The Bend of the World: A Novel (8 page)

Zollen’s stepfather at the time was a member of the Order of the Moose. Most days after his shift ended at the mill, he’d head down to the lodge to throw a few back. A few often became a lot, and his mother would send Wilhelm to collect the old man.

One day when he was on just such an errand, he chanced upon the head of his stepdad’s union, the United Steelworkers, a man by the name of Dan Sternbecker, entering the lodge with another man young Wilhelm didn’t recognize. I would later learn that this sartorial fellow was none other than Dr. Martin Dopffnording, a famous German expatriate who’d worked on the Philadelphia experiment and was now a vice-chancellor of the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Being a curious child, Zollen followed this odd duo. They were deep in conversation, and didn’t notice him.

To his surprise, they did not go into the bar, but instead passed through a doorway to a small dark stairwell that he’d never noticed before. He gave them a few moments and then followed them. The stairs seemed to descend for many stories, frequently switching back on themselves. Why would a social hall have such a deep basement? he wondered.

At the base of the stairs was a small lobby with a sagging couch, a few chairs, some filing cabinets, and a receptionist desk. Beyond the desk, there was a heavy wooden door. He surmised the men had gone through the doorway, but dared not follow them, lest he be caught. Instead, he hid behind the desk.

He must have dozed off. He awoke some time later to the sound of the men emerging from the room. They passed swiftly, speaking to each other in a language that he did not understand at the time, although subsequent studies and investigations lead me to believe that it was an Altaic derivation of middle high Atlantean.

Wilhelm dashed across the room and through the slowly closing door. The room beyond was vast and dimly lit and very cold. In it, as far as the eye could see, were row upon row of heavy wooden planters, each of which held a single, healthy evergreen.

Anyway, Wilhelm explores, leaves, finds his stepfather half delirious and drunk at the bar. He gets the man home; the mother—it’s implied that she’s a sort of Blanche DuBois character, lost and alone in the industrial north—remonstrates the stepfather. He strikes her. Zollen attempts to intervene. The stepfather strikes him. When he wakes, he finds himself in some sort of examination room. An orifice opens on the far wall. In walks a man whose principal identifying mark is the big signet ring on his right hand and his eerily patrician voice. Don’t worry, he says. I’m a doctor.

4

Johnny said that he refused to believe that I’d seen a UFO.

I refuse to believe it, he said. You? You saw it? Of all people. Where’s the justice in that?

We were at the diner on Sunday. I’d eaten a quarter of a wet BLT and pushed it away. Johnny had ordered six scrambled eggs and toast and was working his way methodically through the pile.

What can I say? I saw a goddamn UFO. Three, actually.

Spiro, Johnny called to the owner, who was near the cash register reading a newspaper. Can you believe this guy says he saw a UFO?

Spiro shrugged. Effreeone sees crazy things these days. He shrugged. Welcome to your country. He leaned back in his stool and lifted the paper. I caught the front page: Mayor Denies Gay Rumors Led to Firings at Economy Council.

So, Johnny said to me, would you say that it was mirrored, or more like quicksilver? Quicksilver? Mercury. Um, both? In other words you had a sense that the skin had a certain liquid quality, as if it had been poured? Yes, yeah. But you say you could see your reflection? Yes, clearly. Was it illuminated? My reflection? No; are you being intentionally difficult; no, the ship! Well, I guess; I mean, we could see it. Wait, we? Yes, I
told
you: me and Mark and Helen. Who are Mark and Helen? The couple we met at the museum; who formed the entire first half of the story. Did they see it, too? Yes,
like I told you
. I’m not one to get caught up in the secondary details. Now, the ship, was it illuminated—self-illuminated?—I don’t know; it would have been hard to say; it reflected everything. Did you detect an aura of light around it? What sort of aura? Any sort—listen, you’re the one who saw the fucker, so
describe it to me
. I would not say there was an aura. A corona? Or a corona. A halo? You mean, like an aura? (Johnny put a hand over his face, inhaled deeply, said: Of all the people, it had to be you. It couldn’t have been me.) Sorry, I said; no, no halo. Did it make a sound? Johnny asked. Not as far as I could tell. No humming, no tones? None. Vibration? I didn’t feel any vibration. In other words, Johnny said, it had no visible or audible means of propulsion. Yes, I said, that would be accurate. When you looked underneath it, did you see a slight shimmering? What kind of shimmering?—sorry, sorry!—I know I’m supposed to describe it. A shimmering, Johnny said, like a heat mirage, like you’d see on a highway on a hot day. No shimmering, but I can’t say I looked very closely; is shimmering important? It’s strongly indicative of anti-gravity, Johnny answered. And you say, when it flew away, it tracked a precise vertical path? Precisely. And did it seem to actually
fly
away, or would you more say that it
receded
? I replied, I’m afraid I’m not entirely clear on the distinction. Johnny sighed. Do you remember
Stranger in a Strange Land
? Not especially well, no. Is that the one where he fucks his own mom? God, no, never mind. What I am asking is: Did the object appear simply to fly away, albeit on an unusual and physically impossible trajectory, or did it appear rather to fade out, as if perhaps phasing out of our plane of existence? The former, I said. It flew.

And was this—Johnny forked scrambled eggs into his mouth and chewed for a moment—was this all before, during, or after you made out with the chick?

You said you didn’t . . . Fuck you. You’re just making fun of me.

A little.

I didn’t make out with her. She kissed me.

I do like that sort of creepy, rapey aspect to the story. It plays well with your puerile Ayn Rand philosophy. It would’ve been rad if she’d
taken you
right then and there.

My philosophy isn’t an Ayn Rand philosophy.

Oh, please.
Libertarian
. Johnny laughed. Ridiculous. And don’t try to tell me that you’re an anarchist or whatever. You people are worse than Constitution fetishists. The individual.
Natural rights
. That shit makes me LOL in my pants. I happen to know that you had, and probably still have, hidden away somewhere,
every
book that Ayn Rand ever wrote. Including the books of you’ll-pardon-the-expression philosophy. The trade paper versions. The ones with the crackpot Albert Speer engravings on the front.

Fuck you, Johnny. You’re just mad that I saw a flying saucer and you didn’t.

I am, admittedly, a little regretful, but, eh, you know what they say: miracles are wasted on believers.

Who says that? I asked.

They do, Johnny said. I don’t know. Catholics, maybe. It sounds like something they’d say.

I’m Catholic, I said, and I don’t remember saying that. Or hearing it. It sounds like something
you
would say.

Please, you’re Catholic like I’m heterosexual. You were born to them, and they assumed you were one of them until around puberty, when suddenly they began to suspect something.

No one assumed you were a heterosexual, Johnny.

True, he said. I was born a butterfly.

5

As penance for my failing to come home the night before—Mark and Helen had dropped me off at Johnny’s, and I’d slept on his weirdly grandmotherly couch with his fat tabbies, Anton and LeVay—I’d told Lauren Sara that she could use my car for the day on the condition that she be the one to bus over and retrieve it from Oakland. The Greek had gotten a show at a gallery downtown, and Lauren Sara was going to help her move her paintings. Johnny and I left the diner. Johnny was supposed to meet some people about starting a noise band, and he said he’d walk with me as far as my apartment before heading over to Bloomfield. As usual he was wearing shorts, although it was only forty-five degrees and there was a chilly drizzle. Don’t you ever wear pants? I asked him. You used to wear pants, I think.

And deprive the world of my magnificent calves? He shrugged. Shorts are more comfortable.

Yeah, but aren’t you cold?

I know that your so-called heterosexuality reacts violently to even the thought of contemplating a masculine physique, but I find it impossible to believe that you haven’t noticed the hirsute girth I’ve wrapped myself in since we were kids. I am impervious to cold. I’m a goddamn hrimthurs.

A what? And not since we were kids. You were still skinny in college.

True, but too hairy to be a twink, so I decided to go all-out bear.

What’s a twink? I asked.

Really, Johnny answered, you know perfectly well. I know you’re terrified that people think you’re a fag, as if the sad heterosexual dystopia you’ve left in your life’s wake isn’t evidence enough of a shameful sexual parochialism, but no one buys the ignorance act.

Okay, I said. Christ.

So. Let’s talk about the flying saucer some more. Now, Pringle is a little, let’s say, inconsistent on the issue. In
Fourth River, Fifth Dimension
, he’s pretty clear that UFOs are extradimensional and that they travel back and forth from our universe and their own through a basically magical process, but then in
Fountain of Spooks
, which is the third book in the series, he implies that they come out of the hollow earth. He doesn’t say much in the second book, about UFOs anyway. Your descriptions are pretty consistent with the hollow earth variety. The extradimensional ones are more like balls of light.

Ball lightning, I said.

Shut it down, Johnny said. It is very strange, though, that we’re seeing both varieties in close proximity.

Yes, I said. You’ve definitely identified the part of this story that’s very strange.

Speaking of very strange, any progress on the Where’s Winston?

No, I said.

You haven’t even tried. I shrugged. Not that I expected otherwise. You’re such a materialist. It’s depressing. Maybe your close encounter will awaken some basic human curiosity in you.

It was definitely curious. How many books did this guy write?

Well, there are five that are under his sole authorship and another two that he cowrote with someone named Dr. Wilhelm Zollen, and then there are a bunch of sort of fan-fic, self-published versions that have popped up, apparently from people who heard him speak at conventions or whatnot and became convinced that they were participants in Project Pittsburgh. I’ve read the first three so far.

Project Pittsburgh is the thing.

Project Pittsburgh is the everything. It’s pretty awesome. You should read this stuff instead of shooting your load in bullshit liberal blog comments all day. It’s sort of an all-encompassing conspiracy theory. I mean, usually you get a Nazi, a time portal, and a train full of gold, or you get aliens and Feds, or you find out that Tesla was really Rasputin or Gore Vidal’s grandfather created chemtrails or AIDS was caused by sexual congress with bigfoots, but Pringle’s got a real conspiracy puttanesca thing; it’s all in there; he’s the Whitman of wack jobs; containment has failed on the multitudes.

Well, that all sounds very elaborate. What’s the upshot?

The upshot? Jesus Lord Mother of Mercy, you are becoming a corporate hack.

In a nutshell, I said.

Fuck you, Johnny said, but he could never resist; he was a pedant at heart. So basically, he said, you’ve got this ancient sacred geometry, sacred topography, what with the three rivers and the underground fourth river all meeting at the Point. Usual backstory. Indians knew it was holy, blah blah blah. So the Marquis Du Quesne, who’s the governor-general of New France, and who also just happens to also be the grand master of the Priory of Sion, hears about this, in particular the fourth river, which is, duh, obviously, the underground stream of medieval European esotericism, immediately puts together an exhibition, kicks out the Indians, and builds Fort Duquesne. So then Adam Weishaupt, the thirty-third-degree Freemason and immortal founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, gets wind of this, and basically does the Illuminati version of Aw No She Di’in! Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either
is
or
is manipulating
, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn
Remembrances of Conspiracies Past
. Well, the point is to open up the transdimensional portal between quantum realities, allowing travel between any points in space-time and total control over the historical timeline and all that good stuff. I’m telling you, it’s fucking awesome.

But only two about aliens.

Out of the first three, yeah. I mean, I think he comes back to it when he starts writing in collaboration with Wilhelm Zollen. And they’re not really aliens. They’re extradimensional emissionaries; ascended beings who may already possess the power that the Project seeks. But, yeah, the second book is called
The Testing House
and it’s kind of a big digression about George Westinghouse and satanic ritual sex magic. Sort of a one-handed reader, to be honest. Very ahem descriptive, if you know what I mean.

I know what you mean.

Well, despite your general lackadaisical attitude about the whole deal, I’ve put out some feelers of my own. We’ll see what pops up.