Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

for P.K.

    
SCOTTY DARRELL stood in the field of winter wheat
and felt the wind stab the wet spot on the front of his corduroys. He let out a
sob. Somewhere along the last leg, he’d wet his pants.
I’m nineteen
, he thought,
and
I peed my pants
. He hadn’t done that since the age of seven, and had vowed
then that nothing would make him do it again.

    
Scotty
didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there, but that was the point of
The Gauntlet, an alternate reality field game that made Dungeons Dragons look
like Simon Says. It began on the web and moved with disorienting speed onto a
global gameboard, where the moves were determined by fate, the
I Ching
, and the kindness (or
malevolence) of strangers. After a certain number of moves, you couldn’t
retrace your steps to the trailhead. Chaotic play was built into the game; no
algorithm could map its logic. The GamesMasters had studied everything from
aboriginal rites of passage to Stockholm syndrome, all to fashion a separate
reality to which the player would ultimately surrender.

    
Then
came the good stuff. Then came God, whatever that was.

    
Scotty
had bought into The Gauntlet when the call for “pilgrims” had traveled through
cyberspace to the Middlebury College library server, attached to a piece of
stealth spam with the heading “WE KNOW WHO YOUR DADDY IS.” Though his nominal
father was a tenured professor at Middlebury, Scotty had always suspected he
might be adopted. He couldn’t resist opening the potentially viral attachment.

    
Now,
thirteen months later (maybe fourteen—he wasn’t sure), he was playing the
Seventh Circle, two ranks from the top level of the game. His last contact with
the Masters—not counting the fake-out—had been from an Internet café in Butte,
Montana, but that had been ages ago in gametime. He was “riffing,” and not that
well. He had no money and no ID, and had moved into winter without a coat. If
he didn’t find his next Guide soon, he would have to admit defeat. Although his
status was transnational, it panicked him that he didn’t know what country he
was in. If it was the United States, then he supposed he was in Kansas, but it
could just as easily have been the Ukraine.

 
Beyond all that, Scotty Darrell had done some very bad things in
the real world. And although these things had been done in the person of his
game avatar, he couldn’t shake them. Guilt draped him, but lightly—a clammy
discomfort like the dampness in his trousers.

     
   
He stopped and remembered. The wind rose and
cooed through the grain. His mother’s voice:
little Scotty’s soul has flown, lights are on but no one’s home.

    
Stumbling
through the wheat, his sneakers suddenly hit blacktop. He dropped to his knees
and offered a prayer. He stood up, and had not been walking the median strip
for more than fifteen minutes when the black Lincoln Town Car rolled up on his
right and he was invited inside. “Get in, Scotty,” the man said. “It’s a new
game now.”

It had been raining in L.A.
for ninety-six hours, and still no floating cars. For Stephan
Raszer’s young daughter, Brigit, who knelt on a high-backed chair in the dining
area with her palm pressed against the streaming picture window and her eyes
trained on the Cahuenga Pass, this was a disappointment. Her father had told
her fantastic tales of how in “old L.A.”—in the days before flood control—the
winter rains would spawn such currents that automobiles cresting the hills
would be rafted into Hollywood like logs on a theme-park ride, coming to rest
only once they’d hit the flats of Hancock Park. Like god Shiva, children take a
certain careless pleasure in catastrophe.

    
Raszer
himself was not enjoying the rains. In years past, he’d welcomed them as a
recess from the unrelenting sun, an excuse for skipping the California gold
rush. This year, they seemed a nagging reminder that his Argonautic
enterprise—a very private investigative service specializing in the retrieval
of lost souls—was on the reefs. He rose, foul-tempered, from the futon in his
room and grimaced at the stained-glass Grail window he’d installed at great
cost four years earlier. Its Book of Hours colors had bled to shades of gray in
the joyless morning light. He cursed his extravagance. Raszer had always spent
what he earned; now there was nothing left to spend.

    
“Damn
the rain!” he growled in an Ahab voice, partly for Brigit’s benefit. He lit a
cigarette. The last affordable vice—and, at seven bucks a pack for his brand,
barely.

    
“Oh,
Daddy,” she chided as he entered. “I want it to rain harder. I like it.”

    
“Yeah, I
know, sweetheart.” Raszer padded over and kissed the top of her head. “Rain
makes kids feel safe and grown-ups feel helpless.” A muscle twitched in his
right temple.
There it was again.
Each time he kissed her, he had call to remember how he’d nearly lost her, and
cause to pledge that he would never risk losing her again.

    
It rains
with a vengeance in Los Angeles, gray battalions of storm rolling in from eight
hundred miles offshore like the skyborne funeral of a defeated warrior,
drummers beating out mad, insistent rhythms on the flat rooftops from Venice
Beach to San Bernardino, the swelling ranks of mourners contained only by the
mountains that flank the basin like shrugged shoulders.

    
The rain
paints a different city, a conquered city of empty, mirror-surfaced streets.
For as long as he’d lived there, Raszer had looked forward to this annual
transformation. Transformation was, after all, his stock in trade. This year,
it was only bringing unwelcome hints that the corpse in the funeral cortege
might be his own.

    
He
stumbled into the kitchen, where there were other things that evidenced his
short-lived affluence. He owned one of those big, professional chefs’ stoves
with a gas grill on top, and a collection of cast-iron skillets and cooks’
knives that would have done Escoffier proud. Cooking was Raszer’s only real
hobby, as the others comprised his work. He had neither an investment portfolio
nor a retirement plan. Until the crash, he’d had three savings accounts: one
was a backup for his chronically overdrawn checking account, the second for the
little place he wanted to build someday in Baja, the third was for Brigit. All
but the third had now been exhausted, and that one he wouldn’t touch. He’d
taken out a second mortgage on his Whitley Heights home instead, and was
consulting for the LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit.

    
He
pressed himself a thickheaded cup of Ethiopian coffee, scooped up the
telephone, and stalked out the back door to the covered pine deck overlooking
his meditation garden and the canyon chaparral. The garden, watched over by
sentinels of polytheistic statuary placed amid the rosemary, thyme, and purple
ice plants, was another product of good fortune. He punched in a phone number
while watching beads of water run down all four of the goddess Kali’s arms. The
rain had let up, but not for long. The call was to his twenty-nine year-old
research assistant, Monica Lord.

    
“Monica?”
he said after three rings.

    
“I see
you made it through the night.”

    
“You
coming to work today?”

    
“Not if
you’re gonna be as cranky as you were yesterday. Besides, the pass is flooded.
You want me to hire Charon to ferry me across?”

    
Raszer’s
silence drew a sigh from her. She knew he needed to maintain the ritual of
work, even when there was no work to be done.

    
“Listen,”
she said, “I’ll come, but you gotta promise you’ll let my chiropractor adjust
you. It might restore your balance
.”

    
 
 
“I’m not
sure that’s the sort of adjustment I need,” he said. His mood darkened further
when he noticed the hillside mud oozing like lava into his hot tub.

    
“You
want me to stay with Brigit tonight so you can prowl the roadhouses?”

    
He
leaned heavily on the wet wooden railing.

    
“Damnit,
Monica,” he said. “I can’t shake this funk. I lost a stray. He’s off the grid,
and this fucking rain of bad luck is God giving me the waterboard.”

    
He heard
her blow the bangs out of her face, a prelude to straight talk. “Let go of
Scotty Darrell. You lost your game on
one
job. One in seven years. You used to do it regularly in the old days.”

    
“Yeah,
but then I only hurt myself.”

    
“Check
again, Raszer. There was always collateral damage.”

    
Scotty
Darrell was a stray.
Stray
was
Raszer’s term for the runaways, cult adherents, and other lost sheep whom he’d
been--until recently—paid handsomely to return to pasture. The runaways were
usually running
to
as well as
from
something—most often to the fire
from the frying pan. The others had been “taken” in one way or another. This
they had in common: all had lost their way, and all had gotten mixed up in the
Devil’s business.

    
Tracking
strays was a specialty within an already specialized field, and Raszer got
nearly all jobs on referral. If someone near and dear had gone missing, if a
spiritual swindle was suspected, if you feared physical harm, and moreover,
your fears had risen to that inexpressible conviction that a human soul was at
risk
,
you might find yourself
eventually on Raszer’s doorstep. If he took your case, it would be because the
evidence suggested that an abuse of faith had indeed occurred, and that it was
critical that your loved one be restored to “the grid.” By the grid, he didn’t
mean some Cartesian straight and narrow, but something more like the lattice of
a quartz crystal.

    
Raszer
was nobody’s idea of orthodox, but he did hold fiercely to one article of
faith. He believed that sanity and spiritual health required that we be wired
into a circuit which had as its power source the dynamo of the Godhead. He
could see it, everywhere, spinning out its fibers. The Tantrists conceptualized
it as a mandala
,
the Taoists as a
path,
but for Raszer it was a net
woven of grace.

    
If he
was aware of being cradled by that net now, it was because he could still
recall a time when it hadn’t been there for him at all. It was the one safe
place to be; everything else was what the kabbalists called
sitra ahra
: the other side. Perversely,
that was exactly the borderland to which his jobs took him. He guessed he had a
score to settle there.