“There’s an old saying that if one is going to tell a lie — a significant lie — one must plan it as carefully as a murder. In my case, I planned the murder first and then the lie that I eventually told my Devi… what’s the lovely thing Twain said? He said so many funny, lovely things. Oh, here—‘The truth is a fragile thing but a well-told lie can live forever.’ Haha. You see, my plan was to make a getaway from far more than merely the jejune scene of the crime — it was to flee from all that I knew, and all I was known by. I chose the invisibility of homelessness because I imagine it appealed to a romantic fantasy I’d carried throughout the years of cutting anchor, divesting myself of reputation, relationships, possessions. [“I suppose the double murder accomplished that!” he said, in a chilling, theatrical aside. “Though ‘triple’ would be more accurate, as it wouldn’t be fair to leave myself out. I killed misself off as well.”] This desire to self-excommunicate, you see, was an impulse I’d had since, well, adolescence. And if it weren’t exactly spiritual enlightenment I was seeking at that time, it certainly would have been an illumination of Self — though I suppose in many quarters it’s hard to draw a distinction between the two.
“Let me interject a little something about solvency, because I have the feeling you’ve been puzzling over it. I know Devi mentioned some business about my having made arrangements vis-à-vis access to funds — which is true. Before the murders, I’d spent months stashing money away in safe-deposit boxes around the country… which the prosecution would of course use against me as evidence of premeditation, will use against me. And I shan’t argue. In fact, I shall rush to their defense! Isn’t that what Lord Krishna urged? In defense of war? To urge that one enlist in the war against Self, through the supreme act of violent surrender?”
While unable to shake a queer, out-of-body feeling, Jeremy was pleased to have found himself comfortably settling in (or nearly so) to the sonorous rhythm of his companion’s speech. In other words, he no longer feared ambush. While listening to MacKlatchie’s words, he took in their surroundings with a preternatural attentiveness — the reactive expressions of fellow luncheoners engrossed in private conversations; the telltale gait of servers and their wry, conspiratorial whispers; the very temperature of the large, sunlit room, and its minute fluctuations therein. What’s all this? Jeremy mused, then understood: “all this”—impressions, perceptions, and feelings—were nothing more (or less) than a heightened, holy, inordinate sense of being alive. And now he saw firsthand the very thing that Devi had: a man before him who belonged to energetic royalty, exemplar of a gang whose controversial greatness could be defined by the possession of two qualities, diametrically opposed — a convivial command of the commonplace and a proficiency in the untranslatables of the dark Unknown. It was the effortless personification of those extremes that made the guru.
He spoke of the months immediately after the crime when he lived as a fugitive in Mexico. For a while he kept abreast of the frenzied stateside search for the wealthy heir who’d slain his wife and troubled son, but interest soon ebbed; the public, in its haste to make room for fresh kills and faddish reality shows, moved on. He kept a small room for a while off the Zócalo, where he took flight in profound meditation, channeling the “assemblage points” and “lucid-dreaming bodies” of his Margot and little Jim — before and after death. During one of these zazen, he came to understand (“By a truth revealed through the act of ‘reading’ energy”) that “they hadn’t died at all, because they were never born. None of us were, don’t you see, Jerome? It’s true, my friend! I always thought it was balderdash, but it’s true!” The fallacy of man, he said, was in believing anything else. “This puerile ‘doctrine of Death’—so primitive! — is man’s undoing. For I am telling you that it isn’t the thing of Death, it’s the wrongheaded idea of it that lays waste to man’s joy, his Love, his Freedom.” His work in Mexico City done, he decided to return to Minnesota, where he’d broadcast his revelations in a court of law. “Because they have to transcribe it — isn’t that marvelous? Anything I said would be permanently enshrined: transcribed by law.”
Sidelined along the way by a brutal beating in Monterrey; another one shortly after crossing the border at Laredo (with the same flawless counterfeit passport used in his original flight); and a small heart attack in Oklahoma City — he rode a Trailways bus through that wilderness of megachurches and porn emporiums on the banks of the I-35 (“‘The Highway of Holiness,’ they call it! Locals say the I-35 refers to Isaiah 35:8: ‘A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness’”) before finally arriving in Chicago, where, “a tad bit worse for wear,” he at once felt himself again, himself being a hundred pounds heavier (his body’s counterintuitive response to all manner of travails) than two years before, with a beard like a forest growth after a deluge.
“Well, I didn’t feel on the lam. I had planned on returning for my ‘just deserts’… but for the moment, was absolutely glorying in American cuisine — one could say I was eating just desserts! — and after the grandes avenidas of D.F. and the horrors of that most consecrated of Interstate highways, found the gem¨utlich chaos of Chicago streets to be thoroughly refined and amenable. And as I said, I had been crafting my return all along and was meaning to get on the road again — to Duluth and its courthouse — yet there I was, happy as a soft-shelled mollusk, making camp outside that venerable institution of Mandry’s, and there I seemed, by fate and inertia, to remain. Until she came along. One day there she was, and I fell in love. I heard the sirens, Jerome, not the bells! It was a passionately romantic and carnal love — from my side — though the dear soul never knew it because I never let on. I was startled by her interest in me — at first anyway, till I understood—it seemed so unlikely, as I was an obese and very peculiar sort, of unidentifiable genius and genus of foul-smelling changeling (my normally fastidious toilet had suffered greatly by then), a transcendental ogre, and I wondered — as perhaps you have! — why she would have paid such attention. But you see another part of me was watching and knew. That I was not my former self. That I had become someone, some-thing else — a thing to be reckoned with. That new thing, you see, was a five-star general, who could lead men to freedom or lead them to death. From the moment of that realization, I never looked back, and let myself be taken… by Energy.