40, page 16
The boat stood upright, the hull braced by wooden stands, the light leaking from the cabin’s rime-glazed windows. The general glanced back at me, but I kept my eyes ahead, trying not to show I was unmoored. Then General Özdemir stopped at a set of wooden steps that led up to the boat’s deck.
“From here, you go alone,” he said.
“What is this?” I asked.
His face revealed nothing. “Did you not say you’d do anything for the cause, General?”
I knew I must see this to its end. I turned from him and scaled the steps onto the boat. Shabby light dripped from the cabin and over the foredeck. A white bear slumped against the bow like a drunk in an alley, legs straddling the windlass, its head drooped over its chest, the hatch of its belly open to its dark innards.
Bile stung the back of my throat. What harrow awaited inside that cabin? I shuffled and balked, shuffled again. My heart thudding, my body a single throbbing pulse, I stood staring at the cabin door. Wanting and not wanting, I gripped the knob. My hand trembled as I pushed open the door.
A polar bear reared, its long teeth bared. It raised its massive head, and I could feel the wind of its howl. I leaped away, my wings slamming against the boat’s railing. Then the bear settled and seemed to laugh.
The bear was laughing. Its mouth opened wide and a man’s face stared out, this face also laughing. The crown of the bear’s skull hinged and flattened as the furred muzzle split wide. The paw lifted away the bear mask like pushing back a hood.
“I’m sorry,” the man inside said. Still chuckling, he wiped his tearing eyes. “Bad joke, good joke, I couldn’t resist.”
Resting on its haunches, a paw tapped its furry sternum and the massive breast fell open. The man climbed out of the bear like a bather from a tub. Bare-chested and wearing white knee-length tights, he stepped to me and offered a handshake.
“My angel,” he said. “I’ve waited so long to meet you.”
His hand was tiny, his arms and legs like sapling branches. He had the voice of a man, but his body was a child’s. He was entirely hairless, no eyebrows, his head bald and pale like porcelain.
Over the entirety of his torso wound a tattoo of lilies, their verdant stalks rising from below his navel and bowing at his sternum to arch over each undeveloped pectoral, the white bell flowers drooping down the ladder of his ribs.
“Nineteen,” he said. “That’s what you’re wondering. That’s what everyone always wonders. I look younger, I know, but I’m nineteen.” He grinned, his teeth large and white. “The body means so little, don’t you think? Unless you have wings, of course.”
I scanned the cabin. Everything just as we’d left it, Dewey’s slicker on the hook by the door, soup cans in the cupboard, the picture of Jesus walking on the water.
“A quaint old boat, I’ve taken it as my office,” he said, and motioned at the table for me to sit. “I’m very sorry about the late hour, but we have urgent plans to discuss before tomorrow.”
My body felt stiff, as if my skin was caked with mud. I sat at the table and studied the alien across from me. His eyes were striking: one blue, the other green.
“Questions, I know. That other one, the old man?” He drummed his pale fingers on the tabletop. Even his nails were white. “I felt those wrinkled old eyes carried a certain gravitas. And they’d be suspicious of my youth, not knowing if they should put their faith in someone so young, someone who looks like me. But a man like that? You may think him vulgar, but they’d never question his authority.” He motioned to the bear. “It was either the old man or me in a bear suit.” He cackled at his own joke. “I even gave him my name, which, frankly, has been quite an affront to the ego.”
He proudly grinned. “My name is Joseph Samuel Pfarlier. It was the old man who gave me the nickname. He said Joseph Samuel’s a mouthful. Let’s just call you Jo Sam.”
I flinched at the revelation, but there was more at hand. His face seemed familiar. Like Raja Garbos, I thought he had to be an actor, and tried to place the role in which I’d seen him.
“Did the old man tell you he was a postman?” he said. “Worked the route that included one of my father’s properties. He always struck me as bigger than his job, probably because he delivered me gifts, things my father ordered to keep his little boy pacified.” Jo Sam touched his cheek, lost for a moment. “My mother died when I was a baby, or so I was told. My father was a very busy man. Often that old postman was the only person who’d speak to me all day long. Slowly, we became friends.” He pressed his hands together, leaned his chin on the steeple of his fingers. “He has cancer now. Pancreatic. Not long for this world, as they say. I thought why not let a dying man be king before he meets his maker.”
Jo Sam’s alien eyes drifted to the discarded bear, then back to me. “And you? How did a lowly soldier on the wrong side of the war become Seraphine, the Angel of 40?”
I eyed him as one might a snake on their stoop.
He brimmed with wild satisfaction. “Mysteries. What would life be without them?” He tapped a finger to the center of his forehead. “Dreams. They’re my favorite mystery. Do you ever think about your dreams?”
It seemed dangerous to answer. I only shrugged.
“They come in our sleep, the subconscious telling us what the conscious mind doesn’t dare. Edifying us, I think is the right way to put it. But why does the subconscious speak in these little stories? Why these metaphoric riddles for us to decipher? We have language, after all. Why doesn’t a voice enter our sleep and just say things plainly? You are the cause of your own sadness. Get yourself together and go make friends.” Jo Sam’s hairless brow furrowed. “Dreams are the art of our minds,” he declared, then sat back, pleased with his summation. “Are you a gamer, a fan of VR?”
“Not really.”
“A critic, yes.” Jo Sam smiled. “We sit alone even when around others, privately taking a story into our imagination. Finally, at long last, we allow ourselves to feel because it’s just too risky to feel out there in reality. Reality is too disorderly, too harsh.”
Jo Sam laid both hands on the table, fingers spread. “We keep our emotions in check if only to survive the harsh disorder of our lives, but then when we need our emotions we don’t know how to express them in any productive way. Look at all the harm that does. So much despair, all of us drifting alone through life, these feelings trapped inside us. Without dreams, without stories, we’d simply lose faith there was anything beyond our suffering. We’d kill ourselves before the night became the day.”
I couldn’t track his intent, but he greatly frightened me.
He chuckled. “Let me say it softer. What I offer is a dream. A dream so profoundly different than reality it feels like a simulation though it’s not. A dream to strip away all our troubling past and hopeless future. Reality obliterated, a new self can be born, a new future charted. What’s more intoxicating than to be born again? Surely after experiencing some VR you’ve felt different, larger than yourself, like you could love and be loved, slay the demons, destroy armies, perhaps even fly like Seraphine? And when the dream I provide becomes their reality, reality itself is at my direction.”
I shifted in my seat, glanced out the window. General Özdemir paced in the shadows among the cages, his head slung low. “What do you want?”
“Ah, curiosity,” he said. “Most people aren’t curious. That’s how I get them here. All those parading through the streets have the collective curiosity of mice in a maze. You can always tell the brilliant ones by their curiosity.” He smacked his hands against the skin of his head as if he’d forgotten something important. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I kept as still as I could.
“And here I felt I’d made such an impression.” He lowered his face, shadows darkening his eyes. “My father first made his money from VR. Pfarlier Virtual Reality. Helmets, theaters, the works. Made a fortune. He invested wisely, bought other companies, had a surprisingly fantastic run of luck. Just the two of us, with more money than we could ever spend.” Jo Sam frowned. “Filthy stuff, money. Which is why I’ve spent without limit to buy a war, to buy a city that’s now a nation, and I’ve bought all these people in their wild fervor, knowing I could never spend all I had, and in the end I was going to rid the world of our decrepit enslavement to the dollar. God? Country? These things we hold as precious, yet so easily bought. So much terror, so much killing, but nothing corrupts the soul as much as money, don’t you think?”
“Never had much.”
“And look at you now, wings gifted by God.” He thoughtfully chewed his lip. “My first invention was a method to chemically seed clouds. I was eight years old and wanted it to rain in my bedroom. Quite elementary, in truth. My father took my little invention and told me lies about all the ways he planned to help the world. We’d make it rain in places of drought, allow farms to thrive in desert lands, end famine throughout the world. Never again would wildfire destroy our forests and cities.”
Jo Sam crossed his arms. “Money, money, money. What started as my dream became the property of man, sold to the highest bidder by my very own father. Then laws were passed, corrupt laws by politicians corrupted by money. Soon the corporations and the government who enabled them owned the weather. And we all know how that went.”
He uncrossed his arms, rapped his knuckles on the table with each spoken word. “My. Beautiful. Dream. Corrupted.” He stared at his hands, now stilled on the tabletop. “By ten, I’d designed a facility to farm hydroponics at scale. By twelve, I’d designed prosthetics made of living tissue. Animatronic pets, drone technology, aero-magnetism, so many ideas, so many designs. Over three thousand patents by the age of fifteen. But I was just a child, and powerful people bought my ideas like art for their walls, hoarding their beauty for nobody but them to see. We became the wealthiest family in the world, all while I sank into cynical despair.”
My wings hung like stone against my back. I’d become a rock.
Jo Sam sighed. “I could bore you until morning with the tribulations of my dreams.” He abruptly stood, strode out across the cabin. “We’re both very young, you and I. With medical advances, we can live for another hundred years. But would it be in a world worthy of our days?” He stood at the boat’s helm, gripped the wheel. “If only we could make my dream into reality. But how?” He turned back to me. “Corruption and greed are always just people, you see. People who want their own dream to be reality. One dream versus another. That’s all war has ever been—dreams for which people kill and die. But not us, no. Can you see it? Can you see the truth of my dream?”
“All I see is madness.”
Jo Sam’s face flashed anger. “You see more than that,” he said harshly. “You see what they all see, the promise of a world without suffering. A promise I plan to keep. You’re afraid, and I understand your skepticism. My dream is radical and imperfect. But how else? How else to end millennia of suffering?”
Jo Sam stepped back to the table, slid down into the seat. He slouched, quiet and contemplative. “Tell me,” he said. “What’s the easiest thing in the world to do?”
I didn’t dare glance at him.
“The easiest thing in the world is to make people believe what they want to believe,” he said. “People believe not what is true, but what they want to be true. Therefore, want and belief are one and the same, you see. Find the slightest fissure of fear and there you’ll find the creeping ice of want. Rationalize, normalize, the icy want of fear expands as ardent belief within that fissure, and can shear the face from a mountain.”
He inhaled sharply, exhaled a long easy breath. “And the hardest thing? What might that might be?”
I shook my head.
“The hardest thing is making people understand what they want more than anything is their own destruction.” To this, he mournfully nodded. “After all, destruction consumes our daily conversations, people raging over every bit of news, lapping up conspiracy as if it’s a concern instead of a yearning. We speak as if we want what causes our fear to stop, but really we’d feel deeply unsatisfied unless those fears were validated. Like the tired yearn to sleep, the fearful yearn for destruction. Being right but destroyed always wins over being wrong but saved. Through this yearning, you can make people believe that which acts against their own self-preservation. Once complicit, people are capable of every horrible thing. History has proven this over and over—validate the victim’s yearning for destruction, give them a uniform, a weapon, and they’ll kill and die under any banner and deem it righteous.”
Jo Sam lifted his thin arms above his head, the flowers on his chest lifting, his ribs stretching his skin. Then his body went slack as if he’d fallen into a pit of sadness. “At first, I was lashing out just like all the others, wanting those same wants, a terrified teen using his wealth for wanton destruction. Disrupt the food supply and start a famine, disable systems of energy and communication, sever our limbic addiction to cybernetics. Destabilize the economy, assemble an army, start a war.” His eyes intensely homed in on me. “Or, perhaps, go to a fairground and preach a sermon, set beasts upon those who refuse to face the truth of his dream.”
My reaction of horror elicited from him a quiver that could only be described as sexual. “Yes,” Jo Sam hissed. “She remembers.”
Then I could no longer look at him. I peered at the bear dismantled on the floor, and remembered the boy preacher weeping against the flank of a lion. I remembered him handing me his white Bible and asking my name. I remembered the lions in the fairground crowd and the screams and the blood.
“After my father died and his wealth was solely mine, I dreamt of taking children to Mars,” he said. “We were born into the mess that is Earth. The systems of inequity, the habits of destruction, disorder set in place centuries before our birth. On Mars, we’d start anew, teach the children right. It was a dream so vivid and pure, I knew it came from God. My hours divinely inspired, I worked tirelessly to make my dream a reality. Calculating the nuclear blast to spur water from the permafrost, a comprehensive plan for terraforming. I even launched prototype stations into orbit to be tested for the monthslong journey. All was ready, every figure verified, but then I thought why should I have to leave Earth? This is my home. Our home. The oceans and canyons, the sunsets and the mountains. Even the storms are beautiful.”
Jo Sam rose from his seat and crossed to study the picture on the wall: Jesus walking on the water. “I want you to understand this isn’t some wild impulse. I’m quite sane. I’ve tried to compel a different path to save our beautiful home and inspire the wickedness out of people. But there’s no other way. You kill a leader and another pops up, just the same as the last. Famine won’t change us. War won’t change us. Tectonic disaster, megastorms, pandemics. Think of all that’s happened, yet we cling to those old wicked dreams. Every way falls short of this one way. God of the Bible once felt the same as I do now. The world was flooded, the slate cleaned. If God saw fit to intervene, then why not us?”
He caressed a finger down the picture of Jesus, then turned to face me. “We’ve been sequestering the children to start their reeducation. Above everything, I’m a teacher. Beyond the children, here at home we’ll have the adult population culled within a decade. Only then can we reset the system, erase the ancient inequities at the heart of our suffering, and heal this world.”
His mania spun me dizzy. “Cull the adults?”
“Come now, you’re a soldier. You’re trained to kill for the greater good. The scale may seem obscene, I understand, but imagine how poor Noah felt when God first told him he was to be saved while the rest of the world would drown. We’re all chosen in God’s eyes. Some chosen to die, some to lead. Noah was chosen, just as you and I are now.” His eyes sparkled at the thought. “To start, we’ll arm the vulnerable, give them a proper mission. We’ll simply let them have what they want. What they want is to destroy this broken world. To be martyrs. To be saints. Oh, we’ll keep many, some like General Özdemir, who’ve been explicitly loyal. Others, whose knowledge should be preserved, farmers and doctors and the like. But all these more critical ways—how we govern our minds and bodies and live in harmony with the planet—will be reborn through my one pure dream for us all.”
“No,” I blurted. “I don’t want that.”
He smirked. “Of course you do. That’s why you’re here, and you’ve already contributed so much. The moment I saw you, I knew you were special. When I found you again, you’d become a miracle. Without miracles, even Jesus would’ve been just another John the Baptist. Just a man like I’m a man, and not the Messiah. I need you like Christ needed miracles. And you need me, for what’s a miracle without a message? What’s faith but belief in a dream?”
“What’ve you done to me?”
“Done? No, not done. Allowed. Encouraged.”
His arms willow-thin, legs just bones sheathed in skin, tattooed concave chest, I could do it—I could snap his neck before General Özdemir could run onto the boat to stop me.
“Beware,” Jo Sam said, his eyes narrowing. “God sees all. This boat, for example.” He thumped the soft side of his fist against the paneled wall. “An empty boat hidden in the trees. Bears discarded like trash. What could it mean?” He smugly grinned. “I’ve had to be so cautious, so patient. Waiting until I knew the miracle was real, the dream intact. Surely you understand that Lucifer, too, had wings, and if anything was to happen to me a great calamity would befall the world.”
Jo Sam stepped to press his body against my side, trapping me in the booth. He traced a finger through the down of my wing, his mismatched eyes oozing vile tenderness. “But love me and I’ll love you and all that you love, and you will want for nothing.”
“Are they alive?” I asked, my voice quivering. “My sister? My friend? What’ve you done with them?”
He laughed and whirled away, then hopped back into the bear’s massive husk. “Tomorrow,” he chimed. “At rally’s end, you’ll fly above the crowd and join me in the sky. We’ll raise our clasped hands and leave off into the clouds like gods, the miracle and the message together at last, forever and inextricably bound. The Novae will worship us in fear and trembling. My Seraphine, my miracle, this is merely the beginning.”
