“Can you think of any more?” Eichord prodded gently when Ukie had apparently run out of steam.
“I can think hundreds more, my friend. Thing is, I have to have something for something. I want my uke and I want an adequate channel of communication for legal representation assured me. I want confidentiality for my new attorney. I want—I want to be treated with respect. I don't want that weinie-wagger shit in my file. I want...” He trailed off with a pleasant expression on his face. “So. Are you ready to hear how I did it, or would you prefer to wait until the bodies are dug up so you know I'm for real?"
“No, Ukie. Go ahead. I believe you."
“Right,” he said, expelling a huge stream of air, breathing in deeply and beginning, “I asked you when last we chatted about your familiarity with palingenetic phylogeny, and sacerdotalism, syncretism, things of a decidedly mystical and paradoxical nature but nonetheless important to your comprehension of the god-and-icons thing but you detuned and I went off the wall and that's why today I thought it was so important to prove to you I was real on this thing. Look, Jack. I just gave you more bodies. You know those bodies didn't just go into those graves and jump in and cover themselves with earth, right?"
“Right."
“So now that I'm on that kind of footing with you and you find out for yourself that Ukie is the king of killers of ALL TIME, just like the Champ,” he said in a Muhammad Ali voice that made Eichord smile unexpectedly, “well, then, please keep an open mind and let me try and explain it all to you."
“Fair enough,” Jack said, shaking his head a little.
“But you GOTTA know the territory, like the song says. Don't rule anything out just ‘cause it sounds weird, folks. Okay. This is so ... Oh, jeez, I just can't get into it all it's so spooky and vast and wonderful and awesome. Like where to start. Okay. Okay. I know if I start taking you back through all this you're going to tune out on me again but you have to understand the background or everything is meaningless. It is power, Jack. Such as you can't and never will be able to fathom and it doesn't just spring from nowhere."
“Power."
“The power of ... Before I tell you. I know you said you believe in God. No doubt you also believe in the devil. But for just a second put the thoughts of good and evil out of your head and look at this objectively. Forget the fallacies of Pythagorean and Plutarchean quasimoralities, the metaphysics of the Orphic and anthropo-morphic deities, the dubious disciplines of the gnostic and Nichomachean, the orgiastic and cathartic, the Shinto and Shugendo, the Taoistic, Maoistic, Confuscian, and confusing dialects and analects and sects and sex of the spastics and the flagellants and the secular and the ecclesiastical and the Mikkyo and the Ogolala shaman and the Hellenistic beliefs and spiritual suckering that forms the thick crust of so-called religious thought from asceticism to Zoroaster."
“You're losing me."
“Yeah. Okay. Start over. How do you know you believe in God? HE didn't just part the clouds one day and in a booming, thunderous voice proclaim to Moses Eichord the way it was gonna be. You learned from Mom and Pop. The Church. Sunday school. Relatives. Friends. Friends and relations on weekend vacations. Half-remembered tribal prayers, incantations passed from generation to generation, inscriptions in the stone memories of proud and noble ruins, monoliths carved by illiterates yet meant to be seen from the sky, dusty dogma and rotting ritual, surviving mysteries on crumbling papyrus, fragments of ancient urns from long-disintegrated cities, holy places gone to dust, stagnant sacraments and vestigial words of worship found in sunken cities of the dead, and it was ever thus from the blue waters of the Aegean Sea to the muddy Miss, we learned from the Word. God does not assert himself/herself, nor does Satan. Sitting at the knee of Isis, Serapis, Attis, Sabazios, Hecate, Medea, Persephone, Earth Mother Mary, basking in the katachthonian subworld's revenge and the cultist muck of Steve Holland deification, some cunt—excuse my French—passed along the marvelous, mystical, magical, mixed-up mystery of good and evil. But what if indeed there is no moral wrong or right but only superimposed force that we will refer to as phantasmagoria. It, asexual and omnisexual, neither he nor she, It upper-case, is to the existence of thought what a constantly shifting, complex sucession of optical effects and fluctuating scenes, seen or imagined, is to the vision? Eh? Then by the yellowed yarmulke of Yahweh, by the turquoise turnips of the Tetragrammaton, by the crimson chronology of the Anti-Christ, by the dirty dipstick of the Dionysiacs, then we must reexamine and reevaluate our sources of power.
“Now you must deal with a source of force. A wellspring. A centering so deep within the core that it cannot be reached by ordinary means. It is to concentration what brain surgery is to a headache. It is to focus what a shish-kebab skewer in the cortex is to a toothpick in the canapes. It would be to t'ai chi ch'uan, moo duk kwan tang soo do, hapkido, tae kwon do, wushu, and Shaolin kung fu, and any of that other chop-suey bullshit like hwa rang do, dim mak, and dim ching, what nuclear devastation is to a firecracker.
“I call it the Way of the Viper and I would explain it to you as a nonmystical secret martial philosophy that impinges upon what you would wrongly label the Satanic. It draws on the rarest of all the secret combat ryus, exemplified in the mythological parable of a knight in quest of a great dragon; he confronts the beast, knowing it can easily incinerate him, and as the dragon laughs, a tiny viper slithers out of the shadow of the dragon and delivers his poisonous bite of death. The Way of the Viper takes as his power source the unending, black, limitless energy core of eternity. The dark, surging, mindless, insatiable, voracious, deadly, all-vanquishing force that has been here since before the universe began."
And for the next five or six minutes, what seemed like an hour to Eichord, Jack patiently listened as Ukie took him on another of his little mind-fuck airplane rides, Jack thinking as he listened to the animated tones and the sureness of the rhythms listening with a tenth of his concentration to “—this formidable power source of magnified chi or—” snatches of the monologue in case he would need to interject a brief response. Ukie's fantasy was populated by real dragons and vipers, but the question was, first, was he sane? Eichord would leave that to the experts to determine the range and quality of his psychopathia/psychoses.
Second, or perhaps first, was the question of how he did it. This was no martial-arts expert. This was a Texas liar and a wienie-wagger and a con artist who saw a chance for something—but what? Publicity? Notoriety? There was a reason why the con job. The same guy who was so afraid of the truth now had openly copped. No question that Ukie had offed those people. He was a murderer, clearly. Why not simply tell how he did it? Was somebody else involved? It was a strong possibility. It would explain how a nonmuscle dude might make the transition. It would explain the conning, to some extent. And how was Noel Collier and Company involved? Why not ask?
“—through the focus of intensity which is called the Secret Gate of—"
“Uh, whoa, there, Ukie. Hey. Listen, Jones, Seleska, Foy, Biegelman, and Guthrie?"