The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century (14 page)

Chapter Thirteen

The Kings Taketh

It was the perfect end to the perfect evening, other than a few small bumps along the way.

Paul and Mary had walked the forty-some blocks to her apartment, where she'd invited him in to meet her cat, Igor. A Maine Coon Cat, Igor was easily the largest–and laziest–cat Paul had ever met. He weighed twenty-seven pounds, Mary said, and was a representative of the only breed native to North America, with the cat lore being that Maine Coons were the result of a horny and myopic northeastern bobcat encountering some unwitting farmer's domesticated cat (or, even odder, vice-versa) several hundred years ago.

In the foot-deep windowsills of her early-twentieth-century apartment building, Mary was growing a garden. Tomatoes, peppers, chard, three types of
lettuce, radishes, and a dozen different medicinal and culinary herbs grew from pots, in flats, and escaped out of homemade planters. In the bathroom window was a huge squash plant, which trellised around the towel-rack and onto plumbing under the sink. “You can't trust the food you buy in the stores,” Mary had told him. “It's genetically altered and laced with chemicals.” So she grew about a quarter of her own food. Impressive.

They'd gone to an expensive but elegant vegetarian restaurant and had an interesting conversation in which Paul tried out several of the Wisdom School teachings he'd learned so far, checking his notepad for accuracy. Mary followed along, nodding and commenting, often reinterpreting his truths in terms of the philosophies of Carl Jung or Sigmund Freud.

Then he hit the first bump.

When he tried to pay for dinner with his credit card, the waiter came back to the table with the card cut in half on a small plate. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but when we tried to get authorization on this, the credit card company asked that we cut the card in half and return it to you.” He was a short, slim man, about thirty, with thinning yellow hair and pasty white skin. He continued in a nasal tone, which had been lacking earlier: “Usually if a card is overdrawn we just can't take it. They only ask us to cut them up if the card is reported stolen or has been cancelled. Do you have some other form of payment?”

Paul tried another credit card with the same result, the waiter now behaving decidedly irritated, and Paul becoming increasingly alarmed. So far, he'd managed to avoid telling Mary anything about his troubles. He was becoming so enamored of her that rather than have her think poorly of him for getting evicted, he'd decided to rent a room in a cheap hotel. He'd planned to pay for it with one of his credit cards, which he could catch up on when he found a job.

“What's going on, Paul?” Mary had asked when the waiter returned with a cut-up card for the second time.

Paul fumbled in his pockets, fishing out all his cash. The check was for sixty-three dollars and change (the price driven up by their having shared an excellent bottle of wine), and he only had forty-six dollars and two quarters on him.

“Hang on,” he said to Mary. Then, to the waiter, “Can you come back in five minutes? I need to call my credit card company.”

The waiter gave him a quick, skeptical appraisal and resolved the possibility of his running out on the check by saying, “You don't need to use the pay phone in the hall. There's a phone in the manager's office. Follow me.”

Paul followed him into a small, cramped office next to the Ladies' room. The desk looked like a paper bomb had gone off on it, and Paul saw that most of the forms had to do with the dozens of tax-collecting and tax-assessing and tax-inventing agencies associated with the State and City of New York. The waiter waved to an old-fashioned black Bakelite phone on the desk and said, “There you are.”

Paul reassembled the first credit card and dialed the 800 number on the back of it. After waiting four minutes because the phone had a rotary dial and no buttons to push to select the option of his choice, a man answered the phone with the name of the card's issuing bank.

“I've got a problem with my credit card,” Paul said.

“What's the problem?” the man said, his voice carrying a pronounced Louisiana roughneck twang. Paul remembered reading in the paper about how some banks, to save money, were using prison labor. The prisoners, it seems, made about four bucks an hour and all the credit card numbers they could steal; the prisons kept ninety percent of the pay for “room and board,” and the banks cut their labor costs and rolled the cost of fraud over onto the federal government. Paul wondered how many bank employees had been laid off for that little deal.

“The waiter tried to verify my credit card, and you guys told him to cut it in half.”

“What's your credit card number?”

Paul read him the number. “Just for identification purposes, Mister Abler, can you please tell me your date of birth and mother's maiden name?”

Paul told him.

“And your weight, height, and hair and eye color?”

“How come you need that?”

The guy chuckled. “Just a little joke. You'd be amazed how many people think I can see them over the phone.”

“Where are you?”

“California.” There was a note of defensiveness in the man's voice.

“Are you a prisoner?”

“Are you unemployed and evicted?”

“Well, yeah, but what business is that of yours?”

“Me personally? None. You're a lousy credit risk.” The guy chuckled, then his tone became serious. “As far as the bank is concerned, the problem is that you're a month late on your card payments and out of work, so we can't let you run up any more charges.”

“How'd you find out I'm out of work?” Paul noticed the waiter lift an eyebrow and scowled at him. The man looked at the floor, but didn't leave the room.

“Lemesee,” the man said, and Paul could hear a click of computer keys. “Says here that a law firm in New York City reported today that you're in default to them on thirty-seven thousand dollars in legal fees. They passed along the information about your employment and eviction as a courtesy.”

“A law firm? Which one?”

The man made the noise of somebody sucking on a cigarette while Paul could hear key-clicks.

“They let you smoke there?” Paul said.

“Just tobacco,” the man said, his voice soft with disappointment. “Here it is. Schneiderman, Sabatini, and Kurland, attorneys-at-law. You owe them some bucks, eh?”

“That's where my neighbor, Rich Whitehead, works. He's upset with me.”

“I'll say.”

“They can just report that stuff?”

“If they pay the monthly fee to subscribe to the credit bureau service.”

“Even if it's wrong?”

“If it's wrong, you can request a copy of your credit history from the credit bureau, then write them a letter challenging the accuracy of the data.” He sounded like he was reading from a script. “Our bank relies on information provided to it by third parties, and makes no claims as to the accuracy or…”

“But it's not true!” Paul shouted into the phone. The waiter smirked, but avoided eye contact.

There were a few more key-clicks, the sound of another drag on the cigarette. Then, “Scrolling down here, on the second screen, it looks here like they filed an addendum to their original report, just an hour later, saying that the listing of your owing them money was an
error. They noted that the other data was valid, though.” He chuckled. “They couldn't just report that you're unemployed and evicted. It wouldn't make the report, as it's not a valid complaint from them. So this guy musta concocted the phony bill, posted it with the other info added as notes, and then retracted the original so you couldn't sue them for defamation or whatever.”

“I get it,” Paul said.

“Bottom line, bro,” the man said, “is you outa luck.”

“Thanks,” Paul said, an automatic reflex.

“Don't mention it.”

Paul put the phone in its cradle and said to the waiter, “I need to talk to the lady.”

“I'll follow you,” the waiter said, wiping his hands on his apron in an exaggerated gesture.

Paul walked over to the table where Mary was sitting and reading the dessert menu as if it were an important literary work. He sat down, the waiter hovering close enough to hear the discussion.

“My credit cards are dead,” he said in a low whisper.

“What happened?” Mary said. “Are you having problems?”

“Well, I had a disagreement with my next-door neighbor. Actually, he got upset with this ghost named Noah, and Noah sicced the devil on him or something like that. I never did get it straight.” He caught the expression on Mary's face. “I mean, anyhow, this guy who
lives in the next apartment is a lawyer and he's upset with me, and so today he got me evicted and this afternoon he called the credit reporting services and said that I owed his law firm thirty-seven grand and it was overdue.”

“Do you?”

“No. I don't owe them anything. But he ruined my credit, just to make some kind of macho point. And the upshot is that I don't have any credit cards that work and I don't have enough cash to pay for dinner.”

She smiled and put a hand on his arm. “I always figured one day I'd have a customer stick me with a check. I never figured it would be in another restaurant, though.”

“I'm really sorry…” Paul said, feeling a pleasant tingle from her touch mingle with his embarrassment.

“It's no problem,” she said. “We should have gone Dutch treat anyway. This is the twenty-first century, after all.” She lifted her purse up from the floor under her chair. “How much is the check?”

“Sixty-three dollars and change.”

“So,” she said, her eyes looking up to the ceiling for a moment as she did the mental math, “with a twenty percent tip, more or less, that would be about seventy-six dollars, right?”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, wondering if waitresses always over-tipped.

“Do you have thirty-eight dollars?”

“Yeah,” he said, thinking it would leave him–maybe–with cab fare back to her place.

She opened her purse, then a slim brown faux-suede billfold, and counted out a twenty and eighteen one-dollar bills onto the table. “I get a lot of ones,” she said.

Paul put forty dollars on the table and said to the waiter, who stepped forward to scoop up and count his bounty, “Keep the change.”

“Thank you, sir,” the waiter said, bowing slightly at the waist, his voice conveying contempt.

Paul remembered Jim saying
the poor get no respect
, and had a depressing momentary glimpse of himself through the waiter's eyes. He was, as Susan had implied, a loser. Or at least rapidly on the road to loserdom.

Mary stood up and lifted her coat off the chair next to her. “Let's go,” she said, as she pulled on the dressy red winter coat.

It was dark on the street, and they were twenty blocks from Mary's apartment. Paul shivered in his long black wool coat. “I think I have enough for cab fare,” he said, “or to buy you a drink if you'd like to stop someplace.” He felt utterly humiliated after the incident in the restaurant.

Mary put her hands into her pockets, her face made stark by the light and shadows from the streetlight and passing cars. “Paul, what's going on with you?” Her
voice was both concerned and businesslike. “I mean, you came into the restaurant this morning and left with that homeless guy, and then you came back this afternoon when you should have been at work, and then this.” She swept her right hand out of her pocket at the restaurant's door, then returned it to her pocket. “What's happened?”

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” he said. “I'm not sure I believe it, myself.”

“Try me.”

“Let's walk and talk,” he said, turning and beginning back uptown toward her apartment. She fell in beside him, and he thought,
ok, how would a reporter report on this story?
He decided a straight-up factual account, no side narratives or commentaries, would be best.

“You remember those things I was reading to you from my notepad over dinner?” he said.

“Yeah. Interesting stuff. I think you have the core concepts there of just about every major religion. And most of the non-destructive minor ones, too, probably. I doubt my psychology professors would agree with it all, but it makes sense to me.”

“I didn't come up with that stuff myself,” he said.

“I didn't think you had. I figured you'd been doing a lot of reading, or maybe in your reporting you'd found some priest or rabbi to interview, and that's what the notes were from.”

“That's sort of true.” They crossed a street with the light and continued. “Yesterday, I jumped in front of this truck. I wasn't thinking, it was just an impulse, I had to push this little girl out of the way so she wouldn't get hit. And something or somebody picked me up and all of a sudden I was flying through the air, and it saved her life and saved mine. And then when I got back to my apartment, there was this guy there, said his name was Noah, and he was an angel, or a ghost, or a shapeshifter, pick your culture or religion.”

“Was he delusional?”

“No, I'm pretty sure he was exactly what he said he was.”

And he told her the story, straight through, from his getting laid off, to saving the little girl, to meeting Noah in the doorway and going to ancient Sumeria. He covered Noah's interchanges with Rich, meeting Jim in the restaurant and Joshua in the tunnels, and Rich having him evicted and why. His decision and commitment to join in saving the world. Of the things he'd learned so far, and that there was more to come.

It took four blocks to tell in its entirety,

They walked in silence for another block, Paul dreading her response, fearing she may think him mad.

Finally she said, “That's an extraordinary story.”

“As a reporter, I have to say that if somebody told me all this happened to them, I'd think they were nuts.”