The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott

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Our humanity has not kept pace with our technology.
--Albert Einstein

The path of all suffering begins with desire.
--Buddha

The past cannot survive in your presence, only in your absence.
--Eckhart Tolle

Our technology is going straight up like a rocket ship, but our social development is a flat line.

--George Lucas

He sat unmoving on the couch of his mobile home, in the dark, the air conditioning off in August, a fake copy of Paradise Lost in his lap. He opened the book's cardboard flap and felt for the .25 caliber automatic inside. He lifted the gun out with one hand as a bead of sweat fell from his eyebrow onto his trigger finger. Then, hearing the gentle tick of his kitchen clock only ten feet away, he looked up and saw the faint backlit silhouette of a man's head framed in the curtained window. At this, his heart skipped a beat. But then he realized, by the speed at which the image shrunk off to the left, that it had been a magnified projection cast from a distance. Perhaps his neighbor had paused in alignment with the moon or with the distant street light at the end of the park. The Mexican had certainly not been standing as near his trailer as he'd first imagined.

Thinking about suicide was out of the question now. If Raoul's immigrant family was home, his kids might hear. At the very least, being outside in order to have a smoke, Raoul himself would hear. Which would be embarrassing.
For at least a nanosecond, anyway
, he thought.

He lowered the automatic back into the book, and was sliding it into place when he heard something metallic--like a tap--inside the square, cloth-lined space.
A bullet?
He took the gun back out and felt around until he touched a small, flat length of. . .

A key.

He felt the end of it, letting the rough teeth roll over the tip of his finger. Yes, most definitely a key
.
But to
what?

Then suddenly he remembered. How could he possibly have forgotten? He smiled tentatively, experimentally, hoping to feel something other than the kind of vast, unsuspected emptiness few of his neighbors knew existed. He placed the key into the palm of his other hand, sensing its weight--its reality--there. Then he stretched out his arm, and held it in the air, palm up, waiting for the leverage of it to increase, to become even more significant. Finally, he smiled again, and this time the smile held.

~ * ~

Dawn brought rain to the desert, but he didn't care. For the first time in a long time he even looked into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror.
Who's in there?
he wondered, oddly.
Anyone still alive?
If so, how had this eccentric customer ever entertained such savage folly? It was a mystery. Because there was no reason for it. No
real
reason. He wasn't dying of pancreatic cancer. He wasn't yet a broken down old man living in a trailer. True, he had few friends and family left, after the trauma of his mother's passing, but the face staring back at him was barely middle aged. Pale though it was, it was not without a certain quality, too. There was even a rugged masculinity about his face's symmetry, with its square jaw, high cheekbones, and that set of complimenting creases which served as dimples. The dark hair, the dark eyes, the three day stubble graying at the ends. . . He looked a little like a character actor. Maybe even a stand-in for Tom
Selleck
. Just out of work for a few years, living in a trailer on the set of a long canceled Western.

He'd lost the girl too, of course. If he ever had her. And now it was monsoon season again, he still pretending a call might come. Any call. He'd been
in hiding
--as one former colleague had put it. But why, and from whom? The question had never seemed as relevant before. He thought he knew the answer, but maybe it wasn't as simple as mourning or loneliness. Obviously it wasn't. He had a clue to it now, though. A tangible possession beside the facts. A thing he'd almost forgotten, due to his former history.

He had the
key.

Shaving, he now wondered, with an odd elation, what might have happened had he used the key with April a year ago, when he had the chance. Surely he wouldn't have witnessed her with another man the previous day. A man who even
looked
like him, only more successful. Or richer, anyway. Surely he wouldn't be living in a trailer, or driving an old Ford pickup. Wouldn't be watching every penny, either, because the girl would make sure he couldn't. She'd break him of it. Still, it didn't explain how he'd let it come to this.

He splashed hot water into his face, and looked back into the steaming mirror.
Who are you?
he wanted to demand. But then, still wary of the foreboding possibility of actually finding the answer, he put a towel over his face and pressed hard, instead.

~ * ~

The key fit snugly, almost purposefully, into the lock. Then a second key was engaged, not his. The girl who simultaneously turned both keys did not look like his girl--like his
imagined
girlfriend--at all. Same red hair, but she was cherubically freckled all over her arms, her legs, and even her cheeks, too. She spoke with an unnaturally high and bright dramatic flair, as though she were making a training video. Or being watched by hidden camera.

"There you go, Mr.
Leiter
," she said, lifting a set of polished blue nails toward the opened space. "Will you need a private room?"

"Yes, please," he replied.

She perambulated in front of him, her generous hips swiveling inside a pleated blue skirt that wound and unwound with her every confident stride. When she reached a set of narrow doors down a short hallway, she tried the nearest doorknob with her left hand, but then recoiled with the sudden nervous tic of a smile, and moved to the next door. Opening that one, she motioned him inside.

"Let me know when you're ready," she said, beaming. Then she marched away, but not before glancing down at the locked knob of the door now to her right.

He went into the bare room, shut and locked the door behind him. There was a modular mahogany desk and chrome chair. No decoration, or even an attempt to avoid monotone. He was reminded of rooms he'd lived in, off and on, here and there, for years. Small, quiet rooms with only a desk, a chair, a dresser, and a single bed.

He put down the metal box he held, and sat at the desk. When he heard a door close in the hallway he scooted his chair closer. He stared down at the box.
How long had it been?
Two years at least, he reckoned, since letting go of his job, his career, his life.

He took a deep breath, then placed his hand on the lid. He held his hand there a moment before lifting it. Then he stared down at what was inside.

It looked like a segmented clear plastic snake. He almost recoiled at seeing it again. Each segment held a round coin, like a shiny scale. He lifted one end of the long coil, imagining it dead now. The word
phobia
came to mind, but he resisted the implications. Mustering the will for it, he draped and wrapped the heavy snake over and around his neck. Feeling its ample heft, its dead weight, then, he couldn't help but smile. For the coil contained over one hundred
Krugerrands
, each an ounce of solid gold.

Beneath it was a sheaf of stock certificates. He unfolded these next, and noted the name.

Bernard-Martinson Mining Ltd.

Remembering yet another purchase, he felt, at last, toward the back of the metal box, back past the hinge of the lid, for a small, square felt case. Clasping it between forefinger and thumb, he now pulled it out and into view.

It was a ring case.

He flipped it open, almost casually. But there was no ring there, as he already knew . Instead, there was a stone. A stone too big to risk mounting on any ring. A flawless fourteen carat blue-white diamond.

Returning to his trailer with only the key, he logged onto his computer, using his full given name, David Allen
Leiter
. It was the same five year old laptop he'd used before Wall Street first crashed, and mainly for research, backup, and the field notes he'd taken at a dozen observatories around the world. Many of those files were still there, catalogued by institution. But there was nothing unusually sensitive or proprietary about that. No mere laptop, regardless of hard drive capacity or computing power, had a prayer of crunching the kind of numbers involved in calculating air turbulence above an ELT or Extremely Large Telescope. Because multi-conjugate adaptive optics had led to the advanced multiple object laser tracking of the guide stars utilized to compensate for atmospheric blurring effects, such projections required super computers. Meaning his own now battered and ancient portable had served mainly as a scratch pad. A storage facility for routine paperwork and inter-colleague emails.

He wondered, as he wistfully scanned those files, what two of his former colleagues were doing now that funding had been cut to their own already beleaguered budgets. Were Jeremy Klinger and Bob Wood now working at
Wal
Mart or at McDonalds, judiciously cataloging stocks of frozen chicken nuggets? Were they more into peanut clusters than star clusters?

Hey, this ain't rocket science,
he imagined a pimply teenage night manager telling them, in showing the proper way to clean a milkshake machine to men boasting both thousand yard stares and advanced degree in astrophysics.

Instinctively, he navigated to Google, but instead of typing any remembered names into the search box, he typed the phrase
The fear of spending money
, instead. Then he stared at the answer.

Chrematophobia
.

Well, that was it, then. There was an actual name for it, which probably figured into his extreme frugality and paranoia, too. Luckily, or unluckily as the case had almost proved to be, he figured he'd been afflicted with this aversion to handling and spending money ever since MIT, a school which he'd attended on full scholarship, escaping a history of poverty and loss. Before that, perhaps being abandoned by a poor cabbie father had something to do with it. Or, more significantly, losing his long financially victimized mother to colon cancer. He'd certainly inherited his tenacity and paranoia from her, although not her love of television evangelists. Which explained how he'd parlayed the unfortunate hand he'd been dealt into his own royal flush, the ace of spades being a patent on Aurora MOAO---the adaptive optics system he'd helped develop in the second year of his career as an engineer, and utilized by the military in their latest night vision scopes.