Black stared at Green. Put like that, it did seem truly bad.
Green shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that there is not one genuine step of amelioration of life on this planet. There is no improvement anywhere in this fraudulent kingdom.’
‘But how is it, then, that no seer or advanced soul from any age has warned us about this parasite race that you claim has controlled and ruled this planet since time immemorial?’
‘Take some time to reflect on what you are saying. If a seer truly understood that each and every human being is infected, then he would not be speaking to human beings but to the predator. The parasite would never allow any human to hear what he was saying as the truth, and even if it did, the information would bring nothing but hopeless despair. Do you remember when Jesus said to Judas, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the Kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but it will grieve you a great deal?’’
‘Are we totally doomed, then?’
‘No. Despite the fact that the entire species has been deliberately bred into psychotic consciousness and trapped inside their own fearful, infested minds, which are in turn trapped inside a bigger mind - the collective global mind - human beings are not technologically animated flesh, but light beings who hold a powerful connection to the original source of creation. At any time they can tap into the vast energies coursing through their bodies at every moment and become gods as is their natural destiny.
‘Remember a hologram cannot be cut up. Any change to it, no matter how small, will be reflected throughout the entire whole. Your every thought changes the hologram. With childlike innocence you can influence the whole system for you are building this universe as you go with every thought, word, and action.
‘Now with the cosmic retooling and inter-dimensional collapse of barriers, magical transformation can take place. The filaments in your double helix are already beginning to evolve and stretch out for their lost light encodings. Light is knowledge and information. Large parts of the human genome that are now lying dormant are waiting for an extrinsic factor to switch them on. Your DNA will be entrained. Your bodies will become less dense. Unimaginable characteristics and super abilities are awaiting the human race.
‘It is why your oppressors have introduced so many new methods of shutting down these powerful energies. Fluoride in the water, genetically modified organisms, poisons in food that pass the blood-brain barrier, aerial spraying, the electromagnetic smog that is incompatible with the human frequency, mercury in the teeth, tainted vaccines and many other methods.’ Green had stopped speaking but Black said nothing. He needed time to think.
‘Soon you will have to leave; but would you like to swim first?’
Silently Black stood and walked into the water. He felt the cool breeze against his sun-warmed body. The warm water reached his chest quickly. A wave washed into his face making him splutter. He turned back to tell Green that he didn’t know how to swim, then he realized. It was like in The Matrix. It was not real air he was breathing. Here he knew how to swim. He plunged into the waves and let his arms cleave the water powerfully. With his mind blank he swam out into the open sea. By the time he looked back Green was a tiny green light, and still he swam. Farther and farther away. Until he was suddenly back in his frozen body, brought back by an unfamiliar thud under his window.
A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi
(A precipice in front, wolves behind)
Veera laid the ladder he had borrowed from his landlady against the front wall of Bumi’s house, and glanced around tensely. Quiet for the moment. If any local busybodies asked, he would say he was being a good neighbor, helping the widow nail back that loose bit of her windowpane. He unhooked his duffle bag from his shoulder and threw it on the ground. Squatting over it, he took out a hammer and looked up. It seemed a long way up. He was apprehensive of heights. His armpits were already dripping with sweat. He stood, determined to climb. Wiping his hands down his trouser front, he placed his hands firmly on the ladder and put a nervous foot on the first rung. It seemed solid enough. Carefully he put his other foot on the second rung. He looked up. The window with the blue light was not too far away, he told himself, and as it turned out he reached it surprisingly fast. He peeped in.
A black boy was lying awake watching television.
He shrank back immediately. His first thought - the little slut. She had secretly taken a black lover, but then it hit him like a bolt. Veera, my boy, - you’ve hit the jackpot with this one. That boy’s not hers. She’s stolen him and is keeping him a prisoner. Not that it bothered him any. In fact, he liked that. Goodness bored him. The hammer slipped from his sweaty hands and fell into the bushes. He looked through the window again, but the boy must not have heard for he did not move at all. Veera executed his descent with great care and a racing heart.
He returned the ladder and went to sit on the tiled steps of her front door. He lit a cigarette, and tilting his head back, blew the smoke out in wisps. He had tried for ages, but had never managed to blow a smoke ring. It was cold, but he felt as if he was on fire. All his fantasies… She would soon be back.
When he heard her footsteps, he threw his fifth cigarette into the bushes and stood slowly. She came to an abrupt standstill when she saw him. He could smell the fear in her. He smiled. It wasn’t a good smile. She stood very still. No return smile.
‘What do you want?’
He lit a cigarette and after taking a slow drag blew a perfect smoke ring. He watched it in wonder - well, well, what do you know? His mouth curved into a slow, smug smile. ‘Hello, Bumi.’
‘I said what do you want?’
He tut-tutted mockingly. ‘Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?’
‘Get out of my way or I’ll call the police,’ she said, through gritted teeth.
He opened his eyes, which were already large and bulging, to frog like proportions. ‘Police? OK, OK,’ he said, his arms raised as if in surrender, as if her threat had frightened him, and moved sideways to allow her to pass. She passed and he sniffed the air like an animal. She wore no perfume other than fear. He waited for her to find her key. When she had the key in the lock he asked, ‘But won’t the police be wanting to know about the boy?’
She had dreaded and feared this day from the moment she had decided to keep the boy, yet she felt as unprepared for it as if it was the first time the thought that it might happen had occurred to her. She turned around slowly. ‘What boy?’
‘The one upstairs,’ he said, jerking his head in the direction of Black’s bedroom window.
Her eyes never left the man. ‘That boy is my sister’s illegitimate child. He is an invalid and I am taking care of him for her.’
But he had smelled the panic. ‘Fine. In that case you won’t mind if I call the police and tell them that I suspect you are keeping a boy prisoner. And you see if you can convince them with your cock and bull story.’
‘What do you want?’
‘You… Tonight.’
She licked her dry lips and saw his eyes go to them. ‘I can’t tonight.’ She forced a smile. She was a bad actress. ‘It’s that time of the month.’
You little liar, he thought. ‘That don’t bother me none.’
‘It would bother me. Give me a week.’
‘You have three days and then I am coming for you,’ he said, enjoying the sense of power he felt over her.
She scowled. ‘No, no, we can’t do it in my house - the boy.’
‘No problem. I’ll come here and take you to mine. The other men work as waiters and are all back late… So we will be undisturbed.’
She nodded. He leered at her, and leaning forward suddenly, kissed her on the mouth. He needed a wash badly. She felt the sickness rise from deep within. ‘See you Thursday,’ he threw over his shoulder as he sauntered away.
She turned the key and closed the door, leaning against it for a few moments. Her knees felt like water. She could not lose the boy this way. Not like this
. She wiped her mouth with the back of her shaking hand, and pressed her palm against her mouth to stop the sob that had started in her throat. If her mother knew! She was so far fallen there was no way back.
She looked at her feet. They seemed small; she had always had small feet. He would use her horribly. She knew that. She would be the toilet into which he would flush all his diseased thoughts and urges, but never mind, let it be so. She was not important. There was nothing she would not do for the boy. Nothing. She straightened away from the door. Her hands were still shaking, but her feet were moving quickly up the stairs.
Hurrying toward her boy. So many new improvements had come to visit him. He was changing right before her eyes. This morning she had stroked his face, and the shocked expression in his eyes told her that he had felt something. Some sensations were returning to his face. Perhaps by the grace of God he would be cured, and he would live, after all.
We are the origin of all coming evil.
- Carl Jung, BBC interview (1959)
Across the ocean Shekina opened her eyes from her reconnaissance trip and announced triumphantly, ‘I found the rotted fruit.’ But in that unguarded moment when she had looked directly into Teddy’s eyes, she had registered the unmistakable impression - he wants to have sex with me. She looked away hastily, but he bent over her and warned furiously, ‘Don’t ever look into my eyes again.’
She nodded obediently and looked down, though not before he caught the beginning of that self-righteous little smile of hers.
Teddy sat angrily across from her. He didn’t like this alter. She was too confident. Too bold. She made him uncomfortable. But forget about that now, he told himself. Think, Teddy, think. This is big. The girl was looking straight ahead. Not moving, not speaking. Studiously avoiding his face. He stood up impatiently, and walked around the room. ‘Tell me everything you saw, felt, and heard.’
‘A man. He has dark thoughts about the target… Who is…’ She paused, surprised by the new precept. ‘A boy. Yes, I think the target is probably a teenager. Something strange about him, though. He seems very still, too still, but possesses an intense, hidden, warrior-like power - either suppressed or unused because he doesn’t know he has it.’
‘Is he American?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Somewhere cold and wet. There seems to be a colorful main street nearby; it could be a street in India, but it’s not. There are many brown people living around him.’
‘Anything else?’
She shook her head, but stopped when it hurt to do so.
‘Fine, you can try again tomorrow.’
Quickly, he brought Dakota to the fore and summoned Miss Monroe. While waiting he paced the room. Although Dakota did not react to his pacing, it made her feel queasy and she longed for her dim bedroom and bed.
It was a relief when Miss Monroe knocked lightly on the door and entered. As usual Dakota was wheeled into her living quarters and gently helped into bed. When the sedative had been administered and the lights turned down, she was left alone. And that was why it was such a surprise when she awoke suddenly after a few hours.
Like most multiple personality disorder (MPD) sufferers she slept with her eyes open so she knew that if she lay very still and kept up her even breathing, the surveillance camera would not notice that she was awake. She had dreamed of the brown woman again. The woman had come to her with her hands clasped one on top of the other as if in them she cupped a butterfly. When she had opened her grasp Dakota had seen that it was not a butterfly, but a handful of brightly colored beads.
‘You must take care of them,’ she had urged, holding her other hand out to Dakota. When Dakota made no move to take the beads the woman had begun to cry softly.
‘Please,’ she had begged. ‘I have no one else to turn to.’
In her dream Dakota had silently opened her palm and the woman had poured the beads like a waterfall of color into it.
When she had raised her head from the gorgeous waterfall, she had realized they had been standing at the edge of a cliff and the woman was falling off into a dark chasm.
‘Who are you?’ she had called after her, but she was gone, fallen away without a single sound.
Dakota turned on her side and faced the wall. She wondered who the woman was and why she kept trying to contact her. If there was one thing she knew for sure, it was that she must never again tell anybody else about her. She was a secret.
Without women, men are only a cruel joke
- James Clavell, King Rat (1962)
When Black heard the slow rhythmic breathing that signified his mother was asleep, he let his eyes blur on the ceiling and tried to still his mind. He intended to prove Green wrong. There was no alien mind hidden deep within his. But stilling his mind, he was shocked and horrified to discover, was turning out to be quite impossible. Every time he pulled his attention to the imaginary black screen he had created, it strayed away just as quickly, as if with a mind of its own. A hundred different matters intruded: Green, his mother, a program he had watched earlier, a sound on the street below, a stray melody, a trivial worry, a snippet of conversation he had heard, and on and on. He looked at the clock - an hour had passed.
The inane dialog could not be stopped.
But he would not give up. He simply refused to believe his mind was not his and his alone. He would do it if it took him all night. He reasoned that he was merely unused to the strict discipline of guarding his thoughts. Thirty minutes later he realized that he still could not stop the incessant chatter. Frustrated by his inability, but unwilling to give up, he tried again.
This time, he thought, with more success until an image of a girl in a candy-striped bikini intruded, and when he pushed that away impatiently, he heard a sawn-off nursery rhyme in his head - it reminded him of the floating, forlorn voice of Hal, the supercomputer, in that poignant final scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the memory chips that had controlled Hal’s artificial brain had been disconnected and it had gone out singing, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I’m half crazy over the love of you…’
The disjointed, alien nature of the voice in his own head chilled him. He tried to think of another logical explanation why there might be a sourceless voice in his head, but could think of none. As he grappled with the horrendous realization that his mind too, like every other human’s on the planet, might be hacked, Green appeared.
‘I can’t control my own mind, Green,’ he confessed.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is part of being human.’
‘I don’t want to be controlled by a mind parasite. There must be a way to get rid of it.’
‘There is, and I will show you how, but the parasite has organized and managed your thoughts for so long that expelling it will leave you with the naked and defenseless newborn that is your mind. It will not be able to cope with what is coming. Let the parasite remain for now. There will be time for its removal later. For now, come with me. We will go to a little bar in Rome. It’s rather fun there. People who have partied all night at the Rancho Grande nightclub stop to buy cigarettes, and ease their aching feet in the cool fountains.’
Black Jack looked at the clock; it was 3.30 a.m. A nocturnal escapade. He would like that very much indeed. The predator parasite had just bought itself some more time. He reached out for Green’s outstretched hand and his stripped pajamas became a black tuxedo. He looked at his bare feet. Immediately they were shod in a pair of highly polished leather shoes. They looked very expensive.
‘Italian,’ said Green.
Black grinned and shot his cuffs the way he had seen James Bond do.
‘Very suave,’ commented Green. Then they were transported into a network of cobbled alleys. There was something European, but very familiar about the high walls that rose on either side of them. The clothes and hairstyles worn by the men and women who passed them were all from a different era. A time when no one wore jeans. The men
were in suits and the women were very elegantly dressed, a few wrapped up in fur coats.
‘Where in time are we?’
Green smiled. ‘Guess.’
‘OK, but give me a clue.’
‘We will watch them have their gin and tonic, or…’ Green’s eyes twinkled. ‘We might go in search of a glass of milk.’
In the distance Black heard the sound of a waterfall. A glass of milk. For a moment he frowned then his eyes lit up. Of course, for the white kitten. That’s why everything had looked sort of familiar. ‘La Dolce Vita,’ he cried excitedly. He had watched Federico Fellini’s masterpiece late one night on World Cinema, and been enamored by its depiction of a dream world, glittering with beauty and hedonistic pleasure.
They turned a corner and the past burst upon them in an orgy of color, lights, and activity. Fellini was shooting the famous waterfall scene at the Fontana de Trevi. The entire square was filled with curious onlookers and crew. Fellini himself was huddled on his high director’s chair, in a hat, a thick, woolen scarf, and his overcoat. In his pudgy hands he loosely clasped an old-fashioned loudspeaker cone.
Like every other man in that square on that wintry January night, Black was drawn to the water where Anita Ekberg, framed by the lights, stood bare-legged and bare-shouldered. The breathtaking goddess of improbable, voluptuousness was waiting for her cue to begin cavorting in the fountain. At the edges of the scene a grumbling, fussing Marcello Mastroianni was struggling into a wetsuit of some kind. Black laughed. Funny. All that time he had imagined him to be the epitome of cool.