=When the Man Comes Around=

If it weren’t for the old geezer who recognized the tailfins of the vintage ‘57 Cadillac, Pezcale wouldn’t even have had a description of the vehicle. There were the vanity plates, which everyone noticed, but that was a different story. Too many different stories.  They were  “striking,” “outrageous,” shocking,” “ominous,” “obscene,” etc. “You couldn‘t help but notice them.” “How did they allow anyone to have such plates in the first place is what I would like to know?”. But what was written there? No two people agreed. And none of the eyewitness reports checked out with the DMV.

The various descriptions of the man himself were also at odds. A hodge-podge of features that amounted to the facial equivalent of an oxymoron, each detail canceling out another. He might have been wearing a mask; otherwise you were forced to conclude that he wore a different face at each and every sighting. From the variety of permutations given to describe him, the man might have had a face like one of those little plastic puzzles Pezcale remembered from his childhood. The one where you slid around little numbered tiles with your thumbs to put them in order 0 to 9 while you parents fought in the front seat on those long summer trips to the shore. But it was even more complicated than that. What Pezcale should have said was that the details of the descriptions matched, alright, but the way they were assembled didn’t.

The suspect invariably identified himself as a CIA agent, but the CIA, inasmuch as they were inclined to provide any light on any subject denied that they had any agent in the field matching the man’s description. But what did that mean? A blacker hole in the universe, a more bankrupt empty source of disinformation it would be hard to imagine. When did the CIA tell the truth, or feel itself compelled to tell the truth, about anything? Just the opposite; they were compelled to lie to protect the fact that there was no truth. And, besides, how could they pass up the opportunity to deny they had an agent in the field matching the description Pezcale was able to cobble together when that description, properly considered, described nothing very specific whatsoever?

Pezcale, a leaf on a branch of an entirely different sort of secret agency understood the mentality better than he liked to admit. Did he say “admit?” Ha, now there’s a funny. Pezcale admitted nothing, not even to himself, but to tell himself that he lied to himself would offend him to the bone for he believed himself to be everything he told himself he was and that was the truth, god’s honest. And if this didn’t completely make sense, well, these were complicated times, everyone agreed. Reasoning was circular, a cynic’s way to look at it; Pezcale preferred to see the world as a revelation like Ezekiel.There were only wheels within wheels, the beautiful, if terrible, symmetry of a well-designed machine manufacturing stars from recycled stars the way a factory turns out cans of diet cola.

Well, what the hell was so wrong with that?

[First Interview, forty-three, auto mechanic.]

A census bureau worker is what I thought he said he was. A Secret Service agent? Is that what the others said? Oh. A CIA agent. Well, maybe he was that. I’m a little flustered, you know? He sure asked a lot of questions, that’s for sure. I think he might have said something about the president now that you mention it. I remember thinking at the time, “What on earth would the president be coming here for, of all places?” This isn’t exactly a densely populated part of the state, and it always votes solidly blue, anyway.

The questions started out normally enough, I guess. What do you do for a living, about how much do you earn, what is your age, your religion, your ethnic and racial heritage, that sort of thing. Then they got more personal. I’m not sure I could say why I kept answering. What the hell was it any business of his what I fantasize about when I masturbate? But he had that way about him, you know? A natural authority…like, well, why am I talking to you? Maybe I’m just weak-willed? He made me feel like he had something on me, even though I haven’t done anything against the law, not that I know of, they change the law out of view of the public so much nowadays it’s a crime. Anyways, it was like he knew everything already and wanted to hear it from my own mouth. Like he was testing to see if I’d tell him the truth. I had the feeling that if I didn’t answer his questions and tell him what he wanted to hear that I would have been arrested. Did I tell him the truth? That’s a tricky question. I told him what I thought he wanted to hear. That’s what the truth is nowadays. Did I do wrong? I’m still here, that’s the only way I can judge. I mustn’t have done anything wrong because I haven’t been arrested. Have I?

Does that make any sense? Maybe not. What does? I’ve learned to live with it. Does it make any sense that I wake up with this mark on my forehead? [points to mark. See diagram] What is it anyway? Do you know? Can’t you tell me? Two doctors already told me they haven’t ever seen nothing like it. Why not? Do the others have it, too?

[Second Interview, sixty-two, jeweler.]

Look, maybe I shouldn’t be talking to you either. Maybe I should have a lawyer with me. What do you mean? I still have some kind of rights, don’t I? National security? What have I got to do with national security? I’m nobody, for crissakes! A Jew with a beard. Oy vey!

I’m nobody.

I don’t understand what the big secret it. Is this some kind of CIA experiment, is that what it is? The kind of thing we only find out about seventy-five years later when everyone alive now is dead and no one thinks anything like that can happen anymore? Is that what this means? Why me? Can you at least tell me that? Can you tell me anything at all? Is this still a free country, or what?

I’m sorry. I know you’re only trying to help. I know you’re only trying to get to the bottom of this, to find some answers. At least I choose to believe that. What other choice do I have? But I hope you can see why I’m so upset. I wake up with this strange mark on my forehead, I don’t remember how it got there, and no one can tell me what it means.

[Third Interview, fifty-one, medical billing specialist]

Yes, actually I do remember something else. Believe it or not, it’s the weirdest thing of all. I’d been baking cookies that morning. For the holidays, you know? Peanut butter-chocolate chip, just like the ones you’re eating now. And coffee. He ate the cookies and drank the coffee. I saw him with my own eyes. Okay, he could have faked drinking the coffee, right? But how do you fake eating? I saw him bite, chew, swallow. I saw those cookies disappear. There was nothing left but crumbs on his plate.

But after he left, after I showed him to the door, when I came back into the living room where we’d sat talking to clean up, the cookies were sitting right there on the plate as if they’d never been touched. And the cup was still filled with coffee, and it was still steaming.

How is that possible. Was he some kind of illusionist?

Pezcale stops typing

It appeared nowhere in the great encyclopedias of ancient symbols, not those to be found online, nor in those to be found in the libraries, antiquarian bookshops, or private collections of occultists (a peculiar and for good reason reclusive breed, indeed), not in any they’d been able to locate, and their reach was considerable. A computer analysis of the personal symbolism encoded in the images of artists as well-known as Kandinsky and as anonymous as the taggers of three a.m. subway trains and defunct bridge abutments yielded nothing even remotely close enough to call a match.

A dead end, in other words. But the codebreakers kept working on it; four went mad, not altogether unheard of in that line, but still. Perhaps, one suggested, apparently in all seriousness, the mark was a kind of glyph for an entire body of esoteric knowledge, a cryptographic hologram or portmanteau sigil of the Book of Kells, for instance, or the Kabbalah, or all 78 cards of the Tarot but an esoteric body of knowledge currently unknown, even unsuspected, until now, if that makes sense,.

It didn’t, Pezcale concluded after some reflection. That paritcular codebreaker, by the way, being one of those who’d gone stark raving mad.

Oh well.

What’s the difference between a religious cult and a support group, so the joke went. Answer: not a hell of a lot.

We want to stop it before it comes to that. There are things we don’t want people to know are happening until long after it’s stopped happening and then not even. This, whatever it is, happens to be one of those things. So people, let’s agree to call them individuals for the time being, for want of better terms, come to feel that they are damned, alone, so what, what do we care, it’s better for us that way and on it goes. Do you understand what it is I’m saying?

Pezcale said he did, but he really didn’t, or he did, but wasn’t sure that he understood in the way they intended him to understand. In this line, he’d come to learn, it was better to just agree with the company line. A vague impressionistic sense of what-was-what was for the best. “Amoeba-mind,” he called it, a formless mass, reaching here, retracting there, sensitive to everything. The world as fluid medium, so to speak. For instance:

They fished a body from the river, a suicide—presumably.

Presumably?

There are some suggestive circumstances.

I see—

So they fished this body from the river all covered in glyphs and sigils an alien alphabets, right, and they do a complete analysis, the most sophisticated tests available, the works, trying to determine the origin of the ink used, figuring if we can identify the ink, where it comes from, what it’s made of, all like that, we could narrow the search for our lunatic tattooist.

And?

No luck.

You couldn’t find an analog to the ink?

No.

Was it extraterrestrial in origin then?

It wasn’t ink at all.

?

It was a birthmark.

Summing up what he knew so far: Not much. Pezcale seemed incredulous even of what he’d written in his own private journal.

1. Subjects, from all walks of life, of every age and description, scattered in every geological location, with no discernible connection to each other, are visited by a man, (whom no one can properly or consistently describe), possibly impersonating (or in fact) a government agent, driving a white ’57 Cadillac.

2. Subjects are subsequently interviewed and asked a series of increasingly inappropriate and discomfiting personal questions before the man departs, without any further explanation or future contact (reported thus far), virtually into thin air, as it were.

3. Whereupon the subjects, mystified, perhaps a little shaken, but otherwise seemingly unmolested decide to let the episode go unreported and even succeed in putting it largely from his or her mind until the next morning when they look into the bathroom mirror and it is discovered that their face is now marred by a birthmark where no prior evidence of a birthmark existed. What’s more (though unbeknownst to them at least at present) this birthmark is identical in shape, color, and design to each and every other birthmark appearing on the face of every one of the other subjects (“victims”).

Preliminary conclusions/speculations:

I’ve come to suspect it more than only possible that I am myself the subject of an experiment whose intent and goal escapes me but which necessitates a challenge, if not a complete undermining, of my sanity.

I’ve not lost all sense of scale and proportion, nor have I fallen into a megalomania, at least not consciously, such as to think that I am at the center of any grand conspiracy. If anything, I play a minor walk-on role. I am a short-lived all-but-unobserved, albeit necessary, pivot in a larger narrative that escapes me. For instance: an asteroid (not a “doomsday comet” such as the one said to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaur), necessary only by virtue of my personal orbit, to alter events by that one micro-unit, virtually unmeasurable, except by special instrumentation, but nevertheless having an effect down the line I’ll never know. My involvement is nothing more than a matter of chance alone and it seems to me altogether plausible even without assuming that their experiment has succeeded that I’ve in fact gone insane.

Yet even this account, as truthful as I can make it, is quite likely not at all what I really intended to say.

Here the text cuts off. The remainder of the journal unspoiled, empty, nothing but a deck of blank pages, and whatever it was that Pezcale really intended—or thought he really intended—to say it goes unsaid. And as vexing as this last development was (and is!) especially as it impacts the interpretation of any further developments (should there be any!) one is compelled to close the matter with a resigned, if resolute, though admittedly unsatisfying “and that is that.”

One hates to be so fatalistic but--let’s just say there’s a limit to what we’re prepared to cop to, no matter how guilty we may be.

Determinism be damned—

B.B. Claw closed the hand-sewn goat-skin journal, reached above him to the overhead lamp, and switched it off. Outside the bus window, black as tar, the countryside sped past as if fleeing, maddened, from the moonlight in search of a darker place in the cycle. That made no sense, he knew, but let it stand.

It was still 1974 in Claw’s world and a soul could light up and smoke a cigarette on a cross-country bus if he had half and urge and mind to and Claw did—and so he did. Light up, that is. Life was simple where he lived back then, but it wasn’t any good.

Let us pray.

Hello, my name is Bryce B. Claw, and it is my unhappy duty to inform you…my duty to inform you of the unfortunate…my unfortunate duty…oh the hell with it.

As a poet, if one could technically call him that, Pezcale had his limitations and they were anything but insignificant. He could not remark upon a sunset, for instance, even in passing, without making it a running sore. One wonders what, if there were any, his intent could possibly have been. Communication, in any of its myriad forms, seemed to be the least of his concerns. Well, in that, if nothing else, he did succeed.

There were ghosts moving through the field outside the bus window, a great migration of them, as if they were the smoke of generations that life had burned away—but enough of that. A trick of the eyes, that was all, the smoke he exhaled from his burning cigarette, trapped between the window and his face. An explanation for everything and for everything an explanation, that was his stock-in-trade. My name is Bryce B. Claw, etc. etc., but it is also not…

The oil drills like empty see-saws bang away in the empty Oklahoma night, from Philly to Pittsburgh is a tunnel through forever, and Ohio is a green hill that cannot be leveled by its more than countless cows munch munch munching day and night and night and day for all eternity.

I’ve come to suspect that I myself am the subject of an experiment…a minor asteroid…a challenge, if not a complete undermining of my sanity…the extinction of the dinosaur…not at all what I intended to say…

--Spare a smoke mister? A lanky young man with long, lank and greasy blonde hair, a wispy blonde beard, and a superficial resemblance to one of those idealized Nordic Christs that in turn look like anorectic OD’d rock stars, shuffling half-asleep from the toilet to his seat stops to ask him.

--Have a sit-down son, why don’t you? Let’s have a talk.

Claw pats the empty seat beside him and smiles—the smile that makes him look like Josef Goebbels, oh it was ghastly.

Not surprisingly the young man defers; maybe another time, thanks but no thanks just the same, a muttered something, and he moves on.

Why, a man saves a lot of cigarettes that way.

Right where it was supposed to be that is where he found it. Section G, Row 7 (and we wouldn’t waste too much time searching for any significance in that if we were you) of a sun-baked cracking parking lot with the desert creepy-crawling all around it. The key was in the ignition, as agreed upon, and when he turned it, the engine came instantly to life with the quiet roar of a honeybee in a hive the size of Trans-Siberia. The GPS said, “Welcome back.” The tank, of course, was full.

The exit, as always, was an entrance to another world and when he opened it up upon the salt flats it was as if the passage of the Caddy sucked all of this world into the void it left behind. Regardless of being closer than they appear, there was nothing in the rearview mirror.

Not so easy as all that is it for a man to “disappear from off the face of the earth.” If nothing else, for god’s sake, it seems he always must be somewhere, be someone, be doing something or the other. Yet as best as a man could do so Pezcale did seem to erase himself from common view and not much trace of him was left behind to tell the truth but a pile of pink crumbs. Even in the mirror he had difficulty picking himself out. Well, let’s not be silly, but exaggeration is a must; in truth, he needed to look fast to glimpse himself as others saw him.

Pezcale was born, Pezcale died, Pezcale shall never ever come again; so much then for that mistake.

Those last days he spent then painting all the furniture in his memory white to match the walls; if there had been a welcome mat it would have said “farewell.” The rooms he lived in were empty, or very nearly so. He supped but sparely--coarse grain breads and pots of cheap green tea. He dreamt of spontaneously combusting and burning down to ashes the wind would sweep away. He dreaded nothing but the lack of dread of which there was no lack thereof, nor would there ever be, so not to worry.

He feared not hope, for he’d seen it lying in a grave out in the desert--no face and three gunshots to the back of the head. That’s how he left it. He ignored the persistent rumors of its imminent return; far better than most he knew it wasn’t getting up and coming back, not ever.

And thus he lived--let’s call it living for convenience sake--forever standing in doorways between two rooms. But my friends be rest assured that the journal he left behind did not go unfinished as it is so commonly supposed (or hoped) in some quarters; only one thing is assured: the official story is wrong. There were indeed further goat-skin pages upon which Pezcale managed to say what it was that he meant to say after struggling so hard to say so much that he wished he hadn’t.

But the alphabet is strange, a bizarre forest that he himself was lost in, not so much a language at all, or one in which every figure meant one thing only once and never any more, which is as good as meaning nothing at all. More like a series of images this language was, not exactly a pictograph or a hieroglyph, not so much like anything at all, but a sort of self-portrait you might call it, many times erased and redrawn to get it right, but it was never right and in giving up saying anything it said everything that could not be said and it looked just like him.

Yet, still, and forever after, even before the pills kicked in, the rope snapped taut, the river filled his lungs, or the bullet shattered all the images reflected in his brain, he couldn’t tell you any more than he could tell himself--was it beauty or was it beast? Or was it as he feared it was that which fell unrecognized into the vast abyss between?