Chapter 1

 

DEAD? Alive! He hadn't been dead more than a little while when he realized that he was not dead after all. He wasn't sleeping, either.

He'd misplaced his name but he could still do simple sums in his head, so he couldn't be dead ... two plus two is four, one hundred eighteen plus eighty-two is two hundred ... and it was nearly like an electrical light being switched on. Why had it been off in the first place? He couldn't comprehend. Focusing his mind was difficult. Nonetheless, he tried philosophy. He quickly put an end to philosophy.

Well .... If he wasn't dead, why couldn't he wake up? Or feel anything? Or scream? He tried to scream; it didn't work. If he was dead, why was he thinking? The popular notion of an afterlife seemed a suitable conclusion at the moment, yet he could recall all sorts of odd images that didn't jibe with "judgment day": a piping hot apple pie he'd relish if he could figure out where his mouth was; baroque music; the scented body of Lowia, his off-and-on girlfriend the past two years he'd relish if he could figure out where his ....

And he determined that an afterlife of this kind of disoriented cerebration could be mighty boring. A hell. Hot as hell? No, he dismissed the inferno scenario immediately, having given up the Catholic faith of his childhood sometime during his sophomore year at the University. A man's entitled to his own beliefs. Besides, from what he remembered of those religious indoctrinations, he knew he hadn't lived the kind of a life to deserve damnation. A little healthy punishment, perhaps.... This didn't make sense! Heaven, hell, or the celestial green room before you step out on stage to meet thy heavenly host, you simply don't hang around in space after death trying to visualize classic Hord Fawks westerns. He wasn't dead. He wasn't in New Jersey, either.

What was called for was some hard corporeal tangibility, he decided. A toe wiggling, the blink of an eyelid, the glimmer of an erection, a bubble of indigestion .... He calmed himself as best he could. He emptied his head. He concentrated. Like beaming the ray of a flashlight down the stairs into a darkened cellar, he aimed a mental probe around for signs of spatial dimension. He sang to himself as he explored. He whistled inwardly as he worked. Anybody at home?

He imagined himself the way he remembered he looked. That was the first step. If he willed his physical being strongly enough where he ought to be, maybe, like congruent shapes, the whole would come together and shake off this curious vacuum he occupied. It was a theory, anyway.

Last seen, he was wearing non-designer jeans (faded blue), dirty white sneakers and a brown windbreaker over a plaid shirt. Although he was several inches shorter than six feet, his lanky frame made him seem taller than he was, so many of his friends often remarked. A bit of a nonconformist, too, he deliberately kept himself unkempt and, sometimes, sported gigantic wire-framed eyeglasses (reading only) for effect: his costume was overt advertising of the group, the political and social stratus within which he functioned.

A fact. He and his colleagues weren't exactly revolutionaries. (Truth be told, they worked for a living.) No, they were not like the beatniks or hippies or dugongs of former times - though they often wished they could be. Unless they did something of an extremely violent or reprehensible nature, the Government simply left them alone. This is because there were so few of them left. And their ranks dwindled down to a precious few, year after year.

However, there were the times. Oh, there were the good times .... He remembered.

 

***

 

He remembered being sprawled across an orange sofa in a study hall at the University, working on a paper airplane. By the window, chubby Harry was arguing with George. Harry always argued, never talked. Harry was railing on that gravity and magnetism were one and the same, that the great physicists were all missing the obvious link that tied those forces together. He wondered if Harry's store of ideas could offer a solution to how he could get his paper airplane to soar twenty meters down the hall, then make a sharp right turn into Professor Jacob's office. Although he was a journalism major, he'd always had a lifelong fascination with the sciences.

"You guys going to turn on the television set?" a singsong voice queried. A large jet-black head, nearly bald, with the most angelic ear-to-ear grin you ever saw in your life, eclipsed the ceiling in front of him.

"Hey, Chekah, you bastard!" he acknowledged, offering the African foreign exchange student an outspread hand.

Chekah slipped him five before proceeding to click on the tube. Chekah returned to the orange sofa and gave him a kick on the shin. "Hey, will you let a fellow sit down?"

"Come on, Chekah," he protested, "I'm in the middle of an important project here."

"You aren't. You are fooling around again."

"So you say." He cocked up his legs to give the African barely enough room to squeeze in between his sneakers and the arm of the sofa.

"That ridiculous airplane of yours will never fly," Chekah said.

He took the declaration as an affront to his paper folding skills. He sat up, aimed the craft, gave it a couple of test jabs into the air, then let it sail. The airplane arced swiftly toward the ceiling, stalled, then looped lazily downward, curving past Erik Owens and Dora as the couple entered the room, and crashed unglamourously against the wall.

Chekah laughed loudly.

He remained undaunted. "It worked, didn't it?" he replied. "The only trouble was that it turned left instead of right."

Owens and Dora had always been going together. Owens, blonde, from somewhere in the Southwest, bent down to retrieve the fallen aircraft. Owens crumpled it up and tossed the paper wad back at him. "Litterbug!" Owens accused, then pointed to the television. "You got on the election returns?"

"Certainly we do," Chekah responded. "Some of us are interested in what is going on in the world."

He grimaced at his friend's indication of what he always concluded to be pointless social consciousness. "Don't be so naive, Chekah," he said. "We all know the Moralists are going to thunder into office on horseback. Caffaro has no more chance of winning the White House than you do. The only question is whether or not this is finally the end of intellectualism and free-thinking once and for all."

"You dramatize too much, like you always do," Chekah countered.

"Yeah? Noticed this year's crop of freshmen, have you? The University is worried about budget cuts is it? Well, all these bright, well-scrubbed youngsters will solve that problem. Eliminate the whole damn liberal arts department; the school sure doesn't need it anymore!"

"Quiet," Owens demanded, gesturing. "There's an announcement on."

The dreadfully serious face of a middle-aged news announcer filled up every raster of the 19-inch color television screen. The man seemed to be choking on the words "... biggest landslide in the nation's history. We repeat, the Reverend Angus Yaramon and the Moralist Party appear to be on their way to a near unanimous victory in what has got to be the most decisive and pronounced mandate ever given by the people. With barely 20 percent of the popular vote counted, less than 23,000,000, the Moralist Party seems to have captured all but 193 ballots. We have also been informed that, on this basis, and as the result of network computer predictions, Dominic Caffaro has conceded the election to Yaramon in a private telephone conversation. This has now been confirmed. Only minutes ago, in a telephone conversation with Yaramon, Dominic Caffaro has conceded the election .... "

Harry actually stopped arguing and stared at the television screen in hypnotic disbelief. Everyone's attention was transfixed upon the tube, and a chill suffused the room like a dozen refrigerator doors left wide open.

"President Yaramon ... " someone uttered as though the words had a bad taste.

"Who is this Yaramon fellow, anyway?" Chekah asked.

"Angus Barlow Yaramon," he pronounced the full name and continued as if reciting from a biographical sketch, "was originally ordained as an Episcopalian minister. But Yaramon departed from the church to found his own particularly fundamentalist ministry and television station about 20 years ago. Rumor has it he wove together such a web of partnerships and sub-corporations to get his 'holy roaming empire' off the ground that a spider couldn't figure it out. His little TV station burgeoned like a fat momma, which is sort of how people flocked to the bosom of his gospel. He became a network. He made powerful allies. His ratings soared. Soon advertisers were knocking themselves silly to buy commercial time on his station; Yaramon himself was going video eyeball to video eyeball with the Pope of Rome for spiritual dominance in this country. You likely heard about the World Ecumenical Forums - 'mass debates' the sophomores called them-a few years back? How Yaramon got the Pontiff to verbally joust with him during prime time is beyond my understanding. Even the Pope is human, I guess. Yaramon gave the people what they wanted: that 'old time religion,' special effects, more than a dose of patriotism, and a convincing argument that they were the 'chosen ones' - things other faiths had been claiming for centuries - all in a single package. There aren't any complexities under Yaramon's conservative umbrella; everything is either simple or sinful. Needless to say, the man walked away from that tete-à-tete with His Holiness clutching all the marbles and a fucking crown. The rest you must know, or suspect. A person with so much influence over the masses can't be ignored by government. Although, whether Yaramon was jerking off the White House or the White House was jerking off him is impossible to say. The results are the same: lobbyist to advisor and, finally, to this." He saluted the blaring television.

"Better get your plane ticket back to the jungle," he advised his friend.

"This is the jungle now, I think," Chekah countered.

Something had to break the assault of the TV voice unremittingly driving home the fact that the Moralist Party had, was given, gladly, an unshakeable grip on the reins of the country. It was Harry. It would be Harry. Of all his school chums and former cronies, Harry would be the one to react from the gut.

He remembered, vividly, the scholarly youth dashing to the window, pushing it open, leaning out to the point where it seemed the fool might be about to jump, and bellowing in mock celebration, "Yaramon's the one! Yaramon's the one!"

Very typical of Harry to do something like that in those days, he mulled. He wondered what might have happened to Harry. Chekah, good old Chekah, he learned years later had been killed in the Banana Riots. Chekah was dead. Really dead. And George ... George was committed to an institution for the criminally insane. Harry, like himself, probably vanished into society. Into memory.

Those were the ebullient times, he remembered .... and sighed.

 

***

 

He sighed: an upheaval like a wave. He was uncertain if he had merely imagined an appropriate reaction to a fond recollection, or if he had finally broken through to some sort of reality. He concluded two possibilities: either he had moved or he was reincarnated as a lake. Except, there was a definite gentle rocking, and it wasn't in his mind. It was a threshold awareness of being carried. Yes. He rationalized this new sensation as, it seemed, floating to an upper plane. Upper was correct, too, because he determined he was coming out of a deeper place into a place that was ... for now ... less deep. There was a familiar sensation about this new place. He fleetingly thought a comparison of the experience with the myth of Charon rafting the departed souls across the Styx seemed eerily appropriate. Were this the case indeed, it would make a fine irony flung in the face of modern religion. But he was not departed.

A chink in the wall had been broken loose. Proof. Something to grab onto, if he could grab. He must make the attempt right now. He concentrated all thought within himself and reached out an arm that was not there, stretching as hard as he could imagine, forcing the creation of an extremity that was denied to what little consciousness he possessed, yet had to exist if he did. Grab. Struggle. Push. Reach for the sky. Tote that barge, lift that bale. It was exceedingly difficult for him to keep his mind tuned wholly to the one simple task. Flashes of diverting memories sailed by. Like speeding down a highway festooned with neon signs and billboards. He fought back, envisioning a finger at a time, four fingers, one thumb, linked, skin stretching taut, the open palm, reaching, left -

Ouch!

Pain? No, that was feeling. That. Was. Feeling. He had done it! He had a hand. His left hand had returned to him and, with that, the walls came tumbling down. No sooner had he obtained evidence of a living body part than all and everything else popped into place. The arm bone connected to the shoulder bone. The shoulder bone connected to the neck bone. The neck bone connected to the head bone. It was, in a curious manner, like he was being born again. Although this had to be impossible because, he emphatically reminded himself, he wasn't dead in the first place.

He realized where he was. Now he was asleep. He had been beyond sleeping before. Now he was simply asleep and the rest of the trip would be an easy climb out to awakening. He had long ago learned how to awaken himself from nightmares. Was this one now? If it was ... all he had to do ... was ....

... open his eyes ....

 

Chapter 2

 

DELIBERATELY, he returned. His vision cleared. With each blink, a layer of time stripped away, like old paint. It revealed that he was a newspaperman, a reporter, about 33 years old. He was on his back. He feared. He loved. He hated. He shivered. He was alive. He had a name.

Astin W. Wench stared directly into a bright photographic flood lamp that had been rather badly jury-rigged to what he could see of a dingy, latticed ceiling. The light hurt. He turned away from it. He noticed, against a cinder block wall, a steel cart containing an assortment of medical paraphernalia and some empty soda bottles, knives and tin plates. He guessed he was on a table. His left arm was tightly wrapped in a cloth bandage. He felt numerous pains throughout his body - none of them very serious - and a throbbing headache. His surprise was more discomforting than any of his physical ills. He tried to say something but his vocal chords wouldn't cooperate. Out of the right side of his peripheral vision, he noticed a large human figure coming towards him. He saw that this person was wearing a stethoscope and a full-size barbecue apron like the kind suburban homeowners wear to backyard cookouts. The apron read, in capital red letters: CHEF COCK AND BULL.

Wench smiled, tried to. Apparently he was in some kind of a field hospital. It wasn't a Government hospital, leading Wench to a specific conclusion. The doctor, who was at this moment taking Wench's pulse, if the person was a doctor, had rescued Wench from some calamity. So it appeared. An accident, illness, perhaps a violent attack by person or persons unknown? Wench was unable to remember. He couldn't be sure. Actually, he couldn't even be certain that this doctor was, in fact, rescuing him. But for the moment Wench was quite satisfactorily alive and that was very reassuring.

The presumed doctor approached closer, adjusted the overhead lamp and pushed back Wench's eyelids with a hammy thumb to inspect the patient's pupillary response. The hands were large and firm. The doctor's face floated within a couple nose lengths of Wench and he could see wide, intelligent eyes, a high and shiny dark-skinned forehead. Short, curled gray hair clung to the man's head like algae to a rock. A close-cropped beard of silver laced with black streaks dressed the long chin.

Wench finally got his voice box to function.

"Doctor?" he inquired groggily.

"Yes?"

"I mean you're a doctor. A physician?" Wench asked.

The other man didn't flinch, replied, "have been all my working life, a doctor. A virologist, specifically. I hold a doctorate in biochemistry. But I've a medical diploma, too, though I'm not licensed." He stressed licensed, then added with a sarcastic, twisty smile that was brighter than the light above, "hope you aren't alarmed. We didn't get the wrong man, did we?"

"Wrong man?"

"Forgive me. I imagine this entire situation would be a bit ... unusual, shall we say ... to wake up to after nearly nine years?"

Wench held on while a rush of panic poured through him. The doctor said nine years. Did he?

"What?

"Nine."

"Nine?"

"Give or take a month ...."

Wench swallowed. "A coma?" he asked nervously. Nine years long?

The doctor, meanwhile, was palpitating Wench's legs. "Coma? No. Of course not." The doctor gestured, went on. "Excuse my boorishness. We haven't done too many of you people and I'm still not used to it. We encounter a great deal of disorientation from you folks when we bring you around. I must admit, though, you seem to have picked up right where you left off!"

Wench blinked away more fuzz as his memory slowly continued to reconstruct itself. "Left off?"

"Try to recall the very last thing that happened to you," the doctor suggested.

Wench grappled with images. It was almost the same as trying to catch fish with bare hands. A very large room. The fear. Accusing faces. Anger. Everything brown, like in monochrome. That was it. A trial. "The trial," he said.

"Yes. You were tried and convicted. Anything else?"

"They dragged me away." Wench sucked in air violently.

"Omigod! They were going to kill me."

"What?"

"Kill me. Execution. Now I have it. The sentence was death."

The doctor seemed momentarily upset. "Well, you certainly weren't dead when we got you. Are you positive they - "

"But that was only a few days - " Wench halted abruptly as his mind made additional connections, splicing back together the threads of memory which had been severed. " - ago." Yes, he recollected the trial: a kangaroo court that summarily found him guilty as if they were following a prepared text. The highly unorthodox sentence of death. Dragging him away to a cramped, insufferably hot cubicle where he was going to .... And now here. Somewhere else. In a decidedly non-Government medical facility cum mess hall cum whatever. With a doctor. A civilian doctor. That was the strangest thing.

"Are you getting the picture?" the doctor asked.

"I think so."

Wench, laboriously, sat up. It was a chore, but he was becoming irritated and bored with having to converse on his back. The doctor helped him. After his blood pressure equalized and Wench ceased swaying, he saw that the room, this makeshift clinic, was all that there was. They were inside a one-room enclosure, windows on both sides, a partly open door leading to the outside world. Outside world was correct in more than one sense. Wench now guessed where he was. Where he had to be.

"Alabama?" Wench forwarded.

"With a banjo on my knee," commented the doctor in humorous agreement. "Welcome!"

Further understanding suffused his brain like water into a sponge. Wench asked for a mirror. Nine years was a hell of a long time. All the embarrassing situations he could have gotten himself into, Wench did not want to dwell upon. Once, in college, at a party, drunk, he boisterously gushed and fawned over a girl he secretly desired. That resulted in limitless day-after apologies. Funny he should think of it now. But, nine years? Let him at least see what he looked like.

The doctor handed Wench a hefty piece of mirror glass, cautioning, "watch the top edge. It's mighty sharp."

"So they didn't execute me after all," Wench observed.

"I can't understand why they didn't tell you." The doctor wrinkled his face and scratched his beard.

The waker angled the mirror glass from one position to another, turning it up, down, side to side, almost vainly gazing at his left profile, right profile, chin, neck, farther down. Wench still had all his hair; however, it was quite gray, even white in places. No longer the raven, tousled youth he thought himself to be. Youth? His leathery face now bore the scars and crevices of age, with deep lines emanating from the corners of his eyes and mouth. He still had his moustache, though it was overgrown, resembling an untended hedge. His facial hair, not a beard, was only a few days from his last shave. His lanky, supple frame had filled out. He hadn't grown fat, but a substantial potbelly nestled in his lap. Partly out of dark humor, partly in all seriousness, Wench grabbed at his groin and remarked, "well I still have my balls."

The doctor laughed.

Wench's reflected image was wearing a fairly conservative evening suit, navy blue slacks and jacket, wrinkled, but of top quality fabric and tailoring, along with a white shirt and polished dress shoes: hardly the sort of outfit Wench himself would normally select. "Hey! Where did these duds come from?"

"You had them on. But we removed your tie." The doctor held up a length of gray fabric. "What can you expect after nine years?"

"I didn't expect to be breathing," Wench admitted matter-of-factly.

"You said that. That they didn't tell you," the doctor reiterated.

"Tell me what?"

"That they were putting you in Deep BLISS instead."

"BLISS?" The realization hit Wench like a ton of feathers. He laid the mirror down flat. "Shit!" You mean to tell me that all this time I've been BLISSed out?"

"Deep BLISS," the doctor corrected him, as if there were a difference. "It was a bitch pulling you out, too. Almost lost you."

"For nine years?"

"Which makes you about 42 years old now, by my reckoning. But they didn't tell you?"

Wench was miffed. "They said nothing! I was sweating bullets and pissing in my pants. I really thought they were going to fry my brains. Must have blacked out. That's it, that's all I remember."

"Wonder when they began pulling that crap?" the doctor muttered.

"I thought I was dead."

"Well, you're kicking now."

Wench eased himself off the table. He felt decidedly better. A little hungry, he noted, but his arms worked and his legs were steady. He performed a short, impromptu buck and wing that he learned how to do many years ago. He was no hoofer of which to speak. Nonetheless, all systems checked out fine.

"You approve of my doctoring?"

Wench looked up. The other man began housecleaning. "Four stars, doc," said Wench, "absolutely four stars ... what's your name, by the way?"

"Titus" - the doctor extended a hand - "Titus Archimedes. M.D. Ph.D. You can call me Archie if you want to. Everybody else does."

They shook on it, warmly.

Wench felt his old self doggedly reassembling, like a reversed slow motion film of a shattered porcelain putting itself aright. He knew that, rationally, almost a decade lopped from his life ought to have him ranting hysterically. The questions were there, pressing against his very soul. What had happened all that time? What about his friends? What about the woman he loved? Perhaps it was a side effect of - what did the doctor call it - coming out of Deep BLISS that acted like a tranquilizer. Maybe later the questions would balloon into unavoidable urgency. And later might be a better time to confront them. Right now he was awash in relief and wanted to give the doctor a grateful hug.

"Doctor, about this Deep - "

With a startling shot, the door flew aside like it was blasted from its hinges.

Two giants marched into the hospital.

"Doc?" Wench stiffened.

Two enormous men with muscles like coiled shock absorbers strode forward. They carried with them an aura of militarism and a heavy smell of machine oil. They were soldiers of a sort, or guards; that seemed evident enough. They were both black. Professionally expressionless. One of the guard/soldiers wore a football jersey with a large numeral 11 imprinted back and front, and had on brand new jeans. The second guard/soldier was all in hunting leather. They both wore ponderous boots with soles like armor plates. The guard/soldier in the football jersey had a spiked dog collar around his neck. Tasteful. The two guards held guns. They were not to be toyed with.

"Hey, doc?" Wench repeated. His tension was becoming pronounced and evident. He wondered if he had not gone from the frying pan into the fire.

The guard/soldier in leather saluted the doctor, raising a clenched fist, palm forward, thumb out, to the side of his head. The doctor returned the salute in similar fashion, remaining quite unperturbed throughout.

"Friends of yours?" Wench asked the doctor lamely.

"Don't get excited," the doctor replied, then, to one of the guard/soldiers, "you can take him now."

The leather giant approached Wench. At the same time, the other, Number 11, erected his gleaming, oily firearm as if about to shoot from the hip, aiming the muzzle directly at Wench's nose. The ugly, sexual similarity did not escape Wench's eye.

"Put that away!" the doctor barked.

The gun-toting leviathan holstered his weapon.

Wench sighed.

"I want you to go with them," the doctor ordered Wench. "It's okay, really. You're not quite out of the woods, medically. I want you to get plenty of rest, and remain undisturbed. I'll call you in the morning. Meantime, these two gentlemen will keep a watch on you. They're good men. Trust them." The doctor hesitated, then added with a smile and a wink of an eye, "we're not exactly finished with you, yet."

"Doc, what - ?"

"In due time. In due time." The doctor motioned for the two guard/soldiers to remove his patient.

Arm in arm, Wench was carried, like a reluctant bridegroom, from the makeshift hospital. The land outside was flat, an uninterrupted carpet of overgrown bluegrass. The late autumn sun hung low on the horizon, making the occasional oak tree appear to be fashioned from bronze. It wasn't chilly; Alabama seldom got chilly. But, being autumn, it wasn't insufferably hot, either. Wench caught a glimpse, way in the distance, of a tumbledown antebellum mansion, a four-story, ivy-clothed, many-chimneyed Georgian structure around which separate servants' quarters huddled like chicks around a mother hen. He'd come out of a carriage house, he saw. It'd been converted into the doctor's make-do hospital.

The guard/soldiers threw Wench into a woodshed and chain locked the door. The shed interior was dim, earthy smelling, and empty save for a single cot, pillow and blanket that had been provided for Wench's comfort. A pitcher of water rested upon the ground, next to a plate of dry biscuits. All the comforts of home.

Wench sat on the cot and lit into the biscuits with gusto. He was hungry and, after all, the doctor had told him not to get excited. The incarceration was supposed to be for his own good. He needed rest. If anything, he'd have the opportunity to reconstruct the events that got him into this situation in the first place.