This is the fairytale of my life, the mythology of my existence, and, as I only have one story to tell, there is only one way to tell it. You may find it a little melodramatic at moments and you may not like who I was at times. But, princes frequently start out as frogs and, perhaps, by the time I reach my end, you will understand why. And so, as we all must have a beginning, a middle and an end, I will start at the beginning.

Once upon a time...

Chapter 1

The morning after my mother’s death, I was surprised to see the sun rise. Watching from behind the curtain of my bedroom window, I was surprised to see people leaving their homes to begin their day. Downstairs, the hands of the grandfather clock continued to tick, marking each passing hour with a chime that echoed over the black and white tiles of the front hall. I was surprised when the mail came, the same time it did every day. When evening fell, I was surprised that the sun set, just as it had every evening since the beginning of time. It seemed that my mother’s death did not disturb the planets in their courses. Everything kept moving, as though she had never existed at all. But my world erupted into chaos, the universe unfurling around me.

“The Egyptians buried their dead with what they needed in the afterlife, and instructions to help them find their way,” Magda said.

Each night, she moved through the diner, taking orders and clearing plates. She reminded me of a jungle cat I saw once as a boy pacing back and forth, back and forth; sleek, sensual, seeking release behind the bars of a cage. Occasionally she would stop to bend or twist, and the fabric of her pink polyester uniform would pucker, revealing to my eager adolescent eyes a glimpse of the mysteries contained within. I would imagine the plastic buttons of her blouse melting like butter from the heat of my fingers. Whenever she caught me staring, she would widen her dark, feline eyes and curl her lips into a cruel little grin that sent a shiver through me and set me off like a seismograph.

She was very well-read and, over time, I learned that though she had worked as a waitress for many years, she had a college degree in philosophy. Late at night, when I was her only customer, she spent her idle time reading on a stool behind the counter. She was interested in everything from ancient history to modern astronomy and, though I was afraid to talk to her at first, she turned out to be very friendly. Like Scheherazade, she would entertain me with stories from the latest books she had read.

She told me that throughout the ages, whether it was the chariot of an Egyptian prince or the frying pan of a Mississippi slave, the dead were never buried without the things they needed in the other life.

But many people told me many things and, as I sat with my father in the front pew of St. Columban’s Catholic Church, listening to the priest talk about how sin was the source of death, all their words ran together, swirling around me like a whirlpool rushing down a drain.

The one thing I knew for sure was that my mother’s favorite pearls and diamonds did not accompany her to the grave. Nothing went with her, not even the paper cutouts and drawings of mine she had cherished since my childhood were placed in the coffin to accompany her and comfort her soul in its loneliness.

“She no longer has a need for them,” my father told me. “She will never need anything again.”

The message was clear. No matter what anyone said about an eternal soul, or life after death, I realized that to need nothing implied she no longer existed. My mother’s death brought with it a sense of finality I could not deny, no matter how hard I tried.

Death had entered the garden, when nothing in my life until then had even informed me of its lurking presence. Mine was a world of cartoons and commercials, smiles and upbeat moments, of half-hour plots and happy endings. From my earliest years I had been intoxicated with these apparitions. My feelings and emotions were generated and inspired by them, my core beliefs developed through stories designed to sell toothpaste and toiletries. Nothing had inspired me to live a life more substantial than those I saw on television and, now that my mother was dead, I did not know what to believe.

“Throughout history,” Magda told me, “burials didn’t mark the end of existence but, like the passage from boyhood to manhood, they represented a transition from one existence to another. Around tombs in Byzantium, they prayed for the dead to a time scale developed by the astrologers of ancient Mesopotamia.”

But, there was no learned astrologer to determine where my mother’s soul had gone. There was only a wrinkled old priest who looked like one of those hairless cats that scared me as a boy. He was a thin and ancient man with a thin and ancient voice like the cracked pages of a vellum Bible.

“When we look around the world today for proofs of the Almighty, we see many things.” He moved his trembling head slowly, observing the audience, then asked, “But what is the one thing we do not see?”

While he spoke, my gaze had been wandering from the statues to the candles, and then to the cross above the altar from which hung the bruised and bloodied body of Christ.

Our world, Magda said, was unmoored; cut adrift like a ship on the black and rolling waves of some vast and uncharted ocean. “These days, there is no star in the sky for a sailor to guide by. Like Columbus, sailing further and further from the safety of the known world, we have overestimated our horizon only to find that fabled place, the edge of the world, where cartographers in ancient times were tradition-bound to write, ‘here there be monsters.’

That was how I felt. Thrown from my secure life, whether by chance or the Powers That Be, I was sitting on a skipping stone and it was fear, not confidence, that was increasing with the ripples of uncertainty. Mine had become a world without a center.

“What is one thing we do not see?” the priest asked again, rhetorically, before raising his hands and proclaiming, “angels.” He paused for a moment, as if waiting for a response. “And, why is it that if angels truly exist, we do not see them?” No one spoke as he paused again. “Because angels, whose wings bear their them well above the mortal road we tread and trip down as men, are without sin.”

But the metaphysical certainties of our medieval ancestors no longer existed. Not for my mother, at least. The day my mother learned she had cancer, she told me that she felt like she was standing at the edge of her existence, staring at a gaping void before her.

All her life she had been on a search for something that was missing in her life. She saw a therapist on a regular basis, and always read self-help books. She would go on extravagant buying sprees, developing a passion for one particular thing that, for a time, defined her personality. There was the time she spent months reading up about precious stones, investigating cuts and clarity levels, spending thousands on emeralds, diamonds, sapphires and rubies. But, after the mood ran its course, she stopped and never bought jewelry again. Then there was the time she decorated our new house. Again, she threw herself into the task with all the momentary passion of a one-night stand until she lost interest and turned her thoughts to furs, leaving my father to decorate his office and billiard room on his own. But when she came face to face with her own mortality, she began a search for the meaning of life itself.

Though she and I had never gone to church other than Christmas and Easter, after her diagnosis we began attending on a regular basis. She read the Bible, of course, front to back in a month, searching for some clue to the meaning of her existence. But soon her interest waned and, though she continued attending church, she began looking for answers in other places as well. She brought home books like the Bhagavad Gita which I read too, although I could never pronounce the title. Over the months I accompanied her to different houses of worship on what she called field trips. We went to Buddhist temples, Muslim mosques, Jewish synagogues and a wide variety of Christian churches.

Everyone was very nice at first and welcomed us with open arms to their fold. But when I started questioning them, I mean really questioning them, their smiles would disappear, and they began to point fingers like children arguing over who spilled the milk.

The Jews believed they were the chosen people of the one true God who would one day send them a Messiah, a savior. But, the Christians said the Messiah had already come. “Jesus was the Son of God who died for man’s salvation.” The Jews, the Christians said, simply chose to ignore him.

“No. Jesus was not the Son of God,” the Muslims explained. “He was but a messenger of Allah. The One True God.”

“It says clearly in the Bible that Jesus and the Father are one.”

“But that was taken out of context,” the Jews contended. “Because only the verse before that, he said, “My father is greater than all.”

“Just another example of how the Bible is full of irrational contradictions,” the Muslims insisted. “The Bible was corrupted over the ages and is not the true word of God. That is why the Angel Gabriel came to the Prophet Mohammed and recited The Word of God.”

“All the revelation given to man is found in the One True word of God – The Bible,” the Christians said. “Even if an angel from Heaven, preach any other gospel to you other than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.”

But since the rise of science, all religions were suspect. The universe, our scientists told us, was created not by any God, but by the violent explosion of a single atom. From that Big Bang had been woven the fabric of reality as the threads of space and time spun outward, ever outward, over billions of years and trillions of miles. No longer was the Earth the center of God’s creation. No longer was man the masterpiece of God’s great design, but the descendant of a fish with legs that slithered up on the shore of some primordial ocean. No better than the monkeys to whom we now found ourselves related, our place in this vast and expanding universe was reduced to that of a grain of sand on an eternal shore.

“Reality,” somebody once said to me, either at one of the Hindu or Buddhist temples my mother took me to, “is a dream, an illusion, an image which existed only for a while before being absorbed into the nothingness from which it came, only to be remade again.”

“The world is as you believe it to be,” Magda said.

But I did not know what to believe, and so I turned to my father for the answers.

He was a man full of his own confidence, whose opinions were as definite as the creases in his pants. What he said and did was right, and everyone else was wrong. He had a slogan for every occasion and, to emphasize his certainty, he always ended his pronouncements on life by pounding his clenched fist into his palm, like a hammer on an anvil, along with a rousing, “Boom!”

I longed for him to dispel my fears and concerns about life, so I could stop thinking for myself. I wanted to believe that, if my father said something was true, it must, in fact, be so.

I approached him one night while he sat behind his large mahogany desk. When I was a child, he once caught me browsing through its drawers and gave me such a whipping that my mother let me miss three days of school. Since then, under no circumstances did I set foot into his office without permission. His office was his inner sanctum, he said. Though my mother referred to it, with sarcasm, as his lair.

So, I stood at the threshold staring at him, across the Oriental rug, poring over a stack of papers with a glass of scotch in his hand.

“Dad.”

He lifted his head and looked at me without saying a word, and I did not know what to say or how to say it, so I fumbled around the heart of the matter. “You know the ancient Egyptians?”

In the front hall, the grandfather clock tolled out the hour. My father looked up at his own clock on the wall and sighed, then took off his glasses and tossed them on the desk. But still, he did not speak.

“They saw this world as a dream.”

He looked back down and wrote something on the paper he was working on before looking up again. “Is your homework done?”

I shook my head.

“An answer like that is not going to get you into Notre Dame, is it?”

No. It was not. But I did not want to go to Notre Dame, and I did not want to study business or economics or finance or any of the things he wanted me to study. I wanted to be an astronaut sailing through the dark waves of the cosmic ocean. I wanted to float, unencumbered, beyond the atmosphere, be a discoverer of other worlds. My mother knew this, but my father never seemed to remember.

For him, life was nothing more than economics and politics. Nothing more and nothing less and, the sooner I got used to that fact, he constantly told me, the better. “You are at the age when you must start becoming a man. And in this world, regardless of whatever the ancient Egyptians thought, you must profit or perish.”

I nodded again.

“You’re far too intelligent to daydream your life away.”

Yes, Dad.

“Now, you’ve got to stop wasting your time thinking about those things.” He lowered his head again and said, almost as an afterthought, “turn those thoughts into cash.”

But I could not. For over the past few weeks, lurking like some harbinger of doom, I felt a growing presence in my life, behind every curtain in every room, like a gargoyle perched and lurking above the world. I imagined him gazing down on me, his wings half spread and ready for flight. His were the eyes that watched me, his were the feet that followed me through my life to cast doubt upon my existence until the day I too died a meaningless death.

I had been raised to believe in the pursuit of happiness, but now, for the first time in my life, I was questioning, truly questioning, the world around me. In school, my mind wandered as my teachers stood beside the blackboards scribbling out their answers to the questions they asked. But, staring out into the world beyond the classroom window, a snake-like voice slithered through my head.

“Seek yourself in a deeper question…”

Again and again my teachers drew my attention back to the lesson at hand: math, history, English. It was all the same. “The answer to the question is not out there,” they were insisting, “it’s in here.” But, I thought, they were wrong. The answer was out there. It had to be.