The woman on the tower of ice points, then beckons, her thin, alabaster finger curling slowly. Thunder cracks in the sky, lightning fires across the heights, revealing the mysteries below, as rocks rent, graves open, and the dead come forth. Trumpets swing in the manner of Harry James' "Two O'Clock Jump," ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-ta-daaa-da, flinging latter?day saints out of the damp earth. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of skeletons once knocked down by flood, or fire, or war, or age, or tyranny, or despair, or law, or chance, or a thousand other shocks, now race across the plains, some tripping into piles of bones and dust, others hiding, unsure of what is happening, but most just running, running silent through the fiery night toward the icy tower, toward the resurrection and the life, all changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and he is running with them, awakened from the clay, his feet rattling across the rocks, he never thought he would be awakened, but here he is, what year? what day? doesn't matter now, run, run to the woman on the tower of ice, but then she looks down and her frown seems to be directed at him, and suddenly he hears hideous noises, wailing and gnashing of teeth, and ahead smoke and fire shoot upwards from the ground, crystal prism light filling the air with a multiplicity of colors, and he tries to stop but can't and the earth cracks open and corruption and mortality are his once again, nothing changes, death always has the final victory, as the bottomless pit reaches out its black embrace--

There is light, then sound. Faint at first, then louder, a babble of voices, language deconstructed into meaningless dissonance, words detached, floating, then slowly traces of meaning appearing from the void like visible smears across the backs of his eyelids, words, words, words...

"...professor, can you hear me? Doctor, are you sure he's conscious?" A long pause, static roaring in his ears, words forming out of the sea of white noise. "Professor. My name is Heat. Special Agent Heat from the FBI office here in Albuquerque. If I may say sir, you're certainly one lucky man."

His eyelids flutter, nerves starting to respond, his tongue thick and swollen, filling his mouth like a dirty wet sock. The fingers of his left hand feel numb, cold, ghostly. Heat? Wasn't he just in the winding arms of cool-enfolding Death? Where has she gone? But he can feel the warmth now, spreading across the inside of his skin like an internal desert sun radiating pain-numbing narcotic light...but why would he hear the word heat?

He opens his eyes to twilight filtering through a window in the west wall of the room and suddenly remembers where he is, the Special Agent's word matching the reality outside the window. He feels the hard institutional mattress under his back, the scratch of sheets laundered too many times across his skin, his neck bent uncomfortably into a thin foam pillow. He remembers where he is. But he doesn't remember anything else.

The sound from the television in the corner of the room bleeds into his consciousness. "Our top story this evening...a religious leader in Pray, Montana, tiring of battles in the political arena, is now starting to pray for the deaths of his enemies. 'We're sick of turning the other cheek,' Reverend Wilder Stear said as he led his congregation in praying for the death of Supreme Court Justice James O'Brian. 'The man is responsible for the deaths of millions of the pre-born due to his outrageous position on abortion and he will not be tolerated any longer. As God told me the other night, "Wilder, it’s up to you..."' Justice O'Brian had no comment, but did acknowledge he is alive and well and under Secret Service protection. In other news..."

He turns away from the window as twilight turns to darkness. Two men and a woman stand before his bed, somber, serious, watching him. One man is dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, conservative striped tie, the other in green hospital garb. The woman is severe but attractive, dressed in a gray suit, the skirt just above knee length, her calves thick with muscle. The doctor leans over to the blue-suited man, Special Agent Heat, whispers something, and is curtly waved away. Then the two suits move forward, separate, and settle on either side of the bed. He starts to shrink into the worn sheets, feeling like a city under siege, the suits taking on the gleaming armored finish of testudos.

"Professor, as I said before, I'm Special Agent Heat. This is Special Agent O'Neal. It appears you're the latest victim of our mad bomber. If you've read the papers, and I'm sure you have, you know he calls himself Lightborn. He fancies himself the reincarnation of General Ned Ludd.”

The woman gives him a look which makes him pause a moment.

“We don't have a clue as to who he really is. All we know is he has some kind of crazy vendetta against modern technological society, multiculturalism, and leftism--his twenty previous victims have all been left-leaning intellectuals working in various academic fields. Computers, genetic research, nuclear fission, biochemistry. Statistically, the victims' racial makeup has mirrored the basic racial makeup of America. His next victim should have been either Native American or Latino, which is why the FBI assumed he'd strike in the Southwest, especially with Sandia Labs, Intel, and Los Alamos all within easy target distance."

He swallows a thin stream of saliva, clears his throat. "Don't--don't forget all those nuclear weapons hidden under that mountain out by the air base.”

Heat's eyes momentarily flare, their pale blue surface seeming to ignite like a pilot light. "If you say so. Now, as I was saying, statistically you don't fit the pattern. We were hoping you could help us to understand why."

The doctor moves forward and places his hand on Heat's elbow. "The patient is in no condition to answer questions. He's suffering acute trauma and possible amnesia."

He tries to smile but his lips collapse back into a grimace. "I'm--I'm, I'm not sure what I can tell you."

The doctor pushes his way in front of Heat. "We'll have to cut this short. Perhaps in a few days..."

He closes his eyes and lets the warmth start to take over, his body melting into that soft region below consciousness where questions and answers become irrelevant, where words melt into hiss and static. His conscious mind slowly fades until he is dreaming once more of the seductive woman on the tower of ice.

Heat and O'Neal sat in the Frontier coffee shop across the street from the UNM campus. They'd gone to the English Department to interview the secretary, to find out if she recalled anything about the package which had turned the professor's office into a hole in the side of the Humanities building. The secretary, a short, wide woman in her middle fifties, with bright pink cheeks and a large dimple in her chin, had insisted that she didn't remember the package, that dozens of packages, usually containing books not bombs, passed through her hands each month. She had reached behind her, hesitated, then grabbed a small box off the shelf behind her desk and handed it to Heat. Her look had dared him to open it. Heat had glanced at O'Neal, raised an eyebrow, then taken the package and ripped it open. The secretary had involuntarily closed her eyes and raised her hands to her ears. Heat looked down at an academic monograph called The Scholarly Colon: The Politics of Punctuation. He flipped through a couple of pages then tossed it on the secretary's desk.

"Don't you feel you revealed too much information to the victim?" O'Neal asked. "I mean, he might have remembered something."

"Remembered what?" Heat finished the last of his coffee and set the cup down. "The doctor was right. The man remembered nothing and questioning him in the usual manner might have damaged him even more."

"Still, technically that could be considered misconduct."

Heat rubbed the patches of silver hair at his temples and stared at his young partner. What was she going to do, report him to the Office of Professional Responsibility? Heat had already had four letters of censure added to his personnel file over the years, but letters were usually forgotten after a year or two. Gone were the old days of the Founder when agents would receive censures or suspensions for such heinous acts as drinking coffee outside the sacred confines of the office, or driving their children to school in Bucars. But misconduct was still taken seriously by OPR. Heat sighed. There were manuals of rules, manual after manual, rule after rule, so many rules that agents often broke them without even knowing which rule they had broken. O'Neal was a First Office agent, still fresh in the field. She'd learn.

"Let's stick to the case," he said.

She gave in to his look, a temporary acceptance of parental-like authority. "Okay. Perhaps violating the pattern is the point." She took a small sip from her coffee cup.

"After twenty bombings? I think not. Perhaps that's what Lightborn wants us to think. A random bombing that violates the pattern he's established, purely to cause us to question that pattern, to incorporate the details, facts and evidence into the pattern--"

"Corrupting the pattern."

Heat looked at her dark eyes, the crinkles around his own tightening with a brief smile. He was enjoying putting her through her paces, seeing how her mind worked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to see if she'd done her homework, read over each file, assimilated the details into her mind, if she lived and breathed the case. "Not bad."

A gumsmacking waitress appeared, her pink uniform covered with pie and gravy stains, and refilled their cups. She caught a glimpse of Heat's weapon on his hip and moved quickly away. Heat emptied a package of artificial sweetener into his cup to mask the stale taste of bad coffee. As he stirred it with the wrong end of his spoon, he looked at his own miniature reflection in the spoon's polished surface and willed himself to keep a straight face.

"Of course, there is another possibility."

"What?" O'Neal turned away from the retreating pink form of the waitress and watched him stir the coffee with a look matching her earlier one in the bank parking lot. Then her face lit up with excitement. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small notebook. She flipped through the pages, quickly scanning her handwriting, until her right index finger stopped near the bottom of a page. "The first bombing, ten years ago, killed a professor at the University of Arizona...a Lit prof! So he's come full circle. If that's the pattern, then this should be his final bombing."

Heat tapped the spoon against the rim of the cup. "I doubt this is the last time we'll hear from Lightborn." O'Neal started to protest but Heat waved her off. "Hear me out. You've read the pattern correctly, but it's your interpretation of the pattern that's flawed. Lightborn would know I’m the one hunting him down. He would have to know all about me, details, facts, life history. That's why he blew up that lit prof. This bomb was a message, a warning...to me."

"A warning? To you? Why?"

“Perhaps I’m getting too close.”

O’Neal opened her notebook once again. "The first victim's name was Professor Konrad Korzeniowski. That mean anything to you?"

The corners of Heat's mouth hardened into deep grooves as he pursed his lips. "My parents divorced when I was ten. My mother remarried a year later, an engineer by the name of Jack Heat. I adopted his name. It was easier for an eleven year old to deal with Heat then--"

"Korzeniowski. So Lightborn's first victim was your father." O'Neal closed the notebook and slid it back into her purse. "So this is personal for you."

Heat dropped the spoon on the table. "Extremely."

That evening Heat sat outside on the patio, looking into the speckled gray face of the sky. Snow had started to fall like silver foil flashing forth in the darkness, the frozen tears of some future misfortune. The air felt cold and crisp, the snowfall sticking to the dirt and gravel of the North Valley. By midmorning, the storm would pass, the sun would appear, and the snow would melt and disappear.

Heat stared south and noticed the blue halo of light from the city itself, reflecting off the undersides of the clouds. Albuquerque sat on the edge of oblivion. To the west, the dry desert mesa and its ancient black volcanic escarpment lay waiting, a lifeless sea of sand, sagebrush and fading petroglyphs, like a constant reminder of the final outcome of every dream, desire, life. The necropolis of the Southwest, the Special Agent in Charge had called it. A mummified museum of its own cultural past, the violent heritage of Spanish conquistadors, Native Americans and Western opportunism reduced to the white and blue plastered adobe walls of Old Town, to the blankets on the plaza where Pueblo and Hopi and Zuni Indians sat in the gravity of state-enforced poverty, peddling pottery and turquoise and silver remnants to overweight tourists from Texas and California. The clash, the pull between the Pueblo orientation toward the land and the Spanish Catholic orientation toward the sky still very much in evidence. The license plates read "Land of Enchantment." The SAC had joked that after spending fifteen years here, "Land of Entrapment" would've been more accurate.

Across from the patio Heat looked at barren fields that in spring would be home to chilies, corn and alfalfa. The dead signposts of apple trees stood silent in the snowfall. Land of enchantment or land of entrapment, Heat really didn't care. He called no place home, had no real opinions about the places he lived, whether for a few weeks, a few months, or a year or two. He never stayed in one place long enough to become dissatisfied, disgruntled, hostile to home. He never felt homesick for another place, another past; he was merely a traveller through the shifting landscape of his life and career. For now, that landscape was an earth-brown adobe house off Rio Grande, a house whose living quarters were underground. A submerged adobe. An adobe staircase descended into the house, into the small kitchen, decorated with gleaming copper pans, hand-painted Italian tiles and a few Indian artifacts. Two small windows below the pale, hand-hewn vigas overhead reminded you that you were underground, as if the adobe could collapse out of its 6 x 12 permanence of sun-hardened form and revert back to its primal formless earth and flowing water at any time. For Heat, this was an accurate metaphor for the formless character of his own life.

There had never really been a problem before. But there was one now. Claire, his new wife, considered it a big problem.

Heat lifted a steaming mug of coffee to his mouth and sipped quietly. He'd left Claire curled up on the bed after she'd thrown another tantrum, screaming about how much she hated him for making her leave the Bay Area, how he had become the instrument of her unhappiness and instability and not her savior. At first she’d been merely angry with him, then she had started to sob, breathless at first, then louder, each sob catching in her throat like she was starting to choke on the weight of her tantrum, and looking up at him from her fetal position on the bed as if he was supposed to perform some kind of emotional Heimlich maneuver on her. He'd turned his back on her instead, walked into the kitchen, poured himself a mug of coffee and walked outside to sit in the silence and cold of the New Mexico night.

Claire was fifteen years younger than him. They'd met one February Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. Heat had started wandering through North Beach on Saturdays, walking across Washington Square past the twin spires of Saints Peter and Paul Church to Caffe Trieste, to listen to opera and drink doppio espressos as a way to relax from the stresses of hunting down domestic terrorists like the Fathers and Lightborn. He'd been sitting outside, listening to the muted sounds of an aria from "Don Giovanni," when she'd sat down at the table next to him and smiled. He'd acknowledged her with a slight nod, then focused back on the music as an escape from his own inner musings on the disenchantment of the world. When he'd refocused for a moment on the outside world, he'd noticed her looking at him again, her brown eyes large and wet, inviting him into her world.

Heat had catalogued her features, short brown hair, small, compact body, small breasts, thin fine hands curved like crab claws, a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and under her eyes, and found himself returning the attraction. When another, younger man had come out of Caffe Trieste, espresso cup and saucer in hand, noticed her, and started toward her table, he'd felt a powerful wave of protective possession toward her; he quickly smiled back and invited her to join him at his table so the young man could have a place to sit.

Her name was Claire Jeggel and she'd recently returned to the city after going away to school in Seattle, hoping to resume the life she'd left behind four years before. But the past was a different country now; the relationship she'd hoped to return to was long over, most of her friends were gone, her former network of contacts had evaporated, and so she'd taken the first job offered, working as an office assistant for a downtown employment agency, determined to salvage some kind of present from the rusted scrap of the past. Heat had tried to explain to her that the past was a trap, a zone free from everything but the illusion of safety and comfort, but she was someone to whom nothing could be explained--she was twenty-five and she knew she was always right.

He tried to follow the descent of a single snowflake, squinting, his right eye closed. It disappeared into a vortex of whiteness. It had been this youthful belief in herself, her insistence on the rightness of all her opinions and actions, which he'd found so attractive. Most of the women his own age he'd dated had been bitchy, implacable worshippers of the goddess Cynicism, women whose lives had gone wrong, either through bad marriages, bad careers, or bad children, life choices over which they claimed no power except the power to complain. In their futile and hopeless opinions, the future was bleak and uncompromising, the pattern clear and unchangeable, and even though as a Special Agent Heat often dealt with the worst of human garbage, he still maintained a noble faith in people, and Claire, with her belief in an idyllic life, even an idyllic past life, fell directly into that faith.

Besides, she had a beautiful, firm, young, playful body to enhance the attractiveness of her opinions.

Heat ran his tongue under the groove of his upper lip and thought back on the first time they'd made love, eight days after meeting on Vallejo Street. They were in the small yellow frame house Heat had rented on Telegraph Hill, just off Montgomery near the Filbert Steps, kissing on the couch, hands fumbling over arms, ribs, thighs. He'd reached up and unbuttoned the man's white oxford shirt she had a habit of wearing, unsnapped her bra, helped her pull both shirt and bra off and smiled as she scattered them across the floor, then he'd started to kiss her small pink nipples, softly, teasingly, when suddenly she'd grabbed his head, pulled it tight against her chest and whispered "bite me--HARD."

At first he'd felt more than a little foolish, but as he bit her, his teeth leaving bright red marks on her pale, freckled skin, she'd started moaning, then whimpering, the pain functioning as a key to allow her to unlock the barriers of conscious control. She'd pushed him away, slid down between his legs, quickly unbuckled his belt, slipped her hand into his pants and taken his cock in her mouth. As she worked hard and roughly to get him off he had stopped her, taken her head softly in his hands, pulled her away, then stood, picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where they made love for most of the remainder of the evening. Afterwards, she'd stood naked in the kitchen, a glass of water in her hand. He'd walked up next to her, slid an arm around her waist, and asked how it had been for her. "Wonderful," she'd replied, "except you didn't hurt me enough."

Heat wasn't quite sure how to take that remark, but over the following weeks he discovered she had a need for pain and sexual domination. Most of Heat’s partners had been passive recipients of sexuality, a few of them curious about being handcuffed or enacting some cops-and-robbers or rape-and-rescue fantasy, but Claire was an initiator. She loved being aggressive, she loved being the one in control. Heat sometimes woke up in the morning to find himself tied to the bedposts, her naked form squatting over him, arousing him out of sleep, usually with the aid of a bottle of chocolate syrup or a container of Cool Whip. Sex with Claire was fun. And as Heat turned the corner toward his fifth decade, he fell victim to a rekindled desire for re-experiencing the exploratory joys and excesses of youthful experience.

He also discovered her need for domination was only camouflage for her discomfort at expressing emotion. He worked hard at pleasing her over the next few months, at making her comfortable with their growing intimacy, and he found himself, much to his surprise, developing a strong emotional attachment to her. One cool summer night, the city's famous fog rolling in from across the Golden Gate like waves of cotton, he'd confessed to her that he was falling in love with her, but she'd denied any such feelings were mutual. He pressured her to explain why, how could she not love him, but she played coy, aloof, mysterious, even later sending him an "I don't love you" letter. "Is it okay if I don't love you?" she wrote. "When, I wonder, will you tire of waiting and leave? What if I can never love you and not because of you, but because of me? I don't suppose I can tell you not to take that personally. There are moments when you hold me and I take in your feelings, your energy, and I think, oooh, nice. I everything but love you."

What did that mean? The situation started to affect his work, to drive him toward the edge of obsession. How could she not love him? Then finally, one morning after they'd had a fight because Heat had accused her of withholding sex as a way to try and control her safety in the relationship, she'd broken down and started sobbing, great heaving gulps of air, tears washing down her reddened cheeks, her cries loud enough to wake his neighbors. Heat, embarrassed, had decided he'd had enough, in spite of his feelings for her, and had picked up the phone to call her a cab when she'd stopped sobbing, looked him directly in the eyes and said "I do love you. Please don't ever leave me."

A month later she informed him she was pregnant. After a quiet, hushed dinner at Aqua, where Claire refused to engage in any but the most cursory of conversations, he asked her to take a drive with him. They headed down Bay Street out to the Marina and locating the courage he could not find at the restaurant, he proposed to her, the shadowed masts of sailboats swaying with the tide, the ghostly, lighted span of the Golden Gate Bridge to the left, the sweeping eye of the lighthouse on Alcatraz to the right.

They were married a short time later in Reno and after a brief period of connection and happiness, which Heat had never thought he'd see again at his age, and despite the difference in their ages, she'd woken up one morning, stumbled to the bathroom, and screamed through a miscarriage. Shortly after, her tantrums became her preferred form of intimacy with him and his personal life spiraled downward into her darkness, her loss, her inner battle between the need for love and the need for independence from the need for love. Claire despised Heat because he had helped her to break down her self-erected barriers, her control mechanisms, and confront the truth of her heart, and so he became the enemy in his own marriage, even as he sought out the enemies of the republic whose constitution he'd sworn to uphold to the greatest of his abilities.
And now, like an illicit lover, Lightborn had entered into his life once again. Heat was convinced the bombing at UNM had been a personal message to him. A sick joke at the expense of an innocent human being, another in a growing series of outrages the law enforcement community seemed powerless to predict or prevent. The pattern was there, identifiable, readable, but except for this single instance there was simply no way of predicting when or where Lightborn would strike next. All he could do was wait for Lightborn to show himself—-or perhaps herself--and feel the frustration of waiting for something he knew would not show itself completely, the frustration of never fully knowing the impossible, an endless deferral, known only by the traces and particles of yet another explosion.

But Heat was a law enforcement professional, not an academic theorist--he knew, he had complete faith in the fact that eventually the pattern would reveal a continuity he could not at present see. For now, all would remain shadowy, unknowable, indecipherable, like the alphabet at the center of Jackson Pollack's painting in the SFMOMA, "Guardians of the Secret"--but sometime in the future, fate or fortuna would drop a clue, hand him the key to lock the bastard away for a thousand years. He looked off into the night, the flat black canvas of the unknown, then emptied the remains of his cup into the snow and walked slowly down the stairs into the dark kitchen, hoping by now Claire had cried herself to sleep.

Home | Interact | About | Feedback | Site Map