There is a woman from Indonesia who comes to our prayer group. She is old, maybe sixty or seventy, and she cares for patients at the hospital. She doesn’t wince at the sight of blood. If a patient is missing an arm or a leg or an eye, she doesn’t even flinch. Her name is Rasima Rasima, but she calls herself Sister Rosemary.
I asked her how she stays so calm when people all around her are dying. She says she has been a medicine woman her whole life, and her mother was a medicine woman, and her mother’s mother before that. In her house growing up, there was always suffering. She says home is a place where people go to suffer and die, and she feels at home here.
I wish I could feel that way, too. I think if I could see things that way, then I could begin to be of some use to somebody.
Missing you always,
Marilee
That was the only letter I ever got from Marilee written in her own hand. The rest of the letters came from children, and only the envelopes were addressed in Marilee’s familiar scrawl.
“Dear Jim,” one letter said, “Sister Marilee says you went to Berkeley. I want to go to Berkeley someday. Aaron Rodgers went to Berkeley. They say only the smartest people in the world go there. You must be really smart. I am getting all As, and hopefully I will go there, too.”
The letter was signed, “Barthélemy DuPont, Age 13.”
“Sister Marilee is an angel,” one little girl wrote.
And one boy wrote, “Sister Marilee is FAMOUS!”
It was true. My sister Marilee had made a name for herself in Port-au-Prince. I didn’t know anything about it until, one very hot day in August, I was sitting on the couch with a fan blowing on my face and a cold beer in my hand, and her picture came up on the TV.
She was stepping out of a church in Port-au-Prince, and people everywhere were crowding around her and reaching out to touch her hands. The cameras cut to the Red Cross relief hospital where Marilee was going from patient to patient with a carafe of water.
The news crawl read, “Local Artist Turns Humanitarian.”
I finally met Rasima Rasima in San Francisco in 2017 at Marilee’s funeral. It was Greta who recognized her first, and she went to Rasima Rasima and clasped her hands warmly and called her by her old name. But Rasima Rasima blinked her eyes and shook her wizened head. She introduced herself as Sister Rosemary, which was the Catholic title she had adopted when she joined the sisterhood, and she apologized because she had seen so many patients in her lifetime she could not remember them all.
We crossed paths again at Marilee’s canonization in Rome in 2042. Toward the end of her life, Rasima Rasima looked like a rag doll. She was blind, and she smelled of cumin and garlic and all the other spices that were commonly found in her medicinal teas. She didn’t recognize me then, either. She died two years later in a nunnery where she had retired to write the story of Marilee’s life.
Rasima Rasima began her book, “I would have traded all the years of my life to give Our Lady Saint Marilee Lorenzo just one more day on this earth. She could do so much in a day; it was as if every precious minute held some latent miracle just waiting for Our Lady to come and wake it up.”
Rasima Rasima was not always so devout. When Greta went to her for an abortion in 2002, Rasima Rasima subscribed to a conglomeration of mystical and spiritual teachings that had been passed down in Indonesian culture for hundreds of years, influenced by Hindu, Islamic, and Protestant practices, and heralding back to a time when the island people attributed both tragedy and fortune to ancestral spirits that resided in rocks and trees and animals.
According to her book, The Life and Deeds of Our Lady Saint Marilee Lorenzo, published by HarperCollins in 2044, Rasima Rasima describes her coming-to-Jesus moment as “a quick smack on the face, the way my mother used to do when we misbehaved.” The epiphany came while she and her sister and a neighbor were sitting together on the porch smoking opium and kecubung.
Rasima Rasima claims Jesus came to her in a vision, on Rollerblades, and told her to go to the mission in the nearby village for an ultrasound.
She asked Jesus whatever for.
Jesus reportedly said, “So you can see for yourself all the little dead babies rotting in your belly, conceived by your sin.”
Rasima Rasima knew what Rollerblades were because her nephew wore them to deliver newspapers in the village. And she was familiar with the mission in the nearby village because she passed it often on the way to the market. And she knew what an ultrasound was because several of the women she helped miscarry had brought in fuzzy black-and-white pictures as proof of purchase, so to speak.
When Rasima Rasima passed the mission the following Sunday, the Red Cross was stationed out front recruiting volunteers to help with the relief efforts in Haiti. She had not heard about the earthquake in Haiti until that very moment, but she wondered if Jesus had meant for this to be her path to God. So she signed up.
My sister, as I already mentioned, was obsessed with suffering. And she had already found Jesus. So she signed up to help out with the relief efforts, too, coincidentally, at a free clinic in the Mission District in San Francisco.
Their paths would soon collide. “God’s will,” Rasima Rasima wrote of their meeting in 2010.
“Lucky break,” I say.
In her book, Rasima Rasima explains that on the night she dreamed of Jesus on Rollerblades, her sister had a vision, too. It was of penguins on trampolines.
Rasima Rasima knew what a penguin was from grade school. She knew what a trampoline was, too, because her mother used to treat a white woman in the village for headaches, and one day they all went to the white woman’s house, where the white children were jumping up and down, up and down on a giant trampoline.
Their neighbor, that night, had a vision of Groucho Marx. Rasima Rasima did not know anything about Groucho Marx. But her neighbor did, apparently.
Incidentally, I have seen an actual penguin on a trampoline in a circus act in Long Beach. It wasn’t as remarkable as you’d think.
When Rasima Rasima arrived in Port-au-Prince, straight off the plane from Indonesia, the chief medical officer in charge of the Red Cross volunteers, a towering Haitian from Saint-Germain who did his medical training in Miami, Florida, misunderstood when Rasima Rasima introduced herself for the first time, and called her Rosemary.
Rasima Rasima took this as God’s way of giving her a new Christian name, and so she became Sister Rosemary of Bali, a name that would forever be associated with my sister, Our Lady Saint Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco.
The theological scholar Thomas A. Rhett recently published a paper in Bible America called “The Origins of a Saint: The Quest of Sister Rosemary of Bali for the Canonization of Our Lady Saint Marilee Lorenzo of San Francisco: The Woman behind the Woman.”
Rhett describes the part Rasima Rasima played in my sister’s sainthood after she died as “a labor laboris, an opus operis, a magnum opus! Rasima Rasima single-handedly assured that the name of Marilee Lorenzo, and in effect, her own name, would endure forever.”
It turns out Eliza isn’t the first person to try to live forever. And it doesn’t necessarily take a microchip, either. There are many paths to immortality.
CHAPTER 12
IT LOOKS LIKE I have a potential agent for my book, an old college buddy who went to law school to study criminal justice and came out a copyright lawyer. No shame in that. When he realized he couldn’t hack it at a law firm, even as a copyright lawyer, he became an agent for TV writers in Hollywood.
One of his clients, a guy who wrote for an Emmy Award–winning sci-fi television series for twenty years, just published his first book: a novel. It’s about a future where the US president is elected by popular vote on a TV game show called Pin the Tail on the President.
The candidates have to complete all sorts of challenges, like eating live slugs and balancing on tightropes and sumo wrestling. There are talent shows, too, and a fashion segment, and interviews with family and friends.
At the
end of each episode, the audience at home phones in their votes, and the presidential candidate with the least votes is eliminated from the show.
Sounds an awful lot like the real thing, if you ask me.
Sam Getz is the name of my college buddy who wants to agent my book. I told him what I was doing, writing it all down before I get my brain downloaded onto a microchip, lest something goes wrong, and he said that publishers would kill to get their hands on my autobiography, what with my part in the SHEM Project and my sister the saint and Spencer’s recent fame as an energy expert.
I told him I had no intention of publishing, and he just laughed and laughed and laughed.
This is what he said to me when he was finally done laughing: “Look, Jim. A book as important as the one you’re about to write always ends up getting published one way or another. Maybe now. Maybe after you’re dead. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable if you knew it was in good hands?”
Spoken like a true lawyer.
I was just thinking. It used to be that a decent man, a respectable man, concerned himself his whole life with three important undertakings: finding a good woman to marry, securing a sturdy house to live in, and writing an epitaph for his headstone. But in today’s world, it seems a man can get along just fine without ever deciding to do any one of those things, and he can still be called respectable.
Different times, different times.
I made two of those decisions in my life. I married the love of my life, Greta Van Bruggen, and I bought this house here in San Francisco.
I never decided on an epitaph because I am going to be incinerated and made into fertilizer for AT&T Park. Tombstones are expensive, besides.
Spencer did not concern himself with any of those decisions, and I have it on good authority that he doesn’t plan to, and Spencer is the most respectable man I know.
Different times, different times.
I made the first of these so-called important decisions in 2010, when I was twenty-seven. That was also the time my world got turned on its head. Marilee had gone off to Haiti, and was making headlines for her work with the Red Cross and for her decoupaged dollhouse, which was touring the country and getting rave reviews from plebeians and art critics alike. I was all alone in San Francisco with my flat-screen TV and high-speed Internet and cheap-as-hell water, and I guess that’s why I decided buying a house was the logical next step. I didn’t have much else to do with all that money.
And back then, buying a house, especially a big house with a big yard and lots and lots of green, green grass in constant need of cheap-as-hell water, well, that was respectable.
Not today, not today.
I had just closed on a little two-bedroom on Ortega, big enough for me and my flat-screen TV and whatever else I wanted, when I got another e-mail from Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. that said I had a pickup at the San Francisco International Airport for someone by the name of “Logan Wallace.”
Okeydokey.
But when I got to the airport, I waited and waited, and the red cooler never appeared. I asked the personnel there if Delta Air Lines flight 2245 had arrived. Yes, it had. I asked if all the luggage for flight 2245 had been unloaded. Yes, it had. I asked if there was possibly some mistake, because my luggage wasn’t there.
And then they asked me what my name was, if I had the baggage claim ticket, et cetera, et cetera.
No, no, I said.
I told them some story that I had gone over many times in my head for cases just like these. I told them I was picking up the bag for my friend Logan Wallace, who had been on the plane but had caught the first cab to the hospital because of a family emergency. I was a family friend.
I had another story, too, that I had thought up for cases just like these. Want to hear it? Here goes: I was picking up a bag for Logan Wallace, who had checked his luggage but had managed last-minute to catch an earlier flight to San Jose. He had asked me to retrieve his luggage from San Francisco International since he lived in San Jose and I lived in the city. I was his personal assistant or some other such thing.
But I didn’t use that one, in case they looked up Logan Wallace in their system and found he had not, in fact, caught an earlier flight to San Jose.
I had one more alibi at the ready. Want to hear it? Here goes: I was picking up a bag for Logan Wallace. He had checked his luggage at the airport but had somehow missed his flight. He had asked me to retrieve the bag and keep it safe until he arrived.
But that one wouldn’t work if there was a real Logan Wallace and the flight manifest showed him getting on to the plane.
So because I had no idea if Logan Wallace, or any of the other names I had been given over the years, were real people that actually got on to planes or not, I went with the first alibi.
Logan Wallace was on the plane, but he had to rush to the hospital, so there I was to retrieve his luggage.
“Logan Wallace,” said the pretty Delta Air Lines representative at the main kiosk. “I see a booking for a Logan Wallace on flight two-two-four-five. But it looks like he never boarded the plane.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Could you check again, please?”
Stalling. I had to think of something. Hadn’t I just said that Logan Wallace had arrived and had rushed off to the hospital?
“I’m certain,” said the representative. She scanned through her records again. “Maybe he missed a connection in Chicago.”
“Come to think of it,” I said, “I haven’t heard from him today. I suppose he could have missed his connection. We haven’t spoken since we made plans for me to pick up his luggage.”
Like a pro. Like a pro.
“Aha! Here it is,” the pretty representative said. “Logan Wallace checked in for flight three-nine-eight-two from Seoul to Chicago with one bag, but the flight was canceled just before takeoff due to mechanical difficulties.”
She looked up at me and added, “So that explains why he didn’t make his connection in Chicago.”
“Was he put on another flight?” I asked.
“He’s nowhere else in the system,” she said.
“So what happened to his luggage?”
“He must have picked it up at the baggage claim in Seoul.” She shrugged a little shrug.
She reminded me of Kate Drummond, Charlie’s ex. My ex. Except Kate Drummond had a tattoo of an eagle on the underside of her wrist. This girl only had a watch, which I noticed was still set to daylight savings time even though it was already December.
I wanted to ask her out, and maybe sometime down the road if we were still friends or lovers, I could tell her what a marvelous secret agent I had been the day I met her. I think she would have been impressed.
But as it was, I was scared shitless by my little brush with airport security, and I just wanted out of there.
Remember: I still didn’t know what was in those red coolers that I had been delivering for almost five years. I imagined five years’ worth of cocaine, or harvested organs from kidnapped children and prostitutes, or God knows what. Enough cocaine and organs and God knows what to land me in the San Quentin State Penitentiary, surely. I should have consulted my friend Sam Getz, who had studied criminal justice at Harvard and was now selling TV scripts out in Hollywood.
But what would Sam Getz know about it? Except how to turn it into a movie. And I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s trying to do now, all these years later, with the book I’m writing.
When I arrived home from the airport that day, I e-mailed Happy Happy Happy Message Runners, Inc. and explained what had happened, leaving out the part about wanting to ask the Delta Air Lines representative out on a date.
And then I just waited for a reply.
All of my things were still in boxes from the move to the new house, and I was sleeping on a nest of blankets and pillows on the floor in one of the bedrooms because the bed I ordered had not yet arrived.
The reply came three days later, in the mail, just about the same time my bed arrived. I r
eceived a manila envelope that was addressed to my old apartment on Hayes Street but which had been forwarded to my new address per my instructions to the post office.
And do you want to know what was in the envelope?
A US passport
A United Airlines boarding pass
A letter from Happy Happy Happy Message
Runners, Inc.
$2,000 in US cash and three million in South
Korean won
First question: Whose US passport could it be?
It was mine! The picture was mine anyway. At first glance, it looked identical to the passport I had renewed last year to visit Charlie in London. Except for one thing.
The name on the passport was Logan Wallace.
The letter explained that there was a flight departing the next day for Seoul, South Korea. I was to assume the identity of Logan Wallace, board the flight using the boarding pass provided, go to Seoul, locate the missing package, which presumably belonged to me, Logan Wallace, and which must still be circulating in the airport somewhere, and then use the three million won to buy a ticket home.
There were specific instructions on how to handle the package as well, once I had located it. I was not, under any circumstances, to check the package at the terminal. I was to carry it on the plane with me. Upon arrival in San Francisco, I was to deliver it immediately to a man in a Santa suit on the corner of Market and Eighteenth Street.
This was all one week before Christmas.
The $2,000 was a reward for my trouble, as well as compensation for any expenses incurred along the way. I would be rewarded another $8,000 if I returned with the package in tow and handed it off to the man in the Santa suit.
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