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The Oral Jerry Swagger had five homes, now, scattered across the U.S., including one on the East Coast, near Philadelphia where he had had the meeting with Larry Meier. But his house in Pasadena--it was a mansion, really--was in some sense his real home, his base. For it was in Pasadena that he had gotten his start, building a radio empire that reached listeners around the globe. In more recent years more and more of the media budget had been devoted to television, but although the work had continued to grow, viewers had never quite trusted his image the same way listeners had trusted his voice. OJ's home in Pasadena was his favorite, but he only opened it to special visitors. God was a planner, a builder, and He in no way scorned wealth. But OJ was wary of the slew of media stories that had once alluded to the opulence of his home's furnishings. "Gold brick- a-brack" they had written. Illiterate reporters. Uncultured, slovenly scribblers. They seemed incapable of understanding the finer things of life. To the Oral Jerry Swagger, culture had always connoted British royalty, and he had decorated his home with quality purchases from Harrods in London--articles he had selected himself. Yes, there was goldware at the dinner table, but that was a matter of respect. Carnal, material people--the kings and prime ministers and educators he invited as weekend guests--only respected material possessions. And if they paid homage to a Man of God for the wrong reasons--well, it was still better to be respected than not. It was good to get back to the West Coast. He always slept better in Pasadena. The nightmares of years past ("that thing" was the way he thought of it now) had gradually faded, and he normally felt the security of being surrounded by the familiar and precious things God had given him. But for some reason tonight, his first day back from the East Coast, he turned and tossed, and when he would briefly awaken, he seemed to hear voices echoing in the room. Perhaps he had a touch of fever, he thought. But later he realized he was sleeping restfully. "See, I am sleeping peacefully," he said to someone in his dream. Then, silently, to himself: "You are dreaming." Space and time slowly solidified, and in his dream he was consciously aware of that time in the early days of his organization, when the security guards had rounded up a crazed prophet who was wandering the property. Being a little unsure of themselves, they had brought him to OJ's private office. The man had focused his gaze in awe above OJ's head, and asked: "How is it possible that both an angel and a demon hover over you at the same time?" At that time it had made OJ's hair stand on end to discover the war in heaven taking place so close to home. Even now, awake in his dream, he involuntarily glanced up over his head, and saw a cowled figure hovering. There was a blurry mist where the face should be. He opened his eyes and sat up with a start. Was he awake, or just dreaming he was awake? OJ turned on the light. Yes, he was definitely in his own room. He started to swing back the covers, but then felt the wetness under his hand. There was a line of white across the bed. He sniffed his fingers. The smell was briny. He brushed the white line with a finger and sniffed again. It was ocean foam. Somewhere he thought he heard a door click. Quickly he picked up the phone to summon the housekeeper. Was she staying tonight? He really didn't know. And it didn't matter. The line was dead. OJ rose quickly and began to turn on all the lights. The bedroom light. The light in his adjacent study. The third floor hall light. Nothing. Gradually he worked his way through the house, turning on all the lights. There was no one there. He picked up the phone again. The line was good. He dialed Security. "Yes, Mr. Swagger," the voice answered promptly. "I thought I heard someone trying to break into the house." "We'll be right there, Mr. Swagger. Do you want us to come inside?" "No. No, just check around the outside. What time is it?" "It's ten minutes after 4 o'clock, sir." OJ returned to the third floor, leaving all the lights on. I need to settle down, he thought. He remembered he had unopened mail in his study. He would look through it. And that was when he saw the book, lying there in the center of his desk. It hadn't been there earlier in the evening. The Book of the Antichrist. He knew the author. He could never forget the name. Jack Parsons. Involuntarily OJ sat down at his desk, and began to read the dimly remembered passages.
OJ stared at the final page for a long time. The date was altered, OJ knew. 1984: the name of George Orwell's novel. Orwell had originally titled it 1948, because the events he was writing about were occurring in his own time. But an editor thought the title too controversial, and so had inverted the last two digits. The correct date in Jack Parson's book was 1948. Yes, OJ remembered Jack Parson's book well. It had been given to him in 1952 when he was a young man twenty-two years of age. And he remembered the other book, also: 1984. The substitution meant someone knew. Someone knew the evil that he, OJ, had once done and forever atoned for. "That thing" had returned to haunt him. And there, sitting at his desk, with all the lights on, surrounded by the Godly culture of Harrods, the terror swept over him like a tidal wave. Dean Malik sat at one of the small round tables in the basement of Larry Blake's Bar on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, nursing a Dos Equis. The baseball game was still playing on the wide screen, which would soon be rolled up to make way for the band. He wasn't sure who was on. Perhaps Pamela Rose and Peter Walsh with The Blue Monday Party. Zak, sitting across from him, blew smoke at the exposed pipes hanging from the ceiling. Dean could tell he was tense. But then Zak was always that way, veins filled with a natural flow of amphetamines. "You've gone over everything?" "I've been through it. There won't be any mistakes," Dean said. Dean's real name was Salah ad-Din, but they had always called him Dean at school. He was the son of a former consular official. Zak was Yitzhaq Adolph Alfasi. "I thought Jews didn't name their kids Adolph anymore," Dean had remarked, on hearing the decipherment of the middle initial. Zak had shrugged. "I was named after my grandfather." The explanation made partial sense to Dean. Zak's other grandfather was Yitzhaq. Not much you could do about the balance of genealogical power. "I have to have it on tape, the documents prove nothing," Zak said. "You'll have it." A short pause. "Provided you have the money." The band began setting up. There was a bald man with a small pony tail. And a girl singer who looked something like Bette Midler. It was a dangerous game Zak was playing, Dean mused. Crossing your own people. Not that Dean cared. The Institute can go to hell, he thought, but without passion. A long time ago they had killed Dean's father at Cannes, where the family had gone for vacation. His father had been standing on a balcony below an apartment owned by an important PLO official when the Mossad had cut him in half with a Kalashnikov. The choice of weapon was apparently meant to imply a Palestinian internal dispute. But the deception was ineffective because they had assassinated the wrong man. The police were already there when Dean and his mother returned from the beach, and Dean remembered thinking irrelevantly that now they wouldn't be taking the boat over to the Iles de Lerins, to see the cell of the Man in the Iron Mask at Ste. Marguerite. Some friends got them a room at the Hotel Carlton on the Rue du Canada, and at breakfast the next day he heard people talking, shaking their heads over the mistake, but saying when you got down to it all these Arabs looked alike. What makes you think it was the Mossad, Zak had asked, when Dean told him the story. The DGSE had the apartment under surveillance, Dean said, using the French initials for La Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure. They had taken a photo of a man in the hedge moments before the killing. The man had been identified as an agent of Mossad. Zak didn't believe it. Mossad assassins killed at close range with .22 Berettas. They checked their victims carefully so no mistakes were made. They normally avoided noisy attention-attracting weapons. You looked your man in the eye, the Beretta went poof- poof, and you slipped away quietly. Dean snorted in derision. Zak was a romantic. The Mossad made mistakes like everyone else. Dean had also read the self-serving propaganda, he said, seen it in a film or two--Israeli agents wrestling with issues of morality. Bullshit. The implication seemed to be that assassination was okay as long as you had a conscience. As for innocent by- standers, Dean figured the Mossad was like any other outfit of its kind: some might agonize over the death of innocent by-standers, but most would shrug it off as as one of the risks of war. And the more fanatical wouldn't concern themselves at all, as long as the by- standers were Arab, the only good Arab being a dead one. Just like in the West Bank: when soldiers couldn't get at the actual rock-throwers, they just shot any Palestinian youth who was handy. But Zak said it probably really was Palestinian infighting. Palestinians were always killing off each other. The rival gang had simply mistaken Dean's father for the PLO official upstairs. All Mossad hits are palmed off as Palestinian infighting, Dean replied. The U.S. press dutifully passed along that interpretation because the press was centered in New York, hardly a city with an unbiased view of world politics. Christ, the city was mostly Jews and Puerto Ricans. Had Dean seen the photograph? Zak wanted to know. Yes, he had. How did he really know when, or under what circumstances, the photo was taken? He only had the DGSE's word for that. Dean didn't argue the point. But he couldn't see the French external intelligence service had any motive to lie about it. As one blues number started, some girls got up and begin dancing on the side of the room away from the stairs. Dean watched one of the girls with interest. Tight blue jeans were one of his adolescent sexual imprints, and this girl had his number. He watched the girl's undulating bottom as he thought about the Haram es-Sharif, the Temple Mount, the focus of all this duplicity. Es-Sakhra, the large Foundation Stone on the Temple Mount, was reputedly the spot where Abraham had built an altar to sacrifice his son. The Stone later served as the location of the Holy of Holies of the First and Second Jewish Temples. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the same spot was chosen by the Roman Emperor Hadrian for a new Tripartite Temple dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Then for a time the area had remained barren. When Omar Ibn Kittab conquered Jerusalem in 638 A.D., he was shocked at the Temple Mount's filthy condition and ordered it cleaned. At that time it was called Al Aqsa, "the distant place." It was the spot where a few years earlier Mohammed had ended his aerial night journey from Mecca, then ascended to heaven on the flying horse Burak. Over the Foundation Stone, which marked the actual spot of Mohammed's ascent, the Caliph Abd-el-Malik erected an octagonal monument, the Dome of the Rock, in 691. El-Malik's son el-Walid added another building in 705: the Al Aqsa Mosque at the southern end of the Temple square. The latter structure was built on an unstable foundation of rubble, and was consequently destroyed by earthquake a number of times, and had to be repeatedly rebuilt. Christian Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, and the first Christian Kings of Jerusalem used the Al Aqsa Mosque as their palace. Then administration of the Mount was turned over to the Knights Templar. Al Aqsa, which the Templars renamed Solomon's Temple, served as the Templar headquarters, and the Dome of the Rock became the Templum Domini, the Temple of the Lord. "You sure you want to do this?" Dean asked Zak. "Yes, I'm sure." "Tell me something. When you enter the Temple Mount through the Moroccan Gate--that is, walking up the ramp past the Wailing Wall--there is a large sign, put there by the Chief Rabbis of Israel, saying under Jewish law it is forbidden for anyone to enter the Temple Mount area. Why is that? Why won't Orthodox Jews go there?" "No one is qualified to sacrifice the Red Heifer," Zak said. Dean listened to the band for a while. "I don't get it," he said finally. "All Jews have been unclean since about the Sixth Century A.D." "Why is that?" "In Jewish law you become unclean in various ways. Like being around the dead bodies of other Jews, for example. Say you go to a hospital where there's a corpse or visit a cemetary. Once you become unclean you are prohibited from entering sacred areas like the Temple until you go through the cleansing ritual of Numbers 19. To do that you need the scouring power of the water of impurity, containing the ashes of a sacrificed Red Heifer. You take an unblemished Red Heifer, slay it outside the camp, and burn it with cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet string. Then you put the ashes in the water." "So why don't the Orthodox do just that?" "Only a Jewish priest who is clean can sacrifice the Red Heifer. The problem is there aren't any clean Jewish priests, because they need the ashes of a Red Heifer to become clean." "So there is no way out of the dilemma." "Not for most Jews. They have to wait until the Messiah comes. Others theorize there might be Red Heifer ashes buried in a jar somewhere under the Temple Mount." "But if it is forbidden them to enter the sacred ground of the Mount, they obviously couldn't dig for ashes." "They could tunnel under. That would be okay, because sacredness extends upward, not downward. That's why El Al doesn't fly over the Temple Mount: it would be violating sacred air space. The flights to Johannesburg used to fly over it, but planes are now prohibited from doing that. But you could look for jars of Red Heifer ashes if you first dug a tunnel under the Mount, then searched in an upward direction while staying below the surface." It made sense to Dean. Total sense. He now knew exactly what Larry Meier was up to. No man can serve two masters, Zak thought to himself, leaving the meeting with Dean. But then, he, Zak, never had. Sure, he had led Dean to think his game was one of betrayal. Just as he had told Larry Meier what Larry Meier wanted to hear. But neither Dean nor anyone else knew who Zak's true masters were. Zak didn't think of them as masters. What he was doing was . . . a joint operation. A breathing together. Half the time he didn't understand what he was doing himself. But it gave his life a higher, nobler purpose. Early on the Hoova messengers had informed Zak they came from thousands of light-years in the future. He puzzled over the seemingly nonsensical statement for many days. Had he understood them correctly? He remembered from high school physics that a light-year was a measure of distance, not of time. One light-year was the distance light travelled in a year: about six-trillion miles. How was it possible someone resided light-years in the future? The answer came to him one day when he heard a friend say, "I live twenty minutes away." His friend could have said, "I live five miles away." But knowing the actual distance was less helpful: depending on the speed of traffic it might take you five minutes to go those five miles, or it might take you an hour. Most people in daily life were more concerned with the time it took to get from here to there, so they used a time-measure of distance: twenty minutes away. In a similar way, Zak realized, the Hoovans used a distance-measure of time: the number of miles they had to travel to get from Then back to Now. How far they had to travel depended on the rate of time flow. Zak wrote it out in the form of an equation. If T was the number of years the Hoovans came back into the past; D, the number of miles they had to travel to get here; and c, the speed of light in miles per year, then the expression would be invariant in any inertial frame of reference. Was that right? Zak was attending Cal State Los Angeles at the time contact was made. Cal State L.A. was a commuter college perched on top of a semi-isolated hill, and the nearest free parking was in an ungraded dirt lot a quarter of mile away. Zak would walk from the lot to the edge of campus, then climb the wooden steps up the vertical hillside, arriving at the summit totally exhausted. From the summit's far side was a commanding view of the freeway interchange below. Zak was an indifferent student. He worked most days for a roofing company, and his attendance at Cal State L.A. was dictated by its full selection of evening classes. He had Fridays off, however, and it was the one day he arrived on campus early. Streaking was popular among students that summer, and one Friday at high noon four of them took off their clothes, and went running along the campus's central walkway. Their timing was impeccable. The college was seeking to end the fad, and the following week two other streakers were arrested and formally charged with indecent exposure. Plea bargaining was allowed, however, and the pair were released when they agreed to publish a confession in the student newspaper, urging any would-be future streakers to get psychological counselling and avoid a criminal record. Zak remembered the streaking episode well, because Hoova made contact the next day. Zak was laying shakes at a house in La Crescenta, and had worked late to finish a section of roof. He would tack a one-by-four on top of the row below as a guide to keep the next row of shakes even. Then he would drive two nails through the top of each shake into the underlying wood of the roof. Next he would roll out a layer of tar paper to cover the row of nails, sliding it far enough down to secure against leakage around the holes, but not so far the paper would show once covered with another row of shakes. Louie had come by during the afternoon to check on progress and to deliver the latest jokes. "Hey, Zak, you know the difference between a penis and a paycheck? . . . You don't have to beg your wife to blow your paycheck." Zak had grinned at that one. Louie's wife spent a lot a money on clothes, but always managed to look like a tramp anyway. "This lawyer is praying, `Oh Lord, give me that million- dollar case.' The Devil appears, and says, `You're asking the wrong person. I'll give it to you, but I want something in return.' `Sure, anything,' the lawyer says. `I want your soul, your wife's soul, the souls of your parents, and the souls of your three children.' And the lawyer says, `Okay. What's the catch?' " A few hours later it had become too dark to see, and Zak was rolling up the power cord of the circular saw. As he looked up at the mountains to the north, a bright light suddenly appeared. At first he thought a plane had just turned on its landing lights. But that didn't make sense: no landing approach angled down from the mountain crest. Then he sensed a warmth as the light fluctuated in a slow rhythm. He felt his own pulse, but his heart beat was more rapid than the cycles that came from the unknown plane. No, not plane, he felt suddenly. Whatever he was seeing was alive. The light vanished as abruptly as it had materialized. Something significant had occurred, Zak thought, but he wasn't sure what. He had a strange sense of anticipation which lasted the rest of the weekend. By Monday, however, he had pretty much forgotten the incident. In the morning he begged off time from work to drive over to Wilshire to talk to the owner of the apartment complex where he lived. Zak himself was the resident manager, and got a free apartment and a minuscule salary in return for doing miscellaneous chores, but he was getting tired of unclogging garbage disposals for families who let their kids throw plastic jacks into the kitchen sink. The owner's office was on the tenth floor, and Zak subconsciously noted that nine people got on the elevator in the first floor lobby. Each pushed a different button, lighting up floors two through ten. Zak was amazed. He began to calculate the odds of this happening. Under random ordering, nine people could fit into nine floors in 9^9 (nine to the ninth power) possible ways. But each getting off at a different floor was a case of sampling without replacement. Any one of the nine could get off at the second floor, any one of the remaining eight could get off at the third floor, etc. So there were 9! (nine factorial) total ways for the group of nine to each get off at a different floor. Thus the probability of what had happened was 9!/9^9. Or about .0009. The chance was less than one in a thousand. The elevator had a programmed voice that announced each arriving floor, and the last passenger excepting Zak got off on nine. Zak arrived at the tenth floor an hour later. Or by his watch it was an hour later. According to the building clocks, he had been between floors only a few seconds, and was easily on time for his appointment. Zak didn't know what had happened to his watch. But that night as he was falling asleep, he remembered what had occurred just after the door closed on the ninth floor. The elevator's programmed voice had begun to speak to him.
The Magician is the author of other episodes of the Jack Parsons story (http://zolatimes.com/jparart/Aparmenu.html). -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 2, No 19, June 18, 1998 |