She left after the movie. I almost asked her to stay but was afraid of her saying no. She kissed me and asked if I wanted to get together tomorrow, and I nearly laughed at the pointlessness of the question.
Thank God she left then. Half an hour later Coyote and Jacob came home.
Jacob walked in first. He was wearing the same thing as when I had last seen him ten days ago, but those clothes—now torn and dirt-covered—were the only semblance to the person I once knew. Everything about him seemed to have changed, not the least of which was his stare, now distant and clouded, as if he were semi-catatonic.
He walked into the room, leaving the door open behind him. He glanced at me briefly and seemed to notice me no more than he would a spider on the wall. Despite the dozens of questions he surely would know I had for him, Jacob beelined it for his bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
“He’s the first success of my experiment.”
Coyote stood in the doorway.
Unlike Jacob, Coyote was not wearing the same clothes from ten days earlier. A pair of faded camouflage pants sat loosely around his waist and a black t-shirt clung tightly to his chest and arms. I had never seen these clothes on him before, yet their condition suggested they were not recent purchases. He carried no jacket, just a small Army-style duffel bag that looked only half-full. Coyote, from the looks of it, had just come back from some kind of training.
“Where have you been?” I asked. I wondered if he could smell any trace of Emma in here. On me.
Coyote smiled without showing teeth. “Out there, man.” He let the duffel bag drop to the ground. “Out there.”
“Out where?”
He dropped to his knees and opened the duffel bag, extracting a small box. He opened the box and pulled out a flower. I don’t think I had even seen one like it before. The petals were a soft white, like the fading light from a movie projector. Along them, a series of maroon sprinkles lined up like a trail of marching ants in formation. He went to Jacob’s door and knocked on it. I heard it open, followed by the muffled sound of Coyote’s voice.
“Put this in water.”
The door closed, and then Coyote went into his own bedroom and shut the door. They were gone as quickly as they had reappeared, and it wasn’t until March that I found out what had happened to them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MARCH 1990
“He’s starting to scare me,” Emma whispered, pretending to look at the books on the shelves. “He’s really losing it.”
I stood close to her, probably closer than I would have if we were more in public. But it was late at night and we were well hidden in the stacks of the library where I worked.
“I don’t understand why you don’t break up with him.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes, Emma. It is that easy.”
She took a book from the shelf and gazed aimlessly at its spine. “You don’t understand. It’s like he’s teetering on the edge of something. I don’t want to do anything to push him off.”
“What are you afraid of ?” I asked.
I feared even our faintest whispers could be heard across the whole of the library.
“I don’t know.”
“It wouldn’t be worse than him finding out about us.” In a way, I almost wanted him to find out. Coyote, the person everyone admired and feared, wasn’t in total control for once. I was sleeping with Emma, and nothing he could do to her or me would erase that. It was a morsel of knowledge I savored.
She turned her head and looked at me. There was a sad desperation to her expression. “He can’t find out about us, Harden.”
“But what if he does?”
“Harden, he can’t.”
And I thought, Why are we always so afraid of what Coyote knows? But I didn’t say it, because I already had a vague sense of the answer.
Coyote was going to hold his first Revelation meeting the following night. It wasn’t going to be so much a meeting, I suppose, as a recruitment seminar. He was going to start his experiment in earnest, and he wanted me there. I was the secretary, after all.
“Do you know what he’s planning for tomorrow?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I hardly even see him anymore.”
“He told me he’s going to talk about where he and Jacob went in January.”
“As if I even care at this point,” she said.
I was more curious than Emma. Neither Coyote nor Jacob had spoken about their ten-day absence. Despite repeated questions from me—and Derek, to a lesser degree—they spoke very little at all. Whatever had happened to him, Jacob was Coyote’s boy now. Coyote had brainwashed my once happy-go-lucky roommate, leaving him a quiet and intensely serious shell of the roommate I knew. No more school. No more rugby. Gone were the alcohol-infused weekends, the stories of sexual conquests, the snack-riddled movie marathons on the living room floor. Or perhaps Jacob was a gifted actor, willing to sacrifice his friends, his personality, and his education for whatever it was that Coyote needed. But whatever he was doing, it seemed to be the first time Jacob took pride in his work.
Coyote and Jacob often left the apartment in the middle of the night, not coming back until late morning. Neither of them went to class, and both were informed both by phone and mail that the enrollment deadline for classes had passed, and neither would be graduating in June.
They didn’t care. They weren’t at Wyland for diplomas anymore. And all of it for some stupid experiment. It was an incredible waste, and I think that’s what fascinated me most.
“You’re not curious?” I asked Emma.
“The whole thing is so sad. I don’t even understand it. But I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“People are talking,” I said. “There’s a buzz going around about tomorrow.”
A couple of weeks ago, Coyote and Jacob had become a bit more social. They started walking the campus, making connections with lost friends. Naturally, everyone wondered what had happened to them, and both were happy to tell any eager ear about how they discovered something wonderful. Many people had heard about Coyote’s famous “levitating” incident at Benny’s, and this only served to fuel interest into the nature of their mysterious discovery.
“Come to the Lincoln next Wednesday night,” Coyote would tell the curious. “Nine o’clock. I’ll tell you all about it.”
I reached out and lightly stroked Emma’s arm with my fingertips, a bold public move, even deep in the deserted stacks of books. She smiled.
“You need to break up with him,” I told her.
“I will. I just need a little time.”
She rarely saw Coyote, as he spent most nights at our apartment now. In my mind they were already broken up, but it wasn’t official. Official meant she would talk to him, tell him they were done. Official meant I could date Emma openly, even if that caused tension around my apartment. The truth is, I think Coyote had gotten what he wanted from Emma and wouldn’t even flinch at being dumped. Coyote moved on with predatory purpose, discarding bones that no longer had meat on them. But Emma sensed something more. She picked up on something that gave her pause, told her breaking up with Coyote might have more significant consequences. I was frustrated and wanted it over with. She was cautious and treaded lightly.
Turned out, she was right to be afraid.
She must have been reading my thoughts, because she reached out and lightly squeezed my forearm. “I want you.”
“And I want you to have me. Only me.”
“I know,” she said.
“Do you?”
She loosened her grip. “What do you mean?”
It was time for all the unspoken thoughts to pour from me. “I think I . . .” I closed my eyes again. Tight squeeze. Open again. “No, I know that . . .” Just put it out there. How can it be wrong to say it if it’s the truth?
“Emma, I . . .”
I didn’t say it. It would be too painful if it just died a slow, silent death in the space between us.
<
br /> Then she kissed me. As she pulled back, she pushed her fingers up into my hair.
“I love you, too, Harden.”
I felt a hundred pounds lighter at her words, and I vaguely remember reaching out and touching a shelf of books, steading my balance. We walked from the stacks, and my hand grazed her thigh as we turned the corner.
Everything was okay. It would all work out. Emma and I were together, and that’s all that mattered in my little world.
Then I saw him.
The bouncer from the frat party. Coyote’s friend. Big Ben.
He wasn’t looking our way at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t notice us. My skin grew cold as I looked at the floor and walked away from Emma. The rest of the night, as much as I tried to repeat Emma’s words in my head, four other words replaced them.
What had he seen?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Lincoln was an old, single-screen Baroque-style movie theater in the downtown area of Tillman, a fifteen-minute walk from campus. It used to be a playhouse around the turn of the century, but I guess they converted it to a movie theater once the talkies changed the course of entertainment for sleepy towns around the country. Nowadays, the Lincoln showed mostly indie and arthouse flicks, and did a pretty good business from what I could tell. The owner also rented it out for events, and Coyote had chosen it for his recruitment seminar.
The Lincoln could hold over four hundred people.
On Wednesday night the theater was looking particularly ominous: the dimmed lights took the polish off anything that could gleam and the air was still and thick. The silence absorbed everything around it. I was backstage, watching the place slowly starting to fill.
Coyote put a hand on my shoulder.
“Take notes, Harden. Take notes tonight, that’s all you have to do.”
I looked down at my notepad, which he had instructed me to bring.
“Notes about what, exactly?”
“Everything.”
“Where am I supposed to be? Back here, or—”
“In the audience. First row. Write everything down. I want a record.”
“Why not just tape it?”
“No video. No audio.”
He walked away, and I took a seat in the first row, my pen resting on the notebook in my lap. I knew I couldn’t transcribe everything that was said, so my goal was to get the general outline of what happened, filling in the blanks later. I spent a few minutes warming up by writing the conversation I just had, and the words came out smoothly and easily. I was ready to write what Coyote wanted, not because he ordered it, but because I had the sense that it could be an interesting story. Maybe it could even be a book someday. Or, perhaps, evidence.
When nine o’clock came, I looked around and found the theater half-full. Surely Coyote was disappointed, but I was amazed. Over two hundred people came here on a Wednesday night to hear what he had to say. I took note of a man sitting two seats to my left. He caught my attention because he was taking notes as well, and I wondered if he was a reporter. He looked too old to be an undergrad, but maybe he was a grad student, or perhaps a professor. He jotted away on a small pad, looking around every so often to see if anyone was watching him. He caught me staring at him and offered me a small nod, prompting me to nod back. We suddenly had this fragile bond, and I wondered why he had come here tonight. I wanted to ask him but neither my self-confidence nor our distance allowed it.
Seconds later Coyote took the stage, and that’s when things started getting strange.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“I’m not going to waste your time here tonight.”
Coyote wore a simple white t-shirt that hung on the outside of faded jeans, but his presence was as commanding as a battleship captain in full regalia. I don’t know how he did it—maybe this is what charisma was all about—but you just wanted to keep watching the guy to see what he would say or do next.
“I’m not going to tell you things you already know or promise you something that can’t be delivered. I’m not going to sell you anything, and I’m not going to preach a gospel of false hope.” Coyote turned gently to the different areas of the theater as he spoke, his hands reaching out with an air of inclusiveness.
“What I am going to do is tell you about a recent journey of mine and what I learned from it. What I learned is something you will all want to learn. I want you all to be able to finally see.”
Pretty hard sell, I thought. But I was hooked enough to have to keep reminding myself to take notes. My shorthand was nonexistent, but I scrawled well enough to get most of it. I looked up at him from time to time, catching his expression and his focused gaze as he singled out people from the crowd with his eyes. He was making a connection one person at a time.
“Some of you may have heard what happened to me at Benny’s a couple of months ago, and perhaps that alone is the reason you’re here tonight. You want to know what really happened. Did I actually levitate off that table? Did I really hear a voice?” I heard a small snicker from someone behind me, which Coyote ignored. “I can’t answer those questions, because I simply don’t remember. But there are those who were there that night, and they can tell you what they saw. There are eleven people who will swear my feet left the table that night, if just by a few inches. I can’t tell you. I don’t remember any of that. All I know is something tore open inside of me that night. Something wonderful.”
Where was this going?
“I left that night with my friend Jacob. I didn’t know where we were going or what I was supposed to do, but I knew he was supposed to come with me to witness what I was to witness. He was supposed to become as I now am, and, after ten days together, he was. That journey wasn’t easy, but I know my goal is to teach what we have learned to anyone who is willing to listen. Anyone who is willing to become.”
Okay, now you’re being too vague, I thought. You need to start being specific if you’re going to keep their patience.
Then he did just that. “We spent ten nights in the woods, about eighty miles north of here. We had no food or water. You might be strained to believe this, but it’s true. We spent the nights sleeping on the cold, hard dirt, in temperatures that should have killed us. But we survived. During the day, I sat with my friend, and told him every thought flooding into my mind. I had thoughts I had never experienced before, and I thought them in ways completely new to me. It was difficult for me to explain them to him, but he studied my every word, trying to see what I saw.”
I chanced a look behind me to see if Jacob was still by the door, but he wasn’t. I shifted my gaze down to the faces of those behind me, and not one person looked at me. I wouldn’t say they were transfixed on Coyote, exactly, but they were all looking at him. Some probably thought he was full of shit, maybe even most of them. But the theater was silent, and no one had left.
“On the sixth day, what happened to me at Benny’s also happened to Jacob. His mind opened to a potential he could never before conceptualize. On that day, Jacob also became.”
A man’s voice came from the crowd. “I don’t believe you.”
Coyote smiled, and I had seen that exact look before. It wasn’t a smile you wanted to be on the other side of.
“It’s your right not to believe, as much as it’s your right to leave here and miss the rest of what I have to say. Disbelief is, in fact, the greatest ally of belief. You cannot have one without the other. You need to doubt, because without it, you cannot become. Will you stand, please?”
“Why?” the man said.
Now everyone looked at the heckler, including myself. He was our age, wearing a baseball hat and faded Skynyrd concert tee, and he slouched deep in his seat as if it were his living room couch. I wondered why he’d come tonight.
“Because I want to show you something.”
His friend next to him poked him and gave him a nudge. Finally, with a nervous smile the student stood and, in an odd gesture, turned his baseball cap backwards over his moppy hair,
as if it might get blown off otherwise.
“Close your eyes,” Coyote said.
“I thought you wanted me to see.” A few people around him snickered.
“You will. Close your eyes.”
With a shrug, the student closed his eyes and dug his fists deep into his baggy jeans.
Five seconds later he was screaming.
It was horrifying. This man, this student, suddenly screaming as if being torn open by massive, invisible jaws. He clawed at his face and grabbed his hair. No one tried to help him, because it all ended as quickly as it had started. He just stopped, and when he did, I could hear his frantic panting and wheezing. Then he turned to his left, threw up on his friend, and barreled out down the aisle and through the back doors, into the night. The friend, now covered in a thick slime of vomit, shouted fuck at no one in particular and followed his friend.
I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen anything like it. Not even Coyote’s levitation trick matched this. I witnessed this with two hundred others, as if we all had been watching a grisly car accident together, and yet I’m not even exactly sure what it was I saw. A wave of chills ran through me as my brain unconsciously replayed the sounds within me. I turned back to Coyote, and the sudden silence of the room encompassed me.
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