
It’s All Greek to Me
If you were up by the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion in the luminous dark before daylight, you would hear Enrico Caruso, history’s most famous tenor.
Having died in 1921, Mr. Caruso would not himself be present at this time. Perhaps you are not present either. Perhaps you are dreaming. Perhaps you are not even who you think you are.
You have been living in Birnam Dominion for ten days. You have been up and down Gate Hill Drive in the backseat of your parents’ car a dozen times. You have even been behind the wheel alone as the dark little man in the gatehouse smiled and waved, the gate swung slowly open, and the cool air of what seemed for a moment like normal life again breezed in through your driver’s side window.
You have never heard the voice of Enrico Caruso. Nor have you heard of the man himself. Opera, a music from the Bygone, is not on any of your playlists. But you know a tenor when you hear one. And this one is the one. Though, of course, you don’t know that either.
You’ve never heard of Caruso. Never heard of the poor boy from Naples whose voice delivered him from squalor to become the greatest global rock star of the early 20th century.
You’ve never heard about La Mano Nera, the Black Hand gangsters who threatened to silence his instrument by slitting his throat or forcing him to drink lye if he didn’t pay their price. And even when he paid it, how his paying only made them ask for more. And how they threatened him then with strychnos-nux-vomica.
But that’s all Greek to you.
Yet even though you know you’ve never heard Caruso’s voice, you know somehow your souls are intertwined, because he sings about your life in a language you’ve never studied yet somehow understand.
And this is when you realize that you are dreaming.
If you are dreaming, you are sleeping. And if you are sleeping, you are happier than you have been in a very, very, very long time because for the last ten days you haven’t been sleeping.
And you were starting to lose your mind.
But you’re not losing your mind because you’re not up by the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion so ridiculously early in the morning that it’s not even morning yet.
You’re sleeping soundly in your bed for the first time in ten days, so you are definitely not losing your mind. In fact, you’re probably getting a bit of it back.
Yet for someone who’s sleeping soundly in her bed, there’s a scared-to-death, little-girl part of you that knows but doesn’t want to know that you’ve been running up and down the wildly winding Gate Hill Drive for maybe two or three hours since you snuck out of your house around 1 AM.
Your hamstrings stretch to snapping on the way up. On the way down, you crush your quads with every stride. Your legs burn, front and back.
You’ve been Wisconsin’s high school cross-country state champ three years running. But you’ve never run like this. You’ve never had to run like this, have you?
Yes, you run every day. You know that. But you’ve never had to run to hold your mind inside your head, have you?
So why do you think you are running up and down huge hills in front of a massive black gate at God-knows-when-o’clock in the morning when so clearly you are not?
Sleep tight, Running Girl. This is only a dream and, far from a frighteningly cruel joke you are playing on yourself, it makes you happy because as long as you are dreaming, you know that you are sleeping, finally, after not sleeping for so long.
So you’re not running up and down Gate Hill Drive over and over, burning your body to the ground until your legs give out, then falling and spattering yourself upon the pavement the way Pollack spattered paint upon the barn-floor canvas of his studio and called his works whatever he thought he saw in them when the spattering ceased.
What do you see, Running Girl? What do you see in the spattering of your life since you started running in this hoped-for dream?
You’ve never really have run like this, have you? Or is this why you’ve been running all these years?
Is this why you’ve been running since that first day of middle school when you knew that you were hated because there was something about you, something you couldn’t change and didn’t understand? There was something, wasn’t there? Even if you didn’t learn about it for another year or two when Sadie finally clued you in; when your best friend, Sadie, who’d known for years how much she was hated, explained that people hated you now for being whatever it was they thought you were or weren’t. For having something on you, or in you, or something. Oh God —
How can you be thinking about all of these things at once and be thinking you’re dreaming and actually be dreaming?
So you aren’t dreaming, are you? You’re wide awake. Or at least as wide awake as a girl can be after ten days of not sleeping.
The truth is, you squeezed out of your bedroom window at oh-dark-thirty tonight, didn’t you? You did it so you could run over and over again up and down this huge hill in front of this massive black gate until you ground yourself into exhaustion, didn’t you? And you know as well as anyone, don’t you, that you would never do this to your body unless you thought you were losing your mind.
But you can’t be losing your mind. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t! You must be sleeping after ten gritty, skin-crawling days.
You can’t be losing your mind. If you are, you wouldn’t know the difference between up and down as you reached the top of the hill and rolled yourself, like Sisyphus’ boulder, back to where you started.
The Myth of Sisyphus. That’s it!
This is just a myth. And a myth is sort of like a dream, isn’t it?
So you aren’t up by the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion. You aren’t hearing the voice of Enrico Caruso, history’s most famous tenor who, having died in 1921, is not himself present at this time. And so it is that you’re not present either.
You. Are. Dreaming.
Within this dream you merely happen to be running up and down this wildly winding road in front of the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion. Each time you near the top of the hill, there’s a tug at your heart as you listen to something coming from the back of a strange vehicle: a battered food truck, blue and white with knife-like lettering like the one you saw in Manhattan two days ago when your mother took you to see the office she’d opened for her psychiatry practice. (Now she would certainly know if you were losing your mind. Why don’t you ask her? Probably because you don’t really want to know, do you?)
So, Running Girl, even though you’ve never heard of Enrico Caruso, and you’ve never heard him sing, and you’ve never cared a measure about opera, how is it that you know he’s singing your life in a song you’ve never listened to in a language you’ve never studied but somehow understand?
Ah, yes, it’s all Greek to you.
TRUTH WILL OUT
But there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Running Girl, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
In this maybe-dream you’re clinging to, your legs are practically bleeding lactic acid. Why do you do this? And how can you keep doing it — and feeling it — if you’re dreaming?
You body’s giving out as your heart gives in to a voice you’ve never heard singing a song you don’t know in a language you don’t speak, and in just a few more footfalls, you will fall to the ground and lay there, pinned and wriggling on the road.
Perhaps this is what you want. Perhaps smashing yourself face down into the pavement is the only way you can imagine falling asleep tonight.
And that’s exactly when you tumble and crash and your skin scrapes as it slides across the concrete.
And now you know, don’t you?
One trip, one innocent flip of the imagination reveals to with skin-scraped horror that you are not dreaming; you are absolutely not dreaming.
You are here because you couldn’t sleep again tonight. Terrified, you did the only thing you know to do when you are terrified. You put on your shorts, your shoes, and shirt, and you started running.
You think you’ve come to this place — to the massive black gate that is the symbol of your imprisonment — because what’s been keeping you awake all this time is hungry hum of a locust wind coursing through your cortex.
You crave sleep like secrets crave silence. And the truth will out. Even if you don’t know what the truth is anymore.
Truth is, you don’t know much of anything anymore, do you? Indeed, even if you had your eyes, you might fail of knowing it is a wise young woman who knows her mind. Well, young woman, will you tell yourself, then, the news of your dreaming? Give yourself your blessing and truth will come to light. Murder cannot be hidden long; a young woman’s secret may, but at the length truth will out.
THE CURSE OF GOD
You haven’t slept since your father and mother kidnapped you six weeks before the start of your senior year. Without saying a word to you about it, they ripped you away from the last six years of friends and familiarities, tore you out of the only country you’d ever known, and locked you up behind the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion.
Your brow hangs heavy now upon your eyelids. Like a bare-knuckle boxer, beaten and bloodied, you stagger up the hill, your eyes so swollen you can barely see and so painful that even with your ragged, sweaty fingers, you can’t open them to see any better.
You want to cry. But you have cried so much in these last ten days that your eyes ache and your cheeks smart with the scratch of sand and the sting of sunburn.
But this time, as you near the top of the hill once more, you see a sort-of man, stout, rounded, costumed for another age, translucent, hazy, glowing gold.
His face is all the world a stage, the play your own humanity, his eyes the sockets of your soul. In his voice you hear the Missippi river rolling to the Delta and the drunken sin of gamblers on a paddle-wheel steamboat with a cargo of halfway hope, heading toward a bridge to tomorrow.
Certainly, then, (and you’re only pleading with yourself now), certainly you must be dreaming because Mr. Caruso could only appear to you in a dream.
Or in Heaven.
So.
You are in Heaven, then.
How then did you die?
Did it happen the moment your heart was broken? Or was it you who did the breaking while the two of you were trapped inside the trunk of that car and the fear of being burned alive, or of the burning life inside you, kept you both so quiet, until you were certain that the Zi’s had gone away? Was that not your last night on earth together, you and she? And yet, you didn’t talk about it on the ride home the morning that you left.
Or did it happen when they took you away? Were you kidnapped and then killed? Were you neglected? Or did you simply die of depraved indifference to human life?
Death is such a relief, is it not? To sleep, perchance to dream. Even if you don’t know how it happened. And Heaven, while you’ve never been sure if you believed in it, looks pretty believable right now.
Except that Heaven looks exactly like the top of the hill in front of the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion.
Having died in 1921, Mr. Caruso is not himself present at this time. Perhaps then you are not present either. Perhaps you are dreaming. Perhaps you are not even who you think you are.
Perhaps you have not died and gone to Heaven.
Don’t you remember reading in school last year that ignorance is the curse of God and that knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven? You know you wear the wings of Mercury, Running Girl. Do you know right now how to use them?
OUR FEARS DO MAKE US TRAITORS
Get up, Running Girl. Get off the ground. Dust yourself of bloody gravel. You’re not dead. And you damn well know it! You know it because there is no knowing when you’re dead.
Nor are you quite fully alive, it would seem.
There is about the world no longer anything definite. Yet you are definitely hearing the most gorgeous tenor voice in human history. This has been the constant all along.
And even though you do not know it is the voice of Enrico Caruso, you know that there is something sublime about it, something soaring and sweet that soothes your sleep-deprived and jangled nerves.
Just as before, you may not know the singer but you know the song. You know somehow that it’s the song of your life. And that it’s not quite as sad as the song you’ve been singing to yourself since you left your friend that morning with a look of longing, yes, but for longing for what? She assumed you were longing for your entire life to have been a dream. And what of her, then? Just another dream? Or an angel, Heaven sent?
That’s what this is about! And has been about all this time. You really are in Heaven, listening to the music of your life. This must be your funeral!
But it’s not! And you’ll stick to that until the day you d — What! Ever! — because you’re so damn smart, because you’re a straight-A student who’s taken AP Everything, and you still think you can suss this out.
So then, Running Girl, give it one more shot. Snap yourself back to the beginning and let’s see if the movie has a different ending this time. What do you have to lose?
You must have patience, though. You must remember that your flight is madness and that even when our actions do not, our fears do make us traitors.
So set the record straight this time, or you will have lost your mind and there won’t be any getting of it back because it just doesn’t work that way and you know that, too, because you know it happens in your mother’s practice. As she’s told you many times: once it’s gone, it’s gone; and once it’s gone, you’re gone.
So think it through, Running Girl. Think it through. Very carefully. Very, very carefully.
A MADNESS MOST DISCREET
So.
You have thought it through and you are here at the massive black gate of Birnam Dominion. You haven’t dreamed in ten days and nights because you haven’t slept since your mom and dad moved you here to Birnam, NY, Atlantica from Milwaukee, WI, America.
Do you remember now!? Do you remember passing through the Eastern Border Wall at Chappaqua, having your cheek swabbed, a hair taken, DNA extracted, eyeballs laser-raked, fingers printed and matched, your very breath and blood crunched and calculated to make sure the you you think you are had the same Biometric Identity Ordinal that the they they know they are require you to have — on threat of deportation by summary judgment.
So.
Here? Or not here? Awake or asleep? It’s your call. But don’t worry if you get it wrong. It just means you’re dead.
TO BE VALIANT IS TO STAND
“Hey, you!” yelled a man from within a 28-foot food truck.
“Me?” Jordan replied.
“You! Running Girl!” he said, pointing with a chubby hand and a crooked finger.
“Me?”
“Running Girl. What’s the problem tonight?” he asked, arms out, palms up, almost smiling, almost friendly. “I watch you now maybe 20, 30 minutes. You go up and down, up and down. Why?”
“Why?” she echoed, then paused, for the first time this night, to think — to really think.
Jordan stood there, valiantly resigned to her fate but victorious to have, for at least this moment, held onto her sanity. Hands on hips, she bowed her head: “I don’t know why.”
Since middle school, when she felt a thousand staring eyes paint the target on her back, felt herself becoming alien, knew her life was no longer about play but predator and prey, Jordan’s run has made all the difference. It’s kept her sane. Just like it’s keeping her sane right now through these endless gauzy sleep-deprived days and nights.
All she needs is a bridge to tomorrow. A way to make it one more day. And please, please, just one night with just a little sleep.
But this night there’s none to be had. Jordan isn’t dreaming and she isn’t sleeping. She’s running because that’s what Jordan does and —
“Running Girl!”
She jumped.
“Why you running up and down all night?” said Mr. Metaphoroikos, swinging open the passenger-side door of his 28-foot food truck, his naked belly bulging below his too-small t-shirt.
Jordan said nothing. She had nothing to say. She knew for sure that she was here, awake, not dreaming, not sleeping. Awake, her arms wrapped around her now, the only way left to hold herself together.
“Come over here,” said Mr. Metaphoroikos, gesturing with his right hand as he walked to his left toward the back of the truck.
“Why?” Jordan asked, and turned to run.
“Why?”
She turned back toward him. “Why?”
His tone softensed; he seemed sad.
“Running Girl,” said Mr. Metaphoroikos. “Come over here. I fix you breakfast.”
“You’ll fix me breakfast?” Jordan said with reasonable suspicion.
“You already have breakfast?” Mr. Metaphoroikos asked.
“Uh, I think it’s only like 5 AM or something, right?” she asked back.
Looking out to the horizon line, then looking up, Mr. Metaphoroikos said, “So maybe you here for breakfast?”
“I usually don’t eat before a run.”
“But you finish your running, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Look, Running Girl, I watch you. From inside the truck here. I think you finish with your running now.”
“So?”
“So have breakfast!” Mr. Metaphoroikos said, his hands up, arms open wide, his round funny-fat face glowing with delight.
Jordan didn’t move, but at least she didn’t move away.
“C’mon,” said Mr. Metaphoroikos with a friendly wave. “I got eggs, potatoes, Greek sausage!” he says. “Oh! And bagels from the city. H&H. Still best in town.”
“What’s a bagel?” Jordan asked. And then, without realizing it, she started walking slowly toward Mr. Metaphoroikos.
“What’s a bagel?!” Mr. Metaphoroikos repeated. “They don’t teach you nothing in this fancy Birnam school?”
“I haven’t been to school yet,” said Jordan, frustrated all of a sudden, angry at the reminder of friends missed and confusing classroom days to come.
“You haven’t been to school?”
“Not yet.”
“Because you don’t have breakfast!”
“No. Because school hasn’t started yet.”
“Is not a school day?”
“No.”
“Then why up so early, Running Girl?” asked Mr. Metaphoroikos, his eyes wide with caring, his voice soft and fatherly.
He didn’t need to know, and she could tell. He knew enough already. He’d seen her before: sad and angry, sitting in the back seat as her parents took her with them one place and then another.
But he’d also seen her once when she was driving alone, and when the gate swung slowly open, the cool air of what seemed for a moment like normal life again breezed in through her driver’s side window. And she was, for that moment, he thought, an angel, a cherubim, a guardian of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life.
“Here,” he said. “I made you bagel.”
She takes from him the strange round donut-hole bread. “You made this?”
“In a way,” he said.
“I think you bought it.”
“My friends made it.”
“Your friends?”
“Yes,” he said, and then he grabbed the paper bag, un-crinkled it, and pointed at the logo. “These are my friends: H and H.”
“What are their names?” she asked, now playing along.
“You can’t read names?” asked Mr. M., playing back. “One, his name is “H. The other, H, too! They are twins, I think.”
She laughed. “Do you really know the people who made this bagel thing?” she asked (her mouth full of donut-hole bread-stuff, crunchy-soft, warm and oddly comforting,) not even realizing she’d taken a bite of it and was talking with her mouth full.
“No,” he said.
“Then why did you tell me you did?”
Mr. M sighed. He looked at Jordan — really looked at her — and shrugged his shoulders. “Same reason you run, Running Girl.”
And Jordan, chewing, chewed for a moment, swallowed, reached to wipe her mouth, and received a napkin out of nowhere from M. “Why do I run?” she asked herself aloud.
“Same reason I get H & H bagels!”
INNOCENT SLEEP
As Jordan and Mr. Metaphoroikos ate and talked, they laughed a little more, sat comfortably in silences that should have been uncomfortable but weren’t, and somewhere in all the strangeness that felt like normal life again, she surrendered.
She surrendered to reality, to the truth of what was right in front of her, to the way things were because they were that way. And in that moment of surrender, there occurred within her a conscious reframing of her new life as she realized that the pain of acceptance was less than that of resistance.
For the first time since she’d been delivered to this strange place, she found grace and compassion through the recognition of a series of thoughts so simple and seemingly unrelated to anything they had the effect of explaining everything: a gated community had to have a gate; a gate had to have a gatekeeper; a gatekeeper had to have a gatehouse in order to keep the gate through which those who live behind it pass.
The massive black gate of Birnam Dominion was not a prison gate she would be locked behind forever, but a slowly-swinging opening-and-closing gate kept by the utterly un-massive Mr. Metaphoroikos who, in the unlikeliest way, had become her friend, and by definition at this moment, her best friend in this formerly friendless land.
No longer fearing the rattle and hum anxiety and fitful rage that fueled this night’s desperate attempted escape, the relief Jordan sought from the last ten days descended slowly upon her the way shiny white flakes fall to the bottom of a shaken snow globe and come to rest so peacefully and perfectly at the bottom.
Without even sensing it, she began to tire, to tire truly and to let the miracle of this morning seep deep — like sleep! — into her body and her bones.
THEREIN WORKS A MIRACLE
There were three things everyone knew about Mr. M., two things someone knew, one thing nobody knew, and one other thing one man never imagined he would ever know.
The three things everybody knew about Mr. M. were that he loved a great tenor, he owned a strange vehicle, and he was possessed of a child-like cherubic nature, odd for an old man, borne of an immense generosity of spirit. Only certain people felt it (mostly teenagers), and even then, it wasn’t something they talked about with their parents, or even among themselves. Mr. M’s connection to kids, and certain kids in particular, was a tacit thing, felt but not formal, sensed but not seen.
One thing nobody knew about Mr. M. was ta matia sou dekatessera. He could see with 14 eyes.
But even if people had known this about him, no Birnam Dominion resident would have understood what it meant, or even bothered to find out. (Such was the hubris and folly of the too-well-educated mid-21st century liberal elite.)
Residents of Birnam Dominion thought Mr. M’s early morning music a harmless affectation. His vehicle of odd aromas, especially the unfamiliar odor of Mediterranean meats, and the more prosaic but no less malodorous fried fish, on the other hand, was an entirely different kettle of peccadilloes.
Birnam Dominion had strict covenants, one of which might well have been: “No 28-foot Greek food trucks allowed in plain sight.” As Mr. M. was not a homeowner in any way that even the most tolerant Birnam Dominion resident could rationalize, he had no standing in the matter.
Many thought, though they rejected the notion as inconceivable in this place, that the 28-foot food truck was Mr. M’s only transportation, though no one ever saw him drive it through the gate.
Somehow, no one ever thought to take the measure of it in their minds eye and realize that it never could make its way down the tightly wound and stately wending curves of Gate Hill drive — without at least knocking down a few of the topiary animals that lined the narrow-sidewalk street meant to evoke in Atlantican residents, their fondness for their Pacifican residents’ famous Lombard Street in San Francisco known for the one-way block on Russian Hill between Hyde and Leavenworth Streets, where eight sharp turns were said to make it the most crooked street in the world.
Mr. M. cared not for the crookedness of life, though he knew better than any Birnam resident ever would what Gate Hill drive was really all about and why it’s sly designers had lined it with perennial plants by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees and shrubs and subshrubs to a feeling of wonder and play and safety that captured even the most jaded and cynical of prospective purchasers of the overpriced many-million-dollar homes that lay below.
Some suspected the 28-foot food truck his place of residence as well (a shuddering notion) but no matter how friendly he seemed, his foreignness discouraged residents from pursuing the matter with a quiet knock on the passenger side door, a simple well-intended query, and a modest intent to visit for a few moments.
Nothing about the age in which people lived, or the Dominion they lived in, was simple. No one talked about this though everyone knew it, and no single person on the planet knew it better than Stavros Kostopoulos Metaphoroikos, scion and savior of the Koustopolos family banking business, great-grandson of financier and politician Ioannis Kostopoulos of Kalamata.
After all, Dominion residents rationalized, despite what they regarded as unpalatable eccentricities, it wasn’t as if Mr. M. were one of those lone shooters with an attack full of AK’s, some wack-job Truther, or even one of those odd but oddly harmless bug-out bag survivalists.
Those folks — and there were plenty of them — lived mostly in an entirely different country. Mr. M. was merely born in an entirely different country.
Residents were assured that Mr. M. was subjected to all tests relevant to the verification of his Biometric Identity Ordinal, as well as numerous polygraph screenings, random re-screenings and BIO re-varifications (to account for genetic self-modification) and, of course, the full legal confirmation that his nation of origin was on the list of approved OrigiNations.
(That none of this was true was the one thing only Mr. M. himself knew.)
His battered white truck with the tattered blue awning, grunged and graffiti’d from years in a city that never slept, still turned over when its owner cranked the ignition. Apparently, this was enough. As long as people thought the 28-foot food truck could move, people would put up with its not moving.
Even the oily executives of the Glengarry Real Estate and Environmental Development Corporation (master-builders of Birnam Dominion and another 18 similarly styled enclaves strategically positioned in Pacifica and Atlantica), who threatened again and again to have the truck taken away or dismantled on the premises, never made good on their intimidations.
The truck’s abiding presence was both a quaintness and a mystery, a curiously welcome comfort to the few who still valued diversity, and just one of many minor mysteries residents couldn’t be bothered with. After all, there were so many important rungs and ladders to climb, so many exotic destinations to explore, so many accessory children to be conceived and cared for just a bit better and more creatively than those of one’s neighbors.
The food truck business Mr. M. brought with him to America in the oughts from the Isle of Rhodes represented a heroic effort of Mediterranean maritime legal wrangling. But at least when he came to America, American was whole, and it was a time when people from other countries could come.
But still, some people wondered. And it wasn’t just the truck, the smells, or the strange morning music that piqued their low-grade but constant concern. There were other things — so it was said — and these were the things that kept suspicions on a low-boil back-burner. It was said that secret messages had been sent but never responded to; plans for his removal conceived but never executed.
Such was the pettiness of the privileged — that the less-so might never be trusted regardless of their worthiness.
To a lesser and less powerful human being, this undercurrent of indignity might have been a source of psychic pain. But it mattered not a drachma to Mr. M., who knew very well exactly who he was and why he was here.
No matter the indignities, no matter the slights, his immense humanity could not be contained by narrow-mindedness. Such was the emotional labor he performed each day that he transcended stereotype.
Even if Mr. M. had waved to you a thousand times as you entered and exited the community, his Zorba-like good nature, even in the face of full catastrophe, could melt the coldest of cold corporate consciences. This is what the residents of Birnam Dominion never understood and never would until it was far too late to matter.
Mr. M. was more than just a friendly wave, a kind word, and a happy mustache. He made people feel safe even if they didn’t entirely trust him.
Across a volatile trio of new nations, more dangerously divided than ever along racial, ethnic, and economic fault lines, having a not-one-of-us in a position of such responsibility gave the economically proud and socially self-conscious Dominion residents, a reassuring reprieve from their collective cultural guilt and their nagging fear of difference contradicting their historic identity of compassion and tolerance.
In spite of all the contradictions and confusions, perhaps even because of them, Mr. M’s boisterous ethnicity was Birnam’s fanfare for the common man. Though none would admit it, his whiny tenor and quirky truck made people feel better, not worse.
These comic anachronisms took the edge off of Birnam’s architectural tinted-green-glass-and-titanium future-forwardness, making the environment more human, and less like it had sprung to life overnight out of the terrifying test-tube world of a famous Aldous Huxley novel.
Then again, for some, especially the older men, it was even simpler than that: “Boots on the ground!” they would joke. But deep down, in places they never talked about, they weren’t joking at all. They wanted him in that gatehouse; they needed him there — even if they regarded his mere presence (and that embarrassing 28-foot long food truck of his), as unsightly blemishes on an otherwise pristine contemporary residential canvas.
Ultimately, the people who paid the well-above-market mortgages, the unimaginably high maintenance fees, and the traditional New York state surtaxes thought highly of Mr. M’s potential protective powers because he was swarthy and stalwart and so obviously from a foreign land. To this gated-off Atlanticized population, his physical presence and emotional being seemed to bode well for their security. After all, he was from Rhodes where once stood the mighty Colossus.
At five-foot-two and barely 135 pounds, however, Mr. M. was more talisman than SWAT team. He certainly wasn’t going to be holding back barbarians at the gate. But he had buttons he could push, buttons that summoned Birnam’s own residential paramilitaries, alerted outside law enforcement, cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war with below-the-surface secondary gate systems that could be popped up in a flash to halt just about anyone or anything attempting to enter the community unwelcomed.
Mr. M. might have been the most powerful man in Birnam Dominion, but you’d never have known it. No one did except Dalton Erlacher, Director of Digital Security for the Glengarry Real Estate and Environmental Development Corporation. But Mr. M. knew one thing about himself that even Mr. Erlacher would never know: the source of power in the world and how to harness it for good and not for evil.
If anyone ever looked for someone like Mr. M., and not always at someone like Mr. M., they would have realized that in their midst resided a miraculous man in a much-less-than-miraculous world.
Such miraculous people are, of course, always more than they seem. Holding sober offices, charged with sacred duties, blessed with the wisdom of the ages and the compassion of the Christ, they pick us up when we are down, and lift us up, over, and across to better ways of being.
They can even alter reality just a bit, with a quiet cart ride home when we sneak out of our house in the middle of the night and do crazy things to keep ourselves from going crazy — and then, after we have broken bread with them, and been quelled by their joviality, let go our fears and fall asleep.
And therein works a miracle so true no one knows a thing about it.
And what about the two things someone knew? Dalton Erlacher knew them best. He knew that there was to Mr. M. more than just his gatekeeping and good nature. For one thing, his happy-go-lucky Greek immigrant persona wasn’t a lie exactly but it wasn’t the whole truth either. And for another, he was the architect of BirnamOS, craftsman of the core code at the center of the operating system responsible for every bit of digital magic within a resident’s reach, and the gatekeeper as well of every binary backdoor into the belly of the beast no one would ever reach.
O, TORTURE ME NO MORE
The world record for the longest time staying awake was set by a high school student who was not Jordan MacNeil. Back in the Bygone, long before Jordan was born, a kid stayed awake for 264 hours — eleven days — as part of an experiment he performed upon himself for a science fair. Jordan made it scarcely ten (with her sanity barely intact) and with no knowledge at all of any experiment being conducted.
Nobody knows what the staying-awakest-kid-in-the-world won, risking his own sanity for the sake of scientific progress. He didn’t think he could stay awake that long. Neither did the folks who ran the science fair which ended before his experiment did.
Was Jordan’s desperate obsession that night an experiment, too? How long would she have kept running? There was no way to know now. She might not even remember having done it.
After falling asleep, even before finishing her H & H bagel, Mr. M. kindly golf-carted her home around 5 AM. He knew the house well. As he coasted quietly into the driveway, he wished for two things: not to have to wake up Jordan who was sleeping in the passenger seat; and not to have to leave her in that house, with those people, and the Hell he imagined Jordan’s life to be there.
If Jordan had the same sense of tragedy and dread, her sense of wanting to sleep forever pulled up the covers on it. Unseatbelted, rolled out and onto unsteady legs and unsure feet, Jordan found her way to the door, activated the unlocking with her scanned presence, and softly bumped the jambs on her way through like a pinball between silent bumpers.
The sun was just barely up. But her mother and father weren't. They never saw her leave or return with the dawn in the morning.
Inside, Jordan stumbled her way to bed, legs aching from the torture she had put herself through in one night in order to end the torture she’d been living for ten days. That she felt so tortured was unbelievable and yet, for Jordan, understandable as well. What she didn’t understand was exactly who was torturing who.

