So I went for a walk. I was wearing “street clothes” rather than the very biblical robes I had been wearing of late, or the cool, post-modern, scripture-covered bodysuit that I imagined The Nazarene would wear. It was cool inside, but like everyone else I had to exit through the Hotel-Casino-University’s seventeen progressively warmer air locks so that the desiccating, kiln-like heat that makes these places such popular resorts would not flash-cook my cool skin, unprotected by an ablative sheen of sweat, and send me into convulsions, hydrostatic shock, and a fit of lethal embolisms. It was a lovely day outside, without a cloud in the sky and with nothing to block the views except the looming hulk of the seven-hundred story Hotel-Casino-University, whose upper four hundred floors are pressurized and whose top one hundred floors are shielded against the soothing rays of hard radiation sent our way by Mr. Sun.

Not that this was some luxuriantly vegetated countryside to be gazed upon. The desert is reputed to be very beautiful during certain minutes of the year, and the mountains surrounding the area do have a certain, austere charm, but all in all it is a landscape so obtrusively inimical to human habitation that it must be astounded that we haven’t gotten the message yet and retreated to the rivers, seas, and forest primeval.

The town itself is different from most I have seen. It consists of a miles-wide spread of heavy-walled, tile-roofed adobe bunkers cooled by technology developed for the eventual manned exploration of Mercury, and interspersed with rolling, hypnotically verdant golf courses on which the world’s fiftieth through two hundredth most powerful men play nine hole games while connected to pressurized IV systems to prevent the swift and fatal dehydration that killed the first couple of million hardy souls to explore this region.

I must admit to despising golf with an irrational intensity that may have something to do with the jaunty way my drunken father would swing his six iron into lamps, mirrors, and plastic models of comic-book characters that we had built. Or it might be the socioeconomic stigma of a game favored by Thurston Howell the Third, Uncle Scrooge, and Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire, who owns a mansion and a yacht.

Besides that, my time in the Mysterious East gave me a sobering glimpse into the dark power of the game. In Japan golf is a different animal. Golf is in practical terms just as tied to class, but it is an obsession which gripped the hapless males of every part of the archipelago, including islands in the Sea of Japan that are too small to putt on. There is one golf shop per 3.6 people in Tokyo and Osaka, and the annual volume of trees turned into pulp to make paper on which to print golf-themed comics will completely deforest the planet by the year 2004. A set of clubs costs as much as a set of cruise ships of equal number, and must be carried at all times and in all places to avoid the danger of not conferring their full potential status benefit upon their owner. The fee to play a game of golf exceeds the median income of a section chief in a major electronics corporation, and the price of a country club membership is only slightly less than the total global cost of the Cold War.

Needless to say, I’ve never played. Perhaps if I did I would feel differently. Golf might conceivably be sort of fun. No. Strike that. Golf bad. Golf evil.

The coolest feature of the area around Twentynine Palms are the groves of gigantic, white propellers that have been cultivated on the more moderately sloped hillsides. These things are amazing. Most people believe them to be wind turbines for generating electrical power (which is the cover story given out by the U.N. and the major world powers for security reasons, but that’s almost exactly backwards. As top scientific and military leaders know, the momentum that used to keep the earth spinning on its axis ran out in 1962. Scientists knew it was coming, and had been working on a replacement source of rotational energy since before the second world war, but it was not until 1957 that a temporary solution was found.

Most people know about the launch of Sputnik, but many do not know that it was launched to deploy the longest cable ever constructed, based on decades of suspension bridge research. The satellite itself served as a drogue to keep the end of the cable dangling out into space, dragged along by the earth’s rotation like a streamer manipulated by a Rhythmic Gymnastics competitor. Yuri Gagarin’s flight in 1961, and all of the Saturn and Apollo missions, were actually for the purpose of attaching, fueling, and maintaining the enormous rocket engines needed to pull the cable around, catch up with the earth’s angular velocity, and gradually take up the job of spinning it around at more or less the proper rate. People in the Easter Bloc were in general aware of what was going on, as one could see the cable rising from its attachment point at Larjak, Siberia and spanning the sky as far as the wind-caressed plains of Outer Mongolia.

Titanic efforts and vast financial resources were needed to make this huge, trans-national project work and save the earth from becoming an uninhabitable wasteland of meteorological extremes as it just sat there stupidly in space, trundling around the sun with a day equal in length to its year. The costs incurred, the natural resources expended, and the hundreds of the most brilliant minds driven mad in this labor are the reason we’re not all driving flying cars today. But sacrifices had to be made until a more economical solution could be found.

These gigantic, snow-white propeller towers are that solution. Here and in fifteen other locations around the world, these phalanxes of gargantuan, geothermally-powered propellers provide the motive force for the brisk planetary rotation, relative tectonic stability, and twenty-four hour day we continue to enjoy today.

I stood in front of a posh sunscreen boutique on Twentynine Palms boulevard, oblivious to the ongoing desiccation of my flesh, mesmerized by the graceful and impossibly powerful rotation of those huge, aerodynamically-sophisticated blades, when I noticed a little dark speck at the base of one of them. I couldn’t make out what the speck on that distant hillside was at first but after a while it began to move from the base of one gleaming tower to the base of the next, and I realized it was a man, probably dressed all in black. I reeled as if kicked in the forehead by a draft horse. That was it! That was the Great Emaciator’s inhumanly despicable plan! He had no interest in the Marine Corps Base; he was going to blow up enough of this cluster of Global Rotation Impellers (or GRIs, as they are called in classified documents I happen to have seen at the laundromat) to destroy the equilibrium of the whole system, ruin the earth’s smooth rotation, and watch human civilization die as the earth’s crust, resting as it is on the lubricated melt-layer of the Mohorovician Discontinuity atop the chewy magma itself, slides around like the skin on a damp Shar-Pei as it shakes itself off.

This Abraham Lincoln Johnson guy really was mean, I realized.

I didn’t know what I could do to stop him, but I had to get up there and try. I flagged down a passing motorcyclist and asked him if I might borrow his glistening and organically-curved 1200cc Suzuki Hayabusa hyperbike, and seeing the urgency in my eyes, he said it would be fine. Accelerating the machine quickly to a barely subsonic speed, I blasted out of the city and up the hillsides to the Man in Black in 1.07 seconds, put the bike on its kickstand, scraped the bugs out of my eyes, and beheld my enemy, the Great Emaciator.
But it wasn’t him.

This man was dressed all in black, and did look pretty malevolent, but this was not the man I had glimpsed at the bar in the heart of the Garthbrooksian Empire. The figure before me was hulking and apelike, with a pronounced hump on his back and a fistful of detonators in his huge but stubby-fingered hand. His skin, despite his working out here in the sun, planting bombs on all these pylons, was the white of poached Rock Cod, and his features were clearly the inspiration for the beloved, dysfunctional puppets Punch and Judy.

His eyes gleamed with an emotion that I am happy to say has no name in any human language but dwells somewhere out in the territories past “cannibalistic ravenousness.” Not knowing what else to do, I put out my hand and said “Hi. I’m Albert.” With astounding speed for a regrettable mutation of his size, he lunged forward and bit off my right thumb. This was painful. Then he appeared to spin up into the air as I spun down to the ground at his feet. I was too dizzy to experience the space around me, and was going into serious shock, so all I could do for the moment was stare up at his wide, leering face. Then he spoke.

“Harmonica! Vampire bird fly down bite my ass! Nungo-veen!” I was in so much pain that his words sounded like gibberish to me. “Umpy-Dumpy Barf! Tangling bonemen I said!” he continued. Maybe it was gibberish.

“Do you speak English?” I inquired, with a much greater range of moment to moment pitch and volume variation than I normally exhibit. Mom always said I have a very nice telephone voice, in fact. “Do you understand me?” I asked him slowly.

“VOOOOOM! Buzzy Buzby bee, shitty-head,” he explained. “Glom it, grommet, who’s got the vomit?” he then wanted to know. I realized that I was in the presence of some major insanity. The depressives, catatonics, schizophrenics, paranoids, bulimics, bipolars, and compulsives I had come to know and love at the Baltimore Center for the Preservation of Inquisition Arts (where I had been a patient for a time) were beginners compared to this guy. He was bonkers. I was frightened, but not so much frightened that he might bite my face off or destroy the world, but gripped by the existential terror that comes from any truly unambiguous reminder that the scrambling of a few brain cells or the misfiring of some important chemical-producing gland is all that separates us from raving, incoherent madness. This guy probably didn’t even realize that I was a living being, or even that he was. If he had been sent by the Great Emaciator it was truly a tribute to the G.E.’s management skills that he could even get this guy to wear clothes, much less convince his train wreck of a brain to proceed with the technical tasks of a major demolition operation. Perhaps he was an idiot savant whose mind could function at a stratospheric level of sophistication but only in the specialized area of Evil.

Speaking of Evil, this behemoth picked me up like a rag doll by my left leg and held me upside-down before his face to bathe in his stinking breath. He said the most context-appropriate and yet the most upsetting thing he had blurted out so far:

“Yum.” He was drooling at about ten liters per minute, and his teeth were clacking involuntarily like a cat watching nearby birds. He comforted me with the words “Appalachian Bunghole!” and opened wide for a nice snack of fresh Albert. If I hadn’t been so irritated with him over his kicking my quasi-messianic butt, not to mention over my impending demise I would have felt sorry for this poor, sick bastard.

Sick bastard. Sick.

There was no way one could be as wacked out as this bruiser without something being seriously wrong with his brains. Really, it’s obvious that anyone who would bite off someone’s favorite thumb for no good reason is just fundamentally not hooked up right.

So I lunged out with my hands and managed to get a grip on some of his wiry black hair and on one of his ears. I had never tried it upside-down before, but I gave this child of the Lord all the healin’ I could muster. There was a lot of light and a loud sizzling sound, and at some point I was dropped on my head and went away for a while. When I came to consciousness I was lying beside a quiet and concerned-looking monster-man. He was still amazingly ugly, which is apparently not a disease as such, but he wasn’t roaring or gibbering, and his eyes had lost their rabid gleam.

to be continued…

Leonard’s sources indicated that the Great Emaciator was making preparations for something big in California. I wasn’t privy to the exact nature of those sources, but Leonard assured me they were reliable. A demolitions supply company in Arizona had apparently sold a large quantity of exotic explosives to a man fitting Abraham Lincoln Johnson’s description, and several thugs, mooks, and gunsels known to be often in his employ had been spotted in the town of Twentynine Palms, gateway to the vast Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base. Leonard thought, and I concurred, that much as in Oklahoma he must be planning an assault on a military facility, perhaps to weaken confidence in the US government prior to supplanting it in some kind of coup.

I traveled by the fastest available airship to Palm Springs, and from there caught a mule train to Twentynine Palms. I was checking into the Twentynine Palms Resort Inn, University, and Casino, thinking about my strategy for reconnoitering the area, when I realized that it was happening again. Why had Leonard Nimoy sent me here? Surely he had access to special ops professionals, paramilitary cadres, and undercover detectives who would be far better equipped to handle this problem. A shortage of loaves and an overabundance of fishes was hardly likely to deter the desperate gunmen that the Great Emaciator had brought to the area, and whatever way in which a mass of high explosives the size of a humpback whale might be used to mess up a military base wasn’t going to be prevented by curing some eye infections and STDs. This was bad.

Convinced that Leonard had made a mistake, I called his direct line as soon as I checked into my cavernous room decorated in the style of the Sung Dynasty Imperial Chinese Court. The phone was embedded in a priceless jade dragon that weighed twenty-two kilograms, So I propped it up on the sofa, put my ear to its fanged mouth, and dialed the circular gold Chinese zodiac that was attached to its smooth underbelly.

“Hello, you have reached the offices of Leonard Nimoy. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name, telephone number and the general type and location of global emergency you are calling about, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. If you are a casting director, please contact my agent Herb Vogel of the Hapsburg Agency at 213-555-ROLE. Thank you for calling. Beep.” I liked the way he said the word “beep” at the end of his digitally recorder outgoing greeting, but it was seriously upsetting that he wasn’t there to talk just now.

Since it was important I also tried his cellphone, his alphanumeric pager, his global satellite message relay station, the frequency for his Boeing, his six email addresses, his high-speed diplomatic courier service, and the emergency alert code for his military-spec, ruggedized, field data recording tablet, a gift to him from the President of the Southern California Gas Company in thanks for saving his life during a pipeline inspection in Guatemala three years ago.

Nothing. I was on my own.

What did he expect me to do if the Great Emaciator showed up? I could theoretically grant him a sudden and painful end by changing all the water in his body to a nice Chablis, but that was Against the Jesus Code, and just not something I could ever do.

“Besides,” I asked myself, “what protection could I afford to 4,635 heavily armed and highly trained US Marines?” “Sir! I don’t know, Sir!” was my reply. Was I here just to help the horribly maimed survivors after whatever was going to happen happened? That didn’t seem like a very good use of super Jesus powers to me. I should have been in Calcutta or the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center or somewhere like that healing as many sick people as I could get my sweaty, little, Jesus-powered hands on.

to be continued…

The sunlight swooped through at a lazy, orangey, afternoon angle by the time the rest of my work was finished. There were more ambulances and Fire Department paramedic units than I would have guessed existed in the whole state of Oklahoma, and more police than there were Air Force personnel. No one but me seemed to have a clear idea what had happened, but a team from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta was on the way, and it had been ordered that the area be quarantined, despite the fact that three or four hundred people had already driven away by the time the order came down.

I didn’t want to get stuck in the quarantine area, but I was pretty sure that one phone call from Leonard Nimoy could get me out, so I rested. I sat on the warm asphalt under the wing of a gleaming, blue Pitt aerobatic biplane, and considered my own worthlessness.

I had some experience with that, having suffered horrible, crushing neurochemical depression for many years before the gamma-charged dashboard Jesus leapt for my carotid artery in Ohio. I had even, not long before, made the mistake of committing myself to an asylum in the hope of preventing myself from preventing suicide. That whole thing was a real error in judgement on my part stemming from my ignorance of how such places are run. I had had no idea that the standard treatments for depression included hanging upside down from painful ankle-chains for days at a time, being pursued by wolves through a high-security subterranean maze designed for the purpose, and red-hot pokers thrust into the eyes. I had been thinking more of something like Prozac or Zoloft, and perhaps a weekly chat with a good listener. What an innocent fool I was.

The doctors wore long, black robes and necklaces of cat skulls and human index fingers, and they carried razor-sharp sets of pruning shears at all times. At one of these so-called “mental hospitals” the treatment for paranoid delusions entails being eaten and digested by a Komodo dragon, and even the standard prescription for a slight cough is a punishing regime of daily Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Needless to say, none of this had done anything to help with my depression, so I took advantage of the distraction provided by an orderly slipping in the blood of a decapitated schizophrenic and taking a bad fall. As the other orderlies and nurses, brandishing their machetes and cattle prods, rushed to see if he was all right, I crept to the emergency exit at the end of the ward, disconnected the dumb little alarm thingy, and with some difficulty picked the preposterously well-engineered lock, which took me perhaps ten minutes, during which I was in fear of recapture at any moment. My brother could have done it in half the time, I have no doubt.

I only mention the regrettable Asylum of the Damned episode so that I will not seem too self-indulgent for sitting on the runway obsessing over my inadequacies. That’s what I was doing, but I was doing a really good job of it. I may not be a professional in this area, but I’m certainly a gifted amateur.

I was distracted from my industrious self-loathing by a question that popped unbidden into my brain. Perhaps this sort of thing – helpful little ideas and questions from nowhere – is part of my super Jesus powers. It certainly happens more these days than it did when I was a graduate student. The question was this: Why was that first guy wearing a pirate suit? No one else’s clothes had changed to early eighteenth century Caribbean chic. And how did he get that hook on his arm? I felt stupid for not wondering about this an hour ago when I cured him of his piracy. Could his flesh have been transformed into cold steel by a viral or bacterial pathogen? I somehow didn’t think so. No, there was something strange going on with that guy.

I leapt to my feet and raced off to find him, only to discover that I was not the only one to notice that his garb was suspiciously appropriate for the theme of the prom. The MPs were busy controlling crowds and putting people into empty barracks and big, green tents, but the civilian police (if that isn’t an oxymoron) were questioning hook-man. He was surrounded by officers, but I was able to get close enough to catch some of the interrogation. They seemed, from his reaction, to be asking him things they had already asked him several times, but as I had just arrived I appreciated the repetition.

His name was Ernest Formby, and he was an insurance executive from Tulsa (birthplace of Garth Brooks, although the folks in the Yukon area tend to downplay that fact. He didn’t remember much of what had happened, but it was obvious that he had spent much longer in the pirate game than the rest of the people here. He had found time to assemble a decent costume, including a very hard-to-find style of hat. And to put out his eye and amputate his hand. He had vague recollections of pillaging a Stuckey’s and of sinking a city bus. Clearly he had been infected a good while before. I wanted to ask him things the police were not asking, such as where he had travelled recently, whether he eaten any imported fruits or vegetables, and how fast the progress of the infection had been. I wasn’t one of the authorized questioners, as it turned out, so these queries were not made.

He did say something that really caught my attention. He described, in a pretty good amount of detail for someone whose mind was on interdicting shipping and accumulating pieces of eight, his arrival at the air show that morning. It developed that he had been dropped off by a tall man with a van. He couldn’t describe the van very well, because he was alternating between calling it a “gypsy wagon” and a “sturdy longboat,” but he could describe his driver. He had been dropped off by a very tall, thin, hollow-cheeked man dressed all in black and sporting a beard but no mustache. It fit too well with the apparition I had seen at the Goofy Shirt back in town. I didn’t know who that mysterious stranger was, but I suspected he was behind today’s biological warfare attack at the air show. Ernest Formby had been deliberately infected, monitored as his condition worsened and he acquired pirate clothes, prostheses, and a fair amount of nautical knowledge, then picked up and dropped off here to infect the unwitting crowd.

I made my way back to town without even needing a call from Leonard, simply by turning the gate guard’s tuna sandwich into much more tuna than he had been prepared to deal with. I bought a sack of Milk-Bones at the little market in town, but their pharmacy section didn’t carry Voices-Be-Gone. I found the Greyhound bus sleeping behind the post office, and by plying him with the doggy treats managed to make my way back to Leonard Nimoy’s high-security penthouse suite in Chicago by three AM. Leonard was already asleep, but his robotic valet let me in and made up the spare bed for me.

In the morning, over breakfast I described my adventure, and at the mention of the man in black he made me stop and tell him every detail I could remember. There was little I could convey, but Leonard was nodding and saying “Of course. Of course!” to himself. I urged him to tell me what he knew, and he did.

“The black cylinder you saw him carrying in the bar,” he explained, “is a tall stovepipe hat.”

“Like President Lincoln’s?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “but don’t be fooled. This man may resemble the late President from the Log Cabin State, but he is nothing like him. This man is a fiend, possessing strange powers and bent on mass destruction and world domination.”

“But who is he?” I demanded.

“I am convinced,” Leonard replied, that the man you glimpsed, the man responsible for the terror and carnage at yesterday’s air show, is none other than Abraham Lincoln Johnson, The Great Emaciator.” I just stared. I had never heard this name before (except for the “Abraham” and the “Lincoln,” but it chilled me through and through.

“If the Great Emaciator is active again, it lends order and meaning to a wide array of seemingly disparate data I have been collecting. In fact, I think I have a good idea of where his next diabolical plan will unfold. Are you willing to help me stop him? Your life will almost certainly be in the direst peril.”

I nodded vigorously. “Of course,” I told him.

“Good. In that case, young Albert, prepare yourself for a trip to the desert.”

to be continued…

This young man, whom I quickly came to think of as my First Mate, perhaps indicating that the Pirate Plague had begun to affect even me, stayed by me throughout the action that followed, bravely and skillfully protecting me from innumerable dangers by means of a combination of cheerful ruthlessness and Brazilian Jujutsu.

For the next two and a half hours I rushed about the airfield, the hangers, and other nearby parts of the Facility, curing illness in anyone who staggered about on her sea-legs, anyone who carried a nail file like a knife in his teeth, and anyone who just looked way too hairy and grizzled for their gender and age. I laid healing hands on anyone singing Sea Chanties, which a good policy at any time, really. I became exhausted but kept on going. I wished fervently for the car-catching speed of Steve Austin himself, or the indomitable courage and goodwill of his bionic female counterpart Jaime Sommers, winner of the California Teacher of the Year award in 1977, and now, as everyone knows, the US Secretary of Education.

It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do, but in the end I succeeded. I couldn’t help the fact that the Thunderbirds, perhaps retaining some of their Cold War ideological upbringing, had fallen on the little Russian Sukhoi SU-29 and sacked it to bits, nor could I repair the damage to the several antique wooden propellers that had been broken apart to make cutlasses and sabers, but I could help pretty much all of the people.

The initial step of achieving one hundred percent depiratization was only the beginning. I then had to attend to the hundreds of moderately- to seriously-wounded spectators, pilots, and others who had tried so hard to hack each other up and to sink each other’s cars, trucks, and planes. There were broken bones, cuts, contusions, and abrasions beyond number, as well as a few really ugly cases. Hundreds of women and children still looked like they needed to shave. One man had somehow been impaled upon the eight foot-high endpost of a chain link fence, and I had to enlist the help of six uninjured air show enthusiasts to lift him off there before I could do my thing. A large, red-haired man had found a way to remove his hand and had passed out from blood loss while running around screaming “My hook! Where is my Hook, you swabs?”

There seemed to be far more to do than one person could manage, and I wished my brother had been there to help. As far as I know he doesn’t have super Jesus powers, but he’s a pretty capable guy. I would have seen him approaching from the other side of the crowd, and I would have moved off to meet him, my First Mate helping to clear the way. We would have faced each other for a moment, and after an appropriate interval I would have said “Stephen, you magnificent bastard!” to which he would have cooly responded with “You have some trouble here, it looks like. Can you use a hand?” At that moment the red-haired guy’s hand would probably have flown through the space between us, just to lighten the mood. “Could I ever!” I would have answered, and we would have embraced. Then Stephen would have brought to bear the formidable powers of organization which had allowed him to have the most mathematically sophisticated sock drawer in Baltimore, and which led him to assign player numbers, team names, and contract amounts to all the neighborhood kids when they played Nerf football in Wyman Park. He would have organized the healthy and the walking wounded into teams for clearing debris and transporting victims. He would have identified the doctors and nurses in the crowd and set them up to perform triage. He would have done all kinds of good stuff, if he had been there.

But even my brother’s assistance would not have lightened what happened next. There was a middle-aged woman whose head had been caved in by one of the cannon-flung jeep wheels. It was incredibly difficult to look at her, in part due to a superficial resemblance to our mother. There was no hint of movement in her body. When the small but vital motions of pumping lungs and rushing blood of which we are subliminally aware are gone, a human body becomes something altogether different and terrible. Her skin was not grey, but somehow her utter stillness made it seem grey.

I lay my hands upon her and summoned up my super Jesus powers. Really the term “super” is rather redundant in this expression, although I have been able to turn water into wine in much greater amounts than is recorded in the Bible. But on this occasion I was not super. I poured so much life energy into her that my head thrummed deafeningly with the flow, and bystanders had to look away because of the brilliance of the light radiating from my whole body. I pushed so much life in the direction of this poor woman that in the end I could feel myself beginning to die – my own flickering essence being drawn out with the torrent of radioactively-induced holiness.

Of course, it was not enough. She was dead, and I’m not Jesus. At the time I felt I was not much of anything. I was just a freakish little blip in mankind’s techno-socio-spiritual history that would never make much of a difference. She was dead, and it was not for me to bring her back. Maybe with time I could learn to do it, I don’t know. It’s not clear to me that even if I could gain such an ability I should. She was dead, I was a waste of skin, and nothing more needed to be said.

to be continued…

I did the only thing I could do: I fled. Hey, I’m not Jesus, I just have super Jesus powers. And they don’t include absolutely everything. I mean, would this nutcase have chased after Christ Our Lord? Of course not. He would have been overcome by the unconditional love that was radiating at him, and would have desisted and apologized. Is that a super power? I would say no. I would say that it was Divine Grace or something, which I, not being a deity, just do not have. But even if you think that such an ability (the ability to be too wonderful to mangle with a hook) is a super power, it’s not that surprising that I don’t have it. Does Spider-Man have a venomous bite? As I understand it he does not. Can he lay hundreds of eggs? Again, the answer is no. I hope.

I mention these speculations because they are actually what was going through my mind at the time. In such situations I can process an amazing volume of irrelevant thoughtage at supercomputer speeds. This is not a super Jesus power, but rather a super I’m-scared-out-of-my-wits power, which many, if not all of us possess.

So I fled. I made my way clumsily and discourteously to the aisle, and ran down the steps. To my credit I neither wet myself nor pitched head-over-heels to land craniofacially on an unyielding concrete surface. I made my way down the steps and down the little wheelchair ramp to the ground before I realized that the cyclopean guy with the meathook was not pursuing me. He was engaged in another battle back up in the stands, and seemed to have no interest in me. His opponent was a tube-top wearing mother of two who for some reason had a thick, ragged beard and was swaying drunkenly while laying about with a greasy paper nachos tray which she had apparently mistaken for a boarding cutlass.

Throughout the stands, in the pilots’ area, and everywhere else chaos was erupting. People were flailing at each other with whatever objects were at hand, which in the plane mechanics’ area meant enormous wrenches and things which made very realistic fencing sounds as they clashed, and which made really sickening “ka-thwunk” sounds when they hit someone’s skull. Some people were attempting to gouge out one of their eyes with drinking straws, and a few were trying, with an alarming degree of success, to remove their lower legs and replace them with the sticks upon which the “This Way to the Airshow” signs had been mounted. I could hear people nearby saying “Arrr” and calling each other “matey.” One man was asking a small boy “Have ye ever been ta sea, Billy?” in a way that I did not like at all, and a group of young locals in “Garth Brooks Used To Wear White T-Shirts Like These” t-shirts were attempting to make an elderly woman walk out on a segment of fiberglass bench that they had torn free and cantilevered into space at the top of the stands, its near end held down by the body of a large man who had been bashed unconscious with that very piece of bench. A girl of about ten waved some convincing-looking Letters of Marque and Reprisal in my face and kicked the crap out of my shin. A man in coveralls who was rushing madly toward the comically stubby Gee Bee race plane paused and shouted “Stand to and prepare to be boarded, swine!”

It was a nightmare. It was worse than Jacques Sores’ plunder of Havana, and uglier than the British cannon assault on Severndroog Island. The situation was more tense than the night after Drake took Cartagena, and more desperate than when the Spanish fleet trapped Morgan as he left Lake Maracaibo. People were turning into pirates everywhere I looked, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I ran around stupidly for a few minutes pleading for sanity and dodging aircraft tires and spare jeep wheel rims being fired from a cannon that someone with MacGyver’s ingenuity and speed but none of his unshakable virtue had made from an oil drum. At one point I made my way inside the announcer’s booth and grabbed a microphone from a confused Air Force noncom who seemed to believe it was a defective flintlock. I tried to remember the Sermon on the Mount, but I couldn’t even begin. Mom would have been a little disappointed that my Sunday School lessons at Calvert Methodist had produced so little result. If you could have stuck your nose in my ear and sniffed my brain at that moment you would have known immediately that my mind was overboiling like an unattended goulash. If only Leonard were here, I whimpered internally, he would know what to do.

But wait. Leonard had sent me here with a full knowledge of what I could and could not do with my super Jesus powers, and he wouldn’t have done so unless this was a job for Jesus-man (although I refuse to endorse that name). From this I could only conclude one thing. The piratical pandemonium which had overtaken this innocent air show must be a disease. If it was a disease, I could cure it.
So I gathered my courage, stood up tall, and prepared to emerge from announcer’s booth and deal with a madness that I desperately hoped was viral in nature and not caused by TV violence, as I wasn’t yet sure of how to cure the effects of media poisoning. There must have been something about my bearing as I pushed open the door, for the befuddled noncom from whom I had taken the microphone rushed to stand at my side and said “Orders, Cap’n?” in a weak parody of an Irish or Maybe Scottish accent.

“Yes, uh, me hardy,” I responded, “Keep me from getting my head bashed in as I, um, walk about the deck.”

“Aye aye,” he answered smartly.

to be continued…

The air show was to take place starting at eight AM on a Saturday, and I arrived by Greyhound on Friday night. This gave me some time to kill, so after I had fed and watered the Greyhound, rubbed his belly, and scratched the spot above his tail that caused his left leg to convulse entertainingly, I went into the Goofy Shirt bar. Named for a style of garment made popular by Garth Brooks, the interior of the establishment was decorated with hundreds of authentically goofy shirts in various yoke-collared Western styles and made of a dazzling variety of fabrics and other materials. None of the shirts bore a sign proclaiming that Garth Brooks Wore This, but the implication that he would wear these shirts if given the opportunity was clearly there.

I stood out somewhat here, probably because the simple, homespun tunic and robe I had taken to wearing was so very out-of-step with the totally predominant Cowboy costumes. I smiled weakly as I bellied up to the bar and ordered some water. I tried to show off by turning it into wine, but no one seemed to notice. So after I drank it (it was a nice Merlot, I think) I ordered another water, and tapped the burly fellow next to me on the shoulder.

“Hey, watch this,” I said.

“Whut?” he inquired. But he was looking, so I did the trick. I beamed. He said nothing.

“It’s wine,” I explained. “I changed it.”

“Yew changed it. So?” He was so unimpressed that I could barely speak, but I tried to make clear to him the coolness of what I had done.

“I took plain water, and without adding anything to it, I turned it into wine,” I proclaimed. “It’s a bit like the Catholics’ Transubstantiation, but less gross.” I looked at him expectantly. Without a word he turned away and resumed staring into his beer.

Feeling foolish and a bit despondent, my dismay no doubt compounded by the exhaustion of an all-day dog ride, I got up to leave. I realized that I was too tired to do anything except crash in my luxurious, seven-room, spa-equipped suite at the beautiful Burnett Comfort Lodge. I left six dollars on the bar, figuring that would be about the price if I had just ordered two glasses of wine rather than making them. I feel strongly that my super Jesus powers don’t give me the right to cheat anyone out of their livelihood, except perhaps doctors, but theoretically they shouldn’t mind.

Turning my head for a last glance at the room just as I passed through the door, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a strange, tall figure standing near the jukebox. He was very thin, and was dressed all in black. He had a high forehead and a dark beard, and was holding some kind of largish black cylinder in his hands. I stumbled a bit outside as I clumsily reversed my course, and when I went back in and looked at the jukebox area, he was gone. In my brief glimpse it had seemed that he was staring straight at me, but now there was no sign of him. I walked around the bar for a couple of minutes hoping to discover where he had gone, but he was just not there.

Great. Now I was hallucinating! The last thing you want to add to super Jesus powers is any kind of psychological instability. I made a mental note to pick up some of that over-the-counter anti-psychotic they advertise on late night TV – “Voices Be Gone.” As you doubtless know from seeing it on the shelf at Rite-Aid, it comes in a big, molded plastic bottle shaped like a pygmy chimpanzee with his hands clamped over his ears. There must be a drugstore in one of these little towns, I thought.

The next day was the airshow. I still didn’t know why Leonard had sent me here. He could be rather taciturn and enigmatic sometimes. He probably thought it would be good for me to discover my mission on my own, and he was probably right.

Not having a gigantic pick-up truck with a gun rack, I walked out to the base, which I quite enjoyed in the cool morning air. The guardhouse at the main gate had been converted to ticket sales duty, and after paying my thirty-five dollars I followed the signs past the Wing HQ., across the sports fields, and out onto the vast, paved steppe that was the runway area. I made my way to the stands, had a seat, and prepared to enjoy the spectacle.

I couldn’t help but think of my brother Stephen. He always had a fondness for aircraft, and he would have really enjoyed seeing all these planes. And the name of the Facility itself resonated enough with the lore of the mighty Steve Austin to bring an old joke bubbling up in my mind. “Steve Oster, a man barely alive.” Our last name is Oster – have I ever mentioned that? Anyway, Stephen never liked that bit, especially the part about rebuilding him and making him better, stronger, and faster. He likes sports even less than I do.

The program was a full one, featuring the Air Force’s precision flying team the Thunderbirds (who are not, as I had assumed they would be, puppets), as well as the famous D.B. Cooper Parachuting Team, Bill Seligman and his Gyrocopter, and a bunch of famous aerobatic pilots flying things so old that decades of maintenance have replaced every single part at one time or another, as is done with major Japanese shrines, which are often 400 year-old buildings made entirely of wood cut within the last five years.

The announcer emitted a steady stream of bad jokes and good aircraft specifications, and the crowd roared enthusiastically at every stunt. Bob Harkin did a harrowing series of Snap Rolls in his Waco biplane, Gail Castaneda took her Extra 300L through an impressive Reverse Cuban Eight, and Jay Moore and his Sukhoi SU-29 did what was apparently the most graceful Split-S that anyone had seen all year.

It was at that point that someone swung a heavy steel hook at my face. If my attention hadn’t been caught by the guttural “Arrrr” sound he made just before he did it, he might have caught me in the nostril, yanked my head right off, and tossed it to some kids to play soccer with behind the stands. As it was he scratched me cheek in a way that I could only hope would leave a manly and rakishly attractive scar, and scared the Kibbles and Bits out of me.

As I scrambled away from him, regrettably stepping in someone’s chili dog and knocking over someone else’s Mountain Dew, I could see that he was dressed in a manner that was arguably stranger than my own tattered but flowing attire. He wore a long waistcoat, knee-high boots, and an improbably large tricorner hat. His right eye was covered with a patch, which helped to explain why he had missed me, and in place of his right hand was a sharp and shiny hook, which both made his choice of weapon a no-brainer and suggested some possible reasons that he was so cranky.

I later learned that his name was Ernest Formby, but let’s call him Patient Zero.

to be continued…

Leonard got me some endorsements to helped to pay my expenses. I received an advance of several thousand dollars for future appearances in advertisements for the Candy and Pills division of the One Huge Corporation That Owns Everything Corporation. The product, still only in a couple of test markets, was “Sacra-mints.” Their slogan: “Fresh breath and the Body of Christ all in one!” It seemed like an OK thing to be associated with, so on Leonard’s advice I took the deal. We were approached by the makers of “Sacra-instant,” a powered red wine product that made a surprisingly acceptable table wine out of ordinary tap water, but as our prior sponsor was about to initiate litigation against them for trademark infringement, we really couldn’t consider it, Leonard said.

He also helped me with public relations. People had taken to referring to me as “Jesus-man,” a name I found both disrespectful and just plain lame. I wanted them to use a cooler, moodier, edgier name like “Redeemer” or “The Nazarene.” Leonard made substantial efforts through his press contacts to promote a shift away from Jesus-man to “The Nazarene,” but it didn’t work. It was just too late. Once something like that is out there, there’s no reeling it back in.

So it was in a state still encumbered by the unfortunate appellation of “Jesus-man,” that I was sent by Leonard to the airshow at the Steve Austin Air Force Facility outside beautiful Burnett Oklahoma.

This Air Force Facility, recently downgraded from being a full-fledged Air Force Base, is named after one of the greatest test pilots this country has ever seen, who after losing three of his four limbs in a terrible crash was fitted with bionic limbs that were then state-of-the art, but primitive by today’s standards. Many people don’t even realize that Jack Nicholson has a bionic left arm, or that Al Gore’s body is almost entirely robotic as the result of a chili cook-off accident before his initial Senate race. Steve Austin did not have the advantages of today’s bionic technology, and so had to make do with crude appendages that made unpleasant, high-pitched, shuddering noises whenever he exerted himself in the service of his country. And the knowledge was just not there in those days to provide him with any kind of viable bionic genitalia, which made his run-in with Fembots decidedly disappointing, according to his amusing memoir Cut These Damned Things Off Me and Let Me Die.

The Facility is the home of the 83rd Sonic Boom Wing, whose work can be experienced throughout the region, and explains the embedded-wire-mesh safety glass used for all windows in the town of Burnett.

The town itself is quaint and folksy. Burnett is near the similarly quaint and folksy town of Yukon, the place where the famous Troyal Garth Brooks was raised. This fact is impossible to miss, due to the signs. The following is a listing of just a few of the signs I saw in Burnett:

• Garth Brooks Slept Here
• Garth Brooks Ate Here
• Garth Brooks Shook A Rock Out Of His Boot Here
• Garth Brooks Got Phone Change Here
• Garth Brooks Didn’t Eat Here But He Came In To Use The Bathroom On Two Separate Occasions

On the highways in the area there are sign such as:

• Garth Brooks Spit Out His Gum Here
• Garth Brooks Inadvertently Ran Over A Jackrabbit Here
• Garth Brooks Looked Out Of His Car Window And Thought About The Divine Nature Of Human Creativity Here

In Yukon itself the situation is much worse, with signs ranging from the unbelievably prosaic (Garth Brooks Breathed Here), through the embarrassing (Garth Brooks Masturbated Here), to the very unlikely (Garth Brooks Wrote The Magna Carta Here). It is impossible to determine the nature of any business in Yukon because all business signs have long since been covered by myriad Garth Brooks signs. The interiors of all homes and stores in Yukon are dark and stuffy because the Garth Brooks signs covering the entire area of all windows do not admit much sunlight or fresh air. The streets of the town become dangerously slippery after a rainfall, as the roadways themselves have been entirely covered by Garth Brooks signs in high-gloss enamel, hand-polished tropical hardwoods, aircraft-grad aluminum, and lacquered iron, copper, and bronze.

to be continued…

This sentence no verb. Man, has anything truer ever been said? Not that I am aware of, although my favorite Zen koan is a contender:

A disciple approached the master to ask him a question. “Master, does a dog have Buddha nature?” The master replied: “Mu!” And the monk was immediately enlightened.

That just about says it all, to my way of thinking. Of course the best part is the end. They all end that way: “And the monk was immediately enlightened.” It makes it easy to write your own:

Disciple: Master, what is on TV tonight?
Master: Hockey, and a rerun of The Love Boat on cable.

And the monk was immediately enlightened.

It’s just that simple. Try it at home. The other part of my favorite koan is pretty cool, too: “Mu!” I’ve frequently tried it on people, both before and since I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus. I’m not sure if any of the people at whom I’ve shouted “Mu!” were immediately enlightened, but I haven’t noticed any real difference in the range of reactions since the Kestlerville radioactive Jesus incident, so it seems likely that my super Jesus powers do not include enlightening people.

I think the “loaves to fishes” trick that I can now do is pretty amazing, although none of my uses of it so far have won popular acclaim. My “Wonderbread to perch” effort was not well received at Aaron Burr Primary School in Kansas City. Apparently I had overestimated the “wacky fun value” of suddenly finding your hands full of two wriggling perch covered with peanut butter and jelly. You would think that I would have learned my lesson there, but in my hubris I tried again. But the “croissants to Thresher sharks” stunt I pulled in Chicago got even worse notices. “Thumbs down for Jesus-man,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, while the Sun-Times suggested that I had “been turning too much water into wine to exhibit good judgement, much less Christ-like wisdom.”

These failures were discouraging, but I was just trying to put my powers to good use, and I had to keep trying.

Well, I thank God that Leonard Nimoy stepped in. Many people seem to be unaware of the fact that Leonard Nimoy has been tirelessly working behind the scenes for the safety and well-being of humanity, both before his stints on “Mission Impossible,” “Star Trek” and “In Search Of” and in the years between and since. In 1963 he convinced UFO aliens not to give their alien super-technology to the Fourth Reich conspirators in Argentina, thereby averting a massive increase in the teaching of German verb conjugations worldwide, although John F. Kennedy did not have full confidence in Leonard, and hedged his bets a bit that same year in Berlin. Nimoy saved us all from Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1967. My uncle Ed claims to have aided him in this, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. Leonard has not spoken to me of this affair, and I respect his privacy. In the early eighties he brokered a delicate deal regarding international banking rules between the Vatican Secret Police and the Spymasters of the American Urological Association, preventing a covert war that might have left hundreds of churches priestless, and thousands upon thousands of bladders infected. He never takes credit for these heroics, of course. Leonard prefers that his hand be unseen, and the good that he accomplishes is its own reward.

Many people do not know that the pointy ears he wore as Spock from 1966 to 1969 are real. They are his own, natural ears. When playing most roles he must wear uncomfortable latex prostheses over his ears to compress them into a “normal” rounded shape. If you ever see him at a public function of any kind you’ll see his ears in their naturally acute state.

Anyway, it was with great relief that I received Leonard’s call at a diner in the little hamlet of St. Clair, Missouri. I have no idea how he knew to call me there, but that’s Leonard for you. The connection was not good, and it was difficult to hear each other, so we were both shouting in much the way that one shouts at a deaf foreigner to overcome the obstacles of language and inability to sense auditory stimuli. Our conversation went more or less like this:

Leonard: “Albert, this is Leonard Nimoy calling.”
Me: “Really? This is so cool!”
Leonard: “I want to talk to you about your super Jesus powers.”
Me: “Uhh, OK, I guess.”

To be honest this didn’t thrill me. I was getting pretty frustrated and feeling like a bit of a loser, like I was just blundering around the Midwest using my abilities haphazardly and without any focus or plan.

Leonard: “Albert, you can’t keep blundering around the Midwest using your abilities haphazardly and without any focus or plan.”
Me: “Mr. Nimoy, you are so right.”
Leonard: “Please, call be Leonard.”
Me: “OK, Leonard. I’m really honored.”
Leonard: “Don’t be silly. I’m just a regular Joe like you. Except of course for the fact that I don’t have super Jesus powers.”

We arranged to meet in St. Louis, at a coffee shop hung with colorful paintings of sheep and goats. Leonard became my manager, and sort of my “dispatcher.” He used his incomparable network of connections and information sources in order to pinpoint areas where I could do the most good, and arranged for transportation for me to the sites. The money for those bus tickets came out of his own pocket. It almost makes me want to cry, thinking of Leonard’s generosity.

to be continued…

In St. Louis I learned a valuable lesson. Walking through a lovely little park running along the banks of the Mississippi, remembering the enchanting story of Huckleberry Finn in King Arthur’s court–especially savoring the recollection of the whimsical interlude in which Huck tricks Merlin into painting Huck’s racing frog, so that Huck can go convince Becky Thatcher to teach him what it is to be a man–when I witnessed an amazingly tall man staggering and clutching at his chest. It was clear to me from his movements that he was experiencing a dissecting aortic aneurysm, which aside from hurting like the Dickens can kill you right off without a second thought, so I leapt to his aid.

He was shuddering and grimacing and breathing rapidly, and smelled really good. As his motions ceased and he fell limply into my arms, I unleashed the biggest dose of super Jesus power healing that I had yet attempted. The force of it knocked me away so hard that I landed in a thicket across the river, some two miles away. By the time I got back, soaking from my swim (which I didn’t yet know I could have avoided), he seemed to be gone, but there was a crowd of people standing around another, similarly dressed, but much shorter and stockier African-American gentleman. I approached to ask what had become of the seven-foot tall man with the nice cologne, but I noticed that this man was wearing clothes far too long for his limbs, and a bit snug in the waist.

At that point I realized what I had done. I didn’t yet know that this man was Arthur Stiles, power forward for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, but I could tell that I had somewhat rashly completely cured his Marfan’s Syndrome.

Marfan’s Syndrome, made famous by the death of the amazing volleyball player Flo Hyman, is a genetic abnormality involving the softening or weakening of the body’s connective tissues, and in addition to truly upsetting cardiac problems, it tends to lead to being really, really tall and lanky, and having cool-looking, long, spidery fingers. You see, it turns out that without the strict discipline of authoritarian tendons and ligaments, the bones of a growing human will grow amazingly long. Unless stifled by these restraining connective tissues, your average juvenile humerus, say, will giddily extent a quarter mile or more. Well, perhaps I overestimate the limits somewhat, but in any case they will blithely grow to NBA proportions and beyond.

The five foot six inch but amazingly healthy man before me would never again play in the NBA, and would have plenty of time to think about it in his long, long life. Oops.

In retrospect it’s clear to me that I should have healed him a bit less. Enough to eliminate his heart disease, without effectively regressing his genes past the moment of conception and removing any genetic abnormality whatsoever. In my defense, I must say that I had no idea that I could do that.

I hope Mr. Stiles is not bitter. He has not given up basketball, which is a good sign. He’s an assistant coach for the Knicks now, I believe, and it may well be that he does not blame me and my super Jesus powers for the loss of his prior career. He did convert to Islam, but that’s hardly conclusive proof that he holds a grudge about this matter.

It was some time before I even discovered my other powers. And even now they don’t get as much use as the curing the sick thing does. Walking on water is fun, but if you’ve ever been rammed in the femur by a Jet-Ski while strolling across a lake then you understand the drawbacks. I could be a peach of a lifeguard, but I sensed that that was not the best use of my new super Jesus powers. I had much to learn about their use and potential, so I have kept moving, always on the road, like Richard Kimble or Bill Bixby, helping people where I could. What with the problems at the air show in Oklahoma and that nasty business among less than thirty trees, I still haven’t seen made it up to see Terry, but if my upcoming, desperate Trial among the Giants doesn’t kill the heck out of my quasi-messianic ass, I plan to make the time.

to be continued…

As I shook her hand, a confused and somewhat alarmed expression took over her face. She seemed to smile for a moment, then said something that sounded like “Gnnrpphppt,” and one of her eyes popped right out of her head and landed on my shoe. I had killed her! I had accidentally done some kind of nightmarish Dim Mak Death Touch, interrupting her body’s meridians of life energy at the precise nanosecond that you would not wish to unless she were responsible for killing your elderly kung-fu master and had thus forced you to spend six grueling years undergoing an improbable regime of training under the tutelage of a cranky, one-legged vagabond who knew the ancient secrets of White Spider Death Touch Kung Fu. Horror exploded within my belly, and I lurched backward, but somehow I didn’t care to let go of her hand. She began to shake, then an amazing transformation occurred.

Her body stilled, and she stood there in graceful poise as an actual golden glow suffused her entire body. Her features settled into a “normal” arrangement and fingers sprouted delicately from her hands, tickling my palm as I held right hand in mine. Within moments she had lost any radiation-induced quirks of anatomy, and looked rather like a Laura Ashley model on her day off. She was almost as stunned as I, and I released her lovely hand as she rushed to look at herself in the window of the nearby yardage store. She began to weep, punctuated with little hiccup-like barks, and as she turned back toward me I expected to hear bitter words of blame that would settle on my heart like barnacles, troubling my sleep for the remainder of my sad, lonely days. But she embraced me, saying “nghangoo” softly, over and over again, which after a few moments I realized was “thank you” in the dialect of gratefully sobbing, miraculously healed small-town beauties. Her name is Sara, and she has the gentlest spirit of anyone I’ve ever known.

The next two days are a blur. She dragged me all over town to see her friends and her parents and her tall, wide brother. As people heard the news, they rushed to seek me out, swarming around me like morlocks on a dark night or children on a Calcutta street.

And I healed them. With great power comes great responsibility, as Peter Parker teaches us, so I healed them all. I still didn’t understand it, and didn’t know how I was doing it, but I gradually learned how to do it faster and less disorientingly, and 39 hours and six liters of coffee later I had healed every birth defect, amputation, tumor, rheumatoid knee and vision impairment. Aircraft pilots might be blinded by the brilliance of the sun glinting off the hundreds of shiny, acne-free teen faces turned proudly toward the azure sky. Visitors in later years would be subliminally creeped out by the smooth, liquid silence of a town where no one was coughing, sneezing, or projectile vomiting. Everything had changed in Kestlerville, because of my bizarre accident and newfound gifts.

In the days that followed I hitchhiked a great deal. I was confident that I would be OK even if an evil deviant of a driver wanted to experiment with my orifices then feed me into the workings of the gigantic refurbished industrial meat-grinder that he keeps in the soundproofed barn on his decrepit and out-of-the-way failed mustard farm. I would just lay my hand on his sweaty and twitching forehead, and heal the sickness of the mind that led him to do such amazingly rude and messy things.

I hitchhiked down to Cincinnati where I healed two old men with weak hearts who were about to drop dead at the same time on their chessboard in the park, one bicycle messenger who was crushed under a bus with a cruelly ironic ad on the side for the local NBC station’s “High-Impact, Hard-Hitting News,” and seventeen leprous nuns who had not ventured out of their downtown convent into the light of day since 1972. I then hitchhiked west as far as St. Louis, where I quashed an outbreak of a kickass Asian flu that would have killed hundreds and made thousands of others use way too much antibacterial hand soap.

to be continued…