The Unseen (19 page)

“
Just wondering if you’re coming to the blues thing tonight.  I can give you a ride.”

“
Huh?  No, I’m staying here.”

“
You’re not home by yourself, are you?  How are you feeling?”

“
Pissed off.”

“
Why?”

“
Nothing.  What’s going on?” Peyton didn’t feel like being social, he felt like holing up with his digital sounds and his drugs.

“
I can come by and get you for the concert,” she repeated.

“
I don’t think I’m going.  Sorry, thanks, whatever.”

“
Who’s with you?”

“
Nobody.”

“
Then who’s going to cook dinner for you?” Reese sounded as if this issue troubled her deeply. “Peyton, you shouldn’t be alone after the hospital.  Let me come help.”

“
Don’t need it.”

“
Just let me come check on you before I go to the park.  Is that okay?”

“
Fine,” Peyton said, deleting his audio one layer at a time and shaking his head.

“
I need your address.”

“
I live at The Typewriter Factory.”

He only half-remembered the phone call when Reese showed up after seven, dressed in tight skinny jeans and a smock top, all smiles.  She carried grocery bags inside with her and laid them out on the kitchen island.

“Wow, your place is amazing.” Reese gaped at the high ceiling and the row of tall, narrow Deco windows. “I think I’m in love with it.”

“
It’s okay.” Peyton shrugged. “What’s in the bags?”

“
Your dinner.”

“
I don’t feel like eating.” Though he hadn’t eaten all day, the afternoon lines of coke made his stomach feel as small as a thimble.  He couldn’t imagine putting food in his mouth.

“
You don’t feel well?” She approached him, touching his rib brace lightly. “Sit down.  I’ll cook.”

“
Maybe you shouldn’t hang around,” he said.

“
I’m not leaving you here alone.  Just let me help a little.  I got you a present.” She blushed as she reached into a bag and brought out a DVD.  The cover read
Lost
Mysteries of the Ancient World
, with a photograph of Machu Picchu against a bright sunset. “It’s one of those documentaries like you were watching.  This one has Machu Picchu.  That’s probably a stupid present now that I look at it.”

“
No, I like it.  Thanks.”

“
Can we watch it together?”

“
When do we get to the hard sell?” Peyton sank into one of the big loveseats, picked up his remote and played Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album over his stereo, keeping the volume soft.

“
I’m not selling you anything.” Reese followed him to the living room, crossing her arms. “Maybe I just thought you needed help.  I don’t see anybody else here helping you.”

“
I could call friends if I wanted.  I’m sure you saw other people in the hospital worse off than me.”

“
Maybe they weren’t as cute as you.” Reese smiled. “Seriously, though.  I just had a sense you needed special healing.  Not just your body, but...”

“
My soul,” he finished for her. “I’m a lost sheep, and you want to bring me back into the fold.”

“
You’ve never been in a fold like this.” Reese shook her head with a little bit of a condescending smile. “The big religions out there, they’re all about taking your power away.  Turning people into obedient helpless scared little sheep, like you said.  True discipleship, though—that doesn’t take your power away.  It gives you power.  It can give you immense power.”

“
Power to do what?” he asked.

“
Anything you can imagine.” She drifted closer, leaning her hip against the overstuffed arm of his chair.

“
I can imagine a thousand-story castle on the moon made entirely of blue Nerf,” Peyton said. “Your religion gives me the power to create that?”

“
Don’t be silly!” she laughed. “I mean power over things you care about.  Power over your life.  Isn’t there anything you want?  Anything you crave, but you can’t have?” Reese eased slowly into the chair beside him.  Either she was offering herself as a sexual temptation or she was the most self-oblivious person in the world. “Everyone wants something.”

He decided to test her out.

“Meaning,” Peyton said.

“
Meaning?”

“
Meaning and purpose,” he said. “Our world is just a random biochemical swamp.  We’re the slime on the skin of a tiny rock floating in an empty space so large we can’t even comprehend it.  Our minds are just the side effects of neurons firing in the brain.  We all die, and in the end our species and planet will die, our sun will die, and it will be like none of us ever existed and nothing we did ever mattered.  Now hand me my painkillers.”

“
But what if that’s not true?” Reese found the brown plastic bottle of codeine pills and unscrewed the cap as she brought it to him. “How many?”

“
Four.”

“
Four pills?  That doesn’t sound—”

“
Three then.” Peyton held out his hand. “So what do you know that biologists, chemists, geologists, and astrophysicists just haven’t figured out yet?  What’s the big secret?”

“
Science can only measure the seen world, the world of the senses.” Reese walked to the kitchen, grimaced at its condition, then poured him a glass of water.  By the time she arrived with it, Peyton had already swallowed all three pills, which left her perplexed, but he smiled and took the water anyway.

“
Science can reach far beyond the senses,” Peyton corrected her.  He was getting warmed up, ready to argue as he sometimes had with the preachers who showed up on campus to warn the sinning college students to repent. “Telescopes, microscopes, spectroscopy...”

“
Whatever.” Reese waved her hand dismissively, standing over him now, her blue eye boring into him. “My point is that there’s an
unseen
world.  I believe it, and most humans for all history have believed it.”

“
Most humans for all history have been ignorant.  People today are
intentionally
ignorant,” Peyton said. “They love announcing how ignorant they are.  They take pride in how little they know, as if they’re above knowing anything about the world around them.”

Reese gaped at him for a moment, as if unsure how to respond.  Then she composed herself and cleared her throat, sitting on the arm of his chair and kicking off her shoes.

“Listen,” she said. “I’ve seen and experienced things far beyond what science has discovered.”

“
What things?”

“
When something from the other side reaches into you, you know what it is,” Reese said. “You know it’s evil, and it’s real, and it’s ancient beyond anything you can imagine.  You can feel power all through your body, incredible power.”

“
What are you talking about, exactly?  You said something evil?”

“
I told you, I used to be like you.  I was wild all the time, high all the time.  When I had my first encounter with real supernatural
power
, with real evil...I knew I had to search for the light.  And I found it.”

“
In your church.”

“
Yes.  In my discipleship.”

“
So you thought you saw a ghost one day and it scared you into going to church.  That’s your story?” Peyton asked.

“
It’s not just what I saw.  It’s what I felt, how it got inside me and
changed
me—”

“
That’s just in your brain, though.  They have medication for that.”

“
I’ve seen doctors, taken pills...” She slid down to sit beside him again. “None of them understood it was
real
.  Then I met people who did understand.  I had been touched by something horrible but incredible, in a way.  I had a special purpose in my life and I knew it.  And now I’m serving it out.”

“
What purpose?”

“
Being a Disciple,” Reese said, her face dead serious as her eye looked into his.  Peyton could hear the capital
D
in her voice.

“
A disciple of whom?”

“
Of the messiah.”

“
Right.”

“
Not the one you’re thinking of.” Reese’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she leaned her face close to his. “The messiah to come.”

“
So you’re waiting for the Second Coming.”

“
Not the Second Coming.  The First Light.” She was fervent, her breathing fast through her parted lips, the skin of her face radiating heat onto his.

“
What does that mean?”

She pulled back and stood up.

“I know you don’t believe, and we don’t have to talk about it unless you want to,” Reese said. “I’m not one of those people who needs everyone around me to believe exactly what I believe.  I just want to be your friend.”

“
Sure.  There’s no proselytizing involved at all.”

“
Come on.” She offered a hand to help him up, but he didn’t move.

“
Come where?”

“
The park.”

“
I don’t feel very good.” Peyton shook his head.

“
It’s a blues concert, so that’s kind of perfect.  You’re a DJ, right?  This will be good for your music education.”

“
Because I’ve never heard the blues before,” Peyton said, but despite his sarcasm, he was feeling tempted.  He’d wanted to see the concert anyway, a performance of six different Atlanta blues artists and groups meant to help raise money for music education in the city’s poorer schools.  Georgia blues, a lesser-known species that had evolved far from the Delta and Chicago, tended to a mellower, more country sound.  Peyton liked to think of himself as a free thinker who appreciated more obscure, “real” music and generally turned up his nose at whatever was popular, though he made a few exceptions like Daft Punk.

“
You get a free ride there and back,” Reese added.

“
Okay.  But I’m only going for the music, not the religion.” He took her hand. “Let me go put on a shirt on over this stupid brace.”

“
I’ll go get it for you!  Let me help.”

“
It’s okay.  My room’s kind of messy...”

“
I don’t mind!” Reese insisted, but he started up the stairs.

“
I’ll just put away these groceries since you don’t have an appetite,” she said.

Up in his room, Peyton walked first to his workstation, where he cut out and snorted an extra-thick line to load himself up for the evening.  Then he put on a long black shirt to cover his brace, a drawn-out and difficult process because he couldn’t raise his arms higher than his shoulders yet.  His heart beat like a racing rabbit’s, his entire brain urging him to hurry up and get busy doing
something.
 

It took almost ten minutes to put on his shirt, by which time he worried he was losing his high and so snorted two quick little bumps to get things going again.

“Ready?” Reese beamed at him when he returned. “You look great.”

“
Let’s go already!  I’m sick of sitting around doing nothing.”

“
That’s the spirit!”

Her new, polished black Range Rover was parked inside the high brick walls surrounding the loft complex, near the disused railroad tracks that marked one boundary of the parking lot.  On the other side of the tracks lay the “community garden” area, which almost nobody used.

“This will be so fun!” Reese said as she waited for the heavy steel gate to roll aside.

“
This gate takes forever,” he growled, tapping his fingers rapidly on the armrest. “I want to be there already.  I hate sitting down, I need to be out there moving around.”

The sun was burning out as they reached the crowded lawn of the park, where the first band was already playing their set.  Guitar riffs and jazzy percussion drifted over the audience’s blankets and folded lawn chairs to fade away into the tall old magnolias and oaks behind them.

“There we are.” Reese pointed to a checkered blanket far too large for any bed, where about two dozen people loafed on their elbows or ate snacks from the picnic basket and cooler.  They were a range of ages, from their mid-teens to their late twenties, and they didn’t look like the cheesy religious types he’d expected.  Many of them were inked and pierced, wild-looking kids that seemed perfectly normal.  At least he wouldn’t feel like he was sitting with a bunch of obvious losers in sweater vests.