The Killer Is Dying Read Free Page A

flogging books, pamphlets and DVDs about the new world order, conspiracies that spiraled back thousands of years, Marines awakening from comas with memories of covert actions on Mars, simple sources of free energy, obtaining New Zealand citizenship, and releasing the secret power inside you.
    Like The Real Triangle, which explained how we are being poisoned by the sea of microwaves washing over us: transmission towers (“500 in L.A. Alone!”), Wi-Fi, cell phones. Put an egg between two cell phones, the home page suggested. Use one cell phone to call the other. Within an hour the egg will be fully cooked.
    All of them sites he’d stumbled across one way or another, and now visited daily.
    Sometimes as he sat looking out the window, looking into the screen, it occurred to him that he collected the sites—puerile at best, possibly pernicious—the way others seized on Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, toy garages, and plastic ukuleles. He didn’t understand their attraction, why these sites drew him, but they’d become a refuge.
    The best, he always saved for last.
    Traveler’s comments had started appearing five years before. At first, they seemed just another blog: current events, oil supplies, immigration, foreign policy. Nothing, though, of the entertainment gossip, personal opinions, and political teeter-tottering that filled most blogs. Rarely much about people at all, in fact—just events. Jimmie had checked out the archives, followed the trail backward.
    Then things Traveler had spoken of hypothetically—gas shortages, an election debacle, a flood in the Midwest—actually occurred. As the site became progressively more predictive than discursive, Traveler’s anonymity moderated as well. We , then I , came into use, hints were dropped, passing comments that over time coalesced to confession: she was a soldier sent back from the year 2063 on a mission she could not divulge. Interspersed with an oddly impersonal memoir, the predictions continued, some scarily on target, others wildly amiss. Three years to the day after the first blog, following shortly upon an entry headlined “I Haven’t Much Time Left,” Traveler stopped posting.
    Others had kept the Web site going, so that it was now a vast beehive of commentary, speculation, testimonials, exegesis, and silliness accrued about the original postings and growing day by day, even to the point of a biography cobbled together from Traveler’s entries, on-site “scholarship,” and, it would seem, an imagination spawned of early and ongoing exposure to Star Trek .
    Jimmie scrolled down the line of recent postings, clicking on those whose blurbs caught his interest, reading a sentence here, half an entry there. Many had quotations from Traveler’s entries as epigraphs in smaller typeface above their own.
     
When I found Traveler, I was really messed up, stupid, and hopeless. I’m still messed-up, but that’s just one out of three. I keep hearing all this “Give something back” and “Make a difference” crap, and all this stuff about how something changed your life, and mostly that’s what it is, crap. But it seems to me that Traveler really did give something back, and made a difference. She sure did for me—and my life doesn’t look much like it did before.
Truth is something you catch only out of the side of your eye; look straight on, and it’s gone.
When I was 16 I went to my parents and said I had something to tell them.
“O my God, you’ve got little Alice pregnant!” my mom said.
“No.”
“You’re gay,” my father said.
“No. It’s worse: I want to be a writer.”
That same sense of purpose, that I’d discovered my place in the world, my direction, came to me when I found these writings.
I came home last night and burned the bed. It’s no good without you in it.
The firemen are here now.
I was a great disappointment to my folks. They had always assumed I’d take over the funeral home that had been in my family for six generations.