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King
A Mystery
David S. Faldet
King
A Mystery
Copyright © 2019 David S. Faldet. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7379-5
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-7380-1
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7381-8
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/19/19
for Marty
(1957–2012)
Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us.
Gospel of Mary
This is a work of fiction set against a background of history. Names, characters, institutions, organizations, corporations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead, outside those drawn from the canonical gospels, Acts, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary is entirely coincidental.
Prologue
Most of my life I have believed in what I can see, what I can smell, what I can rub between my thumb and forefinger. I’m writing to set down a record of my brother, Joshua King: what I saw and heard, the effect I saw him have on others.
Sadly, my brother is dead. Some question the story of his life. Others question the reality of his death. I want to give you the facts about Josh—let you decide what’s true.
I’ve got problems with this. First, I’m an archeologist. I have experience writing e-mails. I can write about a potsherd discovered in stratified or disrupted soil, but have no practice putting into words the feelings of the maker of the pot. I can record transactions, facts, reports about inert material, academic theories, but for Joshua I want to use words that give a sense of his life and the lives he touched. In such writing, I’m a novice.
There’s also this; my brother was a spiritual person. Josh cared for the life an outside observer cannot see or touch: the life that, as he once told a friend, exists “between the soul and the spirit.” As I’ve already said, what experience do I, trained to work with dried-out bones, broken pots, and charred wood have attending to the world of intention, of feeling, of soul: the life to which my brother pointed as prophet?
My brother is dead. I can’t call him back, can’t ask him describe his thinking as he returned from his wanderings in Mexico and the western states to the familiar territory of Bremer County, Iowa, or have him put into words what it felt like to have a power pass through his hand as he eased a suffering man’s pain. How can I hope to extend, slightly, even a tiny sliver of light into my brother Josh’s inner and now-extinguished existence? What Josh cared about he explained with an analogy. The purpose of a tent, he said, is not the canvas, not the thin outer fabric you easily see and feel, but the kind of space the tent fabric creates inside. So too with the Spirit. My brother, Josh, attuned as he was to the Spirit, was remarkably aware of the true, large inner shape of human lives. He recognized that we are not what we seem to one another. Josh lived with the conviction that our invisible inner life has a purpose he respected, a purpose he lived to see.
How do I come to terms with my brother’s commitment to that invisible life? I do it by reminding myself that the world in which we breathe and scuff our knees, the measurable spectrum of energy, that until less than a year ago, was my chief focus, is maybe 5 percent of the whole universe. The other 95 percent is hidden: dark energy and dark material that only clues us to its presence by the measurable bend it puts on the arc of travel of what we can see and detect. As with the universe of energy and matter, so with Josh. I watched my brother swim and run and butter his bread. I heard him mumble in his sleep. I listened when he spoke. But I could not climb into his skin. When Josh sensed the presence of the Spirit, I could not feel her tug on his pulse or the illuminations she cast into his brain. I could only observe her trace effects, the ones I plan to report. Even though I feel I scarcely knew my brother, I would like you to know him better, to know his message, to know how the light he carried lives on, even after his passing.
To do that, I’ll use my field skills. I have asked questions about the thought and feeling of the security guard who found my brother as he died. I have talked to the woman who eased that security guard’s back of its pain, and who, you will come to find, knew my brother well. I’ve also got my own memories of Josh. By triangulating between those three known bearings, security guard, friend, and the Josh I knew, I hope to give you some sense of Josh’s life and what took it.
But I’ve got to publish those experiences through the medium of language, choosing which words to write, which to leave out. Better to ask me to give birth to a child or to dance the lead in the Russian National Ballet.
Be patient. Be kind.
chapter 1
Arnie Mikesh got to know my brother only for a few minutes, in the small hours of a Saturday morning in March.
His work shift behind him, Mikesh drove, banging the dash to remind the struggling heater of his aging Chevy pickup to blow warm air against his windshield. The blacktop was almost erased by mist. Disoriented, Mikesh kept his brain clear by singing with Gregg Allman’s “All Night Train.” Above the beat of Allman’s Hammond, Warren Haynes’s slide on the tight-wound strings of his Gibson dived and caught, like a bird of prey on a speed pill, and twitched and looped around the fuzzy alto melody of Dickey Betts’s guitar.
The Allmans rocked on. Mikesh’s truck edged forward at the floor of a white pool of fog covering half of two states. Mikesh was nearly invisible in a cab lit only by the deep-ocean-fish glow of his dashboard. No one waited at home for him. No one sat up late, staring at their phone, toying with the idea of giving Mikesh a call. The ghostly slide of Warren Haynes’s guitar was Arnie Mikesh’s only company as he decompressed from another round in his nocturnal life. “Ride!” he sang off-key with the chorus, “Ride!”
Mikesh had a good memory for weather, but he couldn’t recall a fog like this one. When the temperature spiked that morning, the hard, months-old banks of snow hissed an exhalation of heavy steam, a cloak to ward off the warming sun. Mikesh heard the driving advisory on the Waterloo station before he left for work late in the afternoon—stay off the roads. The whole northern half of Iowa would have near zero visibility until late Saturday morning. But he got to work. Eight-and-a-half hours later he had to get home. Driving, he kept the headlights dim, went forward at a crawling speed, and concentrated with what ragged attention he could drag from his bones.
At the road edge to his left, tire tracks cut through the snow bank of the curve, tracks that hadn’t been there when he drove to work. Beyond the road shoulder there was nothing but thirty feet of air on that sharp corner. Maybe it would be nothing, but maybe, Mikesh thought, somebody had an accident. He turned at the next field drive, returned to park on the gravel road that intersected the curve, grabbed his flashlight, and walked back. Cold seeped through his clothing. The air had a sweet, half-chewed smell from the silage and cattle of the dairy farm to the south. When the beam of his light caught the scar in the snow bank, he could see that whoever went off that edge made a simple job of it. No other tracks, no footprints, no police or ambulance, just a bent-flat reflector post and the tire marks cutting through the piled-up snow