5.

Do the worldlines have an ultimate purpose? Just being. That’s plenty. However, for my investigation, they are a vital tool to inspect the past. One important point: the consciousness that travels along a worldline is translated by the entity that rides it. Thus, my sister’s view of me is just that——full of her own bias. I come off much better on my own worldline. But, as I have said, I am after information that was unknown to me in life, so, peruse other worldliness, I must, no matter how unflattering. Now I introduce a new locale, one I visited in life, as you will see. I feel it may provide a capable commander to help me from this new place, and also a fighting man, one who will eventually understand how to use the worldlines as a resource. However, if I recognize their strategic importance, surely Beddy will too. The worldlines will bestow immense tactical advantages in general. But first I plan to use them to defend this realm, the Land of the Dead. It is a vast territory, an available target ripe for the picking. And make no mistake, the visible and invisible arms of the universe will soon be regions of contest. Soon there will be direct orders from multiple command centers that will offer and accept battle. Whoever controls the lines of communication and routes of march, will win. This must be me.

Alphonso’s Worldline—January 10, 2023

His instinct had been to stay on the move after Ranger died, leaving behind the biggest discovery in quantum physics since the discovery of the quanta themselves. Now he was prey. He headed west.

He didn’t think about the Massachusetts police, questioning his expressionless mother and his shocked professors. But his losses weighed on him. Matching his mood was a squalid garden-level apartment in the Tenderloin. Yet even seedy digs in San Francisco were expensive. He needed money.

Little cash remained after his bus ticket and first and last rent were paid. To secure a future, he built a computer for one hundred and two dollars that would do the basics, search the internet and get him on e-Bay. This left seventy-nine dollars. He didn’t think through a plan, but simply began to prowl the city.

San Francisco was, at first, a continuously unfolding kaleidoscope with too many possibilities to grasp at one time. But over days, neighborhoods clarified into streets that defined blocks, and then areas: A real-life Mandelbrot set with the same indecision on each scale.

The most promising avenue to financial success was buying and selling, although he chose his product with restraint, no drugs or guns. The city became a hive, with identifiable and enterable niches; but where was the honey?

He soon knew: books. Arriving at one church basement bazaar at exactly the earliest time publicized (too early and one could anger the sale proprietors) he spotted an MIT series on materials science and engineering. He opened to the contributing authors’ page, where the type jumped with the familiar names of former professors. Seeing them, he panicked, as if he had forgotten an exam and only remembered once it was too late. In a spasm of shame, he almost left the books where they rested, then realized their value. The volumes would interest the right person.

The real score was a nondescript maroon book, with silvering in the impress: Very High Frequency Techniques. He bought all seven books for $14.00.

Alphonso’s profit from this first investment would be his most dramatic (4000%) and most satisfying. He was now an entrepreneur.

He knew richer stock waited on-line, if he could build the right algorithm. So with signal detection theory to guide the creation of a network of words, he found his targets. Via Hamming- distance analyses and cross-correlation processes he eliminated false positives, false leads. Unlike commercial analytics programs, his algorithm backtracked him to individual IP addresses, put him inside the person’s documents to discover their interests, and let him read e-mails of transactions. By the time he met his sellers, he knew them.

Driving him was the idea that someone had discovered the Stonehenge effect long before him. Surely somebody had known that the lattices of crystalline structures could focus thought, before he’d proved it with the dead geology student.

And he knew it was summed up in a word: magic. To find other key terms for his on-line searches he read every grimoire, key, and codex he could find. He was searching for verification of his idea. In the process, he built the stable, if modest, business that finally won him his goal.

During this time, Alphonso made a valuable contact at an increasingly rare brick and mortar stop at a book show in the San Francisco Hilton. Just as he was wondering whether he should quit in-person trips to scavenge for profitable finds, Alphonso noticed a man presiding over a slim selection arrayed on the floor of his booth. Sometimes scant is a symbol of precious. Alphonso moved closer to see.

The books fanned around the man sitting lotus-style on an expansive pink velvet ottoman tufted with onyx beads. With his legs crossed tightly under him, the man seemed all trunk, a pale anemone, whose skin and hair held to one tone.

Instead of a greeting, the man said “Hmmmm, ” communicating a certain openness, although not to trivialities.

The man’s collection was interesting but catered more to scholars than to magicians. There was a signed first edition copy of The Book of Thoth, with a characteristically pornographic initial “A” fronting the Crowley. In addition, the man had a fine copy of Swedenborg’s Arcana Caelestia published in 1752.

“Mmmm. These guides need receptive minds,” intoned the bookseller.

“Yes,” Alphonso committed half-heartedly.

“Uhh, not looking for this type of thing? Uhhh, classics of wisdom’s source?”

“My search is for something more…directive.”

“Hmmm, directing the reader. Uh, to act.”

“To change. To change reality.”

“Ahhh, such a book would be desirable; but hard, ohh, to find in books. More likely knowledge passed on, person to person.”

“That knowledge would be desirable, if you have it.” Alphonso’s words were barely a question. As if they were two plants now, Alphonso floated the seed of his idea to the man, who caught it.

“Ahh, a lengthy undertaking.”

“I have time. What if I buy you dinner?”

Over glasses of his guest’s choosing, Fernet Branca, Alphonso learned the man’s name: Solomon Candy. Solomon was, just like Alphonso, an academic refugee.

“Ahh, the allure of chemistry was sweet, at the beginning.”

“But you soured on it?”

“Ooh, rather, my advisor soured on my dissertation topic.”

Alphonso had heard this story, that the problem of finishing was someone else’s. He would leave Solomon his illusions. “But the wisdom of the ages is a greater pursuit?” Alphonso did not inspect Solomon’s face for the shifts of emotion that he knew were taking place under the surface. Instead, as he cut his steak, he said, “I think you have information that is hard to come by.”

Then Solomon revealed himself to be an initiate of the Druidic Craft of the Wise. And he spoke about Eli, the leader. Solomon told Alphonso that there were books at an encampment in Arkansas, but Eli wouldn’t sell. Solomon’s description of Eli was that of a wise man, a magician. But Alphonso detected another element. Like a note of decay underneath the embalmer’s skilled work, was the jongleur, the huckster.

And so it was that Alphonso found himself in the gathering Arkansas dusk, looking down a foreboding private road, tangles of vines intensifying the gloom and a rustic arch proclaiming it a place of spiritual respite, a bible camp. The dim light seemed to recede; always the patches of brightness fell further than where Alphonso was standing. He was a shadow in the dwindling year.

He paused and shouldered his backpack more comfortably. An onlooker might have interpreted his pause as a hesitation, a moment of reconsideration. But in this moment, Alphonso merely prepared for a new role. He was used to such adaptings; his identity was more a support for new grafts than its own plant. Under Eli’s wing, the encampment would be a refuge for cover, a lucid asylum. He was determined to be taken in.

Eli’s Worldline: June 18, 2024

Eli listened for a brown creeper, but they were not much in evidence compared to recent years. God damn it, the apprentices must be chain-sawing the big dead trees for firewood instead of chopping smaller downfall. He calmed himself. If he could, he’d run this place like a boot camp, but then there wouldn’t be many apprentices. And his blunt way of speaking and telling others what to do was a good-face, bad-face coin. The good side gave him power over most people, especially those who were looking for a strong voice to follow. It made him a natural leader. But it turned away others; those who understood that things weren’t simply black and white. The smart ones, he could see them draw away. He’d leave his temper out of it.

Things were different now than they had been for his Pap. Pap never talked about a sense of the outside closing in on the hills and glens of the Arkansas woods north of Little Rock. Instead, he told Eli stories of past times, when people hereabouts could use energies that lay under the earth. A remnant of that time, some still saw the occasional ghost and a few knew that people could spontaneously combust, although the houses on most of those spots, where the underground acted like a chimney to funnel up forces from beneath, had burned down and never been rebuilt.

Pap taught him how to shepherd the local folks along. He had worked carny when he left Newton County. Pap had been a dealer in now you see ‘em, now you don’t. But, Pap decided, for Eli, the power would be real. Pap sent him, first to the military, to learn how to fight, then to seminary school, to learn how to preach. He said, “You’ll run the racket from the inside.” Pap said that much of the old lore came with the family in books from a world “older than Europe,” although Eli wasn’t much for book learning, except, of course, the Good Book.

People could have their cake and eat it too about Eli: he was a sorcerer of the Lord, a lion serving a lamb. Alphonso was another one. As per the lilies of the field, no need to reap or sow. Now Alphonso was back for the summer and Eli was surprised to realize how much he had anticipated the homecoming, as if Alphonso were a returning son. Together they would dispense wisdom to the rubes, who were ready to receive wonders. So mote it be.

Surprise more, say less, he told himself.

Ricky’s Worldline—June 25, 2024

Ricky wrote the sentence down, although it made her queasy: “My weakness is that I work too hard…” The college applications, drab documents grubby with worthiness, made her sick of fake self-revelation.

She wanted to tell the truth, but the end of high school meant she had lie to do anything. She wasn’t sure psychology was her ideal future, but at least she might be able to tell what others were going to do, or control them. Thus, her interest in the subject was both banal and conniving. She knew better than to write it down.

Arkansas would be a break from this numb self-packaging, but her father had shut the door on a visit when he asked, “Is there a web address of the sponsoring organization?”

Ricky tried to change the subject. “It’s considered a cross-cultural experience.”

“I hope it’s not a cult,” countered her father with a frown.

“On the contrary, Father.” It was Tristan moving into the room. “They are quite respectable. In fact, they have an extensive interfaith library, including some rare Elizabethan treatises from the Church of England. I have e-mails verifying their authenticity and actually thought that I’d like to take a trip to see them.”

Tristan’s reluctance to approve anything nontraditional could be seen to work on their father’s thinking. James Jameson did not notice Ricky’s wide eyes staring at Tristan, nor the fact that his daughter had quit breathing.

“Are you proposing that the two of you visit this religious camp? And how would you go? Clearly not in the Hyundai.”

“Interfaith camp. We would take the Greyhound down and one of the counselors has a car that needs to come back to the Cities. He’ll give us gas money.”

“How long would you stay?” This question drew Ricky’s wide-eyed attention back to her father. He’s seeing the specifics. Ricky realized how unlikely her trip would have been without Tristan.

“Six days total. Two days for travel and four days at the Camp.”

After Tristan and James had negotiated a number of the journey’s details, Ricky followed Tristan into his room and shut the door.

“Wow, Tristan, I’m grateful, but what is going on? And what about when Dad wants to see e-mails?”

“I’ll show him the e-mails.”

Ricky stared her disbelief at Tristan.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you. The conversation with Dad conveniently raised the topic.”

“Okay,” she said slowly.

“After you introduced me to Alphonso, I ran into him again on campus. We have common interests in philosophy and in old books.”

Her joy at these two very important people becoming friendly was too makeshift to contain her jealousy. Of course Alphonso had free time aside from coven obligations. How sweet for Tristan. And just peachy to be in the “obligation” category. Naturally Alphonso had relationships with all kinds of people that were never meant to include her.

But she couldn’t give up hope that, just maybe, on this trip, Alphonso would finally see her, really see her. They could be fusible elements that would join during a walk in the woods, a conversation under the stars.

Tristan continued his detailed explanations about Alphonso, the books they had read and their ideas in common. She wasn’t listening. She had the possibility of happiness, of purpose fulfilled. She was going to Arkansas.

#

They took their seats on the lumbering canister of the Greyhound.

“No Wi-Fi on this bus,” Tristan reported, inspecting his iPad.

“So tell me about these books.” Ricky scooted down in her seat and balanced her Coloring Book of the Brain in front of her.

“Yeah, the books.” Tristan let his head fall onto the seatback. “Well, one’s a prayer book from about 1670. Called the Book of Common Prayer.”

“And philosophically important? Like Nietzsche?”

“Well this Book of Common Prayer is very uncommon. Apparently, instead of a standard Epistle for All Saints Day, the text is apocalyptic and mentions the ‘Whore of Babylon.’ a term from Revelations.

She tried to figure out what this might mean.

“It’s a term used in hermetical magic,” Tristan said more quietly.

“Hermetical magic?” Surprised yet again that Tristan had appropriated the kind of words he belittled his father for using, she saw that he felt no inconsistency or shame.

“From Hermes Trismegistus, an ancient Egyptian magician, or some say he was a god. Others say he was or a European scholar in the Middle Ages. Most of his texts have been destroyed because occult writings were considered dangerous.”

“Occult,” she stated, panning him so dead that he could hardly miss her real meaning: You are disallowed this topic. But Tristan gave no recognition of going back on his own bargain, the one where he had traded the love of his Dad for an unshakeable superiority.

“It just means ‘hidden’.”

“Did you learn that from Alphonso?” If anyone knows about the occult it’s him. Him and me, me and Dad. Not you. “Did Alphonso talk to you about the occult?”

“Yes. Well no. I asked him about it and he was helpful.”

“Since when is that philosophy?”

“Alchemy was practiced by the philosophers.”

“Alchemy.” She saw her father saying the word, gently, without rancor. But this son had punished him for the word. And here he was, riding along on her hope of love. But what had motivated Tristan? Something powerful.

They stared out the same bus window. Even through the tinted glass, the bright day was hypnotizing, spilling over billiard-green fields, as if being arc-welded to the face of the world.

Tristan said smoothly, “A finding like this would show how early science was linked with the mainstream, meaning with religion.”

“Science?” A sick feeling made her speak quietly. Here was an uneasy unity of her dad and Tristan, but a unity of separation, poles on a magnet, always apart.

Out the window, scumbles of leafy crop marched away in symmetric rows over the rise and fall of land.

“It would mean being published for sure.” He looked at her with a half-smile.

Publication, something else co-opted from Dad. Tristan had never once shown anything but contempt for their father’s journal articles. “For sure.” Her smile was half his.

They were moving faster now. A close stand of birches went by in a striped blur. As if winking in return, a brown-out of the interior running lights illumined Tristan and then hid him. In a stuttered sequence, his face was clear and then obscured.

“So, do you have a thing for Alphonso?” He was trying to sound casual.

The bus was making a scheduled stop in Mankato and the motion was stop and go. She wondered, how did he always do this, get the upper hand? She had rightfully been angry with Tristan and now he was taking her to task. And she let him. Like father, like daughter. They slowed at a crossing. As if steaming, the brakes hissed.

“O.K., I like him.”

“He’s way older than you, Ricky. And more sophisticated.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She posed her most ludicrous face, a mixing of complete incomprehension with disgust.

“Just watch yourself. No. Consider yourself watched. Consider me your chaperone.”

Ricky bent her neck into her seat and colored her book. With a hot pink marker she filled in the hypothalamus, the seat of complex survival responses: Hunger, thirst, sex, rage. She thought No, you watch yourself, Tristan. Something here is not right.

Then she slept, intermittently aware of the sway of the bus, hairpin curves and the slow torque of coming around. The bus would roar up the straightaway to the next bend then rock her back against the window, rock her to sleep.

During one of these awakenings, Tristan’s head fell to his chest, then jerked up to throw itself back. She pushed her sweater between his head and the window.

As his head lolled sideways into the padding he muttered, “Thank God it’s you.”

She wondered if any real person could ever move Tristan to such devout relief.

#

She woke in the aquarium light of the bus windows filtering dawn. Tristan was already awake and staring at a passing suburban landscape. Because they didn’t speak, they could ignore the tension of the previous day.

Then Alphonso was there to greet them at a low white building where a still-illuminated plastic Greyhound sign seemed to retard the rosy strip developing in the east. From a van parked on the street, Alphonso strode toward them. He put his hand out to clasp Tristan’s and then Alphonso stood in front of Ricky, arms akimbo.

“The best is now to come.” He stowed their backpacks and soon they were leaving Little Rock. With the back seat window open, Ricky took in the new place. The thrall of green pressed close as if the densely intertwined spindles of foliage covered the hills in a listening network. It wasn’t, she decided, like the vegetation was conscious, but that, here in the mountain, ones thoughts had more force. Or maybe it was just the long trip and the change in climate. It was hot already.

Alphonso gave the travelogue: “Here’s the boundary of the encampment. The land is rocky, but we do lots of composting. There’s two hundred acres.”

“I guess you don’t see much of your neighbors.”

“Oh you’d be surprised. We’re pretty prominent around here.”

The van slowed to turn through a gate formed by two log poles topped by a carved wooden arch. The carving read “Burning Bush Bible Camp.”

At the end of a long gravel drive was a big log cabin. As the van pulled in, a small group of people came out, the screen door banging like tambourines behind them. Ricky’s eyes fixed immediately on the figure in front. The man dwarfed others. His hair was grey shot with white over a square-trimmed beard that left most of his face bare, except just at the jawline.

Alphonso walked Ricky and Tristan toward the group with a beckoning open arm.

“Ricky,” he put his hand on her shoulder, “Tristan,” he spread his arms open wide, “this is Eli,” he paused, letting the significance of the name sink in, “and his wife Alloday.”

Eli looked at the newcomers in turn.

“Tristan, Ricarda, I have been anticipating this visit more than you know.” Then he smiled at Alphonso and followed Alloday, who was waiting at a path leading out of the clearing. For a moment, before she caught herself, Ricky started to follow. Was her automatic movement a sign of something between her and the couple, or could any familial gravity pull her in?

Just then, Alphonso put his hands together and said, “Tristan, Ricky, meet your compañeros.”

He introduced each apprentice in turn, including a man who thanked them for agreeing to drive his car back north. One young woman presented herself to Ricky with earnest eyes, saying, “So you know about people, being interested in psychology and all.”

Taken aback that these strangers knew about her, Ricky was uncertain what to say. “Well, I like people…” She’d bet these apprentices wouldn’t like her if they knew she had come here to be close to Alphonso.

#

Eli gave his students lessons each day. “Mystical briefings” Tristan joked, referencing the fact that these sessions ended up sounding like a commander preparing his troops. Ricky laughed, but, again, his casual possession of ideas he had formerly dismissed rankled her. She used chores to avoid him and chose a spot as far from him as possible in the Bondo’d pick-up truck that took them to a garden that seemed an entire city block long. Once there, an apprentice directed her, “Hoe around the climbing beans.”

Ricky hefted the tool hesitantly. She had always been the least coordinated in any group, last picked for sports teams; living from the neck up, she was never given physical work to do without instructions.

When she began to hoe, large clods of dirt sprang into the air, leaving the ground around her hacked and pitted. Most of the weeds remained.

“Here, let me show you.” An arm came into view, staying the tool, then Eli’s cut-out beard flicked up and down in time with the how as he clipped the sheerest slice of dirt to cleanly weed the garden floor.

“Now you try.”

Ricky again slashed with an energy that left a chopped mess in her wake. Above her, Eli’s face was suffused with midday red.

“You’re rackety but I believe you’re trying.” He mopped up some sweat with a handkerchief. “Well, nothing is impossible with God. That’s Luke.”

“I’m clumsy,” Ricky said, looking down at the wreck of soil around her hiking boots.

“No such thing,” said Eli. “There’s no such thing as clumsy; there’s only disconnected from your inner know-how.”

“That’s my problem. I don’t know how.”

“Know-how comes from believing.” He said this like ‘bleeving’ and with some irritation. “So, your daily chore is to stand here and bleeve that you can do this.”

Ricky stared up at him.

“Starting right now,” he ordered. He marched off to supervise the distribution of plastic yard bags.

Flattened, she let Eli’s command sink in; it landed like a guidance counselor’s platitude. Belief comes from experience, and in this regard she had none. But she couldn’t just stand there like an idiot because, just now, Alphonso walked toward her, his upper body carried in a smooth processional by his striding legs.

Panicked, she determined she would see herself hoe with ease and exhilaration. She shut her eyes and a blurry image took shape. The lower half of the blur was dark, like the dusky ground, and the top half was bright, like the light-hued sky. But should she see herself in the scene, like she was on camera, or by her own point of view, like she was the camera? She found she couldn’t wonder and visualize at the same time.

“Taking a break?”

She opened her eyes. Alphonso’s smile looked even whiter than usual against the smudges of soil on golden skin.

“Working on believing.”

The man glanced at the vegetal carnage around her. “You looked far away, Ricky, and it’s so beautiful here.” Then he added courteously, “Well, good believing.”

As he moved off, a red flush of humiliation stalked up her face. He had checked her off his list.

Anger saved the elevator-drop of her stomach into shame. Alphonso’s dismissal steeled her purpose. She shut her eyes and willed her inner vision to assume the crystal clarity of real patches of green, arabesque formations of leaf and vine, the tendrils of the diligent climbing beans. She saw the cuneiform hatch marks of her hoe’s barrage upon the soil, as clearly as if her eyes were open.

And then a thing caught her mind’s eye: an angular shape in the dirt, near her mind’s feet. Something poking up amid the dirty disruption of the planting row. She imagined leaning over, and now her body bent with her mind. Her real hand closed around a rectangle that crumbled as she applied the pressure of real fingers. She opened her eyes.

It had been a wooden box, but was now just large, loosely connected slivers. It retained metal hinges and a clasp, all rust. Inside was a cloth in better condition: a weave of chevrons, around a hard, light teardrop of metal. A silvery surface shone beneath black tarnish and evidence of a design pierced clear through its widest part. She rubbed away the grime on her T-shirt and made out flowers: a pattern from an older time.

“A top,” she said aloud as she raised the metal orb to the sun. Even dirty, it flanged the light into rotating beams as she turned it. She had found a beautiful thing.

But how? Putting the toy in her pocket, she thought irrationally that Eli might congratulate her by clapping his big hand on her shoulder. Immediately, the face in the image became her Dad. Maybe, came the next crazy idea, I’m the person Dad was looking for the whole time, someone special, with special abilities. Then she would be desirable to Alphonso, too. This thought twisted out a smile, but it was not enough to make her feel much better.

#

The days passed in a green blur of overarching trees, tangled underbrush, and garden rows. The light was especially distilled by foliage at the fishing hole, sifting jade rays down from a small blue aperture in the canopy. Area fishermen would leave, or take a break, when the apprentices arrived to cannonball from rock cliffs. After a time, the swimmers would lie on overhanging stone slabs to dry T-shirts and cut-offs as fishing recommenced.

On the second day at the encampment, just as the apprentices had sunned their clothing to dampness, Eli and Alloday came to the swimming hole. Ricky and Tristan clambered down the ledges to follow Alphonso to meet them. As a small group, they followed Eli over to a man fishing in an Ancient Aliens tank top. Beside him, a woman handled a small tackle box.

“Mornin’ Eli.”

“Mornin’ Abel. How long you been at it?”

“Got here about ten. But I ain’t caught nothin’. Today makes a week straight of trying. I think there’s naught but minnows in this hole anymore.”

“Abel,” Eli put his hand on Abel’s shoulder, “if you go down there to that little cleft in the bank, a big ol’ catfish is waitin’ for lunch to come on by.”

Abel and his wife walked down to put in their line along a set of rocks jutting out of the water. Within a minute, Abel had pulled up a large fish, slender whips emerging from both sides of its face. The fisherman cried “Who-eee” as he swung his catch into a bucket. Just then, Abel’s wife came up beside him and talked soft, her lips barely moving. They looked darkly at one another. Abel knocked the fish on the head, removed the hook, and carefully carried the fish with outstretched arms to the couple, as if it were a ritual offering.

“Here, this is for you,” said Abel to Alloday, and placed the fish, as if laying a stole, into her hands and with hunched shoulders and slight bows, Abel and his wife backed away, saying “Thankee,” and “See you later.”

Tristan looked at Ricky from under a frowning brow. Her own surprise felt like an air step at the top of a stair.

Had Eli had known about that fish, in particular; not a statistical probability, but a certainty about one single fish? Maybe he was someone who could actually teach her to develop her newfound seeing skill. But she would have to prove herself. She thought of sharing these thoughts with Tristan on the way back to Minnesota, of him accepting her and Dad’s interests. She would probably forgive him everything when he explained why he left her out of his time with Alphonso. They’d have the car, gas station snacks, and each other.

When Alloday looked up at Eli, he put his big hand on her shoulder and said, “Whatever a man soweth, that he shall also reap.”

#

Eli came to the cabin and leaned against the refrigerator as the apprentices finished the breakfast dishes.

“No gardening today. Instead I thought whoever wants can go with me up the mountain to meet my family. They’ve practiced the old ways since they came here, fleeing persecution.”

Ricky thought about this. Didn’t religious intolerance go out with swords and plumed hats? “So they’ve been here a long time?” she asked Eli.

“Long enough ago to bring the Elizabethan tongue.”

With the word ‘Elizabethan,’ she revised her dress reference: Not plumed hats, but ruffed doublets, attire that was worn even earlier. Just how long had Europeans been coming to America? In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

At Eli’s words, Tristan’s eyebrows arched. But Ricky knew Tristan would not go out of his way just to follow the promise of something interesting. He needed a tangible goal that was his own.

Eli looked at Tristan and said, “The family tree recorded in the Bible shows details about the books you’ve been reading that came here from the old world.”

“Sounds good.” Tristan aimed a quick flash of a smile at Ricky.

Alphonso then spoke before everyone scattered to grab belongings.

“There’s a lot of light deadfall that can be cleared and stacked for winter. I’ll stay to do that.”

Eli responded, “In that case, it sure would be nice to come back tonight to a hot meal.”

“I’ll stay too,” Ricky said, hoping that a clause to that sentence would provide a reason for staying. Without luck, she shut her open mouth.

Tristan’s warning look showed in white-eyed sclera. She gave him a pat on the back as he left with the others. “Breathe in, breathe out, Tristan. Breathe in, breathe out.”

#

“Don’t stand right behind the ax.”

Alphonso demonstrated the wrong way first, the arc making clear that, if she missed the log, the blunt razor would become lodged in her leg. Or worse, slice through.

They were chopping kindling for starting fires or cooking in the wood stove.

“Try it again.”

Alphonso placed a small log on the cutting stump, then Ricky let the weight of the ax drive it down. The log was now nearly cleft in two with only a bit joined.

“Here,” Alphonso took the ax, and hit the ensemble like a hammer. The two sides fell away onto the tamped earth around the stump.

Ricky smiled approvingly. “So. East L.A. and here you are chopping wood.”

He gave her a grin and a furrowed brow. “I wondered when I would see the psychologist in you.”

Ricky’s stomach sank. “I’m not analyzing you. You just seem to be good at so many things.” She faltered; she really knew nothing about him.

He pointed a nod her way, as if he was handing her something. “You are right. I learned to chop wood here.”

As Alphonso’s arms worked to select more wood for her to practice on, she watched the muscles bunch and slide.

“I like your tattoo.” The mark on his forearm looked like an ‘A,’ but cluttered with other details. “Does it stand for Alphonso?” As she continued with the ax, she tried to accentuate the pull on her biceps as she swung the tool down.

“It’s a personal identifier. In fact, a mark I put in books to say that they are mine.”

The tattoo looked primal, like a jailhouse tat, not like an ex libris used to guard someone’s knowledge.

As the sound of thwoking log-on-log echoed faintly back from a distant hillside, Ricky asked, “How did you come to the encampment?”

“I heard about Eli from an apprentice and, as soon as I heard his name, I knew that he would be important to me. And, yes,” he said defensively, “he is like the father I never had; a spiritual father.” He began to collect the scattered wood pieces. “So, satisfied?” That question made Ricky’s heart stutter a beat.

“I have told you more about myself than I meant to.”

Again, he had closed an opening and Ricky found nothing to say. She was aware of the driveway and the road it accessed, the highway, and its exit to the bus terminal. Everything felt small. It felt final. Everything important, meaning Alphonso, felt achingly far away. She thought of Eli’s hand on her shoulder.

Alphonso spoke again, just as casually as before, “Tell me about your school library. Tristan says it’s really good.”

She wished she was there now, where the air was filled with a special quality of light, thinned as it threaded through the stacks. Libraries, with their odor of paper, were different than other environments. Organisms produce bacteria and slime as they degrade over time, but books yield only a fine powder as things break down. She watched Alphonso fill the wheelbarrow with the new sticks they had chopped.

Then he said, “Let’s go see how well your wood burns.”

#

Dinner was nearly ready when the van bumped into its space near the cabin.

The apprentices trooped in looking tired, but Tristan was not among them. Ricky went out on the porch, where her brother leaned against the railing, as if resting. Just then Alphonso came out the door, saying to an apprentice, “Take a picture of me and my traveling camereros while it’s still light.”

They posed on the lawn, Tristan and Alphonso with Ricky in the middle. She felt her brother start as she put an arm around his waist. The look on his face was one of pain, but when she opened her mouth to ask him about it, he signaled no with a shake of his head.

Then Alphonso directed, “Take one of me and Ricky.” He put his arm around her, looked down at her and whispered, “I guess I am your spiritual father, in a way.”

His arm was bigger than it looked, and almost too heavy on her neck, but she had an easy time smiling as she nestled where his torso curved to join his arm. When the pictures were done, he squeezed her still-warm shoulder and said to the group, “I have to check the car you will drive tomorrow. I’ll see you later.”

Now alone with Tristan, Ricky insisted on knowing what was wrong with him, on seeing. Gingerly, he lifted up his T-shirt to revel his torso covered, front and back with festering red welts. “What—?” she exhaled.

“Promise me you won’t make a big deal if I tell you. It was wasps.”

Am image clicked into place. “Did they come out of the book? Did they?”

“How could you possible know that?” He stared at her incredulously.

“Look, something is happening, Tristan. To me. And now to you.”

“Let’s just eat and talk about it later.” She understood her brother’s reluctance to say more. She felt the same way after the blood-sucking bookworms, the same shame that she read in his face now. Like the universe had turned its back, given them a failing grade. It had denied them a normal paranormal encounter all their lives, only to deliver up nature itself turning against them. But they would talk about it on the road.

#

That night the apprentices and Tristan met briefly in the library before bed. Tristan’s subdued mood seemed to have touched them all.

“Well, Ricky, Tristan, I hope your time here was good.” Alphonso stood exactly between them.

“I just remembered; I found something hoeing in the garden.” From her jeans’ pocket she pulled out the tarnished toy with flowers ringing the perimeter. “It’s a top. I think it’s old.”

On impulse, Ricky walked to Alphonso. It wasn’t a thought, just an urge to touch his hand. She gave him the toy. His palm was surprisingly callused; in all of her ideas about him, he was smooth. He moved like water, always slipping past her, but she wanted the pointedness of fire.

“Thank you, Ricky,” Alphonso responded with surprise. “I’m touched. But I think Tristan should have it as a reminder of his time here.”

Ricky understood perfectly well that Alphonso was not going to fall in love with her. But his attention to her brother fell across her like the shadow of a closing door, one that brings an instant cold and the impossibility of returning to a place that was heartbreakingly beautiful.

She announced, as if subduing a restless crowd, one who didn’t appreciate her brother’s phenomenal excellence, “Yes, Tristan’s time here has been really successful.”

As Tristan pocketed the top, all concern for his injuries and thoughts of reconciliation vanished. He’s won, she thought, he’s won everything.

#

As a last preparation before bed, Ricky made sandwiches for the road. Then she wandered the darkened first floor of the cabin for a last look. A light was on in the living room and she heard the fire crack over two familiar voices. They were private, intimate; she moved closer.

“I’m glad this works for you, Tristan,” said Alphonso. “And tonight you’ll help to build an exotic matter.”

Ricky stepped backward and flattened herself against the wall, away from the inner sanctum she hadn’t been asked to join. The meager possibility of even a friendship with Alphonso had been usurped by her brother.

“I want you to see for yourself.” Alphonso’s voice came closer, so Ricky darted up the nearby stairs. She paused, hidden on the landing, to hear Tristan and Alphonso walk the hallway below her. Shaking her head to sluff off the wave of rejection, she tiptoed back down in time to see the pair heading toward the kitchen. Alphonso had shouldered a backpack and was telling Tristan, “I’ve done this before; wait ‘till you see.”

Something to see in the backpack? Ricky tiptoed down and followed them from a distance. She heard the back door play its tambourines as it opened and closed. Why would they possibly need to leave the warmth of the firelight and the cabin?

She went out quietly and got her bearings in the shadow of a slippery elm, her eyes adapting to reveal the conspirators filing singly down a path that was opposite the one leading to Eli’s. Down the mountain. She followed.

After just a few minutes, the men’s voices veered off to the right, showing her the cutout that she otherwise would have missed. Turning into it just a few steps, she felt the air change to a clammy wafting on her face, the mudpie smell of earth. It was the entrance to a cave.

Her feet wanted to follow, but her spine seemed to granulate, made of a sand that could only fall down, not go forward. If she confronted them, what would she say? No, she needed proof of abilities that would cause them to draw her into their exclusive club. She needed her trick of eyes-closed seeing to work again.

She focused on the plane behind her eyelids as she had in the garden. There, she could identify the vinous confusion of hillside plants and, further forward, the nodule arteries of their roots anchored in rock that was layered ever more solidly into the hillside. She continued to see into the earth, penetrating the levels separating her from the men. Suddenly, as if she had tripped over a threshold, her perception met the opening of a long and narrow chamber. Its many-tentacled arms receded down and away for miles, but, closest to her was a passage way and, there, crouched Alphonso. He seemed to make himself as small as he could in an elbow in the pass way, as if he were hiding. Further on, in the chamber of a proper cave stood Tristan. As if at an altar, he faced a natural ledge that held a fist-sized, blood red rock. Although she couldn’t hear him, his lips were clearly shaping an identical word, again and again. Why weren’t the two together?

As she continued her blind inspection, her inner eyes were drawn upwards to the honeycombed rock above the men. Veined among grey layers were rich deposits of red stone, like the rock on the ledge. Its intricate formations lifted to heights that glistened like rubies in some places and glowed a soapy orange in others. It filled the hillside with lacey piercings, with ornate cutouts, yet not carved with human artifice. Instead the stone around each hole bore an organic stamp, like the liquid tracings of rivers or veins. Some pervasive flow had spawned the infinitesimally delicate outgrowths of the mineral cathedral. But instead of statues decorating the interior, the big holes that occurred at regular intervals held mummy-like shapes.

The figures were bundled by wrappings affixed by a clear resin, a yellow coating that shone like honey. Not only glistening, but slightly vibrating with a hum that was inaudible. However, she knew she would have felt it through her feet if she had been standing close by. The assembled mummies were not entombed, but alive and waiting, a waiting army.

Just then movement drew her eyes back down as Alphonso began to move toward her in the passageway. It must have been prearranged, since nothing in Tristan’s body posture spelled nervousness, other than an intense concentration. She did not want to meet Alphonso here and had seen enough to tell to Tristan, for him to verify the accuracy of her vision. Quickly she turned and ran into the night from this mouth of greater dark.

#

The alarm clock went off Sunday morning before dawn. Because she had slept in her clothes, her movements consisted of kick off bedcovers, brush teeth, take bag, go. Alphonso was in the kitchen. Although Ricky tried to catch his eye and looked longingly at the hand that had grasped her shoulder yesterday, he merely bustled solicitously to make a simple breakfast and load the car.

Tristan, usually the earliest riser in any household, was late coming down. He looked short-slept. She rarely saw evidence of his fair beard but, as his head bent over the single triangle of toast, she could see stubble.

“Hey,” she tried, hoping to take him aside to share what she had seen last night, but he only leadenly responded and a conversation felt too forced.

They ate quickly and soon the entire group assembled for Eli’s summary of how fulfilling it had been to meet them. Ricky muddled through hugs and “Blessed be’s” and Tristan assumed the wheel with pats on the back.

The Chevy Caprice Classic was a relic, rusty and scratched, but the cloth-covered bench seat was comfortable. As they bumped along the dark driveway toward the Burning Bush Bible Camp archway, Tristan’s arrhythmic clutching of the steering wheel gave Ricky the impression that he grasped the side of a boat, trying unsuccessfully to haul himself up. Instead of his typical correct bearing, his shoulders were hunched and his breath sounded rough leaving the small ‘o’ of his mouth.

“Do you want some water or something?’

Dawn illuminated Tristan’s face like a beacon swinging too close. Dark eyes punched out of his pale face, hovering above lips as red as liver. He gave a faint groan.

“I need to get to my writing. Please drive.” He croaked.

Ricky had never seen her brother like this. The display of emotion that signaled need and weakness shocked her. Contempt, disgust, nervous fidgeting, yes; but weakness, no. On him, emotion was an essential energy that propelled him forward, never back.

“O.K. Tristan, O.K.”

Tristan wheeled the car to a standstill on the shoulder and edged himself across the bench seat to the passenger’s side. As she walked around the car to take the wheel, she was aware of physically changing roles, of her guiding Tristan, rather than the reverse. Yes, he was sick, but she felt more abandoned than alarmed, as if his consciousness should function for both of them.

He seemed in no mental state for a serious conversation, but she made an attempt. “Tristan, I need to talk to you about something, something I saw.”

“I’m documenting an account of….” His head nodded onto his chest.

“At least put the seat back,” she instructed. As he fumbled, he lost coherence fast. She wondered if what happened in the cave had involved drugs, but that would be unlike Tristan. And how would drugs advance, and not hinder, what looked like a simple project of concentration, much like the practice presented in her lessons? As she drove, she thought about what she had seen, Tristan and a rock. Exotic matter. They were trying to change matter.

Ricky drove on without stopping and they came out of the mountains as night fell. Finally reaching flat ground, she took a truck turn-off and joined Tristan in unconsciousness. When she awoke hours later she still felt exhausted and he was worse. To answer his weak flailings and verbal abuse, she shouted, “You need a doctor!” But in the end, she agreed to “just drive” as long as he would periodically reassure her that he was OK.

#

By lunchtime they were leaving Oklahoma and Tristan awoke without his former agitation.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him as he gazed sleepily around. If he was not better, she would once and for all take him to a hospital or call their father, a thought that didn’t even make her feel sick. She was a good liar by now.

After filling up, she pulled the car to the edge of gas station, one overlooking tumble-down shacks that spilled out machine parts and old appliances, and went in for food.

Tristan abandoned his chili dog after a few mouthfuls and Ricky ate silently. Then, as he intently scribbled at some papers, they continued north with only one significant exchange between them.

“I saw you last night with Alphonso in the cave.”

Tristan’s eyes lidded over.

“I could see you from outside the cave, Tristan. I need to tell you what I can do.”

Tristan folded suddenly at the waist, as if he might vomit, then he came back up.

“You’re doing something that involves the occult.” She didn’t care if he was sick; he wouldn’t ignore her. She let loose, “What about Dad? What about how critical you’ve been of him?”

Tristan’s head lolled drunkenly, an effect magnified by the careless tone of his next remarks.

“I pursue what I know is right. The concerns of others are no concern of mine.” His voice was a scalpel and out of its cut poured laughter. He chortled uncontrollably.

“The concerns of people that love you? Me? Dad?”

“You know NOTHING about the reality that I am documenting.” His glassy eyes were now trained on her, even though his head was unsteady on his neck. “Dad’s two-bit, lame-ass, rinkydink investigations are ….. lame-ass.” His head slid around to look out the window. “Dad’s occult studies – alchemy, telepathy – they’re just obsolete names that bear no resemblance to a new science of reality. Exotic matter.”

There was Alphonso’s term she had heard last night outside the library.

“You’re creating something, but I can help you; I can see things that aren’t there!” No, that wasn’t right, but it didn’t matter because then the air exploded. The papers on Tristan’s lap flew up to whip around the cabin of the Caprice, slicing Ricky’s face and hands. Their frenzy filled the car which swerved wildly as the pages beat against the windshield like trapped birds.

She pushed at the air in front of her face, frantic that she would drive them off the road. In her peripheral vision, Tristan flopped forward and she heard him hit his head on the dashboard. Frantically pressing down whatever sheets she could, she pulled the Caprice to the side of the empty highway. Her own heart beat like wings caught in her rib cage and there was blood on the back of her hands. Her palm came away red from her face.

As she cleaned herself up with a napkin and water bottle, Ricky tried to reconcile this attack with her version of Tristan as drugged or sick. His upright bearing had dissolved, but she knew that he had been the source of the combustive paper storm. He felt dangerous; the assault had come from him. She glanced at his face, unmarked by cuts.

Tristan mumbled now with his head thrown back, “What I’m writing about will change the world. I’m writing ….the world…. everything will.”

Just get home.

#

It was easy to avoid her father after their return from Arkansas. What would he do about Tristan, anyway? She covered the thin slices to her face and hands with make-up and she turned to her usual defense, work.

By far, her favorite activity was a game of chess with the young resident for whom she ‘played black,’ the day she applied for her job. She looked for him the first day, and would have asked for him, so eager had he been to play more, if she had known his name. When they were formally introduced, Ricky was told, “Ricky, this is Odie.”

“Hi Odie,” Ricky said.

“My initials.”

“O.D.” Ricky spelled.

“Yeah, I’ve heard all the jokes. ‘Are you retarded or Only Dumb?’ ‘Are ya blind because ya OD’d?’ ‘Why don’tcha OD?’”

“To some people, if you have one issue, you have them all.”

“And then sometimes, you do have them all,” he said.

Being both blind and mentally ill seemed very unfair, so she said the one thing she knew would bring a positive response. “Are you up for a rematch, an entire game, I mean?”

Besides chess matches with OD, it was conversations led by Belquis that made New Foundations feel like a sanctuary. Ricky liked her boss right away; the program director was both calming and stimulating, like a serene stillness after a lightning strike. Ricky was especially gratified by her vast knowledge of psychology. One day, Ricky was helping Reenie to make cookies (“Don’t eat them,” Reenie’s therapist had said. “Her meds make her constipated and she takes matters into her own hands, if you know what I mean”). Belquis and Shanice came into the kitchen to check on a repair and, just then, a the Police song Synchronicity came on the radio.

Belquis said to her assembled charges, “The term ‘synchronicity’ comes from psychology. It means that things are connected in ways that we can’t see on the surface.”

Ricky felt shy about joining the talk, but she took a deep breath, “How do you know that something’s real when it’s hidden? I mean, you can’t verify that it’s real.”

“Imagine,” Belquis answered, “a smoker’s pipe half buried in the ground with only the bowl and stem showing. The parts appear to be two totally different things. How would you know they’re related?”

“Well, they both have holes in them and smell like smoke.”

“Just like synchronous events have similarities. Like, you are planning a trip to Topeka and then you hear people talking at the grocery store about Topeka.”

“Might be coincidence,” Shanice said. Working second shift for the last four years to supplement her day job as a tattoo artist, her practicality and efficiency made her Belquis’s most valued staff member.

“Or,” countered Belquis. “The two things are connected, but we don’t know how.”

Almost every workday, Ricky learned something fascinating, and was jolted by the wonderment that this was actually her job, and for money. At these times, even the worry that Belquis might find out that Ricky’s ID was fake, that she was not eighteen, receded from mind.

But at home, there were worries. Ricky didn’t know if she was relieved or alarmed that Tristan no longer seemed physically ill. However, his behavior had not returned to normal. Most glaringly, he had abandoned his regular schedule of study, which he formerly followed no matter what. And he never again texted to have a coffee date at one of their favorite cafes.

A picture of the new Tristan emerged in this aftermath. She would come home just as she saw the Caprice leaving (why did he still have that car?) and find the TV blaring in the living room. Tristan watching TV? What was more, he had tuned to reruns of worldwide wrestling. This violated a number of his self-proclaimed admonitions. The former Tristan had done his best to groom her to his own cultural snobbery.

Patterns grew in meaning as she collected details. No longer fastidious, he would leave dirty socks on the landing and litter the living room with scratch-off lottery tickets. His overcoat made the hall closet reek of cigarettes. He left the milk out on the kitchen counter with no accompanying glass. Clearly, he had “depasteurized” the carton, as she had once heard him scornfully describe this behavior.

At home, anxieties gathered, like sand drifting under a beach house door, about Tristan and her own weakness to do anything about him. Soon the granules were piles; but she could sweep these away by returning to work, where moments to ruminate were infrequent luxuries. As Shanice joked, “There’s no time to kill at New Frustrations.”

#

Ricky attended one coven meeting on her return from Arkansas, but merely to find out if there was any news of Alphonso. She barely even heard the evening’s lesson and her hankering after someone so disinterested made her feel desperate, like someone scavenging at an accident. This feeling was aggravated during a sleepover with Starr Ann.

They talked, as they did in those days, about Tristan. Ricky ventured, “I feel bad. Like I got him into this.”

“How so?”

“With, hmm…my spiritual interests.”

“Are they really spiritual interests?” Starr Ann’s gaze was surprisingly unsympathetic.

“I have to tell you something,” Ricky interjected. “I can see things with my eyes closed.” To Starr Ann’s bemused frown, she continued to blurt, “I followed Tristan and Alphonso outside a cave the night before we left Arkansas. I could see into the cave with my eyes closed. What happened to Tristan, happened in that cave.”

“Shut your eyes,” Starr Ann directed. “No, seriously, shut your eyes.”

Ricky did, to blackness.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Starr asked.

Ricky willed the room into view, although the colors were dim and Starr’s features were hazy. But she could see that her friend’s hands were fists.

“None.”

“Open,” Starr Ann commanded. Her arm was extended and she was waggling four fingers, practically in Ricky’s face.

Shame crash landed on Ricky like a fallen piece of sky. Then disbelief. Then denial, then admission. She had been a fool. Nothing had happened to her at all in Arkansas, except that she had become the worst of both her father (deluded) and her brother (crazy).

During Ricky’s red-faced silence, Starr Ann regarded her as a cat would a struggling mouse, tail trapped under paw. “What do want in life, Ricky? Love, and maybe something else.”

For a moment, Ricky had a flash of both her and Tristan in residence at New Foundations, with “delusions of grandeur” written in their charts. She was just like him, only not courageous.

Ricky traced a pattern in the brocade of Starr Ann’s bedspread before letting her eyes beseech her friend to help her figure this out, but Starr Ann veered in an undesired direction.

“Whatever happened to Tristan, it seems to me Alphonso is who you want to talk to.”

For so many reasons, Ricky thought.

#

Ricky’s time spent at home was that of a naturalist stalking a strange species. That night, Tristan had left drawers open in the bathroom and the toilet seat up. When she smelled the pot smoke in the hall outside his room, she went to his door to talk with him, to try to have him at least remember her, the sister he had always protected, but in the end she turned away without knocking.

Their couple of exchanges had been the most demoralizing of all.

“Tristan, do you mind if I take the Hyundai to school and then to work this week?”

“My concern could not be less.”

“Why the attitude?” she had shouted.

“I might ask you a question too. Why so conventional? You really have become tiresome.”

Shouting at her sneeringly beautiful brother had not shamed him into remembering their past, his former loyalty to her, and she had never imagined a future without his support. She storm-trooped from the room, marching her indignation.

In another encounter, she couldn’t stop herself saying into the weird silence of a breakfast they just happened to be sharing, “How’s Alphonso these days?” She wanted to sound airily unconcerned, but her tone came out petulant and stilted.

“He’s great—living the high life with money to burn,” Tristan griped. When had he quit liking Alphonso? It was as if everything good surrounding Tristan was corroding, even those advantages that had made her jealous. What would become of him at this rate?

Then he said, as if reading her mind, “You know, you won’t always have me to kick around.” The faint superciliousness looked like Tristan, looked good on him, looked like confidence, although the words made no sense in any context that Ricky could think of.

Ricky reported to Starr Ann, “I don’t know how Tristan can stand himself.” Later, Starr Ann would acknowledge, he couldn’t.

#

Then it came to pass that he was no longer there; she no longer had a brother. It happened in his bedroom. With only his briefs on, in the closet; by a bathrobe tie, by the neck, he hung from the clothes bar.