He turned to contemplate the view again. At last he uncrossed his legs and stood, pushing on the arms of his chair to accomplish it. "Come out back with me, Jamie. I want to show you something."
*
Al Stamper was at the kitchen table, a mountain of fat in '70s disco pants. He was sorting mail. In front of him was a stack of toaster waffles dripping with butter and syrup. Beside him was a liquor carton. On the floor next to his chair were three plastic USPS bins piled high with more letters and packages. As I watched, Stamper tore open a manila envelope. He shook out a scrawled letter, a photo of a boy in a wheelchair, and a ten-dollar bill. He put the ten-spot in the gin carton and scanned the letter, chomping a waffle as he did so. Standing beside him made Jacobs look thinner than ever. This time it wasn't Adam and Eve I thought of, but Jack Sprat and his wife.
"The tent may be folded," I said, "but I see the love offerings are still coming in."
Stamper gave me a look of malevolent indifference--if there is such a thing--then turned back to his opening and sorting. Not to mention his waffles.
"We read every letter," Jacobs said. "Don't we, Al?"
"Yes."
"Do you reply to every letter?" I asked.
"We ought to," Stamper said. "I think so, anyway. And we could, if I had help. One person would be enough, along with a computer to replace the one Pastor Danny carted out to his workshop."
"We've discussed that, Al," Jacobs said. "Once we started corresponding with supplicants . . ."
"We'd never finish, I know. I just wonder what happened to the Lord's work."
"You're doing it," Jacobs said. His voice was gentle. His eyes, however, were amused: the eyes of a man watching a dog do a trick.
Stamper made no reply, just opened the next envelope. No picture in this one, just a letter and a five-spot.
"Come on, Jamie," Jacobs said. "Let's leave him to it."
*
From the driveway, the outbuildings had looked trim and spruce, but closer up I could see that the boards were splintering in places and the trim needed a touch-up. The Bermuda grass we walked through, undoubtedly a hefty expense when the estate was last landscaped, needed to be cut. If it didn't happen soon, the two-acre expanse of back lawn would revert to meadow.
Jacobs stopped. "Which building do you think is my lab?"
I pointed to the barn. It was the largest, about the size of the rented auto body shop in Tulsa.
He smiled. "Did you know that the staff involved in the Manhattan Project shrank steadily before the first A-bomb test at White Sands?"
I shook my head.
"By the time the bomb went off, several of the prefab dormitories built to house the workers were empty. Here's a little-known rule about scientific research: as one progresses toward one's ultimate goal, support requirements tend to shrink."
He led me toward what looked like a humble toolshed, produced a key ring, and opened the door. I expected it to be hot inside, but it was as cool as the big house. There was a worktable running down the lefthand side with nothing on it but a few notebooks and a Macintosh computer, currently showing a screen saver of endlessly galloping horses. In front of the Mac was a chair that looked ergonomic and expensive.
On the right side of the shed were shelves stacked with boxes that looked like silver-plated cigarette cartons . . . only cigarette cartons don't hum like amplifiers on standby. On the floor was another box, this one painted green and about the size of a hotel mini-fridge. On top of it was a TV monitor. Jacobs clapped his hands softly and the monitor's screen lit up, showing a series of columns--red, blue, and green--that rose and fell in a way that suggested respiration. In terms of entertainment value I didn't think it would ever replace Big Brother.
"This is where you work?"
"Yes."
"Where's the equipment? The instruments?"
He pointed to the Mac, then to the monitor. "There and there. But the most important part . . ." He pointed to his own temple, like a man miming suicide. "Up here. You happen to be standing in the world's most advanced electronics research facility. The things I have discovered in this room make Edison's Menlo Park discoveries pale into insignificance. They are things that could change the world."
But would the change be for the better, I wondered. I didn't like the dreamy, proprietary expression on his face as he gazed around at what looked to me like almost nothing. Yet I couldn't dismiss his claim as delusion. There was a sense of sleeping power in the silver cartons and the green fridge-size box. Being in that shed was like standing too close to a power plant working at full bore, close enough to feel the stray volts zinging the metal fillings in your mouth.
"I'm currently generating electricity by geothermal means." He patted the green box. "This is a geosynchronous generator. Below it is a well pipe no bigger than the kind that might serve a medium-size country dairy farm. Yet at half power, this gennie could create enough superheated steam to power not just The Latches, but the entire Hudson Valley. At full power it could boil the entire aquifer like water in a teapot. Which might defeat the purpose." He laughed heartily.
"Not possible," I said. But of course, neither was curing brain tumors and severed spinal cords with holy rings.
"I assure you it is, Jamie. With a slightly bigger generator, which I could build with parts easily available by mail order, I could light up the whole East Coast." He said this calmly, not boasting but only stating a fact. "I'm not doing it because energy creation doesn't interest me. Let the world strangle in its own effluent; as far as I'm concerned, it deserves no better. And for my purposes, I'm afraid geothermal energy is a dead end. It's not enough." He looked broodingly at the horses galloping across the face of his computer. "I expected better from this place, especially in summer, when . . . but never mind."
"And none of this runs on electricity as it's now understood?"
He gave me a look of amused contempt. "Of course not."
"It runs on the secret electricity."
"Yes. That's what I call it."
"A kind of electricity that nobody else has discovered in all the years since Scribonius. Until you came along. A minister who used to build battery-driven toys as a hobby."
"Oh, it's known. Or was. In De Vermis Mysteriis, written in the late fifteenth century, Ludvig Prinn mentions it. He calls it potestas magna universi, the force that powers the universe. Prinn actually quotes Scribonius. In the years since I left Harlow, potestas universum--the search for it, the quest to harness it--has become my whole life."
I wanted to believe he was delusional, but the cures and the strange three-dimensional portraits I'd seen him create in Tulsa argued against that. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe all that mattered was whether or not he was telling the truth about mothballing C. Danny Jacobs. If he was done with miracle cures, my mission was accomplished. Wasn't it?
He adopted a lecturely tone. "To understand how I've progressed so far and discovered so much on my own, you have to realize that science is in many ways as faddish as the fashion industry. The Trinity explosion at White Sands happened in 1945. The Russians exploded their first A-bomb in Semipalatinsk, four years later. Electricity was first generated by nuclear fission in Arco, Idaho, in 1951. In the half century since, electricity has become the ugly bridesmaid; nuclear power is the beautiful bride everyone sighs over. Soon fission will be demoted to ugly bridesmaid and fusion will become the beautiful bride. When it comes to research into electrical theory, grants and subsidies have dried up. More importantly, interest has dried up. Electricity is now seen as antique, even though every modern power source must be converted to amps and volts!"
Less lecture now, and more outrage.
"In spite of its vast power to kill and cure, in spite of the way it's reshaped the lives of every person on the planet, and in spite of the fact that it is still not understood, scientific research in this field is viewed with good-natured contempt! Neutrons are sexy! Electricity is dull, the equivalent of a dusty storage room from which a
ll the valuable items have been taken, leaving only worthless junk. But the room isn't empty. There's an unfound door at the back, leading to chambers few people have ever seen, ones filled with objects of unearthly beauty. And there's no end to those chambers."
"You're starting to make me feel nervous, Charlie." I intended it to sound light, but it came out dead serious.
He paid no notice, only began to limp up and down between the worktable and the shelves, staring at the floor, touching the green box each time he passed it, as if to assure himself it was still there.
"Yes, others have visited those chambers. I'm not the first. Scribonius for one. Prinn for another. But most have kept their discoveries to themselves, just as I have. Because the power is enormous. Unknowable, really. Nuclear power? Pah! It's a joke!" He touched the green box. "What's in here could, if connected to a source powerful enough, make nuclear energy as insignificant as a child's cap pistol."
I wished I'd brought my lemonade with me, because my throat was dry. I had to clear it before I could speak. "Charlie, let's say everything you're telling me is true. Do you understand what you're dealing with? How it works?"
"A fair question. Let me pose one in return. Do you understand what happens when you flick a wall switch? Could you list the sequence of events that ends with light banishing the shadows in a dark room?"
"No."
"Do you even know if that flick of your finger closes a circuit or opens one?"
"No idea."
"Yet that never stopped you from turning on a light, did it? Or powering up your electric guitar when it was time to play?"
"True, but I never plugged into an amp powerful enough to light the whole East Coast."
He gave me a look of suspicion so dark it seemed close to paranoia. "If you have a point, I'm afraid I'm not taking it."
I believed he was telling the truth about that, which might have been the scariest thing of all.
"Never mind." I took him by the shoulders to stop his pacing and waited until he looked at me. Only even with his wide eyes fixed on my face, it was more like he was looking through me.
"Charlie--if you're done curing people, and if you don't want to end the energy crunch, what do you want?"
At first he didn't reply. He seemed to be in a trance. Then he pulled away from me and began pacing again, reverting to the lecture-hall prof.
"The transfer devices--the ones I use on human beings--have undergone a number of iterations. When I cured Hugh Yates of his deafness, I was using large rings coated in gold and palladium. They seem hilariously old-fashioned to me now, videocassettes in the age of computer downloads. The headphones I used on you were smaller and more powerful. By the time you appeared with your heroin problem, I had replaced palladium with osmium. Osmium is less expensive--a plus for a man on a budget, as I was then--and the headphones were effective, but they'd hardly look good at a revival meeting, would they? Did Jesus wear headphones?"
"Probably not," I said, "but I doubt if he wore wedding rings, either, being a bachelor."
He paid no attention. He paced back and forth like a man in a cell. Or the paranoids who circulate in any big city, the ones who want to talk about the CIA and the international Jewish conspiracy and the secrets of the Rosicrucians. "So I went back to the rings, and created a story that would make them . . . palatable . . . to my congregants."
"A pitch, in other words."
That brought him back to the here and now. He grinned, and for a moment I was with the Reverend Jacobs I remembered from my childhood. "Yes, okay, a pitch. By then I was using a ruthenium and gold alloy, and consequently the rings were much smaller. And even more powerful. Shall we leave, Jamie? You're looking a bit unsettled."
"I am. I may not understand your juice, but I can feel it. Almost like it's putting bubbles in my blood."
He laughed. "Yes! You could say the atmosphere in here is electric! Ha! I enjoy it, but then, I'm used to it. Come, let's step outside and get some fresh air."
*
The outside world never smelled sweeter than it did as we strolled back toward the house.
"I have one more question, Charlie. If you don't mind?"
He sighed, but didn't look displeased. Once out of that claustrophobia-inducing little room, he seemed sane again. "Glad to answer if I can."
"You tell the rubes your wife and son drowned. Why do you lie? I don't see what purpose it can serve."
He stopped and lowered his head. When he lifted it, I saw that serene normality had taken a hike, if it had ever been there at all. On his face was a rage so deep and black that I involuntarily fell back a step. The breeze had tumbled his thinning hair over his lined brow. He swept it back and then pressed his palms to his temples, like a man suffering a monster headache. Yet when he spoke, his voice was toneless and low. If not for the look on his face, I might have mistaken it for reasonableness.
"They don't deserve the truth. You called them rubes, and how right you are. They have set aside what brains they have--and many of them have quite a lot--and put their faith in that gigantic and fraudulent insurance company called religion. It promises them an eternity of joy in the next life if they live according to the rules in this one, and many of them try, but even that's not enough. When the pain comes, they want miracles. To them I'm nothing but a witch doctor who touches them with magic rings instead of shaking a bone rattle over them."
"Haven't any of them found out the truth?" My researches with Bree had convinced me that Fox Mulder was right about one thing: the truth is out there, and anyone in our current age, where almost everyone is living in a glass house, can find it with a computer and an Internet connection.
"Aren't you listening to me? They don't deserve the truth, and that's okay, because they don't want it." He smiled, and his teeth appeared, the upper and lower sets locked together. "They don't want the Beatitudes of the Song of Solomon, either. They only want to be healed."
*
Stamper didn't glance up as we crossed the kitchen. Two of the mail bins had been emptied and he was working on the third. The liquor box now looked about half full. There were some checks, but mostly it was crumpled currency. I thought of what Jacobs had said about witch doctors. In Sierra Leone, his customers would be lined up outside the door, bearing produce and chickens with freshly wrung necks. Same thing, really; all of it's just the kick. The grab. The take.
Back in the library, Jacobs seated himself with a grimace and drank the rest of his lemonade. "I'll have to piss all afternoon," he said. "It's the curse of growing old. The reason I was glad to see you, Jamie, is because I want to hire you."
"You want to what?"
"You heard me. Al will be leaving soon. I'm not sure he knows it yet, but I do. He wants no part of my scientific work; even though he knows it's the basis of my cures, he thinks it's an abomination."
I almost said, What if he's right?
"You can do his job--open each day's mail, catalogue the correspondents' names and complaints, put aside the love offerings, once a week drive down to Latchmore and deposit the checks. You'll vet gate-callers--their numbers are drying up, but there are still at least a dozen a week--and turn them away."
He turned to face me directly.
"You can also do what Al refuses to do--help me along the final steps to my goal. I'm very close, but I'm not strong. An assistant would be invaluable, and we've worked well before. I don't know how much Hugh is paying you, but I'll double--no, triple it. What do you say?"
At first I could say nothing. I was stunned.
"Jamie? I'm waiting."
I picked up the lemonade, and this time the melting remnants of the ice cubes did click together. I drank, then put it down again.
"You speak of a goal. Tell me what it is."
He considered. Or appeared to. "Not yet. Come to work for me and get to understand the power and beauty of the secret electricity a little better. Perhaps then."
I stood and held out my hand. "It's been nice to see you again
." Another of those things you just say, a bit of grease to keep the wheels turning, but this lie was a lot bigger than telling him he looked great. "Take care of yourself. And be careful."
He stood, but didn't take my hand. "I'm disappointed in you. And, I confess, rather angry. You came a long way to scold a tired old man who once saved your life."
"Charlie, what if this secret electricity of yours gets out of your control?"
"It won't."
"I'll bet the people in charge at Chernobyl felt that way, too."
"That's beyond low. I allowed you into my home because I expected gratitude and understanding. I see I was wrong on both counts. Al will show you out. I need to lie down. I'm very tired."
"Charlie, I do feel gratitude. I appreciate what you've done for me. But--"
"But." His face was stony and gray. "Always a but."
"Secret electricity aside, I can't work for a man who's taking revenge on broken people because he can't take revenge on God for killing his wife and son."
His face went from gray to white. "How dare you? How dare you?"
"You may be curing some of them," I said, "but you're pissing on all of them. I'll leave now. I don't need Mr. Stamper to show me out."
I started back toward the front door. I was crossing the rotunda, my heels clacking on the marble, when he called after me, his voice amplified by all that open space.
"We're not done, Jamie. I promise you that. Not even close to done."
*
I didn't need Stamper to open the gate, either; it rolled back automatically as my car approached. At the foot of the access road I stopped, saw that I had bars on my cell, and called Bree. She answered on the first ring, and asked if I was all right before I could even open my mouth. I said I was, and then told her that Jacobs had offered me a job.
"Are you serious?"
"Yes. I told him no--"
"Well, damn, of course you did!"
"That's not the important part, though. He says he's done with the revival tours, and done healing. From the disgruntled demeanor of Mr. Al Stamper, formerly of the Vo-Lites and now Charlie's personal assistant, I believe him."
"So it's over?"
"As the Lone Ranger used to say to his faithful Indian sidekick, 'Tonto, our work here is done.'" As long as he doesn't blow up the world with his secret electricity.