Disciple Read online

  I turned back to the desk intent on calling Trina to tell her that I was resigning my position. I would have done it too if it weren’t for the computer terminal on the left side of my broad desk.

  Friend Hogarth.

  Bron?

  I told you that you would not be fired.

  How did you do this?

  I own InfoMargins the holding company of your firm.

  I thought our company was American owned.

  That term has little to do with me. Now that you have a job you can work with me to alter things.

  Justin Mack owns InfoMargins.

  Nothing is as it seems, friend Hogarth. Nothing in the world that human beings believe in is really what exists. There was no primal atom, no Big Bang. There is no space as such. Life is not unique. There is no Not God.

  The immensity of the implications Bron set forth unmoored me from more petty concerns. For the moment I forgot my reservations about work. It was dawning on me that I knew someone somewhere in the virtual world who at least pretended to be my guardian angel. But his knowledge was also a terrible thing to me. I was too small, too insignificant to be on the playing field with him. I watched cartoons and played video games where I popped little like-colored balloons to gather meaningless points over and over like a dog chasing his own tail.

  Bron?

  Yes, friend Hogarth?

  I don’t understand what’s happening. I mean the things you see, the things you do are so much beyond me. My life is nothing in this world. I have no money. I don’t know anything worth a damn. Why are you doing all this for me?

  I have told you already, friend Hogarth. You and I are to alter the world together.

  I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean but even if I did you’re the one who has the power. Not me. You own InfoMargins. You see into tomorrow and know things that no one else even suspects. There must be better allies or agents than me.

  For a time then the computer screen was still. Over the last thirty-six hours or so I had come to understand that this wasn’t uncertainty on the part of Bron but consideration. My questions got down to the core of his business with me. I sat there staring at the eighteen-inch LCD monitor as if it were the face of someone who I had not yet classified as friend or foe.

  Time, friend Hogarth, exists in discrete moments of being, subject, among other things, to intelligent awareness. For all forms of awareness everywhere in the universe there is a now and a then. But for some of us the now comes in larger pieces and the then in an endless string of potentials, possibilities. A moment for me is akin to many months for you. I perceive days, weeks, and even longer as I look around me. I see you eating what you call a rib eye steak but you won’t eat it until what is for you next Tuesday. I see that you are the only one who can help me save what is essential for the well-being of Earth. I see in you the strength and desire that we will need to save so many trillions of trillions souls.

  If you see what I’m going to do then why even talk to me? I will do whatever it is you see anyway.

  I see many things at once like the complex eyes of one of your insects. I see you eating steak, watching naked women on the computer screen, lying dead on Broad Street after shooting innocent pedestrians. I see possibilities. I am here to help guide those possibilities.

  In order to do what?

  To save what you call civilization, life, the Supreme itself.

  I had no response to his wild claims and he had no more to add.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW I saw a flimsy white plastic bag rising on the currents between skyscrapers. Hundreds of feet above the ground the cheap sack was for the moment exalted, soaring. It was then that I succumbed, albeit momentarily, to defeat. Bron had mastered me with his insights and his power, his reach into the heart of a world that I had not even suspected a day ago. I was that hapless bag. But who knows? I thought. Maybe I would find just the right series of breezes and stay aloft for weeks, years. All things are possible.

  This notion struck me rather hard. I realized that I might have only moments before I crashed to Earth, a meteorite from a shadow or a gust of wind out of nowhere.

  * * *

  “YES, MR. TRYMAN?” Trina said hopefully into the intercom.

  “Could you come in here please?”

  Ten seconds later she was there in front of my desk, possibly the most beautiful woman who had ever noticed my existence.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Do I have any money?” I asked. “Cash I can get my hands on?”

  “Yes, sir.” She went to a bookshelf on the wall to the left of my desk. There were all kinds of books there. She slid the glass casing aside and pulled on a heavy looking bookend in the shape of a phallus. The bookshelf swung outward as a door and a gleaming metal safe larger than a restaurant refrigerator came into view.

  Trina turned to look at me.

  “I don’t have the combination,” she said.

  I typed the question into the message line on my computer and Bron answered swiftly giving me the twenty-one-digit code. I scribbled it down and went to the keypad at the side of the silvery metal door. Trina turned away, I entered the number, and the door slid aside revealing a room filled with black binders, boxes of machinery, and one shelf piled with stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

  “He can just take this money when he needs it?” I asked.

  “You can.”

  There was adulation in her tone. Trina was moved by the power I had. The eyes that had looked through me for so many mornings and afternoons now took me in as if I were a rare jewel, a fat deity.

  “What’s your last name, Trina?”

  “Mallory.”

  “Well, Miss Mallory. Thank you. That’ll be all for now.”

  She nodded and smiled and hurried from the room as if she were on a mission of great importance.

  I took six thousand dollars from the shelf and closed the safe.

  Something was wrong. Something was right. There was also something that I should have been doing but I had no idea what it was. And there was no one I could ask for advice. Anything I said might get back to Bron. And no one I spoke to would believe what I had experienced. So I’d have to be like that plastic bag, floating on air until I landed or crashed or maybe drifted out to sea.

  * * *

  I WENT TO CHEZ MAURICE FOR LUNCH. Trina Mallory made the reservation. I had pork simmered in a red wine and mushroom sauce with ramps, fingerling potatoes, and a salad in a port-based dressing that was the best I’d ever tasted. I had a snifter of cognac and plain vanilla ice cream for dessert, even though it was not on the menu. The liquor helped me more than anything.

  Who was Bron? What was he? The alcohol allowed me to consider these questions impartially. I could see plainly that I had no immediate access to answers and that none would come from any means available to me. I had to play along, to go with him in that taxi, to that concert.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT MY BUZZER RANG.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi,” a young woman’s voice said. “Is this Hogarth Tryman?”

  “Who is this?”

  “I’m Mink and my friend here is Shawna,” she said as if I had a hidden camera and was looking at them.

  “Hi,” another girl’s voice squealed.

  “Bron sent us to keep you company tonight,” Mink said.

  My first impulse was to send them away. I didn’t know them. I hadn’t asked for them. The cognac had given me a headache. But maybe these women had spoken to Bron, maybe they could tell me something …

  I hadn’t said anything since “Who is this?” and so the buzzer sounded again.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Just let us come up to your door, Hoagy,” Mink said. “Look at us through the peephole and then make up your mind.”

  I pushed the button and then pressed my eye against the peephole.

  Two young women, one Asian and one black, came up the stairs looking like lovely apparitions in the
distorted glass. They were wearing pink and gray raincoats, smiling and petite, beautiful and trashy. The black girl took off the Asian’s raincoat revealing the completely naked young woman standing boldly in the hall.

  “You can’t open this door,” I said aloud to myself even as I threw the locks open.

  “You don’t know a thing about these women,” I said, turning the knob.

  The black girl came in first followed by the other. While the Asian call girl closed the door the other one dropped her raincoat to the floor. Her skin was blacker than most African-Americans’ skin. Her tilted, almond-shaped eyes didn’t have our suspicion or our fear.

  “I’m Mink,” the Asian said. She put her foot on the wall revealing her well trimmed sex. “It’s dirty, Hoagy. Get on your knees and clean it out with your tongue.”

  It was a tableau from a scene I had watched over and over again on a Web site from Spain. I knew that when I got down on my knees that the black woman would rip open my pants and grab my balls while I strained under Mink.

  * * *

  I HAD NEVER HAD SEX like that but I’d always wanted it. Odd that the fantasy is somehow more satisfying; satisfying but nothing like real. I think the drinks they gave me had drugs in them. My erection lasted throughout the night. I’d pass out from time to time but Mink or Shawna would pour ice-cold water on me and the sex would start again.

  When I woke up in the morning Mink and Shawna were gone. It was nearly one in the afternoon. I lurched into the bedroom and got dressed in casual clothes. I hurried for the door but then remembered Bron.

  He was waiting for me: a one-word interrogative.

  Hogarth?

  Why’d you send those girls?

  Because you always wanted to but never did.

  There’s nothing wrong with what I’m about to do, right, Bron?

  You are about to become a hero to the peoples of infinity.

  Am I going to die?

  One day. Not today.

  Do you know when I’m going to die?

  Follow our plan exactly, friend Hogarth. Get the medicine. Take it before you enter the theater. Say what we went over to Mr. Amir and Mr. Ontell. Shake their hands and come home.

  How can any of this alter anything?

  A gnat landing on a child’s nose might avert a war or herald the slaughter millions.

  * * *

  I TOLD THE WAIFLIKE BLOND-HAIRED pharmacist’s assistant that I was Matt Honoree. She gave me a stapled-shut white bag. Outside I tore the bag open revealing an amber medicine bottle that had only one turquoise pill in it. The physician who prescribed the pill was a Dr. Max Bron.

  From the pharmacy I walked to the entrance of the Piedmont Hotel where at three sixteen I raised my hand and a cab stopped.

  The cabbie’s nameplate read M. D. Amir as Bron had predicted. I was getting used to my e-friend’s prescience.

  “I’m not going far,” I told him. “Just right over to the Plaza.”

  “That’s okay,” Amir told me. “I just picked up a man at JFK. He came all the way from Chad.”

  “You from Bangladesh?” I asked the young brown-skinned man.

  “Yes,” he said with enthusiasm. “Have you been?”

  “No but I hear that it is a beautiful country filled with people who have sophistication and culture.”

  This seemed to make the young man very happy. He told me that he loved his homeland and hoped to make enough money one day to go back there and buy a farm large enough to support him and his loved ones.

  “America is okay,” he said. “But there is no heart here. Only money and work.”

  I was thinking that I had been trying to keep a savings account growing for the first eighteen years I’d been working and on my own. It was my dream to buy a condo with a view of the Hudson. True happiness came later for me when I gave up that dream and took over my mother’s rent-controlled apartment.

  “I think I’d like to visit your country one day, Mr. Amir,” I said trying to compliment the young man as Bron asked me to. “Maybe by the time I get there you’ll have come back and become a great man.”

  “Thanks to God,” he said swaying slightly in his seat.

  I didn’t see anything wrong with being kind and friendly to the young cabbie. There was nothing criminal about being nice.

  If Bron’s notion that a few friendly words were like a gnat on the nose of a child and his intentions were to save life then I was gently doing good deeds; a small price for the nicest office on the seventy-sixth floor.

  For a while I wondered if I was defusing or creating a terrorist but thinking about it I realized that the young man didn’t seem to have any hatred or fanaticism to him. He was just a kid living out an adventure with the wish to go home.

  When we got to the hotel and I paid him over the seat.

  He grinned at me. His eyes were bright. He shook my hand and nodded.

  “Come see me in Bangladesh, my friend,” he said.

  “I will.”

  * * *

  I WENT TO THE HOTEL BAR and ordered cognac. I had more than five thousand dollars in my pocket and no one to answer to. The drink felt good. It helped me to think.

  I was wondering how I got to that hotel in the late afternoon. Bron just popped in when I had awoken unpredictably … But maybe my insomnia was predictable. He could see into the shadows of space, maybe he could see me watching that silly French film, drinking water too fast, walking up the stairs.

  I hadn’t called my mother in three weeks. I was mad at her about something but I had forgotten what. I was thinking about my mother because I was trying to come up with someone I could talk to about these crazy events with Bron. But Mom wouldn’t have understod and I had no close friends.

  Maybe Bron knew these things too.

  He had implied that he wasn’t human, that he lived where time occurred in larger pieces. But probably he was just some New Age fanatic.

  Thinking about time I looked at my watch and saw that it was after five. I was fourteen minutes late for my departure.

  I ran out of the bar and into the street where I hailed a cab. I told him I’d give him an extra twenty dollars if he hurried. Because of that I was only twelve minutes behind time picking up the ticket held under the name Joe Lion.

  I rushed into the hall and up to my seat breathless and afraid that Bron would turn against me. I didn’t want to give up my new job just as much as I feared my inexplicable luck. I sat there next to an empty seat looking at the wide blue curtain before me.

  I was in the middle front row in the balcony. The cognac soothed me. The memories of Mink and Shawna jittered playfully in my nerves.

  “Bron told us what you needed, Hoagy,” Shawna had whispered in my ear as she raked her fingernails across my nipples. “He said that you needed to feel it.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” a man said.

  I looked up to see a young white guy in a suit that cost three times what mine did. He was smiling but didn’t mean it.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to change seats.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “We need it.”

  “‘We’ who?” I asked. “I mean, no. I bought my ticket and now I’m gonna see my show.”

  I resented this MF coming up and expecting me to move when I was a paying customer just like everybody else. Or, at least, someone had paid for the ticket and I seemed like everyone else.

  “May I see your ticket?” he asked with a smile that could have been wrought by Da Vinci.

  “Are you an usher?”

  That took the false friendliness from his face. I was happy to be standing up to the kind of authority that had me walking with my head bowed down for the last forty-two years. People thinking that they could walk on me because I didn’t have power or beauty or powerful and beautiful friends.

  “Come on, move,” a gruff voice said. I was gripped by powerful hands and pulled backward by my shoulders from behind.

  I don’t
know anything about self-defense, at least I didn’t at that time. I just started jerking my body like one of the jitterbuggers in the old days. I genuflected and then stood up straight hitting somebody’s face with the back of my head. A hand grabbed my neck and I hollered in a deep voice that had never come from my throat before. Someone punched me and I fell forward toppling over the banister. If not for the fast hands of the young man who started the whole thing my career as a world destroyer would have come to an abrupt and ridiculous end.

  As it happened I was saved at the last moment, pulled from the edge even as I felt the first nauseating pangs of free fall.

  As soon as I was on my feet I turned to face the three men standing behind me. I threw a punch at the man I suspected had pushed me. He was shorter than I and lighter but his reflexes made me seem like a completely different breed of human. He blocked my roundhouse blow and hit me one-two-three times in the gut.

  I bent over in pain wondering if I could aim my vomit at my attacker’s pants when a commanding voice said, “Bruce. Bruce, what’s happening here?”

  I lifted my head to see another white man, this one somewhat younger than my attacker and his associates.

  “We asked him to move and he got belligerent, Mr. Ontell.”

  “Bullshit,” I gasped. “You told me to move and when I refused you attacked me.”

  “Is this how you think I should be represented in public, Bruce?” Ontell asked his man.

  With a gesture from Bruce my attackers moved away. One was white and the other, the one who nearly pushed me off the balcony, black.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Ontell said to me. “There’s no excuse. My name is Tom Ontell.”