The Locksmith Who Taught Zen by Jonathan Lowe

“Has he confessed or not?” I once asked Lieutenant Drake of the NYPD as he handed me the police report.

    “Yes and no, Mr. Moss,” Drake replied. “As his court appointed lawyer, you’ll have to sort that out on your own. He was caught red handed, but claims he’s not guilty. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have several more important—meaning violent—crimes to attend to.”

    I remember I went to the room where Albert Noonan was presented to me. A short bald man in his forties, he seemed placid and almost disinterested, yet his blue eyes were alive and alert. I sat across from him, and opened the folder on the table between us. Then we shook hands. His fingers felt cool, and relaxed. “I’m Freddy Moss, Mr. Noonan,” I said. “I’ll be representing you in court.”

    “Yes,” Noonan said.

    “Yes,” I repeated his flat, uninflected acknowledgment. “Well, it says here that you are suspected on nine occasions to have placed your own locks on other people’s various doors and gates. On the ninth and last occasion you were caught chaining shut the ticket office to a football stadium just before tickets to a rap concert and Dodgers game went on sale. The note in your pocket read ‘Resist nothing except the illusion of ego and its emotions and obsessions.’  Tell me, were you about to copy the man who the press is calling Sargon, or are you really him?”

    “Do you really know who you are?” Noonan asked me, without a trace of sarcasm.

    “Excuse me?” I said, with some abstraction.

    “Names are merely signposts pointing to the reality beneath,” he declared, although his voice remained calm and even. “They are constructs of the ever compulsive mind, which can only label things and produce in you a fear of your own destruction.”

    I smiled despite myself. “That’s nice, Albert, but we haven’t got time to discuss philosophy.”

    “It is not a philosophy, it is a simple fact. As for time, it is an illusion. Most people live in the past or the future, and yet the past and future do not exist, nor have they ever existed. Everything that happens, happens in the Now.”

    I coughed and looked down at my notes again for a refresher. “So. . . may I call you Al, or do you prefer ‘Sargon the Enlightened One’?”

    He continued to study me, his sharp blue eyes trying to delve beneath mine. “As I said, names are meaningless. It is the ego, the mind which needs to label things. But the ego or mind is not you. You are behind it. Only the real you can know another person, not your mind. Your mind can only know labels. It labels everything from a flower to a person, but cannot truly know anything.”

    “Listen . . . Mr. Noonan? I’m about to lose my cookies here. If I’m to defend you, you’ll have to cooperate.”

    “If only that were true,” he said.

    “What do you mean, if only that were true? You don’t think I’m here to help you?”

    “No, I mean if only you were losing your mind. You think too much. Everyone does. This is what is wrong with the world. The mind plays an endless game with you, and you identify with it.  It hates the Now, and so you are never happy or at peace.”

    “Please, Albert,” I pleaded. “Please just answer my question.”

    “I have answered your question, have I not?”

    “No, you have not. At least not legally, not technically. Are you this Sargon they talk about in the papers, or aren’t you?”

    He sat back and folded his hands. After a moment he said, “It was around seven hundred BC, in the Assyrian capital of Khorsabad, that King Sargon the Second used a lock to secure the gate to his fortress. His lock was wooden, and utilized a wooden key which had notches on it matching the blocks or ‘wards’ inside the lock. Over twenty four hundred seventy years later, in 1778, Robert Barron invented the first lever tumbler lock, which consisted of a housing containing springs, metal tumblers, and a rotating inner core called a plug. Unlike all prior warded locks, these pin, disk, or lever tumbler locks were difficult to pick because a cam was involved. Now, of course, certain tumbler locks are secured inside housings of tempered magnesium alloy steel. And since we should live in the Now, this is what matters now, does it not?”

    “Do I take that as a yes?”

    He just sat there and stared at me.

    I sighed. “Let me try again. Are you the perpetrator, alias Sargon the Enlightened, a locksmith from Van Nuys by trade? Please enlighten me.”

    He looked away. “The past is given as a reference, for your mind, which clings to such things. In the more recent past I used a special tool steel pin tumbler padlock combined with a nickel alloy hardened steel chain reinforced with molybdenum alloy studs. My chain resisted hacksaw blades, and required nothing less than an argon plasma torch to defeat.”

    “Now that your most recent history is straight, at least,” I said, flourishing my pen, “would you mind telling me exactly why you did this thing, Al?”

    “Is it not obvious?”

    “You mean by the notes left at the scene? What’d you do, anyway, read some Buddhist text, and decide to make your classroom as big as all outdoors?” I paused, and watched his face for reaction. There was none. He was at peace with himself, devoid of hostility or even worry over the consequences of his acts. “And by the way,” I added, hidden curiosity now stabbing me like a knife, “where did the sayings they found come from, again?”

    He blinked at the ceiling. “They are from the Ten Grave Precepts attributed to Bodhidharma from the book Isshin Kaimon, The Precepts of One Mind.”

    “Oh, of course.” I turned pages in my file, and read aloud. “Okay, the first here is ‘I take up the way of not killing.’ Supposedly you left that ‘precept,’ as you call it, not at an abortion clinic or death house, Al, but at a military drone contractor. . . right after you picked and replaced their front door’s mortise lock with a double dead bolt. Sound familiar?”

    He gave me no reaction, so I continued.

    “Next was ‘I take up the way of not stealing,’ a note they say you left at Sterling Health Services, an HMO under investigation by a 60 Minutes crew, after you chained shut their administration building. Then it was ‘I take up the way of not abusing animals,’ which was found on a meat packing kingpin’s metal office door, next to his Hummer car dealership, after you clamped a titanium padlock onto the door’s built-in flange. Nice work there, Al. Easy enough for anybody to do, too, huh?”

    “Obviously.”

    “Then the next day the note, ‘I take up the way of not speaking falsely,’ appeared on the door to union local 393 of the Teamsters. And ‘I take up the way of not giving or taking drugs’ was found on the locked door to Liquor World off 42nd Street. Then ‘Sargon the Enlightened One’ apparently took a week off, because it was a week later the note ‘I take up the way of not supporting the lies of others’ was discovered on the chained door to BuzzFeed. And yet all this still didn’t get much press, did it, until ‘I take up the way of not praising myself while ignoring those who suffer’ appeared on the exit doors to the Dorothy Chandler pavilion during an awards ceremony two weeks after that. Did you go on vacation out to L.A. then, Al? And how did you accomplish that one without getting caught? I thought those Hollywood awards shows had high security.”

    “Even security guards do not always live in the Now, unfortunately for them,” Noonan replied with cryptic ease.

    “They’re unenlightened, is that what you’re saying? Like me?”

    He nodded, but without any detectable trace of emotion. “Perhaps it explains to you how a person is able to slide five bicycle U-locks into the adjacent entrance door bars while passing outside.”

    “Uh huh. . .  Well, you certainly got everyone’s attention with that one. They had the fire department out front on live television. And while that was happening a. . . person . . . left ‘I take up the way of not being stingy’ in a note on the windshield of a Mercedes, right after he defeated the alarm and locked The Club onto the steering wheel. What was that about?”

    “The car belonged to a star who gave her time to charity, but not her money. The time she gave was for her own aggrandizement, and the charity parties she attended spent more on flowers and food than was given to the poor.”

    “Why take the time and the risk right then, though?”

    Noonan closed his eyes, then, and took in a slow, deep breath. Finally he opened his eyes, which I imagined were even bluer. “Time is an illusion,” he said.

    I laughed. “You won’t think so when you’re doing it,” I promised him. “You could get twenty years for this, even if you plead guilty and throw yourself on the mercy of the court!”

    “Have mercy,” he said, “on yourself. You are the court. Your own judge, jury, and executioner. May I tell you why you are so obsessed with guilt that you must return to it constantly?”

    “We haven’t got time for that, Al. We have to prepare your defense.”

    “Resist nothing,” he instructed me.

    “Excuse me?”

    “You heard me, but you are not listening. Your mind is creating a constant dialog, a background noise from which you cannot escape. You need to turn it off, and step out of time’s grip on you into the present. Then you can know your true self, and become alive instead of just labeling things around you. Then you will know there is no salvation in the future, and no resolution from the past. There is only the Now, and it is more than enough.”

    “Now, now,” I said, although the smile on my face felt forced.

    He leaned forward, looking directly into my eyes. “Yes, now is the time to awaken,” he said, “from your false identity.”

    “My false identity,” I repeated, contemplating it for the first time, turning it in my mind in frustration. But my mind, with its old patterns, still animated my lips. “Now, of course,” I heard myself say, “the only thing they’ve really got on you is the stadium box office incident. That precept about taking up the way of not indulging in anger. And resistance. If you’re a copy cat, though, and you’re not this Sargon guy, I may be able to get you off with probation. After all, you’ve got no record up to now. Which means it’s your choice now, isn’t it? So tell me, what’s it gonna be? Not much time. Are you guilty or not guilty, Albert? Enlighten me!”

.

Some say that Time is an illusion of the mind. Of the ego. Ironically, over time, I’ve since learned that’s true. When my wife left me, taking with her our son Jimmy, she complained of my staying too long at the office, and of neglecting her. Going out the door, she was crying when she said maybe now I had all the time in the world. Which got me to thinking. Until, in my misery, I gave up thinking altogether, and lost my job too.

    I don’t know how much time has passed, since, but the one who is known as Albert Noonan goes on trial soon. I will not be defending him, nor does he require a defense. I can only complete his unfinished work, the tenth precept. And so I will take up the way of not defaming that which reflects true self-nature, in that subtle and mysterious realm of the One which does not hold dualistic concepts of ordinary beings and sages. The teisho of the actual body is the harbor and the weir. This is the most important thing in the world–the letting go of ego and of waiting and even of seeking. In the eternal present, its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature, and it is beyond explanation. So let the court decide what it will, I know that Albert Noonan is not guilty. And when his jury has been sequestered–when they are locked away–they will see the Truth, too.  -0-

One More for the Road by Jonathan Lowe

 It was one of those hot summer nights. Near a lonely stretch of highway, as Tom stood motionless behind the cash register at Lenox Liquors, he thought about opening a bottle of bourbon for a few swigs of the old stuff to keep awake, but no--he needed this job. His aging mother was dying. Doctors had called it "multiple myeloma." The plasma cells in her bone marrow had turned against her. As her only dependable son, Tom had to hold two jobs just to pay that part of the bill her insurance didn't cover.

     At 10:15 a black Eldorado turned into the parking lot for the third time that night, its headlights sweeping past Tom's eyes. He looked up to see the driver wheel this time in a quick semi-circle, then back directly in front of the door. Next, both doors opened and two young men emerged.  

     One with a gun.

     Tom felt a rush of blood surge into his temples. He froze for a moment, and then slid down behind the counter, visualizing the bullet that might shortly enter his head. That single hot lump of lead which would burrow through all the intricately connected neurons of his brain, funneling away all his memories forever, now waited in the gun carried by the swarthy one. And he imagined again how the hammer would cock back until--

   Sudden blackness. Yes.     

  A medic had once told him that a bullet in the brain would be less painful, because it meant instant death, not a long painful slide into oblivion. He liked that better. But what if he were hit in the stomach?  Then, he realized, it wouldn't end quite so easily, would it. . .     

     The front door started to open, now. Behind the register, Tom focused on the third shelf below the cash register, seeing the handle of an automatic pistol in a shoe box at the back. The initials on it were "L.L."  for his boss, Larry Lenox.

     "All rightie, then," one of the punks said as their shoes clicked onto the store’s tile floor.  Tom lifted his arm up and over the register. "Watch it!  He's gotta gun!"

     Hoping to scare them off, Tom squeezed the trigger, and a big bottle of Rhine Wine burst and showered across some stacked six packs of Michelob. A returning shot caught the register, shattering the plastic corner away. Then more shots thundered, pierced the back wall.

     The man with the gun muttered a curse. Instead of leaving, they were trapped now--cowering in the aisles and afraid to exit the same way they came in. To give them added incentive, Tom fired wildly again, catching two bottles of gin on a header, displayed like bottles on a fence post. Then a new fear replaced his other one.  For an instant the heavy alcohol scent in the room reminded him of the smell of napalm. . . what if the room caught fire? 

      When he could hear again, there was nothing to hear. Had they gone, as he hoped? He lifted his head to look. Once--quickly--then again.  

     A sudden explosion from the side. Tom yelped in pain, glancing down at the flesh wound like a bayonet slash along his middle. 

      "Drop it, man!"  

       The swarthy driver of the Eldorado appeared around a pyramid of silver Coors cases, beckoning his accomplice. Tom dropped the automatic, and the kid loped forward and kicked it away. The automatic skittered back into the dark stockroom as a .38 was shoved into Tom's ribs.  

     "Easy," Tom implored, lifting his shirt despite the sharp stab of pain. "It hurts, see."

     "Well, don’t ya cry on us now," said the driver with a laugh as the other kid got the money from the register. "Yer just nicked. Come inta the back, let’s see what we can do ‘bout the bleeding." Behind the driver the second punk stood grinning. He had a fat, white, rounded face scarred by acne.  

     They turned on the stockroom light. After a moment of terror, Tom forced himself to say, "What's your . . . name?" 

     "Name?"  The punk looked puzzled. As if he didn't know what name meant. 

     "Mine's. . . Tom Russell. Been working here four months, ever since my mother went into the hospital."

     "Oh yeah?"  

     The driver put one hand to his mouth and whispered something to his accomplice. Following orders, that one left the room, closing the door behind him. In the interim, Tom got a towel and dabbed at his wound.

     "Yer one big bruiser, ain't ya?" the driver noted. "Get many customers this late?"

     Tom shook his head as the gunman’s eyes scanned the stockroom floor. "Not until Friday."

     "Tell me," the driver said. "Why'd ya open up on us? Think we'd kill ya?"

     Tom nodded. "Figured you'd think I saw your license plate. Hard to miss it the way you backed up to the door. I. . . didn't see it, though. What'd you plan to do--carry out some beer besides?"

     This time the driver laughed, albeit nervously. "Yeah, ta celebrate. Third place we hit ta-day." He snickered. “One fer the road, eh?”

     They were silent as a sound like crunching across glass was audible through the closed stockroom door.

     "Tell me about your childhood," said Tom, suddenly.

     "Wha--?"

     "Your childhood. What was it like? Was it rough?"

     The driver stared at him, blankly. Then his ugly face wrinkled, his eyes narrowing above the tiny diamond nose stud. But still he said nothing.

     "Because mine was rough," Tom went on. "My dad died when I was eight, and when I turned fourteen I went to work in a laundry at a dollar an hour. Had to quit school to help my mother. We all lived in a duplex and rode the bus everywhere, then. Never had many friends until I got drafted. This one guy--I call him Harry--used to be my best friend. We got to be marksmen out on the range. Harry, he was like me. And that was the only really good time I remember, too--me and Harry, out on the range. You know?"  Tom paused, staring down at the floor. The sound of a truck passing could be heard as a tear slid down his cheek, surprising even him. "But I bet you got lots of friends still around, and even a girl friend too."

     "Yeah," said the driver, flexing his fingers around the revolver. "Big deal."

     "It would be, if you had my memories."

     "That right? How old are ya?"

     "Lot older than you."   

     "An’ ya still a mommas boy?"  The driver laughed. “You--yer jus’ a fool, what you are.”

     Tom smiled smoothly like they do at the Taco Bell drive-through window, because he remembered his first months in the Army, so long ago. There were hecklers then, too. Saying things he'd preferred they didn't.  Things that made him do more pushups than he was asked, so he could stand up and fight back. Things about his mother that reminded him of his younger brother sticking him with her while he went off to become a fat cat lawyer in California. It had made him spend his free time out on the range until he was really good at something, so they couldn't talk behind his back. 

     "What's taking your friend so long?" Tom asked, changing the subject. "I don't hear him out there."

     "Hey, he's jus’ lookin fer somethin," the driver replied.

     "What?"

     "Never you mind what. Okay?"

     But it wasn't okay. Something was wrong, Tom sensed. Many had tried to fool him about things. Like the insurance representative who'd convinced him to drop partial coverage on his mother's policy because the rates were so high, and they 'probably won't need it anyway.’ And especially Barry, his black sheep brother, who’d stuck him here.

     So what could the driver's accomplice be looking for?

     Let's see, he thought. . . They came in, both of them, through the front door. When they came toward him, he fired once, and the driver fired back. First once, then twice more, into the wall. After a moment he fired into the stacks how many times? Four times. Two shots from the driver, then. Another two from him, into the stacks. And then? Then the driver came around, and shot again, grazing him in the side.

     It was a simple addition. Not hard, even for a man with only a GED. Six shots from the driver. Seven from his own gun. The driver's .38 had six chambers. He knew that. But the automatic--it had fired seven. That meant it held at least seven, and probably nine. It also told what the driver's accomplice was looking for.

     Bullets.

    "Did I mention Afghanistan to you?" said Tom as he bent over, trying to decide where to place his next-to-final shot.      -0-

Peeping Tom by Jonathan Lowe

PEEPING TOM

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight,” said Russell Anderson, 60 Minutes co-producer and bureau chief for CBS News.  “You’re saying that Thomas Sidon, a rancher from Naco, Arizona, captured the head of the Calli cartel on his property the day before yesterday, and has offered him to the Border Patrol in exchange for what, again?”

  There was a momentary silence at the other end of the line, which was ghosted by background noise.  Then the White House press secretary replied evenly, “Anything he wants.  And I mean anything.  Including what he did choose, which I will agree is highly unusual.  The President wants a victory in the drug war to sidestep other problems, and we believe Raoul Gasparta is the key.”

  “Go over that part again, will you?  The part I’m not understanding.  I understand about Gasparta. . . his full disclosure on Sidon’s interrogation transcript, the record of kickbacks and the reparations promised to avoid the death penalty.  That’s obvious, and--may I speak frankly?--boring.  Tell me exactly what the President promised him again.”

  The press secretary sighed.  “I thought I made that clear.  Didn’t you hear me, Mr. Anderson?  Maybe you should wait for the press conference in one hour, and ask that question again.”

  Anderson coughed.  “I’m sorry, sir.  I didn’t mean to imply that Gasparta is not important.  But you can understand what it is people will be asking about, surely.  So I have to ask you several things, just to be clear.  One more moment, please, just to verify?”

  The press secretary sighed again.  “Very well.  As I said, a deal was struck with Sidon, whose ranch in Arizona is some five thousand acres.”

  “Straddling the border?”

  “That’s right.  On both sides.”

  “And the President has agreed to the terms of this agreement by signing an executive order into law?”

  “That is correct.”

  “When?”

  “Two hours ago, in the Oval Office.  In exchange for Mr. Sidon’s  cooperation in acting as agent for the U.S. government, he has been granted carte blanche for one year, effective immediately.”

  “And that means. . ?”

  “It means that as of today, Mr. Thomas Sidon has the legal right to enter any private home in America at any time he chooses.  He cannot remove anything, nor can he take photographs.  He may only enter and observe at his leisure.  No U.S. citizen may refuse him entry, under penalty of law.  He is free to come and go as he wishes for the duration of one year.”

  “And this is specifically what he requested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a million dollars, a new red Porsche, or an ambassadorship to Mexico?”

  “Yes, Mr. Anderson.  He didn’t want my job either, thank God.  Although it was offered to him.”

  “But. . . why?  I mean, what’s his motive?  What’s he hope to gain by--”

  “There has been some speculation on that point here.  Perhaps the power or the novelty of it is attractive to him.”

  “Or maybe he’s a voyeur?”

  “Please don’t use that word, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Why not?  Haven’t you walked down your own street at night, and looked at the windows of your neighbors’ homes?  Imagine being able to legally enter any home you want at any time, and the owner of that home can’t bar your entry.  What I want to know is how?  What about rights to privacy?  How can the President do this?  Even this President.”

  “Privacy rights are waived solely on behalf of Mr. Sidon, and only for one year.  He is exempt and immune from any violation, and Congress has been unable to prevent it as they are deadlocked in other matters as well.  So for the duration of Executive Order 1482-421 no homeowner may prevent Mr. Sidon from coming into their home and observing, or searching.”

  “Searching?”  Anderson stood and circled his desk in awe.  “Oh. . . now I get it!  He’s going to be cooperating with you guys, isn’t he?  If he finds drugs, they’ll be admissible in court because he has the sole right to enter without a warrant!  That’s it, isn’t it?”    

  The voice on the line tried to evoke calm.  “I have no comment on that point, Mr. Anderson, except to say that Mr. Sidon will have the full cooperation of the law enforcement, including an escort if he desires.  Police must remain outside, however.  They do not possess his rights.  And whether Mr. Sidon chooses to reveal what he finds is entirely up to him.”

  Anderson cleared his throat, and steadied himself with his free hand on the chair.  “Oh my God. . . he does want money.  Millions.  People will pay him a fortune not to tell.  He’ll be as rich as Midas.  Won’t he?  Where’s he go first, Beverly Hills?”

  “Again, that’s up to him.”

  “’Up to him,’” the 60 Minutes producer repeated in a daze.  “Holy Hopscotch.  This guy is smart.  Fame and fortune at the stroke of a pen!  What’s he gonna wear, though. . . Kevlar?”

  “He will be protected by both police and by the fame he achieves via executive order.”

  “Oh my God.  And. . . and if this is true, that’s who he is, right?  He’s God!”

  “For one year.  That is correct.  If anyone refuses entry, they will be committing--”

  “A sin?”

  “No, a felony.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “With a sin, you pay later.  With a felony, you pay now, Mr. Anderson.  Ten to twenty years in federal prison, based on the severity of the offense.”

  “Severity of the offense?”  Anderson laughed, albeit nervously.  Yet the smile on his face felt too good to be true.  “Who decides the severity of the offense?  No, don’t tell me.  He does?”

  “So you see how it works?”

  “I do, I do.  But what if someone pretends not to be home?”

  “That would make Mr. Sidon very angry, would it not?  Ineffective as well, because he also has the right to force entry when he suspects he has been denied.”

  “How?”

  “With a SWAT team battering ram, should he request it.”

  “Holy--”

  “Listen, Mr. Anderson?  I really have to go now.  I’ve given you too much time already.”

  “Certainly, sir.  I understand.  Thanks.  Thanks so much!  This is the story we’ve been waiting for. . . for over twenty years!”  Anderson glanced at his watch.  “Tell me, does anyone outside the press know about this yet?”

  “No, Mr. Anderson, and goodbye.”

  “Thank you, sir.  Thank you and thank the President!”  Anderson hung up, and then punched his intercom.  “Julie, get me Steve Croft on the phone, now!”

  “Yes, sir,” his secretary’s voice chimed.  “What about the man who's been--”

  “Nevermind.  Julie, listen to me, this is important.  Cancel everything else today.  No calls, no appointments.  And I want the senior staff in my office in ten minutes.  Dan Rather included.  Got that?”

  “But sir--”

  “Do it, Julie!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Anderson sat and leaned back into his leather armchair.  He linked his fingers behind his head.  Then he smiled.  He imagined hiring Sidon to replace a retiring Mike Wallace.  A one year exclusive contract, with bonuses based on ratings.  As the CBS regulars gathered in his office, one by one, he felt a giddy sense of one-upsmanship coming, as though his career had been validated by fate’s whim, and that now--at long last--no one would be able to escape public scrutiny.  Not even Madonna.

  He waited until it was standing room only to speak.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced, “and Leslie. . .”  The phone ringing interrupted him.  He snatched it up.  “What?”

  “Mr. Anderson?” his secretary said.  “I’ve got Steve Croft on line two, but I think you should know. . .”

  “Know what?”

    “Well, remember you told me to cancel all appointments?”

  “Yes. . .”

  “This is odd, sir, but. . . well, I sent that man who was here without an appointment away first, but he got very angry and said he was going to your home instead.  He’s the one who’s been waiting about twenty minutes, remember?”

Wishing Star

WISHING STAR (from the new audiobook MOM GOD.)

 

Miranda, as I called her, and as I imagined her to be a chunk of some alien moon--old beyond estimation--weighed in at six and a half kilograms.  A pint-sized alien, then, but impressive for the darkened scars along her side, suggesting she'd been a naughty child, given to fights.  I was told she'd weighed more, much more, but that she'd decided on a crash diet as she entered the atmosphere at better than a mile a second.  Impact in soft earth had prevented total vaporization, creating the eight foot crater I'd discovered perilously near a tall saguaro cactus.  

     An afterimage of the flash remained virtually embossed on my retina long after her quaking light no longer stretched shadows over my body, and I imagined her years earlier passing Jupiter--that improbable swirl of methane storms across millions of miles of cold--deciding on the very trajectory which placed the meteor in my hands.  When the paper took my picture holding it, they called her my pet rock.  Nickel and iron, they said, that was not of this world.  And somehow I understood from this that I could be happy.  I felt, after Miranda, that it was possible.  If only I could get my wish...

     I'd been lying atop my sleeping bag in the desert sand when that elongated exclamation point--like the finger of God--drew across the heavens.  Moments before the distant and resounding thud I'd been contemplating a past which had brought me from the East, emptied of all those signposts which might stabilize a young carpenter's life, and prevent him from seeing the truth of his aloneness.  I said many things to the reporters, but not these.  I didn't tell them much about myself at all.  Because they didn't ask about my thoughts in the desert on that night and the secret wish I had made, I stuck to those tangible facts which made nice human interest copy.  As they took their photos I smiled like I'd seen men smile in magazines, and I knew already how the image of my face on newsprint would seem: as alien and masklike as a mannequin's.  I was, simply, a rock.  Take away the rock and I was a loner, on my own, looking up at nothing--a stone for a pillow.  Take away the microphone and my silence would be as the stars...

      When I excused myself during the meeting in the lobby of the Arizona Daily Star there was a man who sang to me in the restroom.  "When you wish upon a star," the man confided, "your wishes travel much too far."

       I turned to ask the man what he meant, but he was gone.

       They would all be gone, of course, in much the same way.  Slipping out slightly embarrassed at my indecent lack of credentials, and for this being my one tenuous claim to fame...  even the ones who wanted Miranda for their schools or their planetarium displays.  But before that inevitable thinning, however, a miracle...  A discovery more amazing than that the heavens had opened and Miranda streaked into my grasp, an angelic gift.  A person whose presence I felt.  Curious, shy: a girl who wanted to hold Miranda in her hands, to turn her round and round and feel her texture, her weight...  And with a voice so amazed.

     "Just imagine," the girl exclaimed in the lobby, "how far it's come."

     "It's a she,” I replied at her puzzlement.  "Miranda.  That's her name.  That is...there's a moon of Uranus with that name.  I thought it fit."

     Her mouth formed an oh.

     "I...don't know why," I went on, "I just thought..."

     I paused then, not remembering what I'd thought.

     "Funny," said the girl, "but my name is Miranda too."

     "No, it's not."

     "I've only come as far as Vermont, though."

     I studied her, and felt no deception.  I doubted as one always doubts a miracle, but seeing was believing.

     "That's a long way too," I said, finally.  "Relatively speaking."

     "What is?"

     "Vermont."

     She smiled.  And it was a filling smile, like a door opening on a closed room.

And then there was one more door.

      "Have you come here often, Mark?"

      But no smile.  We were sitting on a blanket, out beyond the park's boundaries, surrounded by saguaro cactus, the only light that of stars.  Almost an hour after she'd followed me over that winding road past the city lights, and now no meteors to break the desert silence.

     "I'm sorry," I told her.

     "Why?"

     "Because you wanted to see one.  A shooting star."

     "It's okay."

     "No, it's not."  I opened my duffel bag and withdrew my battered pair of 20-power binoculars.

     "Really," she said.  "I've seen them before!  In fact, I was outside the same night you were, and I might have seen the same one as you.  It was very bright."  She looked down at her hands.

     "I was going to show you,” I said, then.  “Look.  Look over there.  West, at two o'clock.  That cross.  See the star at the top?  It's Deneb, in the constellation Cygnus the Swan."

     "What about it?"

     "It's a thousand times brighter than our Sun."

     "No, it's not."

     "But it's over nine hundred light years away."

     Miranda thought about it, then she smiled.

     "I'll bet it's bigger TOO," she said.

     I nodded.  "But so far away."

     Now I could tell her about the Crab Nebula, that gaseous remnant of an exploding star in 1054.  Maybe even discuss the origins of comets.  Describe to her black holes and pulsars.  I could mention what books I'd read on the subject...and then...and then how even as a child I'd go outside while my mother and father argued over money and bills inside...  How I'd lay in the grass and look up at the stars and wonder if there were anyone up there looking back...or if maybe it was all only emptiness, a mere chaos of unimaginable heat and cold, size and distance.

     But I couldn't tell her why I was here, now, thirty years old but feeling much older.  I couldn't tell her that, even if she wanted me to...

     "I'm sorry," I said.

     "You really are, aren't you?"

     "But I've brought something else, just in case."

     I reopened my duffel bag again and took out the bottle rocket.  I'd purchased it the same afternoon we'd met, when it occurred to me that miracles couldn't be expected more than once in a lifetime.  The fat lady in the red scarf in the shack with the painted black cat told him to light the thing and step back.  It was that simple.  And when I did it Miranda stood up and clapped her hands.

     "I love it, I love it!" she said, almost breathless, in the smoking dimness.  I glimpsed her eyes, reflecting a sliver of low moon which itself reflected the hidden sun.  After a long silence she wanted to know more about me--”who I was”--and I wanted to say, but couldn't.  The closest I could get was the distant memory of one morning, the first day of college.

     Shadows, then, I told her:  That first morning, when the world seemed heavy with expectation, the sky achingly blue, the future so promising for one whose mind danced with the rhythm of youth.  Some days were meant to be remembered, I told her, and that had been a day of days.

     Halfway through the telling she took my hand and squeezed it.  For as much as I tried to keep it in check, she must have seen a telltale tear come in straining to remember that day in the way I really wanted, past all the pain of my parent's accidental death, and even my dropping out to wander the world with only my hands to sustain me.  As my father had taught repeatedly, if I was willing to work with my hands I'd always have food for my mouth.

     My callused hands, strangely frozen in hers.  Time alone had held such hands.  And now?

     "I'm sorry," I said.

     "Stop saying that."

     "But I am."

     "Why?"

     "Because you came out here for nothing.  Not even a flash in the sky.  Only a substitute.  Like a memory."

     Into my embarrassment her face loomed closer, an oval resolved finally into identity.  Her voice was consoling now, her words chosen carefully:  "We think we'll never forget, but we do," she said.  "How do you remember a feeling, exactly as it happened?  You can't.  All you have are facts--bits of what you did, what happened.  The reality no one understands is buried.  ...Don't you see?"   

    I nodded.  "I made a wish, when I saw my shooting star," I confessed.  "I wished...you...into existence."

    "Me?"

     I described the rooms to her, then.  The studio apartments in Buffalo, in jersey city, in Newport News.  The tiny kitchenettes where over the past year I'd cooked tasteless frozen dinners...the droning rattle of the air conditioners as I tried to sleep over the laughter and television sounds next door.  I told her about reading dog-earred novels late into the night until I was too tired to keep my eyes open.  About dreams of falling, and waking up just before I hit bottom.  I detailed the brief relationships formed out of fear or desperation.  But I couldn't tell her about downtown streets at night, and the bus stations, and the way the streetlights became an eerie green that made everything feel totally alien...lost.  I couldn't describe how the real world had vanished all together for me then, leaving only this substitute for people alone--always, even in the daylight then, alone.

     I couldn't.

     I could only close my eyes and turn away.  And when I opened my eyes again I was alone.

     Three days later I was reading a discarded edition of the Star in a donut shop at the corner of a long block of restaurants.  It was 10 AM and above me the shop's circulating fan beat down, flapping the paper in my hands.  My eyes tracked in the slanted morning light.  But I didn't see the ad.

     A week later found me at the bus stop, sitting next to another discarded paper left in the blue cubicle which protected riders from the intense heat.  This time the ad was in bold type, a giant arrow pointing at it from above.  But just as I was about to read it, the bus came.

     Finally, on a Thursday afternoon, I was scanning the classifieds for an apartment, and there it was.  Not merely a print ad this time, but a photo.  In the wide-angle image a girl held a roman candle at arm's length, a bright blue ball of flame arching skyward over the parking lot in which she stood.  To her left, out on the street, drivers either stared blankly or pretended not to see.  And below the photo:  

     MARK--WHERE ARE YOU?   PLEASE CALL ME AT THE PAPER.   I'M SORRY.  --MIRANDA.

     As I ran toward the phone booth, a strange sense of exhilaration seized me.  The Star's switchboard operator transferred my call to the Classified department.

     "Star Classifieds, may I help you?"

     "Miranda?"

     "...Mark??"

That night I drove her to the planetarium and on the way told her that I'd left my other apartment and was staying at a motel for a while.  I was trying to tell her all those things which "had no words for them so they never get said" when she touched my arm.  I looked over to see that she was crying.  Silently.

     "It's okay," I said.

     "Not it's not," she replied.

     "What do you mean?"

     She told me about the men, then.  The ones who had used her.  She told me about grocery stores too, and libraries, and even singles bars--all of which had bred loneliness for one who disliked being left by men who fled back to their vampire's caskets at dawn. 

      Then...then she told me why she'd left me that night:

     "Your remember your wish?" she said.  "The wish you made when you saw your shooting star?"

     "What about it?"

     "It's the same wish I made when I saw it."

     We arrived at the planetarium, a massive dome looming up into the night sky.  Wordlessly, I led her inside and we settled into the deeply cushioned interior seats, tilted back to afford a view of an arched ceiling on which were projected the images of stars, galaxies, and nebula.  The program of the evening was a clinical study of the relative sizes of stellar objects.  There was the sun, a yellow circle on the ceiling.  ...The earth, a tiny blue dot beside it.  Then a huge red circle projected over both, enough to cover a hundred suns...the red supergiant, Antares.  

     I took her hand on the wayfarer out.

     "I want to show you something else," I said.

     "No more," she whispered in reply.  "I feel so small.  So small I’m almost. . .dizzy."

     "It's okay," I said.  "It's okay, now."

    I squeezed her hand, and then I pointed.

     In the lobby was a new display, amid several others.  On a freshly painted pedestal in the center was a meteorite, six and a half kilograms in weight, dark scars along one side...

     "Now that," I told her, with conviction, "is just a rock."