It made Darfun a fucking hero. He was no hero. “You can’t buy your way into heaven, you old fuck,” Robert thought. Then he wondered at himself. He’d never given heaven a second thought before. Maybe Tuan Li was right – there is a time in a man’s life for faith. It was exactly at the moment he felt something hard hit him in the base of his spine. He began to call out but his face hit the cement with such force that he momentarily lost consciousness. When he managed to swim back to the present, a young aggressive police officer was cuffing his hands behind his back just as another one yanked him to his feet.
Then a middle-aged cop with delicate features stepped out of a waiting car.
“Are you Robert Cowens?”
Robert was surprised at how good the man’s English was. “Yes. Who are you?”
“Detective Zhong Fong, head of Special Investigations, Shanghai District – I believe we have much to talk about.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Matthew stands at his floor-to-ceiling hotel room window and allows the sun’s rays to pass through his fingers. But now it is just light through fingers. Not like the day in April of his sixth year when the splayed fingers in front of his eyes cut the dazzlingly bright light into dozens of dancing pieces. The light was somehow closer that day than the day before, just as it had been closer the day before that than it had been the day before that.
But all those other times the light came in silence. He drew back into his pillows and buried his head but the light was now inside his six-year-old head. And it talked – whispered – invited – took away the pain from behind his eyes.
It was like the matches. That had really made the man he called his father angry. “You could have burned down the whole house. What were you thinking? Were you thinking? Answer me.”
“I wasn’t thinking because I was watching the flame. The fire makes me feel . . .”
He hadn’t even seen the open-handed slap coming. Only felt the crashing pain and wished the man he called his father were dead. It wasn’t the first time he’d had such thoughts. They came most often when the man made him play chess without the chessboard or the pieces. “Think. Concentrate and you can see it all inside your head. Train your mind to be still, to dwell on one task at a time. There’s lots of brain space in a little head like yours. Enough space that there is no need for a chessboard or chess pieces to play this simple game.”
And there was enough space. And more. Enough space to learn hard-line computer programming before he was nine. To become fluent in Mandarin and Russian before he was thirteen. To be able to accomplish every task that the man he called his father set out for him. And there was still space left for his private investigations – investigations into the light.
Snap and a match ignites off his thumb. And light – and the pain behind his eyes recedes.
Click and a circuit is completed that sets a detonator that ignites the RDX. And light. Much light – and the pain vanishes.
But none of the light was as bright as the light inside his head that first time when it talked to him so soothingly, “Matthew, we have been punished for centuries. They have tried to stamp out the light but they cannot. The famous Augustine tried to demean Faustus but couldn’t. Armies have been used and the power of popes, but we still exist. And our writing is still here. The secrets of the faith are in the scrolls that we hid in the great desert along the Silk Road. They will answer all your questions – end your pain. They are waiting for you. In the light – just for you.”
The light didn’t return the next day. Nor any day for eight years. And the light of matches and even explosives seemed dull and senseless to him – and the pain behind his eyes intensified and sharpened.
Then Matthew walked into his first class in ninth grade English and saw the reading list for the term on the board. Everyman, Gamma Gurton’s Needle, The Wakefield Crucifixion, Othello, Twelfth Night, Dr. Faustus – Faustus. He almost swooned when he heard the sweet voice in his head after all those years, “Faustus was in the light, from the light, for the light.”
He didn’t remember fainting or being revived by the school nurse. But he did remember the hours he spent on the Internet that night following search engines to the source of the name Faustus. The first references were all to the play Dr. Faustus. He went to a text site and read the play quickly. Boy, these guys had an axe to grind against this poor dude. Sure he made a deal with the devil but get over it! He read through several critiques of the play and finally came across a strange reference: “name perhaps derived from a leading proponent of the Manichaean heresy, Faustus.”
He drew back his fingers from the keys as if they suddenly had teeth.
He sensed that he was at a gateway. The time had moved by so quickly that he was sitting in pitch darkness in the room. He heard a heavy-fisted knock on the door. At least he had taught the man he called his father that much. “Bedtime, soldier. We’re going to church early tomorrow morning before school, remember?”
“Right, sir.”
Matthew put the filter over the monitor. It cut out almost 65 percent of the light. “Good boy. Say your prayers. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Right, sir.”
Matthew heard the footsteps moving away from the door and disappearing down the hall. His sense of hearing and smell were acute. Odd that his sense of taste and touch were so dull. To the point that he didn’t understand why people were concerned with good restaurants or for that matter why they wanted to touch the skin of Marcia Levinski who always managed to sit beside him in history class. Matthew wasn’t interested in touching other people or in other people touching him.
The French teacher had been enough of that.
“You’ll have to stay after class, Monsieur Matthew.”
“Why, Madame Fastile?”
“Don’t be a bad boy, mon petit Matthew.”
And he hadn’t. She had stared into his eyes and told him the colour of his skin might disgust many but she found it beautiful and what did he think of the colour of her skin?
“It’s very white,” he said as the vein behind his left eye began to throb.
“Yes it is, Matthew. And beautiful don’t you think? You want to touch it don’t you, Matthew?”
He’d touched where she showed him to touch. She was teacher. The wetness surprised him. Her sounds made him feel sick. But she had his hand caught there somehow. Then whatever it was ended and her face returned from a faraway place. She released her thigh’s grip on his hand and she smiled. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to wash his hand. He wanted the voice in his head to tell him that he hadn’t sinned against the light. He wanted the terrible pain behind his eyes to stop.
But none of those things happened. He did his best in the future to stay away from French class. Until he was caught and the man he called his father found out.
“Don’t like French, huh?”
“No, sir.”
“Stupid language anyway. Don’t you agree?”
He didn’t. He liked reading Flaubert and Zola, but he was frightened of Madame Fastile and angry with her for her offence against the light. Finally he answered, “Oui, c’est une langue stupide.”
The man he called his father smiled and told him that he would look after this for him. The next day Matthew was called to the principal’s office. The elderly man handed him a new schedule with Latin instead of French. As he took the schedule, the man’s old hand accidentally touched his. Matthew felt the same disgust he’d felt when Madame Fastile had put his hand between her thighs.
Thereafter, Matthew did his best not to touch anyone or allow anyone to touch him. That was when he started to climb. He learned how from sites on the Net and from magazines. He’d started with indoor walls in DC and quickly moved to rock faces in the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. Just him and his rosin bag and his flexible climbing shoes. There wasn’t a face, no matter how vertical, that he couldn’t negotiate. Climbing was his personal saviour, his only relief – then had come the name Faustus on the blackboard.