Nicodemus told the prison psychiatrist that he knew nothing of the young man named Jesus Santiago. “No such person dwells within my mind,” he said. “I cannot see him with my left eye, nor do I see him with my right.”
“You were seen speaking with the boy,” prodded the psychiatrist, Dr. Stankevi
ius.
“No,” said Nicodemus. “I was not.”
“A guard saw you.”
“If he says so, then he is mistaken. Ask him again.”
When the doctor asked Nicodemus if he knew the significance of the numbers 12/17, the little prisoner smiled. “Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?”
“I don’t know the answer, Nicodemus. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Time is not like a ribbon stretched from now until then. It is a pool in which we all float.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Search your mind. Dive into that pool.”
That was all that Nicodemus would say. His eyes lost their focus and he appeared to go into his own thoughts.
After the session was over, Dr. Stankeviius searched through the folder for the eyewitness report by the guard who had been walking the yard that day. The report was gone. The psychiatrist requested that the guard be brought into his office, but the officer in question had not reported for work that day. When Dr. Stankeviius pressed the matter, he learned that the guard had been transferred to a facility in Albion, at the extreme northwest corner of the state. No attempt to contact him either through the system or via personal telephone or e-mail was successful. Two weeks later the guard was fired for being drunk on duty and went home, put the barrel of his great-grandfather’s old U.S. Cavalry revolver into his mouth, and blew off the top of his head. He left a suicide note written in tomato sauce on his bedroom wall. It read: For sins known and unknown. That same week the file on the death of Jesus Santiago, the young Latino, vanished from Dr. Stankeviius’s locked office. When the doctor attempted to locate the boy’s record on the prison server, it was gone.
A month later, on the day of the devastation at the Royal London Hospital, Dr. Stankeviius had the guards bring Nicodemus into his office. The psychiatrist was sweating badly when he made that call.
Neither guard touched Nicodemus as they ushered him into the doctor’s office, and though they both towered over the stick-thin little man, he exuded much more power than they did. Dr. Stankeviius noted that the guards kept their hands on their belts near their weapons.
Nicodemus stood in front of the desk, his hands loose at his sides, head slightly bowed so that he looked up under bony brows at the doctor. Nicodemus had eyes the color of toad skin—a complexity of dark greens and browns. His skin was sallow, his lips full, his teeth white and wet.
“Have a seat,” offered Dr. Stankeviius. He could hear the tremble in his own voice.
“I thank you,” Nicodemus said in the oddly formal way he had. A guard pushed a chair in front of the desk and the prisoner sat. He leaned back, folded his long-fingered hands in his lap, and waited. His eyes never left the doctor’s face, and Nicodemus’s lips constantly writhed in a small smile that came and went, came and went.
“Do you know why I asked you to visit me today?” began the doctor.
“Do you?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it wants to mean, sir. We each derive our own meaning from life as we fly through the moments.”
“Are you aware of what has happened today?”
“I am aware of many things that have happened today, Doctor. Saints and sinners whisper to me in my sleep. Dumas speaks truth to me in my right ear and Gesmas tells only lies to my left ear. Please be specific.”
Stankeviius did not recognize the two names Nicodemus had mentioned, but he wrote them down. Then he leaned forward. “Jesus Santiago, the boy who was killed … the numbers twelve/seventeen were cut into his skin.”
Nicodemus said nothing.
“Why do you think someone did that?”
Nothing.
“Did you do that?”
“No, sir, I laid not a hand on that child. Anyone who says that I did is a liar in the eyes of the Goddess and will be judged accordingly.” ’
Stankeviius wrote down “goddess” but did not comment.
“Did you arrange to have it done?”
“What people do is theirs to explain or justify.”
“Do you know who did it?”
No answer.
“Why ‘twelve/seventeen’? Why those numbers?”
Nicodemus said nothing.
“Do you know what today’s date is?”
“Time is a pool, Doctor. Today is every day.”
“Please answer the question. Do you know what today’s date is?”
“Yes,” he answered, his writhing lips twisting as if fighting to contain a laugh. “As do you.”
Dr. Stankeviius stared at him. He licked his lips. They were dry and salty. He knew that he should end this line of conversation right now and call the warden, but he felt compelled to talk to this man.
“Did you have advance knowledge of what was going to happen today?”
Nicodemus beamed. “I am but a voice in the wilderness crying, ‘Make straight the path.’ I am neither the right hand of the Goddess nor her left hand. I am a leaf blown by her holy breath.”
The psychiatrist opened his mouth to ask about which goddess the prisoner referred to, but Nicodemus continued. “This is an important and blessed day in the history of our broken little world. Grace is bestowed upon those who witness such events. We need to lift up our voices and rejoice that we are living in such times as these. Future generations will call these biblical times, for with every breath we are writing the scriptures of a newer testament. The Third Testament that chronicles a new covenant with our Lord.”
“You mention a ‘goddess’ and you mention the Lord. Would you care to explain that to me, Nicodemus?”
The prisoner laughed. It was a disjointed, creaking laughter that rose in rusted spasms from deep in his chest. The sound of it chilled the doctor to his marrow.
“The Goddess has heard the call of seven regal voices and has awakened,” Nicodemus said softly. “She is coming. Not in judgment, Doctor, but to stir the winds of chaos with her hot breath.”
“How do you know this?” asked the doctor.
“Because I am not here,” said Nicodemus. “I am the fire salamander that coils and writhes in the embers at the Goddess’s feet.”
He did not say another word, but his eyes burned with a weird inner light that Dr. Stankeviius could not look into for more than a few seconds. After several fruitless attempts to get more information from the prisoner, the doctor waved to the guards to have Nicodemus taken back to his cell.
When he was alone, Stankeviius pulled a handful of tissues from the box on his desktop and used them to mop the sweat from his face. He tried to laugh it off, to dismiss the strangeness of the moment as a side effect of the terrible tragedy in England that was rocking the whole world. His own laugh was brief and fragile, and it crumbled into dust on his lips.
He sat at his desk for several minutes, dabbing at his forehead, staring at the chair in which the prisoner had sat. The echo of that laugh seemed to linger in the air like the smell of a rat that had died behind the baseboards. Stankeviius had been a prison psychiatrist for eleven years, and he had worked with every kind of convict from child rapists to serial murderers and, during his days as a psychiatric resident, had even sat in on one of Charles Manson’s parole hearings. He was a clinician, a cynical and jaded man of science who believed that all forms of human corruption were products of bad mental wiring, chemical imbalances, or extreme influences during crucial developmental phases.