The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century Read online

  “I’ll follow you,” the waiter said, wiping his hands on his apron in an exaggerated gesture.

  Paul walked over to the table where Mary was sitting and reading the dessert menu as if it were an important literary work. He sat down, the waiter hovering close enough to hear the discussion.

  “My credit cards are dead,” he said in a low whisper.

  “What happened?” Mary said. “Are you having problems?”

  “Well, I had a disagreement with my next-door neighbor. Actually, he got upset with this ghost named Noah, and Noah sicced the devil on him or something like that. I never did get it straight.” He caught the expression on Mary’s face. “I mean, anyhow, this guy who lives in the next apartment is a lawyer and he’s upset with me, and so today he got me evicted and this afternoon he called the credit reporting services and said that I owed his law firm thirty-seven grand and it was overdue.”

  “Do you?”

  “No. I don’t owe them anything. But he ruined my credit, just to make some kind of macho point. And the upshot is that I don’t have any credit cards that work and I don’t have enough cash to pay for dinner.”

  She smiled and put a hand on his arm. “I always figured one day I’d have a customer stick me with a check. I never figured it would be in another restaurant, though.”

  “I’m really sorry…” Paul said, feeling a pleasant tingle from her touch mingle with his embarrassment.

  “It’s no problem,” she said. “We should have gone Dutch treat anyway. This is the twenty-first century, after all.” She lifted her purse up from the floor under her chair. “How much is the check?”

  “Sixty-three dollars and change.”

  “So,” she said, her eyes looking up to the ceiling for a moment as she did the mental math, “with a twenty percent tip, more or less, that would be about seventy-six dollars, right?”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said, wondering if waitresses always over-tipped.

  “Do you have thirty-eight dollars?”

  “Yeah,” he said, thinking it would leave him–maybe–with cab fare back to her place.

  She opened her purse, then a slim brown faux-suede billfold, and counted out a twenty and eighteen one-dollar bills onto the table. “I get a lot of ones,” she said.

  Paul put forty dollars on the table and said to the waiter, who stepped forward to scoop up and count his bounty, “Keep the change.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the waiter said, bowing slightly at the waist, his voice conveying contempt.

  Paul remembered Jim saying the poor get no respect, and had a depressing momentary glimpse of himself through the waiter’s eyes. He was, as Susan had implied, a loser. Or at least rapidly on the road to loserdom.

  Mary stood up and lifted her coat off the chair next to her. “Let’s go,” she said, as she pulled on the dressy red winter coat.

  It was dark on the street, and they were twenty blocks from Mary’s apartment. Paul shivered in his long black wool coat. “I think I have enough for cab fare,” he said, “or to buy you a drink if you’d like to stop someplace.” He felt utterly humiliated after the incident in the restaurant.

  Mary put her hands into her pockets, her face made stark by the light and shadows from the streetlight and passing cars. “Paul, what’s going on with you?” Her voice was both concerned and businesslike. “I mean, you came into the restaurant this morning and left with that homeless guy, and then you came back this afternoon when you should have been at work, and then this.” She swept her right hand out of her pocket at the restaurant’s door, then returned it to her pocket. “What’s happened?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said. “I’m not sure I believe it, myself.”

  “Try me.”

  “Let’s walk and talk,” he said, turning and beginning back uptown toward her apartment. She fell in beside him, and he thought, ok, how would a reporter report on this story? He decided a straight-up factual account, no side narratives or commentaries, would be best.

  “You remember those things I was reading to you from my notepad over dinner?” he said.

  “Yeah. Interesting stuff. I think you have the core concepts there of just about every major religion. And most of the non-destructive minor ones, too, probably. I doubt my psychology professors would agree with it all, but it makes sense to me.”

  “I didn’t come up with that stuff myself,” he said.

  “I didn’t think you had. I figured you’d been doing a lot of reading, or maybe in your reporting you’d found some priest or rabbi to interview, and that’s what the notes were from.”

  “That’s sort of true.” They crossed a street with the light and continued. “Yesterday, I jumped in front of this truck. I wasn’t thinking, it was just an impulse, I had to push this little girl out of the way so she wouldn’t get hit. And something or somebody picked me up and all of a sudden I was flying through the air, and it saved her life and saved mine. And then when I got back to my apartment, there was this guy there, said his name was Noah, and he was an angel, or a ghost, or a shapeshifter, pick your culture or religion.”

  “Was he delusional?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure he was exactly what he said he was.”

  And he told her the story, straight through, from his getting laid off, to saving the little girl, to meeting Noah in the doorway and going to ancient Sumeria. He covered Noah’s interchanges with Rich, meeting Jim in the restaurant and Joshua in the tunnels, and Rich having him evicted and why. His decision and commitment to join in saving the world. Of the things he’d learned so far, and that there was more to come.

  It took four blocks to tell in its entirety,

  They walked in silence for another block, Paul dreading her response, fearing she may think him mad.

  Finally she said, “That’s an extraordinary story.”

  “As a reporter, I have to say that if somebody told me all this happened to them, I’d think they were nuts.”

  “Or schizophrenic, or delusional, or someone so needy for attention or love that they make up wild stories to get attention. There are less charitable sounding clinical descriptions. Like, for example, ‘crazy.”’ She smiled.

  “I know,” he said, certain that she was thinking he fit into one of those categories. “What do you think?”

  She stopped in front of a well-lit store window that featured women’s spring dresses in bright yellows and greens, and looked at him, face on. One eyebrow lifted slightly, and in the fluorescent light from the store window he noticed a small scar over her right eyebrow. He wondered how and when it had happened, and realized he was curious about every aspect of her life. What was her childhood like, her growing up, her adolescence, her school years? How did she relate to her parents, who were her best friends, what was her experience of first love? He looked into her eyes, and knew that he saw God looking back at him, loving him through her heart.

  “I believe you,” she said. She took his right hand in both of hers and held it, warming him in the chilly night air. “I’d like to meet Noah and Joshua. There’s no doubt in my mind that if we don’t do something soon to wake people up, the world is doomed. I’m ready to help save it.”

  His chest felt warm and full, the lights of the street seemed to brighten as he studied her face. The sounds of traffic receded, and he was conscious only of the sound of her breathing. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course! If you aren’t telling the truth, then I’ll figure it out quickly enough. If you are, this sounds to me like the chance of a lifetime. It feels right to me, and as I look at your face I’m pretty sure I’m seeing somebody who doesn’t lie and isn’t mentally ill. Of course, the first thing they try to teach us in psychology class is not to trust our feelings but to be objective, to maintain distance from people you’re trying to understand. But I don’t agree with that. My intuitions have always served me well.”

  He ached to kiss her. Instead, he turned and continued walking up the street toward her ap
artment. She didn’t let go of his right hand, but held it in her left hand, and he felt a thrill at walking up the street with this very attractive young woman who had so much more depth than the superficial persona of waitress and psychology student.

  “I’ve often wondered about something in the Bible,” she said, “and I think you just put it all together for me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “In Mark, Jesus told his disciples that some of them would still be alive when the kingdom of God was installed on the Earth. I always figured he just got it wrong. Now I realize he got it right.”

  “You mean because some of those with him realized that the kingdom was within them?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Those who realized that it can be right here and now, when you turn away from serving the kings of the world-mammon-and instead touch the presence and love of God within you.”

  “It’s the story of the mystics,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like the Muslim, Rumi. Or the Jew, Martin Buber. Or the Catholic, Saint John of the Cross. All died already having touched, already knowing, the kingdom. Like Salome said she’s done. ‘Today’s a good day to die.’”

  “It’s an amazing possibility,” Mary said. “Your experiences are almost unbelievable, except the teachings make so much sense. I’d love to meet Noah.”

  “I can’t predict when, or even if, he’ll reappear,” he said as they walked. She kept his hand in a firm grip. “I called for him this morning, but nothing happened. But I can take you to the tunnel to meet Joshua if you want. It would probably be best if we found Jim in the morning and had him escort us.”

  “He’s been in the restaurant before,” she said. “One time I let him use the bathroom and caught hell from the boss for it. I never knew his name.”

  “I think he collects cans in that part of town. It seems like the can-collectors each have their own little territories where they scavenge through the trash. I’ll bet we can find him in the morning.”

  “That would be best,” she said. “I don’t want to go into the tunnels or anywhere near them at night, so that leaves tomorrow morning. But it’ll have to be early, as I have a Saturday class at three.”

  “It’s a date,” Paul said, and he squeezed her hand, then let go of it, putting his hand back into his overcoat pocket. He took a deep breath and said, “I need a place to spend the night tonight. I thought I could pick up a cheap hotel room, but my credit cards are nuked, so I’m stuck. Can I sleep on your sofa?”

  “Sure,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “I’m not trying to hit on you.”

  “I know,” she said. “Or at least you’re not consciously trying.” He caught a smile on her face in the light of passing traffic.

  “Truth is that I’m very attracted to you,” he said. “But it’s in a way that makes me want to take it slow and not sabotage it. It feels like God’s love flowing through you to me.” He put his arm around her shoulders and felt her pull close to him as they walked.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Hard Wind

  The hands of the Regulator clock on the living room wall of Mary’s apartment pointed to twenty past three, and Paul stared at its pendulum for a moment, hearing the gentle tick-tock with each stroke, trying to orient himself. He was on a folded-out sofa bed, that when opened like this left little room for anything else in the room. They’d had to move the coffee table into the kitchen and push the two mismatched easy chairs into the comers.

  The room had a surreal quality to it, and for a moment he wondered if he was fully awake or still dreaming. The clock continued to tick-tock, and he concluded he was awake.

  He tried to figure out what it was that woke him. He’d come so completely awake that even his dreams were out of reach, faint ghostly memories that tore like wet tissue paper when he tried to reach back into memory to examine them. Something about the Holy Trinity, about Wisdom, a female elemental who said She was partner to the male Godhead. The Goddess whom Solomon wrote love poems to in The Song of Songs.

  And then there had been the sound of the wind.

  He shivered and looked at the window. The curtains were modem replicas of old lace, bulged out at the windowsill by leaves and stems from the pots and trays. They moved in an uncertain flutter, and Paul realized the window must be slightly opened. Mary had only one extra blanket, and he was cold.

  He swung his feet out from under the sheet and blanket, dropped them to the floor, then pulled on his jeans and shrugged into his shirt. If he was going to be pulling back the curtain in Mary’s apartment, he figured she may not want her neighbors to see a man in his underwear. Not to mention how cold the room had become.

  He walked to the window and pulled back the curtain. Outside the window, instead of the brownstone apartment building across the street he’d seen earlier, he saw a swirl of gray and blue-black cloud, as if he were looking into the eye of a hurricane.

  “What?” he said under his breath. The air seeping under the cracked-open window smelled of copper and rain and burned gunpowder. He pushed a tomato plant in a black plastic pot to one side and put a knee on the ledge, levered himself up, his other knee on the other side of the pot. He leaned forward to grip the handle at the bottom of the window, intending to push it all the way down. But it was so odd outside: the smell of the air, the swirling turbulence of the clouds. He had to know what it was. He pulled up the lower half of the window and stood on hands and knees looking out, his head and shoulders in the opening twelve floors above the street.

  The swirling wind flashed with branches of lightning, and there was a sudden roar, the sound of a jet plane roaring through a deep and ancient tunnel. The air in the room exploded outward, and Paul clawed at the sides of the window, trying to keep himself from being pulled into the maelstrom. It was a futile effort; he flew through the open window, sucked into the darkness.

  There was a moment of wild movement, thick with cold and pain and fear. And then he was floating in empty black space, his arms and legs out as if he were drifting just below the surface of the ocean. In the endless distance he saw stars burning with a steady, never-ending light; pinwheel galaxies slowly turned; asteroids tumbled through the black emptiness, crystalline structures glittering in distant starlight, their dark sides only discernable as shadows blotting out the stars they moved past.

  Paul felt a breathless exhilaration; a feeling of déjà overwhelmed him. Fear drained from him, and the emptiness in his heart was replaced with a warmth that he recognized as love. He was bursting with love; it flowed through and filled every cell of his body. He thought I wish Mary could see this, and the loving recollection of her rippled through his body like water flowing down a mountainside. There was no sound, no smell, no taste–only light and the feelings that pulsed and flowed and pounded through him. The silence seemed to echo, and in the most vast distance he thought he could hear the faint sound of a piano slowly and softly picking out the notes to Eric Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies. Was it a memory or real? He didn’t know. Where was he and how did he get here? Some how it didn’t matter; this was so beautiful, so profound, so much larger than any puny, irrelevant human consideration of what or why or how.

  And then space rang with a single word: “Behold.” The voice was distinctly feminine, rich and resonant, a voice of power and authority, yet liquid with compassion. The word echoed into the vastness, then was absorbed by the stars.

  “Who is that?” Paul said, his mouth making words in the airless space. He heard his own voice drift into eternity.

  “Wisdom hath built Her house. She hath hewn out Her seven pillars.”

  “You are Wisdom?” Paul said.

  A white dove flew out from behind him, a hundred yards away, and crossed left-to-right, vanishing into the light of a nearby star, seemingly without ever noticing him. In front of him materialized a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Mary, only in her sixties or seventies. Gray hair fell around her shoulders,
her eyes glittered with life and intelligence. She wore a purple robe edged in gold and held a cup in one hand. She was radiantly beautiful.

  Her voice, which seemed to come from every star, every distant galaxy, and all the bits of dust around him, said, “Doth not Wisdom cry? And understanding put forth Her voice?”

  “Are you here to give me my final lessons and the Greatest Spiritual Secret?” Paul said. The voice awakened in him a faint melancholy, a childhood memory, a distant time of bliss and contentment that he had long forgotten.

  She said, “The Word, the Name, He shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  As he watched, she faded into mist and some of the stars began to change. Yellow ones bloated and became red. Red ones bloomed into blinding explosions, then turned black. White and blue ones turned yellow and red, or collapsed into blackness with a wink. Galaxies shifted in colors, rippling through violet and orange, collapsing in or spiraling out. Everything seemed to be moving away from everything else, faster and faster, as if the universe were a balloon being blown up and Paul was the only stationary thing in it. Paul realized he was watching the end of time. This was the final entropy, the era when the expansion of the universe had stretched from the Big Bang to the time when there was no more energy for expansion, no more fuel for the stars. Everything was turning to cold matter, a universe filled with stone, dust, iron, and slag.

  It became darker and colder, and Paul felt the heaviness of it, the loss of heat, the last moments of creation.

  As the last distant stars dimmed into red giants, their final death throes, he felt a tremendous pull, as if behind him was a huge vacuum or a magnet of unfathomable power. Matter flew past him backwards, stars and planets and dust and black holes of matter compressed so densely not even light could escape. He looked all around and saw it happening everywhere, in every direction.

  The universe was collapsing back into itself.

  The pace quickened, and a thunderous roar set up as planets, cold stars, black holes, unimaginable amounts of debris, collided and collapsed together, flying toward a center point, faster and faster. The point at the center became red, then yellow, then blue-white, then suddenly black, twice the size when it was blue. Paul realized it must have become so dense that its gravity would no longer allow light to leave its surface. The blackness in the center of the universe grew, fed by a billion billion stars and planets a second, swelling and trembling.