Drowning in sand.
©1997 Dennis Detwiller
When you first shoot a man, there is no moment of revelation while the deed is done, no heartfelt trauma of something irrevocably being lost. Not like in the movies.
Instead, there is only the incensing numbness and the deafening sound of the gun kicking back violently in your hand, as if you were holding the leg of an angry dog trying to get away. It distracts you.
And this is why people die.
The gun gives you no time to think about it when it happens, and in time, it doesn’t seem that bad. When you remember the event, you recall the details of the special effects, not the look on the victims face, not what he or she was wearing. But the way the gun kicked, the smell, the smoke. You work it into everything else, and the important details get lost in the mental paperwork. Misplaced in the shuffle like a card trick.
Life is like that.
The first man I killed was named Dr. Antonio Malbayam, and he died on his knees at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, a neat hole in his chest like a cigarette stain. Today, fifty years later, I still can’t remember what he looked like.
I sit across the diner from the man sent to watch me. He is a fine fellow, so good at his job that he makes me feel almost alone, something I haven’t truly experienced since before my time in the government. The people who employ him are professionals, they tap my phone, use lasers to listen in on my conversations with the few friends I can maintain, but I don’t mind. Somehow having fewer secrets makes the ones I maintain seem more important. No matter what they might be.
I can’t write anything down, the notebooks might be discovered. I know they search everything when I am not there, deniable men with no names shuffling through my home in the dark, marking the positions of each item moved, each paper read.
Most would be bitter, followed every day, everywhere, spending their final days monitored and written about by MAJESTIC. Not me. I would do it all again in a moment, I would sign it all away, and more (if there was more to give than I have already), with a smile on my face.
In my time, I have seen proof that we are not alone in this galaxy. I have seen a thing that was born under another sun, I have stood in a craft that has traveled between our two worlds. I have learned how it is to move and affect matter and energy with only the power of the mind. Enough for four lifetimes, forty lifetimes, and more.
I have seen the final truth, dancing in mad-mans scribble of the Courtis Equations. The absolute truth, the clockwork that keeps this thing we mis-perceive as a universe spinning in a series of numbers looking like some accountants scratch pad.
This set of Equations is a small part of my secret, the one I guard with my life. Somehow, by rendering this absolute to nothing more than a segment of my secret, it is as if I have defeated him, Dr. Stephen Courtis, and finally his mocking voice is silent in my mind. But sometimes he is still there in my old man dreams, like a ringleader, like a Jester, mustering the subtle humiliations of my life into form and force. Laughing at me, silently with tears pouring down his cheeks. Sometimes he is silent, and just beckons for me to follow.
Courtis was everything I wanted to be, tempermental, Individualistic, brilliant. Bronk let him run all over the program, controlling everyone else. Courtis had carte blanche and used it, like I wished I could, muscling everyone out of his areas in the N-4 complex.
The N-4 building/hangar complex at Wright Patterson was where they kept it, the alien disk they recovered in Roswell in ‘47. A silver hubcap which just hung there in the air, defying everything, thumbing its nose at Newton, Kepler, and laughing in the face of the best explanations we had to date. As if that wasn’t enough to set you off, they had one of the pilots too. In any case, the human mind is extremely resilient, and after a couple of months the Disk just filtered in, like the old card trick, until it was an everyday sight. The Coca-Cola machine, twenty two feet away, an alien spacecraft from Zeta Reticuli 3. God, what were we thinking?
The N-4 Building clung to the side of the hangar like some sort of parasite, a cinderblock and stainless steel piece of Americana from the age of the Atom Bomb. I guess N-4 was a parasite of sorts, all those jobs, directives, budgets, all somehow siphoned from that silver grey thing from another world. It was always all about what we could get from the saucer, what we could learn from it, what we could steal from it. Everyone in my memory from that place has their faces set in eternal consternation, like a child who cannot finish the long division, like the boy who cannot reach a toy on a high shelf.
My office was in the basement, looking much like the cubbyhole I had used for my Doctoral researches at Chicago, covered in papers, empty Coca-Cola bottles, grease stained food cartons. It seemed the same, but felt a million miles from that place, like I had just been transported to another lifetime, like everything before N-4 was a dream.
I was recruited from the Los Alamos Foreign Technologies team by a man called Stepman, who never told me his first name, just flashed a badge from a department of the government I had never heard of. Back then at Los Alamos the brass ring was a rocket capable of sporting an Atom Bomb, so I already had the K clearance which was required to view sensitive Atomic data. It was just a matter of bumping me up to the new highest level, MAJIC, and I could join the new team at Wright Patterson. What’s more sensitive than the Atom Bomb I said? All it took was a fifteen minute conversation, two photographs and a list of people who had already accepted and I was beyond sold, I was a true believer, a zealot.
I was Superman, the world was going to be changed forever, and I would be a pioneer, a name which would be inextricably mixed with the incident, the most significant occurance in known history. I was on the fast track.
That’s before the first real contact with the Others you see. I had high hopes, the American Government was a chisel chinned white knight rushing towards the answers to everything. There was a feeling back then, I can’t really explain it. The physicists I was working with, hell the entire scientific community was sure those answers were just around the next corner. We thought we were so advanced, we were all so sure...
The disk capped that feeling off for me. The first time I saw “The Bucket” (as we lovingly called it), I was 27. You know that point in “The Wizard of Oz” where they switch it to color? That’s what happened to my life when I saw that thing, the most sensitive piece of data any world government possessed, sitting in a small hangar guarded by two men with barely a High School diploma between them.
It made me die a little, to know that an intelligence possessed the knowledge to do something like that. That that territory was no longer virgin. There was a look in everyone’s eyes when we left and it never went away. Until you feel the greed of discovery you cannot know what I mean. It became a contest, as I knew it would. Who could rip the secrets of the saucer from the frictionless anonymity of its makers. Like most contests, no one cared who was second best. Courtis was the top man from day one. Everyone else were just warm bodies so Courtis had someone to prove wrong. Me among them.
If I sound bitter, it is true, I envied the man, and I wish to convey this more than anything else, his abilities, his insightfulness and ability to dismiss preconceived notions, all this which led to his downfall, was beautiful to me. I coveted his mind. I did not wish to be his friend, or colleague or student, I wanted to be him. Somehow, even in his untimely death he defeated me, leaving me behind to waste away slowly.
Perhaps now after all these years I will catch up.
This statement you have found, reader, you are wondering why here? Why in this condition? Perhaps you will dismiss it, but I think not, it is human nature to pry, even moreso when invited to do so, and todays youth is obsessed with conspiracy.
Many of us, that is, my colleagues were blessed with a talent for memory, it was very important for our work, which would sometimes cover dozens of chalk-boards before coming to a conclusion (if at all!). I am eidetic, that is I remember everything I have ever experienced as clearly as if it were happening to me now. All the notes, all the formulae, plans, proofs and documents I have read in my lengthy career in the military are in my head still, and will be until my demise.
And so you find yourself here, reading a careful document I have constructed in my mind over a period of years. As I have stated earlier, I am unable to hide anything from MAJESTIC save what I keep in my mind, and so my mind was my notepad, until I had an opportunity to place it on paper here, safely.
I have cultivated the airs of an old man for the benefit of my watchers. I am prone to sit in the park and feed the birds, to read the newspaper for hours on end, to engage other old men in pointless chess matches filled with witty banter. I too have perfected my one chance of earthly escape. For the last three years I have done crosswords for hours a day at the diner you have found this in. You are no doubt wondering of the cover, and why within there are no crosswords within as the gaudy cover advertises, only normal sheets of paper covered in my hook handed scrawl?
Yesterday I purchased a Crossword book as I always do, inside the relative safety of my bathroom, I replaced the interior of the book with the paper you find here, carefully bending the staples back to their former position. Today, over lunch, I was not trying to figure out a four letter word for Trick, as my babysitter believed, but was writing out my final statement to humanity I had spent the last three years perfecting. 11 Down: Ruse.
Please enjoy the one hundred dollar bill I have left for you in this booklet. I assure you it is not counterfeit.
Anyway:
During the late forties it soon became clear that the subtleties of the craft were beyond even our brightest minds. Four people left the team, in 1947 alone due to emotional strain (back in the naive days when I believed you "left"). The Mathematics involved in some of the discoveries (some from the craft, others I am told, from the pilot), stretched our minds taut, and there were times back then, with everything mankind has strived to achieve in science lying in tatters at my feet, that I considered strongly reaching for a gun. I don't know what stopped me, or the chorus of voices urging me to do it, but one day, my mind was clear again. It was like awakening in an asylum surrounded by gibbering inmates, I found myself repulsed by the company I was forced to keep.
We had hit a brick wall, and no one was moving forward, but everyone continued to scrabble at the wall like trapped animals. Except Courtis of course, he steadily pushed onwards, secretive and rude, logging more time with the craft than anyone else. It was Courtis who discovered how to activate the "motor" of the craft, it was Courtis who measured the tiny time dilation apparent when it was on, it was Courtis who discovered the matinenence of gravity within the craft, Courtis, Courtis, Courtis. Every significant discovery that was made then was made by Courtis, and would not be topped until the 1970's. We all sat back and applauded, maintaining our straining sense of comradery through small talk which even from day one had felt forced.
Courtis was found squashed like a bug beneath a copy of one of the geometries found within the craft one day in December by Louis Montgomery. Louis said it looked like he had been steamrolled flat, spilled open like gourd crushed beneath a truck tire, and although I myself never saw him, I often imagine the image, in it I find some comfort. It makes me feel warm and happy, as if I had finally found out a long nagging secret.
They say the sigil was exerting 190g, the equivalent of 10.9 times the Saturn V liftoff velocity on the human body. It was like hitting a concrete wall at 500 miles an hour, with no car. The pavement surrounding him had sunk 1/16th of an inch in compensation.
It must have been wonderful to behold.
The morning of his death, Courtis had etched the symbol on a plank of wood in the hangar, about 3 feet above his head while standing on a stool. It was his discovery that the very symbol he was etching (quite smaller I may add) was somehow maintaining gravity within the craft through unknown means. When the craft was inverted, everything remained level within it, from the outside occupants could be said to be standing upside-down.
The piece of wood the sigil was on was later removed, and although the 190gs continued to be exerted away from the sign, no counterforce was generated. A man could walk around with it in his hands and level a brick wall, rend flesh, hit target drones at fifty miles, feeling no reciprocal force. This problem alone sent four of our men to the imaginary mental facility (how young I was then to believe there was such a place!). This was a hospital the U.S. government was very familiar with I would later find. Your treatment, two bullets to the back of the head, you cell, a lime pit outside of Mesa Verde New Mexico, your stay Permanent. I know many people who went to that hospital and were fully cured.
Why Courtis had etched the sigil, how he learned to do it and why he would do it larger than the original are all questions left unanswered until now. Frankly, then, I didn't care. Finally, it seemed the madness he had been acumulating had caught up, and crushed him beneath the scope of his intellect.
Or had it?
His notes pointed towards some huge revelation, his equations would become known as the White Sheet, and would acquire tones of reverence when referred to by members of the N-4 team. If their was a Bible ever written for Physics, this was Genesis. Thirty four equations on two sides of a piece of plain paper, with a single word on either side.
That word was "Escape".
Of course, it was overlooked by the rest, the scrawl of a man who had crushed himself to death with alien science. From the moment I was given access to it, I knew that was what I wanted to do, and all I have been trying to do ever since, escape. It was in late December after Courtis' accident that me and Dr. Antonio Malbayam were given the green light to study the Courtis Equations. Two people working in tandem, it was hoped, would be a safeguard against a repeat of the previous incident. I found out after I killed him, that we were both briefed similarly. If I had not killed him, he surely would have pulled the trigger on me.
We were both told that we were to keep an eye on our study partner. Signs of mental deterioration were evident in them, strain, emotional problems we were told. But the subject of the scrutiny was brilliant and necesarry, like a dangerously clever tool.
I had never held a gun before that day in '49, and in an instant all the dim memories of childhood leapt back, it was difficult to not just point and shoot, to hear the noise, to see things shatter and break. Holding the huge cold weight of the gun, my hand trembled, not out of fear, but excitement, and it took all my strength to place it in the fresh leather holster on my hip.
We studied in an antiseptic little room in the basement of N-4. Each working on portions of Courtis' equations, sitting on plain wooden stools beneath florescent lights which clicked and hummed like insects. I had not met him before, Antonio Malbayam, but his work was familiar to me.
We didn't like each other from the start. In retrospect I know why. We were both wondering when we first met in that little room, our minds on the same question at the same instant I am sure: Why does he get a sidearm, he's crazy!
It seems strange to me now that we were both plotting against each other from the beginning of our time in the Vault, as it became known to us. That we both believed we were the hero, the good guy, when only one of us really was.
I'll give you a hint, it wasn't me, that's why I'm still alive.
As we worked on the problems, dissecting the guts of some new horrible Physics, as Alien as the thing that had come down in the ship bearing it, we began to open up to each other. We had much in common it seemed, and we learned to talk to one another, pretending to ignore orders, the gun at our hips, to see past it all to the great and holy answer to everything. I know I never truly forgot our situation, I know that my gun was loaded and ready even after the thirtieth time I went down there for the day, a painted smile on my face. It is hard to tell what Malbayam was thinking, but I like to imagine he was just as suspicious of me, although I know it's not true. It gives me some measure of comfort to know it was him or me.
When Malbayam started shouting that day in September, I found the gun in my hand, no interim memory of retrieving it could be found. My hand did not tremble or waver, it found its bead on Malbayam's chest, who kept on shouting.
"I've found it! I've found it!"
And then I saw it would be my chance for revenge. At that moment, Dr. Antonio Malbayam had arrived at the incredible revelations of Dr. Stephen Courtis, now dead for more than a year. He had become my tormentor.
I knew then I hated him.
Like I said, he died, I shot him, he fell. I was rewarded as a loyal member of the N-4 team, so I was there for the rest of it. No one suspected what truly went on. I said Malbayam had a breakdown and began to destroy notes he had made on Courtis' Equations. No one asked many questions, maybe they knew this would be the outcome from the beginning.
In my remaining time in MAJESTIC I witnessed events which would shape the world with the disinterested eye of an occupied child. Forrestal "died", Kennedy was killed, Korea, Vietnam, Watergate, "the Bucket" was destroyed in an accident in 1972, the crazed NSA made contact with the pilots of the craft in 1978, and they made the deal which signed away everything in 1980. Other things happened, in the end, nothing had any effect on me.
In all those years I was studying those notes in my head, on endless blackboards in private rooms beneath N-4. By 1965 I knew them all so well I quit writing completely. The problems went through my head incessantly , a looped tape, flipping over and over. Everything else was secondary to incorporating Malbayam's fragmented notes to Courtis' Equations.
One day not too far back, it came to me as I sat in my old man chair on my front porch, and it was like the sunlight breaking over the rocks in the morning. As light and easy and transparent as a soap bubble, I had been looking too hard for the answer when it was right in front of me the whole time. In my time as a scientist, there have only been several moments of true wonder at a discovery, this put them all to shame, along with every other earthly pleasure I had experienced. The only thing better than understanding it, I knew, would be to use it.
It is a difficult thing to explain, the Last Equation, but I will try. I have thought long and hard on a method of translation for someone who most likely has no training in scientific fields, and have come to the conclusion that even to someone of a scientific bend, a simplification of the Equation would be meaningless. So I have settled on Metaphor.
Imagine there is a puzzle, and you are left in a room to solve it, some take longer than others, those that finish leave through a single door in the room. Some never finish at all, but are called through the door from the room. This is the world, the room, the puzzle, the door.
But what if one day, as you were working on it, the puzzle arranged itself in such a way as to resemble the room, its components, you, in perfect minute detail?. What then? What does this event mean? If you move a piece does it change the room? No it does not.
You think long and hard on the nature of the puzzle, until you realize, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, that you are solving a puzzle within a larger puzzle. Somewhere some unimaginable giant manipulates the pieces of his puzzle and you dance.
What can you do? Forces control you and are controlled, above and below you to infinity. You continue to play with the puzzle, pondering how to break the loop, knowing now that you are altering the outcome of other people, other puzzles. But if you are altered yourself than no action is your own and you can hold no blame. It is a difficult question, one you find eating at you as you move the pieces. Until one day it strikes you.
You can put the puzzle down.
You stand for the first time in the room, and turn and look behind to see an endless expanse of open ground you had not noticed before. Past the fake room and the distracting puzzle and the false door.
It is territory in a direction that until perceived does not exist, and once perceived does not need to. It is what encompasses the whole of everything. An absolute perfect eternity.
When they find my body, like Courtis, they will ignore the important things, but you will know. Courtis did what he could to leave a hint behind, as it is not something that can be shoved in ones face. I too have done my best, as I am watched fastidiously. Your are holding the fruits of my labor. It is my statement and last confession, the compilation of all I have learned in this illusion we call reality.
Beyond this I have no true idea what awaits me. Only glimpses from dreams, of something more whole and more complete than anything in this broken down world. Here, I am nothing but a localized effect, the consequence of a billion different rules, put there by the actions of a Maker who had no hand in our creation. We are only a side effect.
It reminds me of a poem:
So Man, who here seems principle alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some wheel, or verges some goal,
'Tis but a part we see and not a whole.
Did courtis imagine that he would breach that sphere? I know now that he did, and I will too.
Like any truly great teacher I have ever had, Courtis was distant, he was harsh and unforgiving, but he taught me more than I will ever be able to repay him for. It is hard to look back and realize my whole existence here was folly except for those few brief years I knew him, and the many years I spent studying his work. But now I have a chance to show him, to make him proud. I will move on tonight.
When I see him again I am sure we will have much to speak of.
gladzio666