Demons (18 page)

He said this the night we watched with real amazement, on the evening news, the government giving its official opinion that the demons had not existed as a physical reality, that it had all been some kind of hallucinogenic gas attack by a cult of industrialists who had had an obscure world-domination plan.

There is, somehow, no existing footage of the demons—nothing on video or digital. Nothing. It has all gone black. We have our own explanations for that; the officials have theirs. It doesn’t matter.

All the deaths, the spokesmen said, were carried out by human beings, some of them in costume, possibly some robotically augmented. Those who remember otherwise, said the spokesmen, remember hallucinations formed by suggestion, spawned by faked video and mass hypnosis. The previous President was allegedly killed by a hallucinogen-addled assassin.

The world tries to forget, as of course it must. A World’s Fair is planned, an Olympics. There is much reconstruction. But there are enough of us who remember—millions who are sure of what they remember—and who know that the spiritual world is the material world; that the material world is the spiritual world; that the universe is just a conception in a mind that dreams what it must, that calls for us to return to its deepest places, through awakening to who we really are.

Me, I’m doing a little writing and some graphics for
Memorial
magazine, which Paymenz funds and which I oversee. Melissa is just Melissa—most of the time. She only rarely chooses to show her true self to me. Her higher self is hard for me to look at—there are no sunglasses for that light. But she opens the shutters a little when she teaches the hundreds who come to her, to hear her speak at the unprepossessing little edifice they have built for her, the Hall of Remembering, in an oak grove on a former cattle ranch near Martinez.

And a sadly smiling, mustachioed little man named Yanan has come from Turkey to live near us. He was sent by Nyerza, he said, to be my special instructor, to prepare me for the time—maybe soon, maybe years from now—when I will enter the Conscious Circle.

Every so often, I take a step closer to that place where I see myself as I really am; where I see
who
I really am; where I forgive the unforgivable. Every step toward that place is joyful—but every step hurts.

BOOK TWO

UNDERCURRENT

“I believe that Demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary—although, you know, I don’t believe in them.”

—EDGAR ALLAN POE

Nine Years Having Passed . . .

1

San Francisco

Let us speak plainly. Let us not be cute about it. Stephen Isquerat only dreamed what happened in the little room at the top of the pyramid of the West Wind building. There is such a building, but there is no such room, not precisely. It exists only in the dream and, perhaps, in the place where dreams refract reality.

You woke in bed remembering it,
he said to himself, all that working day.
It was just a dream,
and again,
just a dream. So let go of it.

But the memory of the dream had dug into his mind like a tick. The squirming faces, the mushroom trays.

Stephen was still thinking about it at five that afternoon as he sat in a squeaking chair in Dale Winderson’s office in the West Wind building in downtown San Francisco, waiting for an audience with Dale himself, West Wind’s CEO.

“An audience with the pope!” his supervisor, Quellman, had said, laughing off his envy. Envy because it was young Steve Isquerat who had been summoned to see Dale himself in person, privately. It had to be an opportunity; the CEO didn’t fire anyone in person.

Stephen wished he could change seats. The deathly dry breath of the air conditioner snuffled and whirred at the back of his neck; he could feel it lifting the little hairs there. But Winderson’s receptionist glanced at him sharply from time to time across her track-lit domain, the dust-blue expanse of synthetic carpet; he might seem eccentric if he abruptly changed seats. She was young and flare coifed and sullen, behind that vast U-shaped desk situated under the enormous WW logo, a small thorn of a woman compressed between the huge symbol and the huge desk.

There were no windows. Outside, he knew, it was a crisp late-autumn day, pleasantly misty. In here, seasons didn’t exist.

He shifted in the seat, and it squeaked reproachfully. The seats squeaked whenever you sat down or moved in them at all. They were made of a West Wind product, Inimicalene, a polymer that had always made Stephen recoil when he touched it. A variant of it was used as a kind of cellophane, and having to open things wrapped in the squeaky, repellent substance always made him react as if a cold drink had hit an exposed tooth nerve.

He squirmed again under the air conditioner’s chill breath on the back of his neck . . . and twitched at the squeak of the chair.

As a supervisor of new product development, he’d suggested they might replace Inimicalene with a variant that was less uncomfortable to the touch. Everyone at the meeting, he remembered, had stared at him.

Uncomfortable? What did he mean?

No one admitted the stuff was loathsome, but he saw them all shudder when they touched it.

And there was something in that experience, he reflected, that he couldn’t grasp, something connected to the dream—a feeling of revulsion that could not be articulated.

The dream played itself again in his memory, even as he tried not to think about it, even as he tried to ready himself for his meeting with Winderson.

Don’t think about climbing those concrete steps to the little room. Following the sleepy-eyed old woman, climbing up from what should have been the top floor of the narrow, pyramid-shaped skyscraper.
Spiraling like a nautilus, those steps, up and up.

Don’t think about the old spinster’s face
. . . though it wasn’t at all a sinister face. But when she turned to him—rosy-cheeked, bright eyes of some dark color you couldn’t quite identify; bluish hair in a bell shape, like that of any number of old ladies; her teeth so perfect and white, much too perfect for a woman her age—it affected him like touching Inimicalene.

“Almost there,” the spinster had said brightly, eyes dancing with delight. “Never quite but almost! Goes on forever. Who was that old Greek gent, said you couldn’t go anywhere because any distance could be divided again and again, smaller and smaller, so it went on forever? Yet here we are, here we are!”

In the dream . . .

In the dream they had stood on the topmost landing of the entire building; and she had opened a shabby plastic-amalgam door to the topmost room, a room no bigger than a broom closet, itself shaped like a pyramid. Then she stood aside and gestured for him to enter. Her manner was that of a kindly nurse in a maternity ward, ushering him into the presence of one of life’s sacred joys.

He had stepped through and seen that the only furniture in the room was an old, flaking wooden kitchen table—a table he almost recognized, perhaps from his father’s tiny kitchen—and on it, a wooden tray filled with dirt. In the dirt were human faces—unfamiliar yet almost known to him—seven of them, staring straight up as if the faces were the caps of big mushrooms. Each one—though only a face, its temples and jawline flush with the black soil—was alive, was squirming, fidgeting within itself. The eyes rolling; the mouths opening, gasping, murmuring without words, a little drool escaping the corners of their open, mumbling lips: five men and two women.

As he had stepped closer, seven pairs of eyes had swiveled to fix on him, and the babyish fear in their expressions turned to idiotic joy.

“Now if you’ll just feed them,” came the old woman’s chirpy voice in the dream, “everyone’s future will be happy . . . happily . . . joyfully . . . to”—her words fragmenting as the dream broke up—“completionate . . . fantastible, joynicating . . . razzle suckle . . . Steve . . . Stevie.”

“Mr. Isquerat?”

He nearly leapt from his seat. “Yes?”

“Mr. Winderson will see you now.”

“Coffee, Stephen?”

Here was Mr. Dale Winderson, the billionaire, offering to pour him, a junior executive, a cup of coffee. But it wouldn’t do to be obsequious, to insist on pouring his own coffee.

“Sure. Thank you, sir.”

“You can call me Dale, Stephen. Your
father
called me Bratboy.” He chuckled. Winderson was a tall, good-looking man with thick black hair, wearing a silk San Francisco Giants jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He had permanent smile lines etched around his eyes and mouth.

“Bratboy, sir? Not really.”

“Oh yes, really! I didn’t mind.”

The office was enormous—it was a good eighty feet to the ceiling with the square footage of about a two-story house. The sparseness of its furnishings reflected an elegant minimalism that only emphasized the volume. There were a sofa, Winderson’s broad, Chinese-lacquer desk, two chairs—leather, not Inimicalene—and a few paintings. The window wall revealed the stalagmite caviness of downtown San Francisco: a few copters darting like mutated dragonflies, the new monorail slithering over the Bay Bridge.

Winderson stood in front of the tinted window, pouring coffee at a mahogany serving table on casters. Despite the tinting and the gray sky there was a certain glare, and only when Winderson brought Stephen his coffee—in a black mug with the WW logo emblazoned in gold on the side—did he realize that Winderson had hair plugs of some kind and that the expression on his face, with its cheerful lines, was more or less printed there. His expressions were garments, like his casual clothing.

Trying not to stare, Stephen sipped a little coffee and pretended to admire the view.

“Your father was a great guy,” Winderson was saying, as he sat on the edge of his desk, stretching his legs out.

Stephen sat in the black leather chair across from the desk; the big office seemed to whisper of opportunity, of privilege.

“Old Barry . . .” Winderson shook his head as if at some cherished memory. “Your dad took me under his wing when I came to Stanford. He was my roommate, a year older—but it was more than an obligation. He
liked
helping people find their way. And he’d go the distance for a pal.”

Stephen felt grief pierce his giddiness for a moment. His father, a grade school teacher, had indeed been a good man. He’d had his problems—a tendency toward moody withdrawal, and he’d almost destroyed his marriage with an affair—but he’d loved his son, and made sure Stephen felt it. He had died two years before of cancer, after a cruelly protracted battle.
The insurance companies crapped out on me, son. The HMO dropped me, of course, long ago. So I spent everything on treatments. I shouldn’t have. I should’ve known it was too late. What that means is I’ve got nothing to leave you—except a tired old favor. A man owes me a favor. You’ve heard of Dale Winderson . . . what I did for him—well, he owes me. We were roommates, and he can get you in at the top of his company. I don’t really know what they do there, exactly—chemicals or refining or something. But if you don’t like it, you can always move on. You’ll be one of the people you wanted to be. . . . I mean, you know—you can use your MBA.

What had he meant, “one of the people you wanted to be”? Why had he put it like that?

Stephen had dabbled in online day trading, stocks of all kinds, since he’d turned eighteen. He’d lost as much as he’d made at it, but it had always been small investments, and hence small losses—and the excitement had whetted his appetite.

He didn’t want to be like his father, teaching kids who didn’t care. He wanted to be one of the people who mattered in the world.

“Your dad,” Dale was saying, “well, he was really there for me. I owe him. I mean it was more than just shepherding me through school. Did he, um, tell you what it was that he, ah . . . ?”

“No, sir. Dale.”

“Well. All that matters is, what he did for me got you the job. I won’t pretend that your grades did it, though they were respectable. And now it’s going to get you another opportunity. . . .”

He paused, sipped coffee, looking at Stephen over the top of his mug. Waiting.

Waiting for what?
Stephen wasn’t sure. He cleared his throat and took a stab at it.

“Dale—I’m here at WW because I want to be. I mean—I want to be part of the—”—

“Team, right? You want to grow with the company. Son, you’ve already been hired. You don’t have to give me that tired old speech. I just wonder . . . do you know what the world is really like? And what our place in it really is? Of course you don’t. Almost no one does. You’re an alert kid—and you caught our interest with that Dirvane 17 business you brought up.”