The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [145]
The pact was eventually made, and reached its successful fruition. Ralston Cooper came to be a household name and Andrew continued to write and to make a decent, unnoticed living off it.
As for Bari....
She was able to maintain her promise to Camelia that Ralston would always be protected, would always be under close watch, by keeping him near her beloved Andrew by orchestrating a lifetime career of the two together.
A crucial part of the plan was that Andrew needed to write, for writing was his destiny, but to fall under the limelight of celebrity was not within an Everborn’s best interests, not with a Magdalene lurking about.
This was all the better for Ralston, for as far as Bari figured, what better place to hide an undetected Everborn whose Watchmaid had died than in the taboo of celebrity limelight?
If only the two of them could understand as well as Bari did....
SECOND INTERLUDE:
Max & The Watcher-
THE MOTEL UNTOLD AGAIN
40.
In The Waking World
I awoke again, one more time, to rediscover how I remain Maxwell J. Polito, resurrected from the dead, and that whatever dreams I dream from now on will never be as outlandishly surreal as the realities I live in the waking world.
Dreams could never possibly compete.
Not since I awoke from the dead, anyway.
This entire process of meeting with an alien being inside a motel room in Carbon Canyon...to get together in order to write a Ralston Cooper novel upon a magical time-travel typewriter that would whisk away the words onto another typewriter several months in the past...onto Andrew Erlandson’s typewriter...and this novel would consequently effect the chain of events which brought me to where I am now...
....it was like a thousand mirrors facing each other at once and I was a key figure captured in the vast reflective prism of the past several months.
The Watcher had taken it upon himself to slip a potent downer in my chocodile, causing me to fall into a deep sleep while he himself took over the helm and typed at the motel room desk rather than dictating the story to me. He confessed this to me, and having fully awakened I’ve resumed the helm at the desk to write about it and to press on with the forthcoming conclusions of the story the Watcher and I labor to tell.
The Watcher had permitted me a brief overview of what he’d written during my slumber, a verbal slide-show of condensed stories and explanations and answers presented like a one-sided prime-time interview. Gratifyingly enlightened and educated in little time, I am ready to proceed onward.
I’ve only but to make mention of what I dreamt when the Watcher had taken his turn at the desk. I dreamt of a pizza, for some reason beyond me, and of God kneading and flouring and shaping its dough and spinning it upon acrobatic fingertips in the window of an authentic pizzeria for passers-by to see. Perhaps I dreamt this because inwardly I remained hungry and I love pizza, or maybe the dream dealt with something to do with the process of creation...even if it was creating food.
You ask me what God looked like, flipping pizza in a pizzeria window?
He looked like my wife.
I realized within the dream that God wasn’t actually my wife. What I realized, before I awoke, was how obsessively hurt I was deep down, about what the Watcher revealed to me while I was typing...about my death, about...
...about my wife…
...so much about my wife that even a psychedelic vision of God couldn’t keep me from seeing her face.
Sooner or later this bitter hurt was destined to fall smack into my lap, if even in dreams.
After all, my wife slept with the major subject of a carefully-maneuvered research assignment to tap into the hidden truths firsthand of the evidence of an alien race interwoven through the history of human society.
What was a man to do with that sort of knowledge?
“Continue writing about it,” the Watcher himself responded to me when I awoke.
And that shall I do.
With these words and insights conveyed, I shall do it right now.