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WRATH * I * WRATH

The Man

The man with the black cloak and the hood that hid his face, and the sleek black
gloves that hid his hands had a briefcase full of money. And that was as much as
Chancey needed to know.

The black-green bundles, twenties wrapped up in red $1000 bands, seemed to
dance before his greed-quivering eyes.

Chancey had asked him, "Who are you?"

And the man had showed him the money in response.

So Chancey smiled a slick, conspiratorial smile over the top of his eager, rubbing
hands. "You know what?" he said. "You're right. I don't need to know. Hell. For
that much money, you can tell me to fly blindfolded." He laughed.

But the man failed to achieve empathy with Chancey's attempt at wit.

The man said, "That would be foolish."

Then there was a long, awkward pause. It made Chancey feel nervous. And
every time he looked up from the money, there was just that darkness where a face
was hidden; and a foreshadowing of something monstrous. Chancey cleared his throat
and turned away. He reached one hand into the inside pocket of his brown leather
bomber jacket and withdrew a lighter and a pack of Camels. He said, "So. Just tell
me where you want to go, and we'll set up an appointment."

"I want to go here," said the man.

Expecting the man to be pointing or gesturing in some way, Chancey turned back
to face him. His cigarette, still unlit, dangled loose, bobbing on his lower lip. The man
was holding a scrap of paper with coordinates noted on it. Chancey had to get close
and squint before he could read them. Nearer the man, he could smell a clean, new,
rather antiseptic scent: like newly extruded plastic and a hospital operating room.

"I'm not sure I'm familiar with that area," Chancey said, trying to visualize the
intersecting lines on a map grid. "Isn't that just ocean?"

"It is," affirmed the man.

"Well. I guess it's your dollar. When did you want to go?"

"I want to go now."

"We can't go now. I've got things to do. I need to fuel up. I've --"

"I will give you another thousand if we go now."

Chancey shrugged. "Okay," he said. He paused to light his cigarette; inhale and
exhale, blowing smoke in a ring. "I guess we go now."

* * *

It took an hour and a half to get to the vicinity of the map coordinates the stranger
had given him. And the whole time the stranger was silent. Not one spoken word. It
would've been difficult to talk anyway, making himself heard above the throbbing of the
rotors, but not impossible. And Chancey had never had a passenger that quiet. He
tried to ask him questions, once, twice, but each time got nothing in response but the
black void beneath the hood turned in his direction. It was unnerving. There was
something unnatural about the shape of the man's face, but it was just a vague
uncertainty in the shadow of the hood -- and his eyes were totally hidden.

"This is it," said Chancey.

"Are you sure?"

"S'what the GPS says."

Then the man became suddenly very preoccupied with scanning the surface of the
ocean; craning his neck and looking far out and down along the side of the cockpit.

"You mind me asking what it is you're looking for?"

No answer.

"A boat maybe? An island?"

"There," the stranger said suddenly, pointing.

Chancey followed the direction of his finger, down, down, to a smallish looking
rectangle, black against a brilliant backdrop of reflected sunlight.

"What is that?" he asked.

"Take us down."

"How low?"

"Land. Right by it."

"What? Land? What is that thing?"

"Just a man's home."

"What the hell. You mean somebody lives there?"

The hood nodded.

"What kind of lunatic?... Who?... Who are you meeting up with out here?"

"Eliphaz Montrego."

"Who?"

* * *

Eliphaz Montrego was a man who was many different things to many different
people. Some considered him dangerous, some considered him godless, some
considered him godlike. And while these people of different opinion disagreed about
many facets of his personality, there was one thing they could all agree on: he was
insane.

Eliphaz Montrego was, in fact, considered to be the most insane man to ever
inhabit the planet. All over the world, Japan, France, Germany, Canada, America,
Russia, China, the insanity of Eliphaz Montrego was known, and it was more than the
scientists, philosophers and psychiatrists of just one of those nations that claimed him to
be the most disturbed man in the history of the world -- near all of them did.

Eliphaz lived on a small man-made island, a platform which, with its foundation of
pontoons, rode the waves above its anchoring point about four hundred fifty miles north
of the Hawaiian Islands. On this floating platform there was built a house of sorts; a
hundred feet on a side, with walls made of super-strong, lightweight materials as the
kind used in the construction of wide-body jet planes -- a strong, stable, storm-
withstanding house. Inside the house, Eliphaz had all the technologies and luxuries of
modern day life. Name an item known by a three initial designation: DAT, VCR, DSS,
DVD... he had them all. Wide screen, high definition TV's and satellite phones, mega-
megaherzt prototype computers... spa, jacuzzi, water-bed, sensory deprivation and
meditation module. A portion of the house was a greenhouse in which only the most
exotic of rain forest plants and animals were kept and maintained. He had it all, the
cake, and most of the frosting, of material wealth and possessions. The one thing
Eliphaz did not have was companionship. No one shared occupancy of his dwelling
with him, and no one ever came to visit, but that was good, because Eliphaz didn't want
anyone to distract him from his thinking. Which is what Eliphaz' primary pursuit was in
life: thinking. It was really the only thing he did.

He thought.

And thought.

Days, weeks, months, would pass in which Eliphaz would do nothing but think
uninterruptedly. All the appliances and gadgets, and the furniture, and yes, even
Eliphaz, would sit, still and unused, and gathering dust while he sat and thought.
Eliphaz, you see, had no need for food, or water, or sleep, or his body for that matter.
Such things as hunger and thirst and fatigue were concerns of the flesh, and they no
longer held power over Eliphaz because he had elevated beyond the realm of the
fleshly. Now he was a creature of pure mind -- thoughts and energy.

Eliphaz had tried to tell other people about his evolved nature and how he had
attained it, but no one ever listened. He'd tried to tell about how when he shut his eyes
and screened out the perceptions of all manner of other stimulus he could hear other
people as they thought, and dreamed and pondered -- and how it wasn't just one
person whose mind he heard, it was everyone's.

Five billion minds, all of them responding to a million sensations every second of
every day, and he could hear them, all of them, like a roaring sea of whispers that only
his ears could detect. And if he really focused; if he narrowed his concentration, like
aiming sunlight through a magnifying glass, he could close out all but one mind, and
entering that one, he could work anything he desired upon the owner. He could give
them visions, plant suggestions, openly communicate mind to mind, totally dominate
them; force his will into their conscious, or, if all else seemed trivial, he could kill them
by manipulating that portion of brain which controls automatic functions, like heartbeat
and breathing.

He had done that. Many times, in fact.

But no one believed that either.

"I killed Elvis," he told one psychoanalyst.

"Elvis died of a drug overdose," the psychoanalyst responded calmly.

"No, he didn't. That was just a charade, just like all his fans always thought. But
when I found out he'd faked it and all of my worry and concern had been for nothing,
man, I killed him."

"And how did you go about killing him, Mr. Montrego?"

"I thought him to death."

"I see."

That was a very typical reply for them. They, being the ignorant body of humanity
as a whole that failed to "see" whatever they could not easily comprehend. Long ago
Eliphaz had learned that lesson. His mother had been the first to ignore his special
situation; pretending there was nothing unusual about him.

"Look at me, mother. I'm sixty years old and I haven't aged since sometime around
my twenty-fifth birthday!" His mother had been on her death-bed then, about to settle
down for that night's sleep from which she would never wake.

She looked up at him, her blue eyes cloudy and tired, and a smile pulled at the
corner of her mouth. "We must all learn to accept our mortality, dear. We will all grow
old and die," she said. Her voice sounded like breath, like a moth with quivering wings
-- ethereal, fragile.

"Can't you see me?" he said. "I'm young! Don't you understand?" He grabbed her
hand and held it up to his face so she could feel the smooth, youthful flesh of his body.
Sometimes mother's eyesight was not so good. "I'm young. I'm not dying."

"Now," said mother. "Now, now. We've all got to go sometime."

He let her hand go and it limply dropped to her side. Minutes later she drifted off
to sleep. And he cried. He cried for her loss, and he cried because the world was
cruel and unfair, and he cried because he knew he would never die.

And to the best of his knowledge (although sometimes seasons and years had a
tendency to blur together on him), his mother had died close to twenty-two hundred
years ago. And he still looked no older than twenty-eight.

He had led a life of many questions, Eliphaz Montrego. He had searched in vain,
through the centuries, for an answer to the question of his identity, but always the
problems of his existence seemed too great for men to provide a response to. He had
given up hope in religion and science a long time ago.

When, during one of his many stays at a hospital, while he was waiting for doctors
to arrive at some kind of conclusion about his health and state of mind, he'd told a nurse
that he hadn't had anything to eat or drink in the past five years she just looked at him
with the kind of face he'd expect to see shown towards a child who had just told about
flying to the moon with a space suit and a jet pack.

"How do you expect to keep living healthy if you don't eat?" she asked. It almost
sounded as if she was scolding him.

"I don't know," he said bitterly.

"Well then, there you go." The nurse slid a tray into place over his thighs as he sat,
propped up in bed, and removed the cover from the platter, revealing meat loaf,
mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and applesauce. The nurse introduced each
course of the entree by pointing and explaining which food group it was from and what
nutritional value it contained.

Eliphaz looked at her name tag.

Marsha, it said. She was a young nurse. Her name tag was perched jauntily on the
swell of a young, firm breast. His thoughts did not, however, go there.

Later that night, after all the lights in the rooms and halls had been either turned off
or dimmed, Eliphaz slipped out of bed and down to the nurse's station where Marsha
was on duty. He killed her. This he confessed the next day.

"I stopped her heart by dominating her mind and body with my thoughts," he said.

"I see," said the psychoanalyst.

Eventually, it developed into a morbid sort of game: killing and confessing, trying to
get the psychoanalyst to believe him. Sometimes, he would tell the psychoanalyst,
ahead of time, what he was planning to do.

"Tonight I'm going to kill Mrs. Fredericks in room 1108. I'm going to force her to
disconnect the feed tube from her IV, take the end that's still attached to her arm, and
make her blow a bubble into her own blood stream."

"I see."

The next day Mrs. Fredericks was dead. A candy-striper found her motionless
between the sheets of her bed with the length of IV tubing that fed her medication and
saline through the needle in her wrist still in her mouth.

* * *

Eliphaz' next visit with his psychoanalyst found the doctor in a much less
emotionally suppressed state of mind. His first words to Eliphaz when he came into his
office for his noon o'clock appointment were: "How did you do it?"

Eliphaz answered: "You'll have the opportunity to find out soon enough, doctor.
You're next."

Giving credit where it's due though, Eliphaz didn't kill his psychoanalyst. The
doctor was already dead when Eliphaz showed up at his house that night. He'd died of
a good old fashioned heart attack. Eliphaz did, however, take some comfort in
knowing that the doctor had just had a physical examination and been pronounced as fit
as a Stradivarius, never mind the fiddle.

A week after that, Eliphaz demanded of his new psychiatrist that he be locked up
for life.

"Why should we lock you up?" asked the new analyst.

"Because I've killed dozens of people."

The analyst made a note in his little leather-bound notebook. Guilt complex, he
wrote.

Among his many other life accomplishments, Eliphaz was an author. One can
hardly help but feel the need to express one's ideas to others when all one's time is
devoted to thinking such grand and fantastic thoughts as those of Eliphaz'. His book
was called, Chaos, Immortality, and the Horizons of the Mind. The company which
published it hyped it as "The Philosophy of Life as Perceived By the Most Deranged
Mind of All Time!" Chaos, Immortality, and the Horizons of the Mind sold two
million copies, its entire first printing, in the first week it was available as a hard cover.

The book made Eliphaz a very rich man.

He used all that money to build his house.

So he could get away from it all.

So he could spend all his time thinking.

Without interruption.

Which is something he could've done for only God knows how long. But he didn't.
Because he was interrupted.

Sitting, lotus-style, with an inch of dust like an extra skin covering his body, he
became suddenly aware of a mind at close proximity. A mind and a motor. A big
motor; it made a husky growling noise, punctuated by a steady chop, chop, chop, and
sounded like a tornado of swords. The sound of it got nearer and nearer, then
suddenly diminished. The tornado powered down with a long-dying whine. Then there
was a voice.

"Hello!"

The voice was tinny, and abnormally loud, like it was being amplified by a bull-
horn.

"Hello!" It said again.

Four hundred and fifty miles from his nearest neighbor and here somebody was
paying him a visit.

Eliphaz stood up, his knees popping and creaking in protest to the movement, after
having been still for so long. He walked, his feet kicking up a high wake of dust as he
made his way. He crossed to the front door of his house -- his architect having been
required by fire code to provide two exits in case of emergency -- and aggressively
threw it open.

There was a helicopter in his front ocean. Landed on pontoons, the helicopter was
bobbing in the swell and fall of waves. It's rotors were still turning, but slowing, with
the engines cut.

There was a man standing on the near-side pontoon, bracing himself with one hand,
reaching for a hold inside the cockpit. The man was clad in a black cloak that
concealed his face as well as his body. There was a bull-horn in his other black-gloved
hand.

"Did you miss the signs on the buoys? No trespassing! Intruders will be killed on
sight! Or can't you read?" Eliphaz yelled.

The man leaning out of the helicopter brought the bull-horn up to his lips.

"Eliphaz Montrego?"

Eliphaz offered no reply, but apparently his visitor wasn't expecting one anyway,
because he went on without pause:

"Eliphaz, I read your book."

There was a moment of silence.

"So what the hell do you want? An autograph?"