interested in pretty boys anyway. He was as fit as a formerly dissolute and still nonabstaining forty-two-year-old could rightfully ask to be, and he had acquired with the onset of his second life an exceptionally high tolerance for pain. One doctor had pegged it as an overproduction of endorphins. A different kind of doctor had once called it “Dionysian masochism”—a diagnosis that still made Raszer laugh out loud.
His most singular physical attribute, however, was—in a word—metaphysical. There was a light in his eye. To the amazement of L.A.’s most skillful opthamologists, this luminance wasn’t metaphorical, nor was it caused by some lodged shard of glass or accident of shape. Raszer had, just inside the stone-blue perimeter of his right iris, a “second pupil,” a dwarf companion to the central orb. In bright sunlight, it contracted to a dull, clay-colored fleck, no larger than the head of a pin. On gloomy days it oscillated faintly, sometimes causing him headaches and vertigo. But in the darkness of true night, and only when the flame of desire—sacred or profane—had been fanned, it spun open and reeled out light like a strand of golden thread.
Raszer rose from the library shelf at the click-clickety-click of a pair of high-rise sandals and turned to see Monica come in, her streaked surfer-girl hair attractively damp and her trench coat spattered with mud.
“I crossed the Jordan for you, Raszer,” she said. “Now whaddaya have for me?”
“It’s bad out there, huh?”
“The major intersections are all flooded. Another kid drowned in the L.A. River last night.” She regarded her dappled coat. “And there’s mud . . . everywhere.”
“Christ,” said Raszer, “it just gets worse.” Defying the gloom, she still looked sunny, and that, as always, got a little smile out of him. “Sorry about your mac. Now take it off and sit down. I want to pick your fine, feminine right brain.”
“About why there are currently no women in your life?”
“No. About Scotty.”
She shook her head and released a sigh that was almost a moan. “Don’t you remember telling me that obsession kills creativity? W
hy don’t we just spend a rainy afternoon combing the society columns? Somebody’s kid has gotta be missing.”
“I think I lost him because I played it like a man,” he said, ignoring her. “I was linear. I followed leads, not scents. How would you have—”
“I dunno,” she said. “The Gauntlet is a boys’ game. And anyway, boss, you have as good a nose as most women.”
“Not when I’m in close. I had him. I was inside the game. I offered him his exit…his goddamned ‘DX,’ for chrissakes. I had him on the phone and I lost him.”
“Look, Raszer,” she said, peeling off her coat to reveal jeans and an extra-large sweatshirt with a Sex Wax logo. “The guys who invented this game may be divinity students, and they may call their out clause a deus ex machina, but what if the player’s already found God? Why would he quit just because the ref blew the whistle?”
“Because those are the rules. The ref is the game’s puppet master.”
“Well, that’s where I might’ve done it differently . . . ” She bit her lip. “Rules. Women don’t follow them. The Gauntlet is an immersive-reality game, as opposed to just an ARG or an RPG. Once you’re out there, you write the rules.”
“Yeah, but you’re still bound to the contract. Otherwise, the game’s CURTAINS would open up and the Masters would be exposed. The whole gaming world operates on that deal. The DX clause is mutually binding. If the player calls for it, the Masters oblige. If the Masters ordain it, the player has to come home. It should’ve worked . . . ”
“Except that—”
“Right,” Raszer snapped. “Except that there was an exception.” Almost a year after the fact, after the headline-grabbing lawsuit filed by Scotty’s angry parents had nearly leveled him, Raszer was still churning. His anger was aimed at The Gauntlet’s sly creators, who’d duped him and still come out clean, and directed inward, for thinking that anyone played by the rules anymore. “A hitch,” he muttered.
Monica spoke softly. “You trusted them, Raszer. I think—under the circum-stances—you had to. How could you have known they’d given him Extreme Unction?”
Some of the argot they now used as familiars was peculiar to the arcane world of The Gauntlet—Extreme Unction, for example, meant that the player had “died to the world” and was beyond recall, like a bomber pilot trained to ignore any instruction once the target was in sight, or an undercover agent whose existence was denied once he was active—but much of it belonged to the broader arena of alternate reality games (ARGs), an outgrowth of web-based role-playing games (RPGs) like The Beast, which in turn traced their origins to the fantasy games of the pre-Internet 1970s.
No amount of post-Columbine controversy could shake the popularity of these flights from a numbing existence, a popularity that now persisted well beyond college years. It wasn’t difficult to understand why. After all, the motto of the gaming universe was “Remember, in an alternate reality, you always have a place to go.”
But The Gauntlet was different, and Raszer had known it, even if he hadn’t known that a month before he’d finally managed to hammer his way into the game’s nerve center and convince its makers—under threat of exposure—to let him pull Scotty Darrell’s strings, the GamesMasters had already given the boy Extreme Unction.
Scotty had been set free to “ride the snake.”
The Gauntlet’s trailhead, or point of entry, was located—as most RPGs and ARGs were—on the web, but with an immediate distinction. The “avatar” you took on as your gaming persona was not simply a powerful mutant, a buff guy or better-looking girl, but a saint or scholar, like Augustine or Aquinas or Avicenna. What followed were role-playing scenarios that posed hundreds of ethical quandaries, leading ineluctably to the conclusion that the only valid ethical choice was no choice at all. If God existed and you submitted, the result would be good. Once you got this, you went offline and began your pilgrimage with instructions as simple as:
1) Walk three miles due east from the Student Union to the junction of County Road HH and Hwy. 67. Board the first northbound bus. Do not carry cash, credit cards, condoms, or identification. These are ballast. Bring breath mints. Do not wear sunscreen.
The instructions were to be expressly followed. There were dire warnings about what might befall the player if he failed to “play out his line,” sought outside aid, or revealed the identity of the GamesMasters.
2) Sit next to the most accessible-looking person on the bus (someone roughly the age of your parents). Don’t worry—the seat will be open. Offer this person a mint. This is your first Guide. Leave bus with the G and say, “By the way, do you know of anyone who could make use of a keen mind and a steady heart?” If the G does not respond, get on the next bus and try again.
Following these initial moves, which put the player on unfamiliar ground and with uncertain footing, the plays became more difficult and potentially riskier. Some players came running back after one night. Others, the floaters, found themselves thousands of miles from home in the first week. It was amazing what could happen once you’d put yourself at the disposal of others.
Raszer had found the game fascinating, in principle. It was postmodern evangelism, played incognito and without preaching. It was dharma. Ordinary people might encounter these young mendicants and be subtly transformed by them—the way hardened hearts had once been softened by the Franciscans—and if so, God might show Himself in a fashion. But from the start, there were problems. The game aimed for the best and the brightest, but drew many whose moral fiber was less than firm.
Some players too eagerly followed the game’s admonition “to make observa-tions, never judgements”; some guides employed their acolytes in less than godly ways.
When Raszer had at last connected with Scotty, the boy’s wariness had seemed to give way to relief. They had four contacts, the first two via The Gauntlet’s message board, the last two by telephone. By then, Raszer smelled a rat, and so did his stray, who left the phone dangling at a Mobil station in Las Vegas. Scotty hopped a bus for Hollywood and was captured on a surveillance camera when he hijacked a tram at the Universal Studios tour, shooting and wounding the driver and holding the terrified passengers hostage for two hours. To the theme park’s embarrassment and continuing economic distress, he’d managed to escape—vanishing almost literally into thin air—and was now on Homeland Security’s Most Wanted list.
There had been something confoundingly gratuitous about the whole escapade, as if Scotty’s instructions had been nothing more than, “Shake people up.”
The story was tailored for the tabloid media, and Raszer was identified as the deprogrammer hired to rescue Scotty Darrell from the sinister game. He remained enmeshed in a legally dubious but debilitating lawsuit brought by Scotty’s parents, who’d initially endorsed his unconventional strategy but had now hurled the weight of two lawyers against him. His reserves had dwindled, his reputation had been devalued, and his phone had not rung with new work in six months.
“So you wouldn’t have played the GamesMaster gambit?” Raszer asked.
“Maybe not, but if I had, I might have thought of offering Scotty a new game.”
There was a whisper of stocking feet in the hall, and Brigit came sliding in.
“There’s a really weird old man out front, Daddy,” she said breathlessly.
“What do you mean, honey? At the door?”
“No. Out front. At the end of the walk. He’s just sitting there in the rain. He looks sort of creepy to me. Like the bogeyman.”
“Jesus,” said Raszer, tight jawed. “Another one. They all know where I live now. I’m gonna have to sell. And I love this house.” He crushed out the cigarette. “You stay here with Monica, muffin. I’ll go see who’s come to call.”
TWO
Raszer wasn’t sure why his heart was in his throat. Hired killers don’t wait at curbside, and neither tabloid journalists nor subpoena servers hang around in the pouring rain. There were, however, two types that did behave this way: cuckolded husbands a
nd crackpots. Raszer had seen his share of both. In his line of work, not altogether different from that of a parish priest trying to mediate a witch hunt, passions ran high, judgments nearly always bordered on the irrational, and men were driven by a zealotry born of primal drama they could no longer remember well enough to use as an excuse for their consuming madness. Now seven years of scrupulously maintained anonymity had evaporated, and the cranks had his number.
The bedroom hallway led to a small, sunken living room with a low Moroccan tea table and a well-used hearth, up two steps to the bar and dining area from which Brigit had been watching the Hollywood Freeway flood like the Nile, and finally into the converted front room that had been Raszer’s office from the beginning. There, hard drives and paper files kept dossiers on dozens of snake oil salesmen and spiritual racketeers he’d either exposed or driven back under the rocks. Any one of them or their associates could be waiting outside. A big bay window faced the cul-de-sac; Raszer stepped to the side and gently drew back the curtain.