The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Read online

  “Billy, this is nuts!” Paul shouted.

  Billy shook his head slowly and stepped forward, taking Paul’s in his hand with a gentle but firm grip. “Now, sir, that’s just how life goes. This isn’t the first time somebody’s been evicted here, and it won’t be the last time. Now you come along with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Out. Out the front door.”

  “But my stuff. I’ve got to get into my apartment to get my things!”

  “Noon tomorrow,” Billy said. “We got movers coming at noon, and it’ll all be down on the dock.” His voice softened. “You be here a bit early, I’ll let you help them if you want. Come around eleven.”

  Paul jerked his arm back from Billy’s grip and marched over to the elevator, pushed the button.

  “You’re not thinking of making any trouble for me are you, Mister Abler?” Billy said, walking over to stand behind Paul. “This ain’t nothing personal. I need my job, too, you know. And I know you don’t want what would happen if we had to call in the sheriff.”

  The elevator door opened and Paul stepped in. He turned around in the doorway so Billy couldn’t enter without pushing him out of the way. “Don’t worry, Billy. I’ll let myself out.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Despair

  Paul stood on Eighth Avenue watching the afternoon traffic of cars, taxis, trucks, and pedestrians flow around him like a ceaseless river. He searched out faces, hoping to see Noah or Jim or Joshua among the people, but none of them appeared. He leaned against the black enamel steel fencing that bounded the small yard around the apartment building, and watched as two squirrels alternately chased each other up and down an old maple tree.

  He called out softly, hoping none of the people walking by would hear, “Noah? Are you here?”

  The squirrels didn’t even turn to look at him. His only answer was the sounds of the street: car engines gunning and moaning, horns crying, a distant siren, a drunk at the newsstand across the avenue shouting at an attractive woman walking by.

  He stepped out onto Eighth Avenue and turned right, walking downtown, unsure of where he was going or what he would do. He ran through his mind the short list of people he might be able to call for a place to spend the night and realized with a mild shock that none were what he would call true friends. They were all acquaintances: people he knew at work, people in his building, people he’d met while working on stories over the past years. The three close friends he’d come to know in college had all moved on; Thomas was in Atlanta, Mike in San Francisco, and Amanda had gone to Salt Lake City for a job and ended up married into a polygamous Mormon family living in a small town in southern Utah. His career had soaked up all his time, all his life, left no room for meaningful friendships.

  The people from work would probably be embarrassed to see him, and of the people he’d met over the past year in his building, the only one he’d gotten to know well enough to visit each other’s apartment was Rich. A lyric from an old Beatles tune about “all the lonely people” ran through his head as he looked around at the people on the street, wondering how many of them, like him, were essentially friendless in the big city.

  At 27th Street he passed the Fashion Coffee Shop and, on an impulse, walked in. It was that quiet time between lunch and dinner, and there were only three tables occupied, all by students. Mary was sitting on one of the counter stools reading the newspaper. When he walked in, she looked up and smiled.

  “Hi, Paul,” she said.

  “Hi, Mary,” he replied, sitting on the stool next to her.

  “This isn’t your regular table.”

  “I’m just going to have a cup of coffee.”

  She got up and went behind the counter to the coffeepot and poured him a cup, brought it over and put it in front of him. “Be right back,” she said, then took a pitcher of water over to a table occupied by three young women and a shaved-head young man. On the way back she visited the other two occupied tables, went to the soft-drink dispenser and refilled a glass of cola, took it back to one of the tables. Paul watched her and wondered what her life was like when she wasn’t moving plates and glasses around.

  Mary returned to the stool and sat down. “Seven more minutes,” she said with a glance toward the kitchen.

  “Seven more minutes?” Paul said.

  “Yeah, assuming Diana shows up on time. I leave in seven more minutes. I’m shot.”

  “Long day?”

  “Fridays are always long days, because I work a full shift. Monday through Wednesdays I have classes so I only work the mornings, but I work Thursdays and Fridays from seven in the morning ‘till four. There’s supposed to be an hour’s lunch break in there, but I prefer to catch it five minutes here and five minutes there.” She tilted her head to one side in a plastic-smile gesture. “So I’m on my lunch break right now.”

  “What are you doing after work?” Paul said. He felt instantly embarrassed at the tired-out pickup cliché; he hadn’t meant it that way. It was just a statement of curiosity. Or was it?

  “Gonna walk two miles and feed my cat,” she said, giving him a look that he took as curiosity. “Why?”

  He shrugged, feeling suddenly warm. “I don’t know. Just curious.” He noticed that his armpits were suddenly sweaty, and wondered if he’d remembered to put on deodorant after his morning shower. The call from Rich had unnerved him; it was possible he’d overlooked parts of his normal routine.

  “I live up near Central Park, in the Sixties,” she said. “It’s kinda an upscale area, but the apartment is owned by a friend of my father’s, so he’s giving my dad a break on the rent.”

  “That’s nice,” he said, wondering if he’d brushed his teeth.

  “I mean if you want to walk me home. It’s about two miles north of here, I’d guess. Almost forty blocks. Somebody once told me that every twenty blocks is a mile.”

  Paul realized from the tone of her voice that she was nervous. He’d never heard her like this before; she was always so self-assured, so totally waitress-in-charge. And she’d just asked him if he’d proposed to walk her home.

  “I’d love to walk you home,” he said, wondering how she’d react if he asked if he could sleep on her couch. “Can I take you to dinner after you feed your cat?”

  She laughed. “You getting food for me? That would be a change.” She reached behind her neck, found her ponytail, pulled it over her shoulder and smoothed the hair. “Where would you like to go?”

  “What’s your favorite food?”

  She looked at her hair for a moment as if she’d just discovered it, then tossed it back over her shoulder. “I’m vegetarian.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I love animals. I’m not gonna eat one unless my life depends on it.”

  “What is love?” he said.

  “Well, I feel like I’m one of them, you know?” she said. “I’m an animal. A human animal, but an animal. And I’d rather somebody didn’t kill me for food, so I figure they feel the same way. And look how they struggle when they know you’re going to kill them. They know, and they don’t want to die. So I think love, at least in this context,” she looked at the floor for a moment, “is compassion.”

  “What would you say if I said that God is love?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Sounds sweet enough.”

  “No, I mean really. I mean that God is love. That’s how we experience God.”

  “I dunno,” she said. She nodded her head toward the table with the four students. “You see that girl on the end, the one with the long red hair?”

  Paul glanced over. The young woman sat with two other girls and a boy: they all had that self-conscious look of college freshmen. The redhead wore skintight black leather pants and a white lacy top that was cut so low her breasts were visible. “With her hand on the guy’s leg?” Paul said.

  “Yeah. They’ve been coming in here about four months now, this is sort of like their hangout. I’ve seen her fall in love three t
imes, three different guys. And I mean, she’s really falling in love with them. Head over heels. She dumped the first one, the second one dumped her; she was in here crying and talking about suicide. And now this one. But I think maybe she’s just really sensitive to pheromones or she wasn’t nurtured enough as a child. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, and there could be some of that in there. It’s the difference between lust and love. But love is more real, deeper.”

  “I love my cat,” Mary said.

  “Do you see God in your cat’s eyes?”

  “Well,” Mary said, “When I look into my cat’s eyes, I get the feeling sometimes that I’m looking into some kind of larger intelligence. But I’m also clear that I’m looking at a cat, who’s looking back at me as a cat looking at a person. You know?”

  “Exactly.” He nodded at the girl at the table. “And that’s the difference between you and the girl over there. She looks into a guy’s eyes and feels that love feeling and thinks she’s looking into God’s eyes, and she doesn’t realize there’s a guy there, too. She’s leaned how to get her juice, her energy, her contact with God, by falling in love with a guy. But her mistake is she thinks that boy is the only place it is, or at least that she’ll only find it by falling in love. That her only connection to God is through a boy. She doesn’t realize it’s inside of her, that God-ness he is making her feel. That it’s God in her. She just thinks that connection to God is available through him. Of course, she wouldn’t even call it a ‘connection to God,’ she doesn’t think in those terms, but that’s what’s happening. She touched God once by falling in love with a boy, and now she thinks that’s the only way to touch God. And it’s gonna be the tragedy of her life.”

  Mary looked impressed. “That’s so insightful.”

  “And I’m sure it’s true. It’s a Truth.”

  She nodded and said, “I’ll look for God when I see my cat tonight.” A dark-haired middle-aged woman came through the door and Mary’s expression brightened. “There’s Diana, only three minutes late for her shift. We can go now.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Kings Taketh

  It was the perfect end to the perfect evening, other than a few small bumps along the way.

  Paul and Mary had walked the forty-some blocks to her apartment, where she’d invited him in to meet her cat, Igor. A Maine Coon Cat, Igor was easily the largest–and laziest–cat Paul had ever met. He weighed twenty-seven pounds, Mary said, and was a representative of the only breed native to North America, with the cat lore being that Maine Coons were the result of a horny and myopic northeastern bobcat encountering some unwitting farmer’s domesticated cat (or, even odder, vice-versa) several hundred years ago.

  In the foot-deep windowsills of her early-twentieth-century apartment building, Mary was growing a garden. Tomatoes, peppers, chard, three types of lettuce, radishes, and a dozen different medicinal and culinary herbs grew from pots, in flats, and escaped out of homemade planters. In the bathroom window was a huge squash plant, which trellised around the towel-rack and onto plumbing under the sink. “You can’t trust the food you buy in the stores,” Mary had told him. “It’s genetically altered and laced with chemicals.” So she grew about a quarter of her own food. Impressive.

  They’d gone to an expensive but elegant vegetarian restaurant and had an interesting conversation in which Paul tried out several of the Wisdom School teachings he’d learned so far, checking his notepad for accuracy. Mary followed along, nodding and commenting, often reinterpreting his truths in terms of the philosophies of Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud.

  Then he hit the first bump.

  When he tried to pay for dinner with his credit card, the waiter came back to the table with the card cut in half on a small plate. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but when we tried to get authorization on this, the credit card company asked that we cut the card in half and return it to you.” He was a short, slim man, about thirty, with thinning yellow hair and pasty white skin. He continued in a nasal tone, which had been lacking earlier: “Usually if a card is overdrawn we just can’t take it. They only ask us to cut them up if the card is reported stolen or has been cancelled. Do you have some other form of payment?”

  Paul tried another credit card with the same result, the waiter now behaving decidedly irritated, and Paul becoming increasingly alarmed. So far, he’d managed to avoid telling Mary anything about his troubles. He was becoming so enamored of her that rather than have her think poorly of him for getting evicted, he’d decided to rent a room in a cheap hotel. He’d planned to pay for it with one of his credit cards, which he could catch up on when he found a job.

  “What’s going on, Paul?” Mary had asked when the waiter returned with a cut-up card for the second time.

  Paul fumbled in his pockets, fishing out all his cash. The check was for sixty-three dollars and change (the price driven up by their having shared an excellent bottle of wine), and he only had forty-six dollars and two quarters on him.

  “Hang on,” he said to Mary. Then, to the waiter, “Can you come back in five minutes? I need to call my credit card company.”

  The waiter gave him a quick, skeptical appraisal and resolved the possibility of his running out on the check by saying, “You don’t need to use the pay phone in the hall. There’s a phone in the manager’s office. Follow me.”

  Paul followed him into a small, cramped office next to the Ladies’ room. The desk looked like a paper bomb had gone off on it, and Paul saw that most of the forms had to do with the dozens of tax-collecting and tax-assessing and tax-inventing agencies associated with the State and City of New York. The waiter waved to an old-fashioned black Bakelite phone on the desk and said, “There you are.”

  Paul reassembled the first credit card and dialed the 800 number on the back of it. After waiting four minutes because the phone had a rotary dial and no buttons to push to select the option of his choice, a man answered the phone with the name of the card’s issuing bank.

  “I’ve got a problem with my credit card,” Paul said.

  “What’s the problem?” the man said, his voice carrying a pronounced Louisiana roughneck twang. Paul remembered reading in the paper about how some banks, to save money, were using prison labor. The prisoners, it seems, made about four bucks an hour and all the credit card numbers they could steal; the prisons kept ninety percent of the pay for “room and board,” and the banks cut their labor costs and rolled the cost of fraud over onto the federal government. Paul wondered how many bank employees had been laid off for that little deal.

  “The waiter tried to verify my credit card, and you guys told him to cut it in half.”

  “What’s your credit card number?”

  Paul read him the number. “Just for identification purposes, Mister Abler, can you please tell me your date of birth and mother’s maiden name?”

  Paul told him.

  “And your weight, height, and hair and eye color?”

  “How come you need that?”

  The guy chuckled. “Just a little joke. You’d be amazed how many people think I can see them over the phone.”

  “Where are you?”

  “California.” There was a note of defensiveness in the man’s voice.

  “Are you a prisoner?”

  “Are you unemployed and evicted?”

  “Well, yeah, but what business is that of yours?”

  “Me personally? None. You’re a lousy credit risk.” The guy chuckled, then his tone became serious. “As far as the bank is concerned, the problem is that you’re a month late on your card payments and out of work, so we can’t let you run up any more charges.”

  “How’d you find out I’m out of work?” Paul noticed the waiter lift an eyebrow and scowled at him. The man looked at the floor, but didn’t leave the room.

  “Lemesee,” the man said, and Paul could hear a click of computer keys. “Says here that a law firm in New York City reported today that you’re in default to them on thirty-seven
thousand dollars in legal fees. They passed along the information about your employment and eviction as a courtesy.”

  “A law firm? Which one?”

  The man made the noise of somebody sucking on a cigarette while Paul could hear key-clicks.

  “They let you smoke there?” Paul said.

  “Just tobacco,” the man said, his voice soft with disappointment. “Here it is. Schneiderman, Sabatini, and Kurland, attorneys-at-law. You owe them some bucks, eh?”

  “That’s where my neighbor, Rich Whitehead, works. He’s upset with me.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “They can just report that stuff?”

  “If they pay the monthly fee to subscribe to the credit bureau service.”

  “Even if it’s wrong?”

  “If it’s wrong, you can request a copy of your credit history from the credit bureau, then write them a letter challenging the accuracy of the data.” He sounded like he was reading from a script. “Our bank relies on information provided to it by third parties, and makes no claims as to the accuracy or…”

  “But it’s not true!” Paul shouted into the phone. The waiter smirked, but avoided eye contact.

  There were a few more key-clicks, the sound of another drag on the cigarette. Then, “Scrolling down here, on the second screen, it looks here like they filed an addendum to their original report, just an hour later, saying that the listing of your owing them money was an error. They noted that the other data was valid, though.” He chuckled. “They couldn’t just report that you’re unemployed and evicted. It wouldn’t make the report, as it’s not a valid complaint from them. So this guy musta concocted the phony bill, posted it with the other info added as notes, and then retracted the original so you couldn’t sue them for defamation or whatever.”

  “I get it,” Paul said.

  “Bottom line, bro,” the man said, “is you outa luck.”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, an automatic reflex.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Paul put the phone in its cradle and said to the waiter, “I need to talk to the lady.”