Dear, dear Reader,

I write these words from inside a mental institution. I apologize in advance for my lack of writing skills. I am a madman, not a writer. At least the doctors tell me I am a madman, a schizophrenic. I hear voices.

First, I must let you in on something: the human race is being replaced—will be replaced—surreptitiously, cleverly, by Powers I do not yet fully understand. The new species is—will be—more empathetic, less destructive, less violent. I am one of the first, a progenitor, not fully human, the next step toward creating a planet devoid of Homo sapiens. How do I know this? Goddess told me. And, you ask, who is Goddess?

She is one of my voices. God and Goddess. What are they? I do not know. They argue, bark insults, plague me day and night, just as they did with my father, though with much less potency with him than with me. In fact, the voices started with him. They cajoled him into having sex with my mother and at the moment of my conception, burrowed into her egg via his sperm. They have aggressively colonized my brain ever since. For what purpose? That I already told you: I am the Next Step. Not fully human. And like the first of any advanced abstract-thinking species, I am confused and conflicted.

What God and Goddess say during their incessant arguing and what I believe are two different things. My only escape is to the tunnel where my bones lie. But that is for another story.

To start at the beginning, with my father's life. . . . Well, better yet, let us start with his death—and then go back to the beginning when he first met her.

~ John Powers ~

On his back, his left hand fell heavily to the ground. It seemed miraculous to the dying man that his remaining upturned palm, in which he felt the tickling of an ant’s legs, could overcome the heavy pull of gravity dragging them both earthward. The insect’s frenetic probing reminded him of something he had learned long ago when the others died: the ceaselessness of that which is still seeking always taps a mocking farewell to the ceasing of that which had once been sought. So be it. Although lying fully on the dirt path, he was strangely hesitant to lower his hand and let the back of it touch the Earth. Such surrender marked the final ending. As long as it hovered inches above the solid inevitability of corruption, life circulated above and below. How he came to lie dying on his back beneath the forest canopy, levitating one hand upon which reconnoitered an anxious ant, was a puzzle that frayed his concentration. Must keep the hand above the famished soil and remember! Memory was the cushioning air beneath the hand; it was the light, the open space, which fought off malevolent, solid darkness. How could it end like this? Hold the hand up, heavy as it was becoming, and remember. But the insect? Keep her from her nestmates to satisfy a need? Lower to ashes and dust for the benefit of an ant that she might be set free? Yet, this emancipation would leave him to expire without even a lone arthropod to see him off. No. Lower it and he dies. He wanted to live! A minute longer? Minutes? Someone might come along and save him. Hours? Whatever it takes. His hand remained a hovering, weighted hope, the ant a taunting vitality.

Ticklish questions came to him as faint and delicate as the probing ant. So many questions. It was long ago, not long to the Earth and soil, but long enough for a man. More than long enough. The woman asked him a question—the question—when she first entered his office and stood just inside the door with both hands raised palms up. “Mr. Powers, how does one justify a life without cruelty, and therefore also without the distilled beauty of cruelty?”

He was taken aback, unsure, confused. She, a young employee he assumed, had knocked him off-center. How could a beautiful 20-something woman have such a thought? Distilled cruelty represented pure evil—Mephistopheles in extremis—not a concept whose existence could ever be justified. Yet here stood this young woman, gorgeous, throwing around the word cruelty as though it was synonymous with a white lie, or even virtue. She looked well-manicured, mentally sharp. No bruises. Nice clothes. And he had never met her before.

“Good question,” he said non-committedly, indicating with his placid expression that he would play along. “What do you think?” Wise reply. Cowardly, but wise. Time to think, clueless girl, and answer the question to a question until you get it right. He looked at her with his best poker face. Is she still assuming that age is wiser than youth? Not an irrational assumption, simply wrong, most of the time. Flirting with a man who occupies a position more powerful than she? Maybe, though he was not much older. Nevertheless, that question of hers was how the whole mess started. Of course, the Big Bang was how it started if you want to get technical . . . but that question in particular led to his being here, lying on his back, hand raised palm up, squinting at the mottled sunlight teasing an algorithmic yes or no that singed his clouded retinas.

“Fate starves at probability’s door,” she said without emotion. Her stare made him squirm, but he made no sound. “Mr. Powers, how does one justify a life without cruelty, and therefore without the distilled beauty of cruelty?”

After repeating this question, she sat without being invited and crossed her legs, knowing the effect without the effect knowing her. Therein lay the danger. In a flash of insight, he recognized that she thought she knew the danger, but the danger dwelt in her utter ignorance of what the danger really was. Being young himself at that time, although slightly older than his strange visitor, the dying man also knew that back then he held with her an equally disadvantageous position in their mutual ignorance of the ignorance of danger. Or so he thought. Clever man. Too clever by half! Although he had never met her before, he confidently concluded that they were a matched pair. Such is the agony and ecstasy of youth. Such were some of the unformed, fragmentary thoughts he contemplated at the time while waiting for her reply. He flirted with his eyes and smiled his best enigmatic smile. Remaining silent and waiting patiently for responses was one of his most effective social tools. Alas, her face suddenly registered something beyond his limited experience and all his self-congratulatory analysis about her being young and ignorant fell in tatters when she asked her next question. So transformed had her face become that he scarcely believed that what now stared back at him was human.

“When will you finally lower your hand?”

The second question seemed wholly unrelated to the still unanswered first, and his inclination was to think her mentally unstable. All his smug conceptions of her female intellectual inadequacies evaporated in the transcendent authority of her stare. Almost rendered comatose by her transformation, he closed his eyes to block the searing gaze, and when at last he opened them to speak, she was gone. He lifted his hand to call her back and realized both hands had been resting on the arms of his desk chair the entire time.

What did she mean? was his first thought, followed immediately by his second, who is she? and that followed by his third, she’ll be easy to find. No no no. These initial stupefied flashes of reaction merged to form a confident confluence of certainty. She would not have come if she weren’t interested, and so on and so forth. Tiresome in retrospect. He was convinced she would return and felt a smug self-satisfaction but for the niggling incongruities wagging their Cassandra fingers: Why didn’t she stay? What happened to her face at the end? But these cautionary thoughts were mere spices, adding to the flavor of the encounter. She picked him to see and therefore will be seen again soon enough. He clung to that explanation while he called his secretary, sounding flustered but actually preternaturally calm.

“Who was that woman that just left?”

“What woman?”

“The one who just walked out of my office.”

“I didn’t see her.”

“You must have, Rose. She had to pass your desk to come in. Didn’t you tell her to . . . I mean, didn’t she ask to see me? And when she left, too. Were you gone?”

“No. What did she look like?”

This stopped him cold. What did she look like? Her hair? He only saw flowing and luxurious locks, or was her hair short? Her clothes? Nice they were, he recalled, but now the details eluded him. Just a generic but lovely frame that accented her stunning looks, a brief flash of brushstrokes from some immortal portrait. But one can’t just describe a person as beautiful. Was she tall? Short? Eye color? No details came to him. Ridiculous. Yet she was as real and immediate to him as his own . . .hand.

“I thought she worked here,” he said incongruously, clenching and unclenching his fist.

“Well,” said his secretary. “I didn’t see her, and I’ve been at my desk all morning. Maybe she slipped by while I was kneeling at the file cabinet.”

“Both times, in and out?” he asked accusingly.

His secretary shrugged, piqued at his insinuation. “What did she want?”

“That is a very good question. I have never seen her before. Maybe she works for a department on one of the lower floors.”

Another shrug.

So he took a walk. A long walk, visiting every floor in the building. No luck. Time passed, but her presence never faded from his memory. As if he stalked some dangerous beast, he peered at every face, every shadow, every alleyway, to spot the apparition (which he had taken to calling her). Soon after, she came to him in his dreams, but just as ethereal and fleeting. In one recurring dream, she stood in his raised palm and demanded to be put down. But the meaning eluded him and she remained a distant touch.

~

After the apparition left his office, she returned to the comfort of her wispy abode in the belly of the rocky beast. The Others were waiting.

“Did you?” came the hum from the shadows.

“Yes.”

A darker shadow split apart. “When will you return?”

She did not respond but instead merged.

~

John Powers gave up his job two years after his encounter with the woman. Two years of fruitless searching. Her extraordinary appearance made it impossible to continue living a pedestrian life. He tried, god knows he tried. As an Asian specialist at an international consulting agency, he tried to remain excited about global business transactions, but failed to find the meaning he once found rewarding. Relationships following her visit were brief and unfulfilling, his job a somnambulant exercise of the most superficial routine. Nights were spent drinking, though he rarely got drunk. Then, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, he made a decision.

“Why in the hell would you want to move to China!?” cried his friends.

“There are 1 billion more chances of finding her than if I stay in San Francisco.”

All were astonished, for he rarely mentioned her even to his closest friends.

“Who?” they asked, begged, demanded.

But he would just shake his head and continue drinking.

“John! Who?” they insisted.

When he had imbibed enough, he simply replied, “I can’t describe her.” And he really couldn’t. Yet she had become a description of him, and her few words the working title of his autobiography. Unsatisfied with his life lived from the outside in, he was determined to make her the central theme of his existence from the inside out. If she were to be the main protagonist in his plot, then exotic China would be his next . . . no, his first chapter. It was a bold, irrational move, but he knew she was not of this world and if he threw himself into some symbolic extremity, a sort of behavioral sacrifice, she might again appear.

~

When his ship docked in Shanghai, John was met by Elizabeth Wu, a young administrative assistant at the university where he was hired to teach courses in Business English. After huffing through customs, and barely setting foot on Chinese soil, she grabbed his arm in a very un-Chinese manner.

“Did you hear?” she asked with an urgency also very un-Chinese.

“What?” he replied, startled.

“The Japanese are threatening to invade!”

“What do you mean?”

“The Japs, the Japs, they claim we blew up a bridge in Wanping! I’m not sure what will happen now!”

John hesitated. Get back on the ship? He had promised not to lead a pedestrian life, but by any account this was a bit much and a bit soon. Nevertheless, her words came back to him. John Powers clenched his fist. So, it begins. “Let them come!” he exclaimed. But with this proclamation he felt ridiculous under the startled gaze of Miss Wu. “I mean, do you still want me to teach?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Depends on what happens next. Let me take you to where you’ll be staying, at least until this is sorted out.” Her eyes were wide and fearful. They bustled into a taxi, and as the car inched its way through the nervous crowds and narrow streets, John asked above the continuous honking by the driver, “Where is Wanping?”

“Near Peiping.”

“Ah well, hopefully things will quiet down. My Chinese is bad, but my Japanese is worse!”

Miss Wu chuckled dryly and announced, “Your Chinese is excellent. Here we are.”

The car had pulled up in front of an old, single-story red brick guest house with a decorative tile roof. John carried his luggage into the cramped foyer and turned to Miss Wu.

“What next?”

“Normally we would give you an introductory feast to meet other professors and staff, but they are all at home glued to their radios. I have asked another teacher, one of your fellow Americans, to come and fetch you to his apartment. His name is Peter Hedley. He also speaks fluent Chinese.”

John could see that Miss Wu was anxious to leave. He smiled. “Thank you. I will see you tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she replied quickly. “Yes, good luck.”

Here I am alone in a strange house in a strange city in a strange country whose people speak a strange language, about to be invaded by an even stranger country whose people speak an even stranger language. Great. No pedestrian life for me! Now is a good time to make your appearance, strange lady. Your strangeness will fit right in.

But no strange lady appeared, and it shook him to realize he felt genuinely afraid. The loneliness of his position oppressed him greatly and his resolve wavered. For the first time in over two years, his mind was completely free from thoughts of his mysterious apparition. As if aware of this disquieting frame of mind, a knocking on his door brought him around to the absurd thought that it was her come to rescue him in his distress. He opened the door, half-laughing at his ridiculous notion. Even so, he felt an irrational disappointment that his apparition was not standing in front of him.