The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  I looked at the empty sky high above Wall Street. “All part of some vast conspiracy, some huge plot. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Part of a huge purpose. Working toward one goal. The Final Act. The script was written before they were born. Before any of us were born. All we have to do is play it out. But—we’re almost there. Look at the name of the street: Canyon of Heroes. You always wanted to be a hero, didn’t you? Well, here you are. This is the place you want to be. Someday maybe they’ll throw ticker tape at you.”

  The sudden bitterness in Oriente’s voice made me feel better. “I fucked you up,” I said. “You know it and I know it.”

  “We’re here,” said Oriente. The car stopped in front of stone columns at the entrance to a brick church. “There are answers here to questions you never asked. You will see here what I know—and what you know.”

  We walked up the steps to a glass door with a sign on it: “St. Paul’s Chapel is temporarily closed for refurbishment.” Oriente knocked on the glass.

  “You’re Muslim,” I said. “Why are we coming to a church?”

  “There is only one God,” said Oriente.

  A young black man with gray plaster dust in his hair and a painter’s mask over his face came to the door. When he saw it was Oriente, he opened up and said something in Spanish that I didn’t understand, gesturing for us to enter. Painters and sanders were hard at work from floor to ceiling. “There is a lot of cleaning up to do,” said Oriente. “And I’ve donated a lot of the money for it.” He cast an eye over the workmen and the work. “There is a lot of history here,” he said. “George Washington used to pray here.” He smiled. “This is where the Founding Father came to meet with the Creator.”

  Oriente turned his wolf eyes toward me. “But we will leave the tourism for another time. Up there in front of the windows, the altar, that is what I wanted you to see. We’ll have to get them to take off the canvas covering.” Oriente shouted in Spanish to the workmen on the scaffolding in other parts of the chapel. One shouted back and a couple of them started climbing down. “This will take a minute,” he said. “Let’s have a seat on the front row.”

  Hot as it was, a cold shiver of superstitious fear ran through me.

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “exactly where you were when you saw the Towers hit?” I thought of the kitchen in my house in Westfield, and of Miriam drinking milk out of the carton. I said nothing. “Of course you do,” said Oriente. “Everybody does. They remember watching TV over their morning coffee, or turning on the set in the boss’s office, or frantically pushing the buttons on their car radios, changing stations to make sure they hadn’t heard wrong. Everybody remembers. Everybody will always remember.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Sitting right here.” He looked over his shoulder for the workmen and saw they were bringing ladders up to the sides of the altar. They climbed almost to the second-story ceiling and untied the upper part of the canvas covering, then walked it down and pulled it away. I expected to see a crucifix, or at least a cross. But the image behind the altar was not quite like anything I’d seen in a church before. A thunderous white cloud was carved from wood, and golden shafts, half lightning and half light, exploded downward from it. In the center of the cloud, in the center of the explosion, was a single word written in an alphabet I didn’t know. At the base of the cloud, delivered by the blast of lightning and shafts of light, were two black stone tablets with the Ten Commandments etched on them in gold.

  “The flash of fire, the downward rush of the clouds—the altar has been like that since the days of George Washington. It has been here—waiting,” said Oriente. “Do you see the Hebrew letters? YHWH. Yahweh. Jehovah. ‘I AM THAT I AM.’ The name before all the other names of God, the first name of Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment. Oh yes. ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.’ You feel it, don’t you? You look at that and you know what it is and you feel it. ‘Behold, He cometh with clouds and every eye shall see Him.’ ”

  I looked at the altar, and at the sun coming from behind the windows, living rays lighting shafts through the plaster dust that hung in the air.

  “I heard the first explosion,” he said, “and the pews trembled, but I didn’t move. I bowed my head, and I waited. Eighteen minutes later, the second explosion. And that was when I went to the back of the church. Come. Come with me now.” We walked straight down the aisle behind us to the steel door, which was already half open for air. Oriente pushed it the rest of the way. “I will show you a beautiful thing,” he said. “Look at the altar, and now look out this door.”

  In front of us was an old churchyard with crumbling head-stones tilted by the roots of ancient trees. Around the graveyard was an iron fence draped with banners and posters too far away for me to read, and in the far distance, a few tall buildings.

  “Beyond these graves, and beyond this fence, just there, filling your eyes with its enormity—from here to there—was the World Trade Center.” He looked at me to make sure I understood. “I stood here,” he said, “and watched the flames and the people falling. I listened to the screams of sirens and the screams of men. I smelled the brimstone of the buildings burning and the stinking pitch of jet fuel, and I was covered with the ashes of Hell as I watched one by one the buildings coming down. Not just two buildings, but all seven. Like the seven candles, the seven churches, the seven seals of Revelation. ‘Behold, He cometh with clouds and every eye shall see Him.’ ”

  I resisted the horror and the beauty of the emptiness beyond the iron fence. But every image I had seen on television and in photographs and in my waking and sleeping nightmares was there in front of me. I resisted. But I saw it all.

  “There is no God,” I said.

  “You do not believe that,” he said, without surprise or anger. A simple statement of fact.

  “And your client Ryan Handal, what did he believe up there on the ninety-third floor burning to death?”

  The executor of the Handal estate and director of the La Merced Foundation weighed his words and decided not to use them. “Let’s go across the street,” he said.

  “Are there many more like you?” I asked as we waited for the light to change at the corner of Vesey and Church. The smell of hot pretzels filled the air, and Oriente bought a bottle of Snapple from the street vendor.

  “More what?” he said, offering me a drink, then shrugging and putting it back when I refused. “There are many pious men and women in this country and around the world.”

  “And if I was pious, what would you want from me?”

  The light changed and we crossed, walking down Vesey to the entrance of the excavations. The guard at the gate, like the workman in the church, seemed to be an old acquaintance of José Oriente. He handed us each a hard hat, and we walked down the ramp under the office trailers to what must have been, once, part of a lower parking level. There was no one around us, and nothing to see in front of us but that huge hole and beyond it a mural painted on the side of a half-shattered building: a big heart in the colors of the American flag with the legend beneath it, “The human spirit is not increased by the size of the act but by the size of the heart.”

  “What would I want from you?” There were a couple of big industrial spools that used to hold electrical cable and he pointed at them like they were easy chairs. “My leg is acting up,” he said. “Let’s sit and talk. Sure you don’t want a sip? No. Well. Kurt, what do I want from you? Just to listen—in here.” He tapped his heart. “There’s no question of giving you orders, or bringing you into an organization. There are no orders. There is no organization. There is inspiration, and God’s will. There is the guiding hand. I just want you to let yourself be guided. I want you to be saved.”

  “You want to be my savior?”

  “I want God to be your savior. But, yes, I suppose I want to play my part.”

&n
bsp; “Tell me who you are.”

  He shrugged. “I am who I am. I am the man talking to your wife at your door in Westfield. I am the voice on the phone the other day.”

  “The voice ordering me and my child to be killed.”

  “Not like that.”

  “You are José Oriente from Panama.”

  “Yes. And I am Ryan Handal from El Salvador.” He let me think about that for a second. “I thought you guessed,” he said.

  “And who else?”

  “A man with a lot of friends.”

  “Was it you that called the White House to get me out of Guantánamo?”

  The man with friends smiled and shook his head, but I couldn’t tell for sure what that meant. “I didn’t know who you were in Granada, Kurt, but by the time I found you in Africa I did. And I knew what a gift you had.”

  “Did you call the White House?”

  “Do you want me to trace a diagram in the dust here?” he said. “It would be a lie. It would be useless. It would teach you nothing and it wouldn’t convince you of anything. What is true is that, just as I told you, I was a doctor who spent ten years in Tadmor prison. The pain is still in my bones, although sometimes I can control it. But mainly the pain is inside my soul. I have suffered for my belief in God. Suffered long and terribly. And from that suffering I have learned. When I was in prison, two things kept me alive: one was my faith, the other was a kind of strange dream. You know what it is like to dream, don’t you? Prison dreams? I dreamed that when I was free, I could be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. Why limit yourself to one life if you can have many? And in America you can invent yourself again and again, even at the same time. And so I did, while I and the brothers prepared for Judgment Day.”

  “With terror.”

  “We’re so close to the time. The lessons need to be learned quickly. The End of Days is near.”

  I looked out over the destroyed pit where so many people died. “All this for some bullshit vision of the Apocalypse. Is that it?”

  “Listen to me. Listen. The clash is coming between Believers and Unbelievers. But that’s nothing to what will come after. What you see here has created believers all over the world. Muslims, Jews, Christians—they witnessed the horror, they felt the fear, they’ve suffered the wars since, and they turn to God for help.”

  “God Almighty,” I said.

  “You have to understand, Kurt. And I think you do. We have entered the last age of man, when God has given us the power to work His Divine Will. We can build mountains, and we can tear them down. We can create human life in a glass tube and we can use the same science to devastate life across the entire face of the planet. Now what does that mean? It means we have waited thousands of years for Judgment Day, never knowing when it would come. But now we can put it on the calendar. We can fix a date.”

  I saw on his face the look of a man who is quietly content, and absolutely sure of himself. “When the Sword of the Angel came into our hands in 1992, we thought we had the key. When you stole it—you, Kurtovic—we thought we were lost.” He looked at me and smiled charitably. “Then we learned better. God showed us the way. He brought us the four winged beasts with many eyes.” He craned his neck to look up at the sky, as if he were following the flight paths of two airliners.

  “When?”

  “What?”

  “When is the End of Days?”

  He shook his head. “You aren’t ready to know. There is more work to be done. More spreading of the word. More fire. More plagues.” He gestured like an actor onstage, moving his hands through the air. “So much more. But with every horror on earth, more souls will find their way to Heaven. You know that. I know you do. Ah. Look.”

  There was a red dot of light on the palm of his left hand as he held it up. He looked at his other hand, and there was another red dot of light. No, two. He moved his hands in front of him, and the light didn’t quite follow. Then he looked at his chest. More red dots danced across it, the pinpoints of laser gun sights. Somewhere in a tall shrouded building across the way, or from windows behind the all-American heart, people we couldn’t see were taking aim.

  “They won’t shoot unless I make a move toward you, or I try to run,” said Oriente. “There is too much they want to know. And I have so many friends. We can keep talking. This will be taken care of.” He looked down at his chest and counted the quivering red dots as if he were looking for stains. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven points of light,” he said and twisted his mouth in an odd smile.

  “You are so reasonable now,” he went on. “When you thought you were Allah’s man on earth, Kurt, you were not so useful. You were a child. You heard the wrong message. But now you reason. Now you’ll see. All of this”—he swept his hand over the sanitized destruction of Ground Zero—“all of this opens the door to salvation.”

  He flinched. One of the red dots on his chest erupted dark red and liquid. “My friends,” he said, suddenly short of breath. Now another of the dots exploded. “My brothers!” And another and another. Seven silent shots ripped through him, heavy-caliber bullets tearing his elegant suit and shirt and tie and flesh and bone and guts to shreds until he was left lying on the concrete floor of the ruin like a dog mangled by a thresher, his pale eyes staring out at the empty sky.

  When Griffin walked down the ramp a few minutes later, a group of men in the uniforms of sanitation workers came with him. They brought white plastic garbage bags to pick up the last little pieces.

  “Your shooters?” I said.

  “FBI,” he said. “And they weren’t supposed to shoot.”

  Chapter 37

  I kissed Betsy good night in the soft blue light of the hospital room. “We’ll be there,” she whispered. I moved as silently as I could past Miriam’s bed, afraid to wake her, and afraid to see the fear on her face again if I did, then I drove the rest of the way home from Ark City to Westfield.

  The house was completely dark, and dead quiet. The top of the washing machine was still open with my sweaty running clothes still in it. The bed where Betsy and I made love that morning so long ago was still covered with twisted sheets. On the answering machine, the light was flashing like crazy. I threw the phone across the room and went back to the truck.

  “Sam?” I called out, knocking on his front door. “Sam? Are you home?”

  His wife, Caroline, opened the door. His youngest daughter stood beside her and Caroline twirled a finger in the little girl’s hair. “Hey, Kurt, you’re back,” said Caroline. “Thank God. Oh, thank God. How are Betsy and Miriam?” The little girl looked up. “Miriam?” she repeated. and now the other kids gathered around behind their mom, curious.

  “They’re good,” I said. “Just resting.”

  “God bless,” she said.

  “I wanted to talk to Sam about Thursday.”

  “He’s still counting on you.”

  “Yeah. Is he here?”

  “No, Kurt, he’s back to doing double shifts right now. Go on down to the waterworks. He’s gonna be mighty happy to see you.”

  When I pulled the truck into the parking lot I saw Sam sitting outside on the back step. “Boy, am I happy to see you,” he said. He put out his hand and I put out mine, but that didn’t seem like enough. He threw his arms around me and hugged me like a brother.

  “Thanks, Sam.”

  “It worked, didn’t it, Kurt?”

  “It did,” I said. “You and Betsy—I don’t know how you did it.”

  “All she had to tell me was the bad guys had come to town.”

  “I know.”

  “She had the plan. I wish I could have been there, you know, when it happened. I helped her move the canisters, and I wanted to stay. But she said I had to be back here to make it look right, like I was beat up.” He rubbed his jaw. “She swung that butt pretty good.”

  We were both silent for a second. “Right,” I said, and we broke out laughing.

  “She okay? And Miriam?”

  “Th
ey’ll be okay.”

  “Ah, Kurt, man, who’d have thought it could happen here?”

  “Yeah…. Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You don’t have anything to drink, do you?” I didn’t really expect that he did. The county is dry, and nobody in his church drank, or admitted to it.

  “Let’s check the safe,” he said. He got a couple of cups from the watercooler and from far back in the back of the safe he pulled a blue velvet bag. “You won’t find better bourbon than this,” he said. “It’s so expensive, a bottle lasts me a couple of years.” He filled both cups to the brim.

  “About Thursday,” I said.

  “Everybody’s looking forward to it, Kurt.”

  “You still want me then.”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “Hell yeah.”

  “After everything that’s happened, I feel like, you know, a lot of people got fucked up because of this. Because of me.”

  He looked at me and nodded and drank a little more deeply into his cup.

  “They were after me,” I said.

  “Well they learned a lesson, didn’t they?”

  “I’m thinking maybe we should go someplace else, me and Betsy and Miriam.”

  “No, Boy. No way.” He looked at me through eyes watering from the whiskey. “This here’s your home, and a man’s only ever got one of those, you know? I mean, you can spend your whole damn life wandering around, and there’s just gonna be one place—I mean not maybe where you was born—or school—that’s not it.” He took another sip. “It’s a place you feel like you can be. You know? Where you can be. Like, it is who you are. You know any other place in the whole wide world where you can be like that? You? No. Westfield, Kurt. Here. You. Here.” He put his arms out and hugged me again and was a little off balance. I helped him lean back on his desk. He finished his cup. “Good stuff,” he said.