His name is William Wyatt III. People call him Bill. He often feels like the reincarnation of two people. He loves motorcycles and adventure, and usually keeps to himself. Unfortunately for him, the story of the Apparatus is the story of his failure. It's the sort of failure he can live with, looking back, knowing he tried and kept trying for a long time. Things started to unravel on or about the ides of March. Bill’s dissertation was due on the upcoming equinox, and he hadn't written a word. So he had some work to do, and a lot on his mind.
Everything was fine until he misarranged the moss. At the Office of Poetic Inquiry, Bill strove to inspire a sense of vitality and exploration by encouraging inventive enterprise at Eureka University. Leading by example, Bill prepared Camp3® for the Dirt Lab™ Hootenanny and a sharp confrontation with Meat Truck at Luster Lounge on Sky Island.
Canada! He couldn't wait to get there. The approaching event promised a top-notch, ruthless battle: 3 bands vying for center stage at the Chairman’s Ball—a function promoted to garner funding, liberating the Office from Federal pressure. But first he set sail for Mexico to salvage the shards of his shattered 9 Rod Path and finish his dissertation. (Where he was headed, he would need to blend in.) He planned to fluidly discriminate the signals and sly insinuations codifying Lemuelite interaction. A tight faction, Lemuelism—but a cultivated proficiency would allow access to their now-alien world. For his final chapter, he would expose the Apparatus. But to truly penetrate Lime Keep, Bill would have to do more than simply finish the Path and play along, he would have to find a way to really believe, lest stray brainwaves put him out of phase with the Apparatus, revealing his doubt, impeding the Intervention, and getting him killed. The sailing catastrophe knocked Bill off course, however. He arrived in Lime Keep unprepared.
Bill's mishap occurred off Goat Point. Sailing Academe south in favorable winds around Baja toward Mainland Mexico, he stayed chiefly within sight of land. Lime Keep, in the Central Highlands, was his destination, but as of yet he made no particular haste. Camp3® wasn’t due on Sky Island yet, and Lemuel Lamont wasn’t going anywhere.
Bill delights in accomplishment; he loves accolades. He will work for a gold star. He supposes his addiction to achievement resulted from the potent anxiety and personal havoc surrounding Drywater and the dreadful events that stopped his 9 Rod progress. He finds enormous enjoyment in the satisfaction of earning awards. (He will do virtually anything for points.) He had to finish the 9 Rod Path!
As Bill cleared Goat Point under full sail in his tiny craft, he prepared to smolder the Three Offerings. Wanting open water for the ceremony, he tacked out a few kilometers. It was time, he reflected. Besides a little food, sunscreen, and a bottle of fresh water, he had nothing of note onboard but a magnifying glass and his wad of holy moss. Out at sea, he was exposed and vulnerable. As the sun crawled upward, the day warmed. Bill's First Offering caught an errant puff of Pacific breeze and the fragrant moss bundle ignited. He should have arranged it more carefully. He dropped the magnifying glass and it skittered across the tiny deck and plunked overboard.
A sailor’s worst nightmare: Fire! So far from shore, Bill hesitated only an instant before pouring his drinking water over the spreading flames. Too late! The fire spread fast. he stayed on the blazing vessel, heroically but ineffectually waving at the inferno, singeing his beard and blistering his hands.
Why was Bill so fixated on completing these dumb tasks, validating ridiculous rigmarole to which he no longer subscribed? What was he trying to prove? Why tender this heretical incense? What compelled him to imagine any series of sanctioned hoops could set him free? He dove into the cold ocean and treaded water, stretching for a look above the swells. He rotated, peering all around. Lost. Riding the undulating glass hummocks of saltwater, Bill reflected that maybe he deserved this. Perhaps he asked for it, just like Bishop Proctor!
It started with such a tiny spark, a curling wisp of smoke. If Bishop Proctor’s restless remains required this, then... Bill waved his fist at the sky, screaming. This was an unacceptable kink in his already disrupted journey! Though he remained determined to survive, Bill reflected on the suitable circumstances of his impending demise, this proper, if tardy, conclusion to Drywater.
Bill's spent mind re-spewed the propelled confession that burst like spring runoff from his fourteen-year-old mouth, half a lifetime away now, in Canyon County Containment. Bishop Proctor ruined everything.
clink!
Now he saw why live is evil spelled backward, how a prophet profits. Social mores: More! Who’s covering the cover-up? It’s factual: words fail us. And, despite our preoccupation with the past and fixation on the future, reality stays here where the living happens. Only now matters. Tangle with the temporal and risk bewilderment. He figured united and untied exploit the same letters intentionally. In quantum physics, nothing exists half the time. Be sure of one thing at the cost of knowing nothing else.
Boy Scouts certainly can be unleashed and irrational, that’s for sure. Trouble was brewing. Due to Bishop Proctor’s stupidity, Billy sidestepped the vital truth. He waxed pompous in his private philosophies and stirred the stew.
Even if Bishop Proctor hadn’t tormented him with his lame story Billy couldn’t have remained calm. But the Bishop might not have irritated Billy so deeply if Billy wasn’t already so wound up. Typically, Billy tuned out such pointless drivel. Mixing Bishop Proctor’s mindless monologue with way too much coffee, he neglected to snatch an over-ripe moment from the jaws of an uninspired finale. He should have pointed and laughed, replacing blind hysteria with unbridled ridicule. Opening a prudent hilarity floodgate might have released pressure, stemming the mounting adolescent tide. But his reeling head betrayed him; he coughed on a theoretical hairball and choked. As a 9 Rod Initiate, Billy should have stayed calm and withheld the rifles. He should have controlled the situation instead of worrying about Bishop Proctor’s feelings.
Billy might have sensed trouble on Sunday when Bishop Proctor brought the newspaper clipping to church. But the article represented such stimulating evidence that the wild still oozed mystery and cloaked danger that his young mind overlooked distinct indicators that Bishop Proctor was up to something. But Billy wanted to believe that nature still held secrets. His duty interviewing each Boy Scout, sending worthy boys for a week up at Drywater, positioned the Bishop to murmur warnings. Boys fidgeted in chairs out in the hallway, waiting their turn. Bishop Proctor interviewed each separately.
“Do you obey the Scout Law, Billy?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. What about integrity, do you radiate it?”
“I try, Bishop Proctor.”
“Excellent. Oh, Billy, I clipped this article…”
Bishop Proctor chuckled dismissively. “Of course, you can’t believe everything you read.”
Sharing the piece discreetly, planting seeds in malleable minds to spread speculation, Bishop Proctor set his own snare with the falsified headline:
New Evidence: Bigfoot in Canyon County!
Billy's new job escalated the fiasco. He worked all day at Jitters. Training, he learned the drill: Tap the filter, grind the beans, secure the latch, press three, wait, tap, tighten, double check, press two, rotate, steam just so, side to side, finish with a flourish—no, this flourish, and on and on. After several tries, he mastered the foam. A coffee novice, Billy shouldn’t have consumed so much. Nevertheless, he downed each trial beverage while concocting the next. Several hours later when Bishop Proctor pulled up all packed for Drywater, honking like mad, Billy's veins throbbed with two lattes and a double cappuccino, three mega-mochas and eight botched shots of lumpy espresso. Was he ever wired!
“Hey Billy,” hooted Bishop Proctor before I got settled, “Why is C is squared?”
“What?”
“Because it goes both ways, my friend. Relationship. Nothing else exists.”
“Neat,” Billy replied, twitching.
“Life is a three-fruit tree, Billy, stuff intertwining. Like my novel: The Three Fruit Tree.”
“Just a second, Bishop Proctor. I have to take a leak.”
Billy experienced tremendous anxiety pumped so full of Christian crank. His pee smelled like spent grounds. On the drive, he tried to settle down, tapping-tapping-tapping on his knees as Bishop Proctor navigated a skeletal maze of dirt roads, picking his way past Hidden Lake toward Drywater. Tires crunched on gravel. Billy's head whirled.
“Ambrose Bierce’s legendary disappearance hinges the core action,” Bishop Proctor continued, “Mnemonic images propel the novel’s split motive and dual gravity, alternating between braiding the plot’s triple trunk, compelling but blurred, and pursuing a deep seated and formulaically fine-tuned narrative—precise, Billy. As the conflict intensifies…what is that smell?”
Prodigiously alert, Billy had already noticed the scent of mothballs wafting from the back seat. But he said, “What smell?”
“Never mind, Billy. In part two, I’ll toss around quick shots of sharp dialog detailing Ambrose’s final trek back toward Lime Keep, emphasizing parallels with Trope’s painful comprehension that an escalating series of metaphysically disruptive waking dreams crumbling loose from his subconscious psyche involve bona fide memories he suspects the Lemuelites of forcibly manipulating during his debriefing from a top-secret high-level historian position in the vaulted archives tunneled into the mountains above Eureka. What stinks?”
Billy pointed toward the back seat and said, “I think it’s that pelt.”
“That’s just a big old rug, to sleep on.” Bishop Proctor waved it off. Silence briefly prevailed. Bishop Proctor had no talent for deceit. Billy tap-tapped until Bishop Proctor cleared his throat and rattled off more swill.
“Meanwhile,” he gushed, “Trope patents anomalous superconducting substances he encounters analyzing old mine tailings with Eureka University’s mass spectrometer. Organizationally rearranged monatomic elements, he calls these peculiar powders—derived by volatile laboratory procedures from rare transition metals. (You know how dangerous royal water can be, Billy.)"
"Gradually, through thorough research, Trope realizes that legendary ghost gold, digested residue allegedly found in specialized organs of primitive, blind, cave-dwelling catfish, is roughly equivalent to the stuff he has coaxed out of his slag heap! Ghost gold is monatomic, Billy, rare because gold atoms usually pair up. Like us, gold craves companionship. Cave cats cruising prehistoric underground waterways metabolize granite, yielding ghost gold as a by-product! Trope can isolate ghost gold, but can’t get it pure. He impatiently retains a useless patent to an incomplete discovery. Scrambling pell-mell for the elusive overture to his alchemical symphony, without which he cannot vend his development to Lemuelites anxious to activate the idle Appartus and instigate the Apocalypse, Trope pursues the solution ruthlessly. He wants the powder. He needs the power! The Ark is a central meaner, a resonator. Mind control, Billy, plain and simple. It runs on ghost gold! Magnified by circumstance driven greed, obsession has bitter hold of Peter Trope."
“Meanwhile, you fortuitously discover and exploit the effects of this peculiar elixir. Monatomic ghost gold, found uncorrupted only inside vicious white catfish deep inside Harley Mountain, can be liberally ingested, rendering your physical structure immune to the traps and illusions of this rough plane. You inhale invisibility and breathe immortality. You can walk through solid rock dosed with the magical powder!"
"You put me in your book, Bishop Proctor?"
“Not yet Billy, listen. We Lemuelites have the Apparatus tucked away under a cheese plant in Lime Keep—that’s common knowledge in circles where that sort of contingency gets considered. But we don’t know how to use it. In our affluent, ecstatic, standardized myopia we don’t even recognize the obvious. We are barking up the wrong tree. We still think the machine is just a symbol, a relic! Ha! Our infatuation with pseudoscience, our watered down ceremonies, our devotion to money and power, have flushed the substance of our faith right down the corporate pipes, sacrificed to committees, drowned in rote rules, replaced by pamphlets, social functions, and bland mannequins of the true God! We just don’t get it!”
Bishop Proctor’s book sounded like a load of crap. “Heck, Bishop Proctor, we’re all Lemuelites,” Billy reminded him.
“Billy, this is fiction. You can’t write a novel if you’re hung up on the truth!”
“Significantly,” Bishop Proctor segued, “Ambrose Bierce sent a last letter to his niece, detailing the Apparatus’ ‘sign’: a timeless ideogram representing constellations above a planted plain—stars over stripes: the American Flag, Billy. Or, to the true initiate, stacked plates, space light, and silver leaves—pages, Billy. Pages! The American flag is a cryptogram pointing to a book from space! It’s an extraterrestrial memorandum way beyond coarse language all about agriculture and evolution—a message about record keeping, cellular archiving, and physical transformation on a molecular, on a sub-atomic level! I’m serious, Billy. This is deep stuff.”
“I know, Bishop Proctor. I know.”
“Think about it, Billy: The Stars and Stripes; The Silver Plates. In fact, Billy, all this scientific, religious, metaphysical and spiritual hoo-ha boils down to a firm fundamental apprehension of the static structure of our dynamic universe, a repeating pattern; the shape of everything unfolding. The original American flag, mystically revealed to an early American shaman by someone called roughly God, describes that structure. It explains why C is squared. It accounts for gravity. It confirms agency. It unifies the theories. It delineates the Heavenly Kingdom. You’re smart enough to see there’s something to this, Billy. Ambrose Bierce was nobody’s fool. You just have to read the signs and follow the similes. You’ll know, because it just feels right.”
Billy watched jackrabbits panic in the headlights, tumbling headlong over sagebrush banks back into the dark.
“I guess so,” Billy agreed.
“You know what I think, Billy?” Bishop Proctor’s eyes lit up as he glanced over, measuring Billy's vibes.
“What do you think, Bishop Proctor?”
“Billy.” Bishop Proctor lowered his voice. “Billy, I think Ambrose Bierce met up with…with…you know who, right? Right, Billy? You know!”
“Elvis, Bishop Proctor?”
“Billy, seriously, Ambrose must have found…oh, you’ll figure it out. It’s obvious. Read the book!”
“What book?"
“I mean later, Billy. After I write it.”
The tragedy resulted from regular people simultaneously following their entwined imaginations toward a violent but remarkable conclusion. Everyone wants to pinpoint blame, but Bishop Proctor ate the fruit of his own three-fruit tree, following his esoteric road to its acrid end. He had to see it through, careening out of control, like the mindless mob or the cowering fearful: defenseless against situational momentum. Billy happened to be positioned to make what he identified as a moral choice, and he chose to play along. He said yes to life. Billy had too much bean in his bloodstream to back off. The fuse already sputtered, so he unlocked the guns. What harm could it do? He didn’t dispense gunpowder. Neither lead nor ramrods were distributed. But a muzzle-loader has substantial mass. The gently flared barrel makes a nice handle. That Billy had not considered.
If Billy had called Bigfoot’s bluff right off, it would have unraveled quickly for Bishop Proctor and turned out funny. He would have been exposed as a goofball in an ape suit. Game over. Last night they would have burned marshmallows and poked the fire instead of slogging around Canyon County swinging empty rifles, pulsing with fear-driven rage. Bishop Proctor would have giggled himself to sleep and today would find them all paddling canoes out on Hidden Lake rather than completing reports and making statements.
Billy couldn’t deprive Bishop Proctor, though. He didn’t want to undermine his ruse. Don’t steal a man’s thunder by blowing his cover, Billy told himself. Perhaps Billy wanted to believe it and enjoy it, forgetting his 9 Rod Path, and just embracing the natural flow of Drywater. Certainly Bishop Proctor underestimated how quickly panic would rise once the boys started to comprehend the situation. Some improvised weapons and congregated immediately, and can look back with some pride in their fortitude and innovation. But the several boys who barricaded themselves inside tents and pissed themselves under piled pillows have a lifetime to grapple with these gloomy facts and probably won’t miss Bishop Proctor as much. The rabble that required Bigfoot smashed and skinned couldn’t even keep their wits, let alone muster the gumption to confront danger and take a level swing. Those weaklings rallied the maddening mob from inside nylon walls with their discomfiting weakness, compelling others out to catch, corner and destroy the beast, deputizing their spontaneous hostility and commandeering their bravery, sending them out ad-hoc saviors, sanctioning their reckless crusade. It made Billy sick.
It couldn’t have occurred to Bishop Proctor that Boy Scouts could play such disparate roles and take themselves so seriously. Surely the possibility of murder never crossed his mind. Wrapped in his jokes and his ideas, Bishop Proctor exerted no grace, exercised no caution. He ignored human nature. He lacked insight.
Deep down Billy loathed Drywater. But nobody else had a Black Powder certificate, so he got wrangled into running the rifle range again and gradually half-convinced himself a week in the mountains would give him a chance to look around for some schist. Geology floated Billy's boat. He loved rocks. He probed intrusions, inclusions and strike-slip faults the way Bishop Proctor obsessed over history and connections, insisting the stolen American Flag pre-dated the Encounter by hundreds of thousands of years.
"What?" Billy asked.
“The Lakota got it from the Hopi,” Bishop Proctor exclaimed. “It wasn’t a big secret back then; there were no big secrets back then. Ambrose connected the dots and went looking. He figured it out. He found the tubes. Everyone who figures it out disappears, Billy!”
“Figures out what?”
“The Secret Combination, Billy, the tubes, and their source.”
“What about the 9 Rod Path?”
“The Path doesn’t matter, Billy.”
The rocky terrain at Drywater provides challenging Bigfoot territory. By the time Bishop Proctor got suited up and hiked out around the bluff and up the ridge, the gloaming had dropped pretty hard and a campfire crackled in the semi-dark. Blue smoke filled the falling night. Bishop Proctor sounded convincing with his first staccato grunts, mournful howls, and firm tree shakes.
It dawned on Drywater gradually that something weird was out there.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Quiet! Listen.”
“There, you hear it!”
“Where?”
Almost immediately the boys formed two groups, some cowering inside tents weeping, while the rest hatched a plan. Bishop Proctor would have anticipated neither the paralysis of some nor the organized audacity of others. Bigfoot steadily approached camp, breaking saplings and plowing menacingly through the underbrush, peering over broken rock tops from just beyond the ridge—glancing furtively toward our fire, looking agitated, staying hidden, seeming aggressive. Someone said, “Billy, unlock the rifles.”
Billy couldn’t really be sure what was out there. Best to err on caution’s side; better safe than sorry. As a Senior Scout, he held responsibility. Bishop Proctor had bedded down conspicuously hours ago. Why bother him? Billy didn’t want to wake him up and wreck his night. He could handle this.
Let’s just say Billy did know. He did not. But let’s say he did. Wouldn’t he have done the same thing anyway, with all the facts? Until then, Billy was sure good and bad were two solid things you could fit a book between. Now he sees it’s all the same mess. He drank a million milligrams of coffee. Do the math. Riding up to Drywater with Bishop Proctor put him on edge. The Bishop never shut up for a second about his novel. With his looming review, Billy needed to seem responsible and impressive. He craved endorsement. He couldn’t relax.
Billy did notice a weird rug that smelled like an attic. He wouldn’t say he became suspicious, but he knew how Bishop Proctor loved a laugh. And he knew Proctor wouldn’t notice good taste if it clobbered him with a brick, so it didn’t surprise him what happened. Bishop Proctor yawned a lot during the drive, talked about the joy of sleeping under stars. “Ahhhh,” he sighed, “The sweet outdoors!” He asked about Billy's new job and Billy said it was okay, tapping his knees. Billy wondered what Bishop Proctor was up to, looking back. But he didn’t know.
Nobody did anything wrong or out of the ordinary. It just went haywire. Bishop Proctor went too far. He would almost die laughing, rehashing last night’s details, if he could rise up from the bloody fur puddle beyond the police line. The pathological poignancy Bishop Proctor craved and created with his outrageous scheme stretched the boy’s too painfully. He unnerved everyone. It was too much; he went too far. But he couldn’t stop himself. It wasn’t his fault.
You could say he asked for it. He always did. You could say Billy killed Bishop Proctor by bending the truth, or that democracy got the best of the Bishop. Proctor conjured dark useless lessons, created living koans. Simply for the thrill he triggered incalculable psychological tsunamis. His was a risky existence. This Bigfoot scheme was unsafe. But Billy suspected. The gorilla suit smelled awful. It must have been a real bummer to hike around in. Bishop Proctor called it a rug. He planned to sleep on it.
"Billy Wyatt," a soft voice said, "The jury is back."
Floating now, legs a-dangle, exhausted...Bill nailed his attention back onto the dismal present, where he was, sadly, lost at sea. Along the west coast of the America the mantle folds back under, recycling offshore and thrusting up mountains from Alaska to Patagonia. The line is long and distinct, the resulting continents jagged and massive. But bobbing out in open water without reference, land remained astonishingly elusive. Bill swam left.
Consider how geology puts our minds to whole new time frames, forcing us to take a broader, longer look, evoking motion from stillness. Religion, bless its heart, tends to compress rather than stretch our collective human imagination. We settle on a general representation then try to share it. For many, this simplification feels better than prolonged exposure to the immeasurable (the vast unapproachable infinite), so the sharing, rather than the substance of the subject of devotion, becomes holy. Religion decays into idolatry, but in a nice way. Eventually we worship committees we form. It doesn’t matter. In the end, we’re all subject to the rocks, and they to physics--physics ultimately to God, or whatever you label the fecund momentum of emergence.
Panting, Bill paddled right. If god is love, then we have to start by understanding that, he thought. What about love? Shall we hold on, give it away? Should we let go? Everybody knows, right? Deep down we all know it. Bill looked up to the noon sun for direction. No hint. Nothing. Bill slipped under.
