Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

I was found by three men on their way to work. The first, Hakeem Kaspar, was a lineman for the county, as in that Glen Campbell song I’ve always found lovely but weird, though at the time I was discovered on the highway, I hadn’t yet heard it. The second, Bailie Belshazzer, worked as head mechanic at one of the country’s first wind farms. The third, Caesar Melchizadek, was a blackjack pit boss in an Indian casino.

Profound intuition told me that the wrong university creative-writing program might hammer out of me anything original about my style and convert me into a litbot.

Anyway, I usually crossed the street to Beane’s Diner toward the end of the lunch rush, so I could sit at the counter without being crowded into a conversation with another customer who might want to talk about something as absurd as politics or something as evil as, well, politics.

Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies, so threatened the larger population of the sane that soon everyone feared to stand against the violence, whereupon madness accelerated. No one seemed to remember the lessons of history—or cared to learn them. Perhaps we would persevere through this current darkness.

“Well, if my father came down out of the stars, I hope he was Luke Skywalker rather than Jabba the Hutt.”

“A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize it. They’re opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They’re opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world’s gone weird.”

“People used to take that Orwell book, 1984, to be a warning. Now they see it as an inspiration.

“Nature is a place of constant competition between individuals in a species, and between one species and another. In this broken world, animals aren’t able to rise above violence. But people have the ability to forsake it. People should. People must. But that is our work, Quinn. Not nature’s and not God’s.”

“How’d I ever get to be so old?” “You didn’t die.” “I’m working on it,” he said, stepping outside.

something like a man,

We’d been made terrified. I think that weird blue light, those concentric circles . . . somehow they programmed us to guard you and get you quickly away from that lonely stretch of highway, into the hands of the authorities, eventually to someone who would care about you as if you were their own child. I kept thinking that your vital thread had been broken, that the ends of your vital thread couldn’t be tied together again until you were in loving hands.”

When feverish politics and demented ideology entwine, those who are not well anchored to the beliefs that allow a civil society can be swept away, becoming part of the storm of madness that lays waste to everything.

“Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue.

“I don’t want to be one of the X-Men,” I said. “There’s way too much angst involved in being one of the X-Men. Being one of the X-Men only works if you’re as handsome as Hugh Jackman, and then not much. Anyway, even the X-Men aren’t big box office anymore.”

My mind was formed in part by sensible, cool-headed nuns who couldn’t work themselves into hysteria even if Godzilla suddenly erupted through the pavement of the street in front of the orphanage and ate a busload of commuters.

“Our strategy is righteousness. Our tactics are surprise and relentless action.”

“Does Frodo mean anything to you?” “The Lord of the Rings. I loved those books.” “Of course you did. Was Frodo a hero?” “Yes. A great one.” “After he carried the One Ring all the way from the Shire to the evil realm of Mordor, to the place where it could be destroyed, the ring corrupted him. He put it on.” “Only for a moment. He did nothing evil.” “Because Gollum bit Frodo’s finger off to get the ring. Frodo would otherwise have succumbed to the lust for power.” “I’d like to think he wouldn’t have.” “Of course you would like to think it. That’s you. But Frodo lost his innocence and never was quite at home in the Shire again when he returned to it, never at home among the innocent hobbits.” “I never liked that part. I wish he could have been at home among them,” I said. “Of course you do. He was nonetheless a great hero. Had he not been, the hobbits would have perished, every one, and with them all others with any room for innocence in their hearts. Middle-earth would have been a place of endless horror.

I was beginning to suspect that movies hadn’t prepared me for much of anything.

perhaps to suggest that, as per Star Trek, we were being teleported from the ship to the surface of some alien planet.