GODWALKER Read online

  GODWALKER

  by Greg Stolze

  This book is respectfully dedicated to all

  the readers who have made my career

  possible. Thanks!

  Copyright 2011 Greg Stolze

  All rights reserved.

  First printing 2004

  Not everything has to be understood.

  PROLOGUE

  In 1989, Christine Jorgensen lay dying in a hospital cancer ward. Her friends and family all visited, trying to give her comfort and encouragement. She also had three other visitors who were strangers to her and to one another.

  The first was a tall man dressed in women’s clothing. He wore makeup, but the coarse stubble of his beard poked through the foundation. His nostrils were flared and his eyes, intense.

  The second was a stout blonde woman dressed in white and black. On her left hand she wore five bulky rings, each adorned with a stone in the shape a platonic solid. On her right wrist was a charm bracelet bearing a cross, a crescent, a star, two interlocked commas, a figure of a fat man and a dancer with six arms. Her lips were chapped and she constantly shifted from foot to foot.

  The third was dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a baseball cap, and its gender could not be immediately determined. It stood with arms crossed.

  All three of them had felt the same impulse, the same wordless sense of immanence. All three had come to see Christine Jorgensen, a 72-year-old who had been born George Jorgensen. George had gotten the first publicly acknowledged sex change operation in 1952, and now three strangers had come to watch her die.

  The woman with the chapped lips spoke first. “I want you to know how much I honor and respect you.” The cross-dressing man snorted, but she continued. “Your life has been exemplary, in terms of… of contacting your true self, of connecting to something higher. I’ve, uh, strove to do the same, and I want to continue your work, expand it… you’ve made so much possible for people with, uh, other sexualities… I think that, if I become the godwalker, I can expand that, can build tolerance and, and…”

  “Shit,” the man interrupted. “Do you really want your dried-out peacenik crap to be the last thing she hears?” He leaned in over the bed. “Look, I unnerstand what you’re really about,” he told Christine. “You’re not about unity and connection. You’re about rebellion. You were the only one in the fifties with the guts to say ‘I’m this, I’ll be this, and fuck nature and society and anyone else in my way.’ I’m not gonna beg for your blessing, but I’ll tell you this: I’m the one following your path. I’m the one breaking the rules.”

  The third visitor looked at the patient’s chart, but didn’t speak until Christine’s croaking voice emerged. “And you? What do you have to say?”

  The androgyne shrugged. “I am what I am. What I have to be.”

  The woman tried again. “I give you my pledge that, if I assume your mantle, I will only…”

  “Oh, cram yer pledges,” the man replied. “You really don’t get it, do you? Promises and oaths mean nothing to us! It’s, it’s the violation. That’s the only thing that matters!”

  “I think I know a little bit about this,” the woman sniffed. “The entire purpose of the Great Work is fusion and transformation, the philosopher’s stone is…”

  They were interrupted by a rasping laugh from the bed.

  “Hah,” Jorgensen said, actually speaking the word between her laughs. “Listen. Water might want to be ice, but if it’s not cold it ain’t happening. I didn’t become… what did you call it, ‘godwalker’?… because I wanted to. I didn’t try to. I didn’t even understand what I was doing until I was far along the road. I guess if you’ve all been called to me, by whatever… force, whatever spirit is going through all of us, then it means you’re tuned in too. But if you think my… opinion is going to have any effect, you’re just wrong. Look. What’s so important? Do you think this made me any happier? Do you think you’ll understand everything, the more tuned-in you become? It just raises more questions. You won’t die contented. Believe me.”

  Then she started coughing, very hard. The androgyne leaned out the door and called out in an authoritative voice. A nurse responded, and then doctors, and then the three strangers were firmly but politely asked to leave. They did, drifting together towards the parking structure.

  Their footsteps echoed off the oil-slicked concrete floor, off the low concrete ceiling. Late afternoon sunlight lanced through the lot’s open sides.

  The woman had just asked, “What do we do now?” when they all felt Christine die. They did not feel any particular loss, any movement of her individual spirit. Instead, what they felt was the redoubling of a looming, impersonal observation.

  To the man, it was what a dog feels when its master stands over it, a treat in one hand, a rolled up newspaper in the other.

  The woman felt like a young child, who doesn’t know if a watching parent approves or disapproves of its behavior.

  For the androgyne, it was like lying in bed as an adolescent, contemplating infinity, knowing it goes on forever… only this time, it felt that eternity was looking back.

  “Whoa,” the sexless stranger whispered.

  “That’s it then,” said the woman.

  “The king and queen is dead,” said the man. “The question is… which one of us takes the crown?”

  “Well, if you look at the question of intention and who’s the most worthy…” The woman began to speak, but stopped when the man’s hand cracked across her face, backhanded and hard. She stumbled back, pale.

  “This is not a democracy,” he started, and then realized that someone else was watching them. He turned and saw two people standing by the door into the hospital, a woman and a man, her standing behind him with her hands at her mouth. Both of them were still and had wide eyes.

  “What’re you looking at?” he demanded, taking an aggressive step towards them. “You wanna fuck me or something?” They backed into the hospital.

  “They’ll get the police,” the woman whispered, her tone self-righteous, her mouth pursing and her face turning red.

  “Fuck the police,” the man replied. “They ain’t gonna help you now. We’re gonna settle this godwalker thing right here.” He opened his purse and looked down into it.

  “If you think you can take the position by force,” the woman said, and then stopped when his hand emerged holding a small, black pistol.

  “That’s exactly what I think.”

  The woman shrank back. “By losing I will win,” she muttered, backing away. “By retreating I will triumph,” she said, but her eyes were afraid and she didn’t believe it. All three of them could tell. The pressure of cosmic attention shifted away from her and pressed harder on the two who remained.

  The woman burst into tears and ran as the man turned the gun on the sexless one. Both of them were silent for a moment.

  “You’re tougher,” he said. The androgyne nodded, breathing in through its nose and biting its lips.

  The man’s mouth cracked in a mean smile. There was lipstick on his teeth, and his pupils were just pinpoints.

  “Your hands are shaking, though.”

  “Are you going to shoot me or not?” Its voice quivered, but only a little.

  The sound of the gunshot echoed harsh in the concrete garage.

  Ten minutes later, the cross-dressing man was in the emergency room. His arm was broken and so was his neck.

  The androgyne slipped out a side door, shaking, still nervous. It had run to a bathroom and thrown up after the short fight. It walked away, awkwardly trying to hide the bloodless bullet holes in the front and back of its shirt.

  You never get a second chance

  To make a first impression

  CHAPTER ONE

  The sun was straight overhead a
s Kate Mundy drove through Kansas. The temperature was cool, but it was a cloudless day and the light seemed so powerful that she winced and squinted, even through sunglasses. The highway had been patched with stringy ropes of black asphalt, and they flashed under her tires so fast they made her eyes squirm.

  Kate was driving a 1989 Honda Accord. Rust made pimples under the plum paint by the wheel wells, but it still ran well. The needle on the fuel gauge was below the red E. Kate had checked the map and taken a calculated risk that she’d make it to a gas station before going dry. Kate always made calculated risks.

  She was not alone in the car. Sitting in the shotgun seat was someone who was and was not Kate’s son, who was and was not her daughter. The passenger’s name was Leslie Mundy.

  “Today was supposed to be a female day,” Kate said. It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

  “Please, just drop it, okay?”

  “I’m just saying, every little bit helps.”

  “Mom, I’m not taking a long car trip in drag.” Leslie shifted in his seat. “It’s not very comfortable.”

  “I just don’t want you to lose all you’ve gained.”

  Leslie scowled out the window, not wanting to hear or think about losses and gains. Instead of listening to Kate’s voice, Leslie watched the rows of cut-down grain march past. He couldn’t watch them spin by without thinking of the spokes of a wheel, or of a giant’s legs marching unstoppably over him.

  They drove silently through another mile. Like the one before it and the one after it, this mile was absolutely flat. Kate frowned. For a moment, she thought she’d seen words rising out of the blur of cracked and fixed concrete, but she couldn’t quite catch them.

  “Think we’ll run into Dad?” Leslie asked.

  “Oh yeah. Not a doubt in my mind.” There was another pause.

  “I think it’ll be kind of good to see him again,” Leslie said

  “You do, huh?”

  “Lighten up on him, Mom. Maybe he’s… uh…”

  “Maybe he’s what?”

  “I don’t know. Gotten back all that good stuff you guys used to be about. You know, a new loving age? Saving the world? Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, maybe he could believe in that again. I mean, if he did once, right? No reason he couldn’t.”

  “He burned out, Leslie. Took his eyes off the prize for a split second and never found it again.”

  “I thought that was the whole point of this trip, finding the lost prize,” Leslie said. There was a touch of bitterness in his voice. Kate, who was and was not his mother, looked over at him. He was looking out the window, not at her. He was watching the wheat, the horizon, the giant’s spinning legs.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Another silence.

  “So, you’re not looking forward to seeing Dad?” Leslie asked.

  “Well, it’s not like I dread it. There’s a lot worse things in the world than Fred Mundy.”

  “Oh, I know, I know.”

  Kate bit her lip, squinted over at Leslie.

  “Look, I…”

  She trailed off and didn’t finish her sentence. Leslie didn’t look at her. Kate tried again.

  “Your father…” She furrowed her brow, tried one more time. “Fred is a good man. He is. At one time I thought he could be a great man. I thought he had what it took to, you know, go the distance. But this is a hard life, you know? There’s a lot of bastards, just plain bastards out there who want power and nothing else and don’t care what it takes. Fred was never one of them, but… well, he went through a lot. It wore him down. I know you want to admire him, but you have to recognize that he got worn down.”

  Leslie didn’t turn his head, but his eyes flicked over at Kate. “So why’s he started looking again, after all this time?”

  Kate didn’t answer for a while.

  “What I dread is running into one of those hit squads,” Kate said eventually. “Talk about bastards who just want power.”

  “So you believe those stories?”

  “Not all of them, no. Stories, there’s always a new story. A guy gets high in Newark and suddenly there’s a story that people are learning to walk through walls. Tabloid stories about two-headed spider babies, about Hillary’s secret sex change operation… The hit squads, it’s the same thing, one little fish of truth swimming in an ocean of nonsense. They’re all ghosts, they’re all priests, they’re all bankrolled by the Israelis. Garbage, mostly. But I know something put a scare into that old crazy spider Boniface. I know that Stealin’ Dan’s death didn’t just happen, and that Neal Brinker was scared shitless by something more than puppet shows and shadow-play. Coretta Rowlands takes them seriously, and she’s nobody’s fool. So there’s something there.”

  Leslie bit at the inside of his cheek, then named his fear. “What I dread is the Freak.”

  They’d turned off the heater miles ago: The sun on the roof had warmed the enclosed space until both of them had taken off their sweaters. Nonetheless, Leslie shivered. He had never, to his knowledge, met the Freak. But he wouldn’t know, would he? Maybe it had scoped him out and passed him by, like God’s reaper walking by a bloodied door on Passover night. Or maybe it was unaware of him, maybe he was beneath its notice entirely. Leslie hoped so. He didn’t want to compete with… that. Didn’t want to compete with anything, with anyone. That was his parents’ dream. Only they were and weren’t his parents.

  Even Kate, who was usually hard to faze, shifted in her seat. “The Freak’s just one person, I hear. The hit squads… they’re organized, somehow. They got money and people to use it, questions to ask and people to think about the answers. If anyone’s going to poke around a potential godwalker, it’s them.”

  Leslie almost said, “They never came for me, did they?” but decided against it.

  The car sputtered, then died.

  “I told you we weren’t going to make that gas station,” Leslie said.

  * * *

  In Chicago, a woman named Tina woke up in a strange bed, next to a strange man. She experienced a moment of disorientation, but then her memories caught up with her senses.

  He was very handsome. She’d noticed that first thing, last night. Half Justin Timberlake, half young Harrison Ford. In repose, his face was perfectly smooth and unlined, like a mask or the face of a young child. His name was Lance.

  He wasn’t the first stranger Tina had ever picked up, but was by far the best. As she shifted in the bed, she could feel soreness in her thighs, her calves and stomach. The muscles burned from clenching over and over as she clutched at him, ground herself against him harder and harder…

  Feeling her move, his eyes flicked open. There was no morning dimness in them—they went straight from out cold to wide awake. Maybe he hadn’t been asleep at all, just lying beside her with his eyes closed.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  If Lance had the face of an angel, he had the voice of a dying man. It was hoarse, scratchy, harsh as sandpaper on rusted metal. At first it had bothered her, but in the course of their evening she’d gained a new set of associations for rough, raspy voices. She knew that if she heard it on the phone in a week, she’d respond.

  He smiled and reached out to stroke her hair. That was a first: Usually the one-night men were up and out the door at top speed. Then again, Lance had been very different from their first embrace. He was slow, confident, proficient… he looked like he was barely twenty, but he fucked with the lazy skill of a much older man.

  Tina liked sex best when she was in love, and she’d only been in love once. But this stranger—Christ, she didn’t even know his last name!—had made her feel almost as well-known and cherished and free as Ramon, a man she’d lived with for three years.

  If only it wasn’t for those things in his chest. As she came more awake, Tina realized there were bruises on her breasts and stomach from driving herself against the cold metal links.
/>   He kissed her, lips closed to keep in morning breath. “I’ve got to go,” he said, standing. She thought he looked a little sad. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She considered “Thank you” but didn’t want to sound sappy or make him conceited.

  “Lance?” He didn’t look at her. He was pulling on his pants. “Uh… you did say your name was Lance, right?”

  “Did I?” He turned to her and smiled again. Heartbreaking.

  “Uh, did I give you my phone number?” she asked.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Do you want it?”

  The smile faded. “Tina,” he said gently. “I thought we understood one another.”

  Tina had to sit up so that she could hang her head and start twisting her hair around her finger.

  “Well, we do. I mean, we did. No strings, no repercussions, no expectations, yeah, but… I don’t know.” Suddenly she felt ugly. She turned away from him, saw her contact lens case on the anonymous bedside table. She wore blue contacts, even though she had perfect vision. She wasn’t a real blonde either.

  “Tina, don’t be sad.”

  “I’m not. I mean, it’s flattering just to get hit on by a guy as good looking as you. And you, you really know your way around a woman’s body, that’s for sure.”

  Lance laughed, and Tina cringed. Then she felt his warm, knowing hands on her shoulders. He touched her with just the right tenderness. His lips brushed her neck, her ear, as his hands slid down her arms. He embraced her from behind.

  “Tina, you were wonderful, I loved every moment, and it was perfect.”

  “But you don’t want to see me again?”

  He squeezed her close, then spoke.

  “I can’t… afford to be meaningful to anyone.”

  The rasp in his voice seemed even harsher than usual.

  “Besides, the next time you see me, you probably won’t even recognize me.”

  She turned, deeply confused. In his youthful face, his eyes looked ancient.