Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (3 page)

    
To
Raszer’s hard-won erudition and reckless curiosity were added a set of
categorically feline physical attributes. He’d been a somewhat awkward and
ill-adapted boy, but had managed to overcome his handicaps with a punishing
regimen. He was a reasonably skillful rock climber, could handle a combat knife
well, and had managed to collect a black belt in karate before bridling at the
sensei’s authoritarian mindset. At this stage of his life, the youthful ugly
duckling had at least now achieved the grace of a swan. The sharp features that
had seemed too roughly sculpted in youth had emerged from the stone, chiseled
by both his Celtic and his Semitic ancestry.

    
He was
still no Adonis, but the women Raszer desired were not interested in pretty
boys anyway. He was as fit as a formerly dissolute and still nonabstaining
forty-two-year-old could rightfully ask to be, and he had acquired with the
onset of his second life an exceptionally high tolerance for pain. One doctor
had pegged it as an overproduction of endorphins. A different kind of doctor
had once called it “Dionysian masochism”—a diagnosis that still made Raszer
laugh out loud.

    
 
His most singular physical attribute, however,
was—in a word—metaphysical. There was a light in his eye. To the amazement of
L.A.’s most skillful opthamologists, this luminance wasn’t metaphorical, nor was
it caused by some lodged shard of glass or accident of shape. Raszer had, just
inside the stone-blue perimeter of his right iris, a “second pupil,” a dwarf
companion to the central orb. In bright sunlight, it contracted to a dull,
clay-colored fleck, no larger than the head of a pin. On gloomy days it
oscillated faintly, sometimes causing him headaches and vertigo. But in the
darkness of true night, and only when the flame of desire—sacred or profane—had
been fanned, it spun open and reeled out light like a strand of golden thread.

    
Raszer
rose from the library shelf at the
click-clickety-click
of a pair of high-rise sandals and turned to see Monica come in, her streaked
surfer-girl hair attractively damp and her trench coat spattered with mud.

    
“I crossed
the Jordan for you, Raszer,” she said. “Now whaddaya have for me?”

    
“It’s
bad out there, huh?”

    
“The
major intersections are all flooded. Another kid drowned in the L.A. River last
night.” She regarded her dappled coat. “And there’s mud . . . everywhere.”

    
“Christ,”
said Raszer, “it just gets worse.” Defying the gloom, she still looked sunny,
and that, as always, got a little smile out of him. “Sorry about your mac. Now
take it off and sit down. I want to pick your fine, feminine right brain.”

    
“About why
there are currently no women in your life?”
   

    
 
“No. About Scotty.”

    
She
shook her head and released a sigh that was almost a moan. “Don’t you remember
telling me that obsession kills creativity? Why don’t we just spend a rainy
afternoon combing the society columns? Somebody’s kid has gotta be missing.”

    
“I think
I lost him because I played it like a man,” he said, ignoring her. “I was
linear. I followed leads, not scents. How would you have—”

    
“I
dunno,” she said. “The Gauntlet is a boys’ game. And anyway, boss, you have as
good a nose as most women.”

    
“Not
when I’m in close. I had him. I was inside the game. I offered him his exit…his
goddamned ‘DX,’ for chrissakes. I had him on the phone and I lost him.”

    
“Look,
Raszer,” she said, peeling off her coat to reveal jeans and an extra-large
sweatshirt with a S
ex
W
ax
logo.
“The guys who invented this game may be divinity students, and they may call
their out clause a deus ex machina, but what if the player’s already found God?
Why would he quit just because the ref blew the whistle?”

    
“Because
those are the rules. The ref is the game’s puppet master.”

    
“Well,
that’s where I
might’ve
done it
differently . . . ” She bit her lip. “
Rules.
Women don’t follow them. The Gauntlet is an immersive-reality game
,
as opposed to just an ARG
or
an RPG
.
Once you’re out there,
you
write the rules.”

    
“Yeah,
but you’re still bound to the contract. Otherwise, the game’s
CURTAINS
would open up and the Masters would be exposed.
The whole gaming world operates on that deal. The DX clause is mutually
binding. If the player calls for it, the Masters oblige. If the Masters ordain
it, the player has to come home. It should’ve worked . . . ”

    
“Except
that—”

    
“Right,”
Raszer snapped. “Except that there was an exception.” Almost a year after the
fact, after the headline-grabbing lawsuit filed by Scotty’s angry parents had
nearly leveled him, Raszer was still churning. His anger was aimed at The
Gauntlet’s sly creators, who’d duped him and still come out clean, and directed
inward, for thinking that anyone played by the rules anymore. “A hitch,” he
muttered.

    
Monica
spoke softly. “You trusted them, Raszer. I think—under the circum-stances—you
had to. How could you have known they’d given him Extreme Unction?”

    
Some of
the argot they now used as familiars was peculiar to the arcane world of The
Gauntlet—
Extreme Unction
, for
example, meant that the player had “died to the world” and was beyond recall,
like a bomber pilot trained to ignore any instruction once the target was in
sight, or an undercover agent whose existence was denied once he was active—but
much of it belonged to the broader arena of alternate reality games (ARGs), an
outgrowth of web-based role-playing games (RPGs) like The Beast, which in turn
traced their origins to the fantasy games of the pre-Internet 1970s.

    
No
amount of post-Columbine controversy could shake the popularity of these
flights from a numbing existence, a popularity that now persisted well beyond
college
 
years. It wasn’t difficult to
understand why. After all, the motto of the gaming universe was “Remember, in
an alternate reality, you always have a place to go.”

    
But The
Gauntlet was different, and Raszer had known it, even if he
hadn’t
known that a month before he’d
finally managed to hammer his way into the game’s nerve center and convince its
makers—under threat of exposure—to let him pull Scotty Darrell’s strings, the
GamesMasters had already given the boy Extreme Unction.

    
Scotty
had been set free to “ride the snake.”

    
The
Gauntlet’s trailhead, or point of entry, was located—as most RPGs and ARGs
were—on the web, but with an immediate distinction. The “avatar” you took on as
your gaming persona was not simply a powerful mutant, a buff guy or
better-looking girl, but a saint or scholar, like Augustine or Aquinas or
Avicenna. What followed were role-playing scenarios that posed hundreds of
ethical quandaries, leading ineluctably to the conclusion that the only valid
ethical choice was no choice at all. If God existed and you submitted, the
result would be good. Once you got this, you went offline and began your
pilgrimage with instructions as simple as:

    
1) Walk
three miles due east from the Student Union to the junction of County Road HH
and Hwy. 67. Board the first northbound bus. Do not carry cash, credit cards,
condoms, or identification. These are
ballast
.
Bring breath mints. Do not wear sunscreen.

    
 
The instructions were to be expressly
followed. There were dire warnings about what might befall the player if he
failed to “play out his line,” sought outside aid, or revealed the identity of
the GamesMasters.

    
2) Sit
next to the most accessible-looking person on the bus (someone roughly the age
of your parents). Don’t worry—the seat will be open. Offer this person a mint.
This is your first Guide. Leave bus with the G and say, “By the way, do you
know of anyone who could make use of a keen mind and a steady heart?” If the G
does not respond, get on the next bus and try again.

    
Following
these initial moves, which put the player on unfamiliar ground and with uncertain
footing, the plays became more difficult and potentially riskier. Some players
came running back after one night. Others, the floaters, found themselves
thousands of miles from home in the first week. It was amazing what could
happen once you’d put yourself at the disposal of others.

    
Raszer
had found the game fascinating, in principle. It was postmodern evangelism,
played incognito and without preaching. It was dharma. Ordinary people might
encounter these young mendicants and be subtly transformed by them—the way
hardened hearts had once been softened by the Franciscans—and if so, God might
show Himself in a fashion. But from the start, there were problems. The game
aimed for the best and the brightest, but drew many whose moral fiber was less
than firm.

    
Some
players too eagerly followed the game’s admonition “to make observa-tions,
never judgements”; some guides employed their acolytes in less than godly ways.

    
When
Raszer had at last connected with Scotty, the boy’s wariness had seemed to give
way to relief. They had four contacts, the first two via The Gauntlet’s message
board, the last two by telephone. By then, Raszer smelled a rat, and so did his
stray, who left the phone dangling at a Mobil station in Las Vegas. Scotty
hopped a bus for Hollywood and was captured on a surveillance camera when he
hijacked a tram at the Universal Studios tour, shooting and wounding the driver
and holding the terrified passengers hostage for two hours. To the theme park’s
embarrassment and continuing economic distress, he’d managed to
escape—vanishing almost literally into thin air—and was now on Homeland
Security’s Most Wanted list.

    
There
had been something confoundingly gratuitous about the whole escapade, as if
Scotty’s instructions had been nothing more than, “Shake people up.”

    
The
story was tailored for the tabloid media, and Raszer was identified as the
deprogrammer hired to rescue Scotty Darrell from the sinister game. He remained
enmeshed in a legally dubious but debilitating lawsuit brought by Scotty’s
parents, who’d initially endorsed his unconventional strategy but had now
hurled the weight of two lawyers against him. His reserves had dwindled, his
reputation had been devalued, and his phone had not rung with new work in six
months.

    
“So
you
wouldn’t have played the GamesMaster
gambit?” Raszer asked.

    
“Maybe
not, but if I had, I might have thought of offering Scotty a new game.”

    
There
was a whisper of stocking feet in the hall, and Brigit came sliding in.

    
“There’s
a really weird old man out front, Daddy,” she said breathlessly.

    
“What do
you mean, honey? At the door?”

    
“No. Out
front. At the end of the walk. He’s just sitting there in the rain. He looks
sort of creepy to me. Like the bogeyman.”

    
“Jesus,”
said Raszer, tight jawed. “Another one. They all know where I live now. I’m
gonna have to sell. And I love this house.” He crushed out the cigarette. “You
stay here with Monica, muffin. I’ll go see who’s come to call.”

 
Raszer wasn’t sure why his heart was in his throat.
Hired killers don’t wait at curbside, and neither tabloid journalists nor
subpoena servers hang around in the pouring rain. There were, however, two
types that did behave this way: cuckolded husbands and crackpots. Raszer had
seen his share of both. In his line of work, not altogether different from that
of a parish priest trying to mediate a witch hunt, passions ran high, judgments
nearly always bordered on the irrational, and men were driven by a zealotry
born of primal drama they could no longer remember well enough to use as an
excuse for their consuming madness. Now seven years of scrupulously maintained
anonymity had evaporated, and the cranks had his number.

    
The
bedroom hallway led to a small, sunken living room with a low Moroccan tea
table and a well-used hearth, up two steps to the bar and dining area from
which Brigit had been watching the Hollywood Freeway flood like the Nile, and
finally into the converted front room that had been Raszer’s office from the
beginning. There, hard drives and paper files kept dossiers on dozens of snake
oil salesmen and spiritual racketeers he’d either exposed or driven back under
the rocks. Any one of them or their associates could be waiting outside. A big
bay window faced the cul-de-sac; Raszer stepped to the side and gently drew
back the curtain.