man.
Who is this whole man I see? Someone vicious. Someone sexually corrupt. Someone consumed with money hunger. Someone racially prejudiced. Someone cocky. And angry. Oh, so angry. Why? I soon figure it out. Because life has screwed him. Yes, semblable, frere, he is owed the good life.
Having penetrated his psychology, I begin my stalk. He aids me by being observed in his meeting with Gounaris. This brings great pressure on him. I myself watch him go to the attorney appointed for him by the Family-he must be thinking, Will they blame me? Should I run and hide? So he is subconsciously attuned to a quick- getaway stake; a stake he would otherwise examine much more carefully from the outset.
I assume a breathless style of speech with a disarming homosexual cadence when I call him, talk wildly of $5,000, to get which he needs do nothing except listen, then I hang up. This arouses all of his cupidity and only a minimum of his cunning-and by leaving him stew for a few days, I assure that he will come to feel the money is already his. It is owed to him, just as the good life is owed to him!
See his anger work for me? And then I give him a sudden short deadline to get this money he deems to be rightfully his.
Ah, the moment of truth. Has the wind shifted, has the tiger caught scent of the hunter sitting up over the staked-out goat? No. He goes to await my call at an open phone near an apocryphal bookie joint on one of San Francisco’s major streets.
Safety, you see. How can he feel anything but safe there, with no easily apparent ambushes from which he can be stalked? And with the subconscious assurance that an illegal book is operating there with impunity, thus implying like immunity for his own illegal bribe-taking?
I use a cellular phone so I can walk by him as he takes the $5,000 bait, after I have given him silly instructions of how to get $10,000 more, and perhaps another $10,000, and another…
Thus I can see how he stands at the phone, can monitor pedestrian traffic up and down the street. And I can do it in total safety, because I am invisible to him.
Invisible? How can this be when I am made up in the most bizarrely eye-catching charade possible? Because he sees me only as a white man trying to be black-thus, beneath contempt, beneath notice, because black is the last thing this violently prejudiced man would want to be.
Thus, invisible.
Each night as I walk by, waiting for that moment when no other pedestrian is about so I can do my delicious deed, the boy at the all-night gas station on Army Street is placing the 11:00 p.m. call to that phone booth, letting it ring, and hanging up, touchingly delighted to get $20 each time he dials. And after Jackie-boy is no more, even more delighted to get the $100 bonus to call Stagnaro and relay my little Raptor message. Of course I get back my note from him and destroy it.
Why this slightly cumbersome charade? Because this way I leave Stagnaro my Raptor call in a voice he can never connect to me through voiceprints should he ever get one of mine. I doubt he taped the first one, which was me; why would he? At that time it was merely an isolated crank call. Am I not clever?
In closing I must tell you, since my promise is to be honest with you, that I am surprised by a rather rotten dream the night I kill Jack Lenington. I am Pharaoh’s executioner in ancient Egypt, I have died, and my maat (the orderliness and justice of my life) is being weighed in judgment by Osiris in Dat, the Egyptian underworld. Found just, I will be given eternal life. Found lacking, I will be forever dead.
All of my deeds, I argue, were from the noblest of motives. Ordered from on high. But to my terror the scale in which I am being measured tips heavily against me. How can this be?
Mighty Anubis says sadly, “You are self-righteous, O falcon-man. All of the horrors you perpetrate are for the highest of motives. But these are really the basest of motives. Selfishness, self-aggrandizement through being ‘noble’ at all times. This way you can justify any action, no matter how base. Go to eternal death, O falcon- man.”
As I fade into nothingness I wake from my dream with sweat standing on my brow. What can this mean? Bah! Humbug! It is only some ploy of my little brown walnut of a man, my gnome, my Rumpelstiltskin who crouches down at the hinge of my subconscious and denies me access to…
Enough of that nonsense! My fitful sleep since Lenington’s death will pass when I begin plotting the next assassination. The next one. Ah, that will require time, cleverness, dissimulation. I must locate, then plan, then stalk…
But I am getting ahead of myself again. Behind myself? This playing with time can be so confusing. So can playing God, but-no matter. It is what I do. While there is yet time, let us listen to more sentimentalized drivel about man’s capacity for violence from poor Will-if he would ever get to the bloody point of it all…
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Will Dalton said, “So, in sum, I will be speaking as much from speculation as from observation, as much from surmise as from scientific thesis. I will be radically interpreting many facts already in evidence, which might not be too acceptable to many brilliant and knowledgeable colleagues in the audience; mea culpa in advance, ladies and gentlemen.
“Ironically, it is science that is starting to bring us back from the edge of the pit it dug for us, trying to return us to an ordered view of our universe and our place in it.
“Most of us here are ‘historical’ scientists concerned with classification of ancient, already-extinct species, rather than experimentation, thus have never been guilty of misusing Nature or trying to take man outside his rightful place in the universe. Paleontologists try to understand what Nature has already done, not try to change what she is doing currently, So we don’t need power, we need sturdy knees, sharp eyes, nimble fingers, and much more generous grants than we currently get.
“Recently, theoretical subatomic physics has joined us by shifting ground from materialism to idealism, by hinting we can almost do without this material world, since it is just a by-blow of energy. Quite different from scientism’s ‘matter in motion’ theorem, and surprisingly close to the ancient animism modern materialist man rejected long ago-the ani mism which says everything that exists has the wind of life blowing through it.
“Wind of Life. Energy. The ancient Greek concept of pneuma. Not really much to choose among them, is there?
“At the same time, biologists and ecologists are now telling us there are limitations built right into the cosmos concerning how much we can misuse and how badly we can mistreat Nature. Because we are destroying the ecosphere, the shadow of that nonbeing science thought it had banished five centuries ago now looms over us again with empirical evidence to back it up. And the ancient word ‘pollution’ is being used again in its original religious sense by-science.
“To every primitive culture known, pollution means the same thing: the bad breath of God striking man. Pneuma on a bad day, perhaps. Infection, contagion that requires quarantine, ritual cleansing, purification of anyone exposed to it. Which is what modern science says about our modern pollutions, be they toxic waste, corrupted water supplies, AIDS, or the numerous other infections plaguing mankind with their deadly presence.
“Can we count on science to handle our modern pollutions? Unfortunately, no. Through no fault of its own, it isn’t up to the job. We cry to science, ‘Author! Author!’ but we are shouting in an empty theater. We demand a lineage, a legitimacy to answer ethical and moral questions about our place in nature. We demand solutions to our problems, but science can’t tell us what to do because it can’t tell us who we are, where we came from, or where we are going. It doesn’t know. It was never designed to know.
“Leaving us who, exactly, to legitimize our existence? Nature? Science, walking in religion’s footsteps, has demythologized Nature, robbed her of reverence, treated her as a blind whore who will spread her legs for any passerby. The great religions? God, not Nature, is their measure. Science itself? Science’s mosaic shows us as the measure of things, because we are the creature, quite literally, who can measure them.
“Since this is hubris so horrific it sets the teeth on edge, we realize we need a very different kind of knowledge from that which science offers us, a knowledge that cannot uncover scientific facts but can uncover their meaning. Because science has a hard time with the beginning of our story. With beginnings in general. With the intersection of the known and the unknown. With the moment of being or of nonbeing.
