Through a Glass, Darkly

So, as I was reading through the book of Zechariah last week and thinking to myself “whoa, this is one weird book,” I remembered something that happened to me a couple years ago, back when I lived on the other coast. It’s a pretty weird story that really only makes slightly more sense now that I’ve read Zechariah. So if the story I’m about to tell you doesn’t make any sense, just read Zechariah and it might make slightly more sense.

Anyway, at the time, we were living in Moses Lake, Washington, a little town of about 16,000 I worked as a quality engineer at a chemical plant. If you don’t know what a quality engineer does, please do not ask because I do not want to be held responsible for involuntary manslaughter when you die of boredom during the explanation. Well, I wasn’t the only one that worked at the plant (duh!) and there were a few guys I am pretty good friends with. The plant was way out by the old Air Force base and the only way to get there was to drive by Papa’s. Papa’s is the ubiquitous small-town bar/card room/off-track gambling facility/restaurant/bowling alley (every small town has one, right?) and as such, we would stop in for a drink on the way home one or two nights a week. (Actually, Maggie doesn’t know that we did this! Sorry honey!) I guess we were what you might call regulars. There were some people that were definitely more regular than us and the story that I am slowly getting around to is about one of them.

I’m not sure that I ever learned his name. For some reason I think it might be Bruce, but maybe I just thought he looked like a Bruce because I never remember him actually telling me that his name was Bruce. He was probably about 50. He had a shaggy salt and pepper beard that always looked as though he hadn’t trimmed it in over a week, but never looked like he just gave up on trimming it. His hands looked like mechanic’s hands, all scarred and dirty, but his hair was impeccably neat. Every time we stopped in after work, he was already there relaxing with the Bruce Special: one beer (Miller, I think), one scotch (I don’t know what kind) and a mass-market paperback book. Usually the book was science fiction or fantasy, but every couple months he would switch it up with a serious piece of literature by Thomas Pynchon or Tom Delillo or the like.

I’m pretty sure that Bruce (let’s just keep calling him that for lack of a better name) worked as some sort of handyman/electrician. I know that he drove a truck that had an ad and phone number on the side of it for “The Hand-E-Lectrician.” It was one of those older little Toyotas with a white canopy that had no windows over the bed. I have no idea what he kept in there, but I assume it was tools and stuff. Probably a little sheet rock too, since I heard, well, everybody heard eventually, about his misadventures in remodeling. After everything went down the way it did, I was really tempted to look in the back of his truck. It wasn’t parked in the garage, so it survived the fire. But in the end, I decided against it. I decided that, really, I didn’t even want to know what was in there.

I think it was about in April of 2004 that things started to get a little weird with Bruce. The first complaint/rumor came from a couple of snowbirds who returned from their yearly 5-month excursion to Arizona in mid-March. They had hired Bruce to be caretaker, for lack of a better word, for their huge lakefront house out on the peninsula. I guess that this was pretty much business as usual and that they had hired Bruce for about 6 years in a row and he had always done a good job. So good, in fact, that they had even recommended him to their snowbird friends and by the winter of 03-04 he was actually looking after 5 or 6 houses. Anyway, shortly after all the old folks returned to town, rumors started to fly about Bruce going crazy or something like that. Usually, rumors are enormous falsities with just a hint of truth. This one however, was dead on. At least it sure looked that way when put together with everything else.

It turns out that when Doris and Robert returned from Arizona, they found something really strange about their house. They had asked Bruce to paint their dining room while they were away. They left him the paint and everything, and when they returned, the dining room was that perfect color of rusty red that they had wanted. The only difference was that where the door to the kitchen had been, there was now just a plain, flat wall. A perfect wall, mind you, with a perfectly placed electrical outlet and everything. Apparently Bruce was a pretty good handy man. When they contacted him about the problem, he claimed that there had never been a door there and what were they talking about? So, to prove him wrong, old Robert took a sledge hammer to bust down the wall where he thought the door was supposed to be. He found it on his second try. His first try left a huge hole in the wall about three feet to the left of the door. He did not hire Bruce to fix the new hole. Anyway, back to the kitchen. When Robert finally managed to bash a hole big enough to climb through he saw his regular old kitchen. It looked like nothing had changed in months, except that all of Doris’s plants were dead. On second glance he noticed something weird. Before I describe it, let me assure you that I have seen actual pictures of this kitchen, so I know that Robert’s story is true. Bob is a friend of a friend and our joint friend showed me some of the pictures that Bob showed him. Hey it’s a small town.

Lying on the floor in the center of the kitchen was a microwave that had been totally disassembled. And when I say totally, I mean totally. Every single little bolt had been removed; every single tiny piece of electronics had been disconnected. Each and every piece was laid out nicely on the floor, all organized by size. It was obviously the work of someone with a lot of time on their hands and good attention to detail. I mean, even the individual capacitors and resistors were disconnected from each other! While this is weird in and of itself, the weirdest part was that, hanging from a beautifully installed hook on the ceiling (which hadn’t been there before), was a beautifully framed cross-stitch picture with several flowers (mums, I think they were) and the frilly words: “What is to die let it die. What is to be annihilated let it be annihilated.” Yeah, they fired Bruce right quick.

Turns out that the other 4 or 5 houses he was taking care of had similar things done to them. There was always a room that had been completely walled off, though it wasn’t always the kitchen, a totally disassembled piece of electronics on the floor and an elegant cross-stitch picture with a disturbing message hanging above the pieces. I think one of them even mentioned cannibalism or something about the eating of flesh. Bruce didn’t work much after word of this weirdness got out.

From then on, I started seeing Bruce’s truck in Papa’s parking lot at lunch, too, not just after work. Seems he was starting to spend a lot more time there. Still, our relationship, if you want to call it that, didn’t really change. We still just said “hi” or whatever at the bar.

One day, on my way home from work, I stopped in at the bar by myself. This was starting to get to be a regular occurrence, drinking alone. I am so glad we got out of there only a few months later, otherwise who knows what would have happened. So I went into the bar and I saw Bruce sitting at his regular table. Well, I should say that I smelled Bruce before I saw him. I think the whole restaurant could smell those fumes wafting off of him. Mmm, nothing like the smell of gasoline to make you hungry. Even weirder than the smell was the fact that he didn’t have a book with him that day, just a notebook.

I let my curiosity run away with me and, after I paid for my pint of Fat Tire, I went over and sat down at Bruce’s table. Before I could get a good look at what he was writing or drawing in his notebook, he flipped it shut and put it on his lap.

“Hi Bruce,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Oh, not much. Just sitting here, working some things out, you know how it is, right?” he asked.

“Yep, I do. Same old same old. Run of the mill, just trying to make it through. I hear ya,” I said, thinking that I would just go back to my table since I get enough small talk at work.

Suddenly, Bruce got a gleam in his eye and said, apropos of nothing, “So, Harry, do you want to hear about my misadventures with the old folks.” I figured he was talking to me even though my name is not Harry, but whatever.

Well, this was exactly what I wanted to hear about, so I nonchalantly replied, “Oh, okay. I mean, if you feel like talking about it, I guess.”

“Okay. So, round about November, I got this idea in my head to conduct an experiment. I decided that I would cut off my favor from one room in each house. You know, not show any concern for it anymore. I stopped watering the plants, I stopped cleaning the floors, I stopped killing the bugs, just gave up on the whole thing. I actually sealed it off completely from the rest of the house. It wasn’t just the wall; I sealed all the HVAC ducts. I disconnected the water supply. I cut the wiring to all the outlets. I wonder if they’ve found all that yet? From what I’ve heard, though, the experiment worked out about like I thought it would”

“Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.” I said this even though my mind was reeling, I mean, who does that kind of stuff? So I decided to press further, to really try to figure out what was up with him. “So what was the deal with the disassembled electronics and the cross-stitch things?”
“Hey, the owners asked the exact same thing!” he said with a little bit of excitement in his voice. “And do you know what I told them?”

“No,” I said, and before I could say “what did you tell them,” he interrupted me.

“I told them ‘This is the word of the Lord, man! If you like it, pay up and if you don’t then just forget about it!’ They paid up alright. Three hundred bucks per month, just like we’d agreed,” he said with a little “harrumph” of satisfaction.

I didn’t say it but I was thinking that they probably paid up because they were terrified of him and just wanted him to get the hell out of there.

Then, Bruce looked at me and motioned for me to bend down and lean in a little closer, so I did. “Do you know what I did with all that money,” he asked in hushed, conspiratorial tones. “I took that magnificent prize and I threw it to the potter!” And then he burst out laughing as though this was the most significant and hilarious thing he had ever heard. I still have no idea what he meant by it.

Looking to change the subject back to something I could maybe understand I asked him what he was working on in his notebook. He gave me an appraising look, with his eyes half closed, his head tilted a little to his left and his mouth in a little bit of a smirk. “Okay, Arnold,” he said. “I guess I can probably trust you. You look respectable, but don’t tell anyone what I’m about to show you. It’s top secret.”

He opened the notebook and showed me a crude drawing of, well, this thing. “What is that?” I asked.

Falling back into his conspiratorial voice, he whispered “it’s an automatic, personal, rejudgmedemption device!”

“A what?” I asked a little incredulously.

“An ah-to-ma-tic, per-so-nal, re-judge-mah-demp-shun dee-vice,” he said, pronouncing each syllable as though he were talking to a five year old.

Trying not to be offended by his condescension, I told him that I understood what he said, I just had never heard of anything like that before.

“Well, it is patent pending, that’s probably why,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you!” He then proceeded to pull out what looked like a used page from a children’s coloring book upon which he had written ‘Patent Pending.’ “See?”

“Oh, yeah, that must be why,” I said with more than a hint of sarcasm. I don’t think he even noticed.

“Well, do you want to see it then?” he asked.

Figuring that this would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find out exactly how crazy he was, I, of course, accepted his invitation.

We walked out the door of Papa’s and into the parking lot. When we got to his truck, whew, if you thought he smelled badly of gasoline, you should have smelled his truck. It smelled as though he had pumped gas directly into the cab instead of into the gas tank. I didn’t mention it though, so I rode with him in his stinky truck down the hill into Cascade Valley, the not-so-nice part of town. He pulled up in front of one of the strangest houses I have ever seen. Well, the house wasn’t that strange. It was a typical little bungalow, maybe 1000 square feet, 2 beds 1 bath was my first guess when I saw it. The weird part was the garage. It was freaking huge, like twice the size of the house, and into the garage is where he headed, so I followed.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the garage was his car collection. He had four beautiful late 60’s Pontiac Firebird convertibles. Two were red, one was white, and one was a sort of light brownish color. “Wow,” I exclaimed, “those are some beautiful cars!
What do they have in them, a 427 big block V-8 with dual exhaust?” I asked. I don’t really know that much about cars, but I have learned how to talk about them so that I sound like I know a lot.

“I don’t know,” he said off-handedly as though he didn’t even care.

“Oh. Well, where did get them,” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said again. “They just showed up on my lawn one day back when I used to have trees. They patrol the world to make sure everything is going along smoothly. As of last night, it’s all good. Okay come check out my device!”

I was quickly learning to ignore things he said that didn’t make any sense, so I just followed him around the cars toward his device.

It looked pretty much like what he had drawn in his notebook. It was made entirely out of what appeared to be brass and looked like a big bowl on legs with some thingies attached to the top. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were, but they each had some sort of little spout or something. There were seven of them. All in all it was probably 5 feet tall and the main bowl could hold, maybe 10 gallons.

“That’s where all the gasoline goes,” said Bruce excitedly, pointing to the big bowl. “It’s supposed to use lamp oil, but that stuff is way too expensive. I can get 10 gallons of gas for like 17 bucks compared to the 50 or so it would be for the oil. Then, the gas flows from the bowl through these pipes up into these seven thingies here. Capillary action, man!”

“Oh, well, then what? What does it do, exactly,” I asked.

“I don’t know yet, isn’t that cool,” he said. Now, I was really starting to feel uneasy. Just how crazy was this guy. “I’ve dreamed about this thing ever since I was at Fuller back in the day. It came to me in a vision,” he said with awe.

Not wanting to show my ignorance, but not being able to help myself, I had to ask, “Fuller? What’s Fuller?”

“Fuller Theological Seminary in southern California. That’s where I got my Doctor of Divinity,” he said matter-of-factly, as though this was perfectly normal and everyone already knew that anyway.

“So, wait. You’re a pastor? Or you were a pastor or something,” I asked trying to hide my derision and disbelief.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. For awhile. I was an associate pastor at some evangelical church in Idaho for a couple years, but the Senior pastor fired me when I preached a sermon that said his tongue would rot in his mouth and his eyeballs would rot in his eye sockets. I don’t know what the big deal was.

“You’d be shocked to find out how many of the handy men around the country are actually burned out pastors. I can’t think of more than three guys I graduated with that are still in the business. I am personally not too fond of pasturing a flock doomed for slaughter.

“So, what do you think of it, the device,” he asked before I had a chance to say anything.

“Wow, I, uh, don’t know what to say. It’s really…..something,” was all I could manage.

When he realized that I really wasn’t going to say anything else he said “well, I guess you’ve seen it. I’ll take you back to Papa’s now.”

Just as we were about to walk out of the garage, I saw, sitting in the corner, something that looked like it used to be a washing machine but was now completely disassembled and set out piece by piece. Chuckling under my breath, I asked Bruce “so, further experimentation on removing your favor from electrical appliances?”

“Oh, that,” he said, looking at the remains of the washer. “No, that’s part of a different experiment. A better experiment,” he said with that same strange gleam in his eye that I’d seen earlier. But he refused to say more, and five minutes later, I was back in the parking lot, standing by my car trying to think of an excuse I could give Maggie for why I was coming home so late.

That was the last time I ever saw Bruce at Papa’s and the last time I saw him at all until about a month later in the hospital. Before we get to that, I’ll tell you what I think happened with Bruce in the meantime. Now, please keep in mind that this is all pretty much hearsay and speculation. Some of it is from Bruce’s journal that one of the firemen found and asked me to give him, so that part might be accurate, but knowing Bruce, it could just as easily be crazy talk.

Bruce had become obsessed with the idea of “union,” the reliance of one thing on another. I guess he even got a cat and named it “Union,” before he, uh, um. I don’t know how to say this, but as part of his experiments with the idea of union, he decided to see if his cat “Union” could function after he, um, removed her limbs. The answer, as he quickly found out, was no. No for the cat, and no for limbs.

But let me back up a little here. According to his journal, Bruce began to experiment with things about a week before I saw his device. It started with what would probably best be called a vision, or a prophecy, though Bruce wrote that he adamantly refused to call it a prophecy, saying that he was no prophet. Anyway, the vision or whatever, was of a plant falling apart, little bit by little bit. From this vision, Bruce got the idea to start experimenting to see what happens when different things are taken apart, piece by piece.

He started small by taking the batteries out of his TV remote, and found, lo and behold, that it no longer worked. But that wasn’t the whole experiment. He also wanted to see what happened to the things after they had been taken apart. So he started to document the changes he saw each day in the things he had disassembled. It looks like he went pretty quickly through the electronic/mechanical things in his house, culminating with his major appliances, so he was pretty much done with that phase of the experiment when I visited him. It’s probably why he only showed me the garage and not the inside of his house. According to the firefighters, the floor was covered with pieces of electronics, all blackened and stuff, but still identifiable.

It seems that this part of the experiment was pretty boring to him since not much changed after he took the stuff apart. Plastic and metal don’t really rot, you know? So after that first week, he started to try other stuff. He plucked each leaf off of all his plants and cut of each branch, laying them in neat piles next to the plant pots. Each day he would describe the changes to each leaf and branch and to the plant itself to see how taking them out of union with each other would affect them. They rotted, duh.

Then he moved onto to his furniture. He took the screws and bolts out of the screw holes and documented how his chairs and his bookcases fell apart. He cut open each couch cushion and removed all the stuffing to see how that affected the couches ability to seat people comfortably. The answer? It ruined the couch and made it unsittable. He took the light bulbs out of each lamp in his house and found that neither could work on their own.

So now you can picture his house as it was about a week before the fire, just completely filled with disassembled junk and rotting flora. It was about this time that he started his um, cat experiment. Then, he moved on to himself. First he took apart his clothes, you know, took the zippers and buttons and elastic off of everything. He found that he couldn’t wear it any longer. So now he was walking around naked, not having showered since he took apart his plumbing two weeks before. Sounds like a pretty sorry sight altogether.

Bruce’s last journal entry was dated two days before the fire and all it said was “Nothing left but me and the device. Me first.”

Two days later, his house and garage practically burned to the ground. The first responders found Bruce, naked, unconscious on the front yard pretty badly burned with an acetylene torch in one hand and well, no other hand. I guess he cut it off from its union with the rest of his body and sealed up the wound with that same acetylene torch.

The investigation showed that the fire started in the garage, and was fueled by about 10 gallons of gasoline in a strange brass structure. They think that he tried to take the, what was it, The “Rejudgmedemption Device” apart with the welder’s torch. Bad idea. Anyway, the cops found out who he was and asked around until they learned that I was the last to talk to him. So I got questioned a little, nothing serious. I think that they decided it was an open and shut “insane guy burns down his house” case. But they did give me his journal that one of the firefighters found, somehow unscathed among all the rubble.

A couple days after the fire I went to visit him in the hospital. I asked how he was and gave him his journal. He asked about the house, and what had happened. I told him.

“Well, it looks like a fire started in the garage with all that gasoline you had, and then it spread from there. The fire department responded pretty quickly to rescue you before you got caught in the fire. They put it out pretty quickly too, but it still burned about two thirds of everything you own. Sorry.”

He looked off into space and mumbled, “Oh. What about my device? What happened to it?”

“Well,” I said, not sure what to tell him. “They think that your device was actually the source of the fire. I’m really sorry, man.”

His eyes grew to about the size of saucers and I saw a vaguely familiar gleam in them. “Sorry? Sorry? Don’t be sorry! It worked perfectly!”



Inspired by the book of Zechariah and in part by the works of Chuck Palahniuk and Russell Rathbun