Fallen Masters (25 page)

“Mr. President … how are you feeling, sir?”

POTUS opened his eyes slowly and tried to focus, but the lights in the room seemed overly bright and somewhat painful.

“I was tackled, pinned down.…” He remembered a more grotesque pain that seemed never to end. Then nothing. Then this. What
was
this?

“I might feel better if you could turn down the lights just a bit. I think I might be having a migraine. Or—maybe it is something else. I have a feeling it was something more, something worse than a migraine, but I don’t know what it is. I also have no idea where I am, and worse, I don’t even know when or how I got here.”

“Sir. I need you to just lie still.” The voice was still disembodied, and had a somewhat metallic quality to it, as if coming from a speaker.

“You need me to lie still? Who are you? Where are you?”

“I’m right here, sir. Please stay as still as you can. You were shot.”

“Shot? My wife, my son? Where are they? Are they all right?”

“Your family is safe and fine. They were proceeding to another part of the auditorium when it happened, and they were evacuated swiftly from the premises. There was only one casualty.”

“Good. Did they get the person who shot me?”

“Yes, sir … they did. He got a few rounds off before Secret Service brought him down.”

“Who was he?”

“His name was Lee Timothy. He was a nobody, an antiwar protester who somehow managed to be on the honor guard detail. It seems he lost his father and two brothers in the line of duty in the Middle East and Africa.”

“Then he wasn’t a nobody,” POTUS said. “He was an American who has paid a great price for our freedom. I know how painful that must have been for him. But I am happy to hear you report there were no casualities.”

“But there was a casualty. One casualty, as I said before.”

“Dammit! Please tell me it wasn’t Freddy! He must have told me a hundred times that nothing would happen to me on his watch … that he would take a bullet for me if he had to. Was it Freddy?”

“No, it was not.”

“Who, then?”

“Sir. It was you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How badly am I hurt?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet?”

“No. I don’t feel any particular pain.” POTUS made a quick pass over his body with his hands. “I can’t find any wounds.”

“In truth, sir, you can’t even find your body.”

“What? That’s a strange thing to say.”

“Think about it.”

The person speaking to him was standing right over him, looking down at him.

“Damn. Martin Sheen!”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“You look exactly like Martin Sheen. He’s one of my all-time favorite actors. He played the President on TV.”

“I look exactly like you want me to look.”

“Really? That’s a strange comment. And this is one strange debrief. What am I doing here? And where is
here
?”

*   *   *

Whoever it was that had been talking to him disappeared as memories of the event began coming back. He remembered now, exiting the car and starting through the corridor provided by the honor guard, returning their salutes. He could see the men, from eighty-six-year-old Clyde Barnes, the World War II vet (how did he know Clyde Barnes’s name—and how did he know that Sergeant Barnes had landed on D-Day?), to twenty-one-year-old Logan McMurtry, who had been to Afghanistan twice (and how did he know that?). He couldn’t remember meeting either of them.

Then he remembered seeing Lee Timothy, who was second from the far end on the left side. He brought his M1 rifle from the present arms position to a firing position. He fired twice, and POTUS could clearly remember the .30-caliber bullets going into his chest. He had not worn his bulletproof vest. He hated the damn things.

Wait a minute. If the bullets hit me in the chest, why am I not wounded?

Again he ran his hands over his chest, but this time, he wasn’t sure he felt anything at all, including his chest. What was it the man who sounded like a movie star—he couldn’t place exactly which one—had said to him? That he couldn’t even find his body?

Wait a minute. If I am the casualty, then that clearly means that I am—what? Injured? Dead? Is that possible? Am I dead!

Wow! I thought you didn’t feel anything when you were dead. But that’s not true. Dead feels like a headache. And a powerful one, at that. Have I been shot in the head? I will need some heavenly Advil ASAP!

POTUS sat up and started to look around, but everywhere he looked, all he saw were rays and shafts of light around him like swords from the sky.

Hmmmm. Sky? Does here—Heaven—the hereafter—even have a sky? Am I in the sky? I have a lot of questions for a dead guy. As soon as my adviser returns, I am going—

“Yes?” Without even a millisecond passing after he had this thought his guide was standing there again.

“You don’t look like Martin Sheen anymore.”

“Who do I look like now?”

“You don’t look like anything. At least, nothing that I can describe. Are you an angel? Are you a ghost? What do I call you?”

“Call me IRA.”

“IRA?”

“Yes.
I-R-A.
Intellectual Research Adviser. I appeared to you in the form that you would find acceptable. You would expect a senior member of the Secret Service detail to be with you, so I assumed the role. You are the one who projected the Martin Sheen image on me. You have many questions, I know—and I will answer some of them immediately, and others not quite yet. But there is much work to do.”

“Work? I have work to do here?”

“Absolutely. What do you think happens when you die? You think it’s all milk and honey from now on? Well, that, goddamn it, isn’t going to happen.” IRA winced. “Oops, sorry, sir! Not you, sir,” he said to POTUS. “The Big Boss, sir. I mean the Creator. He asks that the name not be used in vain.”

“So I’ve always heard,” POTUS said.

“Right. All right, let me try this again. When you die, you don’t get a harp, you don’t get a halo, and you don’t get the universal book of knowledge. You’ve always heard that dying is a natural part of life, haven’t you?”

“I’ve heard that, yes.”

“It’s true. And that means that, even after you die, you still have to work at being you.”

“IRA, are you telling me that I am going to run the United States of America from the afterlife?”

“Not exactly. You will have a little bit of help. In fact, you will have quite a bit of help. Come with me to the Hall of Governing Wisdom.”

There was a flash of light. Or was there really a flash of light? Did POTUS just imagine it? For that matter, was he imagining all of this?

He found himself walking—yes, walking, not gliding—down a great, wide hall with floors of glistening marble, flanked on either side by beautiful Corinthian columns. POTUS had never seen anything close to this; even Saddam Hussein’s most elaborate palaces seemed like chicken coops compared to this. He wished he could call Steven Spielberg or George Lucas to make a special effects film of the place, but even that would not be able to capture the beauty all around him.…

Without consciously walking toward them, POTUS found himself standing beside one of the columns. Was he standing? When he reached out to touch one of the columns, he perceived no physical denseness to it. Yet this column, and all the other columns, had shape and structure. And something else. They seemed to vibrate, and to give off a beautiful musical chord, like a bridge written by Bach, or Beethoven, or Vivaldi.

“These columns aren’t really here, are they?” POTUS asked.

“They are here because you put them here. Everything here is thought and energy.”

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me I know enough about architectural design to imagine something like this?”

“Not exactly.”

“IRA, I haven’t been this confused by something someone is supposed to be teaching me since my first week of calculus in the Academy. You aren’t making, if you will excuse the language, a hell of a lot of sense.”

“I’ll try to do better,” IRA said. “Everything here has shape and design, and there is a grand architecture for all the archetypes.”

“Right,” POTUS said, the expression in his voice clearly showing that he still had no idea what IRA was talking about. It would take him a while to absorb all that was happening. He felt rushed, pushed, propelled—but to what end? He could not even guess.

“Come, they are gathering now.”

“They? Who are they?”

“To put it in a form you can understand, I’ll say that they are the Council of Elders. Think Parliament, or your Congress.”

“Ahh, so there is some structure to this place.”

“Yes. But you cannot contribute just yet. They will be expecting you when you are ready—but for now, all you can do—all you will do, is observe.”

The members of the Council, men and women, were sitting at a great round table. They were meeting in a room that had textured white wainscoting halfway up the walls, then marble above. An unbelievably large chandelier hung over the table. All the men had silver hair and were dignified looking, the women had brindled hair and possessed an aura of beauty. There was an appropriate racial mixture to the group, and even as POTUS looked at them, he realized that he wasn’t “seeing” them at all.

This room, the chandelier, the table, and the members of the council had all been created in his own mind. Somehow, he understood that, that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They were
there;
he just needed a frame of reference for them, and his mind had created that frame of reference.

Slowly—all too slowly from POTUS’s perspective—he was learning and experiencing some amazing things. How had all this come into existence? It wasn’t all just in his mind, though his mind—his soul, really—was forming “sights” and “sounds” to fill his consciousness with images and ideas. It was all still very foreign to him, yet somehow familiar … he wondered whether this was what
eternity
meant: Experiences and images that were always and everywhere present, the same yet constantly changing, always had been and always would be. And he had been invited to step into the stream of eternal consciousness at this time—as measured in earthly time, that is—and for all time. This was his new home, he realized, and he was being called upon to make new choices, each and every moment of his new existence. When would it end? Probably never, he thought. Nor did he want it to.

CHAPTER

47

There was a barely perceptible and unintelligible murmur among the Council members; then Mr. Pennington held up his finger to call for attention.

Mr. Pennington?

Suddenly he was no longer POTUS; he was six-year-old Marcus Jackson on the way home from school on Chicago’s South Side when three older and much larger white boys stepped out in front of him.

“Where are you going, colored boy?” one of them taunted.

“I’m going home.”

“Not before you shine my shoes—boy.” He stuck his foot out and the other two boys laughed.

Young Marcus did nothing.

“Shine my shoes, or we’re goin’ hurt you, bad.”

Marcus got down on one knee, and with a broad smile, the bully lifted his foot. He took the bully’s foot, then jerked it up quickly, throwing the bully on his back. The other two boys attacked him then, but like an avenging angel, a gray-haired white man who lived on the corner was on them. He pulled the two bullies off the Marcus, then helped him back to his feet. The three bullies ran off.

“That’s right, run!” Mr. Pennington said. “Every time you little punks come by my house, you had better run!”

Marcus Jackson was wearing shorts, and Pennington brushed the dirt away from Marcus’s knees. “That was a brave thing you did, son,” he said. He invited the child in for milk and cookies, and he visited him often after that.

Pennington was a retired army master sergeant who had won the Silver Star in Korea. It was Pennington who persuaded the young man to go to West Point, and ultimately came to stand proudly in the audience with his mother to watch his graduation and commissioning. Captain Jackson was in Germany when Pennington died, but as soon as he returned to the States, he visited Pennington’s grave.

But even as POTUS stood there remembering Pennington, he realized that the Governor of the Council was not Pennington, and now he no longer even looked like him.

He looked around and recognized no one. What he did not yet realize was that these Council elders had not been incarnate for centuries … so he would have no way of knowing them.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Council,” the Governor said. “We are gathered here today to discuss the territories for which we are responsible. The Dark Forces are gathering in their uniformity, and they are orchestrating the masses to bond and unite against the Light.”

Echoes of frustration were heard from the other members of the assembly.

“That’s not good.”

“We need to do something.”

“What can we do? Our options are very limited.”

“We have to do something.”

“There is very little we can do,” the Governor said. “We are bound by the rules of our Divine Creator and Source, and we cannot interfere and actually do things for mankind. We can only interface with them, and inspire them to make more positive choices. How many times do we need to go over this?”

POTUS chuckled. Had the Governor actually said
interface
?

“You do understand, don’t you, that this is cognition only, that nobody is actually speaking?” IRA said. “You are creating the language you think you hear, and thus you are responsible for the vocabulary.”

“OMG! That’s like Doctor Who’s Tardis. It translates the alien languages so it all sounds like English. Oh, and how does the Big Guy feel about the OMG reference?” POTUS asked.

“Touché. Well, I didn’t vocalize my thought just now, but your interpretation of it was accurate.”

The Council had interrupted its conversation during the exchange between POTUS and IRA, and for the moment there was not only no sound, but no motion either. It was as if a hold button had been pushed.