The Book of Fate

15

Breakfast bell’s ringing, Nico. French toast or western omelet?” asked the petite black food service woman with the vinegar smell and the pink rhinestones set into her pink fingernails.

“What’s for dinner?” Nico asked.

“You listening? We’re on breakfast. French toast or western omelet?”

Putting on his shoes and kneeling just in front of his narrow bed, Nico looked up at the door and studied the rolling cart with the open tray slots. He’d long ago earned the right to eat with his fellow patients. But after what happened to his mother all those years ago, he’d rather have his meals delivered to his room. “French toast,” Nico said. “Now what’s for dinner?”

Throughout St. Elizabeths, they called Nico an NGI. He wasn’t the only one. There were thirty-seven in total, all of them living in the John Howard Pavilion, a red brick, five-story building that was home to Nico and the other thirty-six patients not guilty by reason of insanity.

Compared to the other wards, the NGI floors were always quieter than the rest. As Nico heard one doctor say, “When there’re voices in your head, there’s no need to talk to anyone else.”

Still down on one knee, Nico yanked hard to fasten the Velcro on his sneakers (they took away the laces long ago) and carefully watched as the food service woman carried a pink plastic tray filled with French toast into his small ten-by-fifteen room, which was decorated with a wooden nightstand and a painted dresser that never had anything but a Bible and a set of vintage red glass rosary beads on it. The doctors offered to get Nico a sofa, even a coffee table. Anything to make it feel more like home. Nico refused, but never said why. He wanted it this way. So it looked like her room. His mom’s room. In her hospital.

Nodding to himself, he could still picture the stale hospital room where his mother lay silent for almost three years. He was only ten when the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease hit… when one faulty gene in her brain ignited the CJD protein that eventually kick-started her coma. When the diagnosis first came back, she didn’t complain — not even when young Nico asked why God was taking her. She smiled, even then, and respectfully told him that’s how it was written in the Book. The Book of Fate. Her head was shaking, but her voice was strong as she told him never to argue with it. The Book had to be respected. Had to be heeded. Let it guide you. But it wasn’t just respect. She took strength from it. Security. No doubt, his mother knew. She wasn’t afraid. How could anyone be afraid of God’s will? But he still remembered his father standing behind him, squeezing his shoulders and forcing him to pray every day so Jesus would bring his mom back.

For the first few weeks, they prayed in the hospital chapel. After six months, they visited every day but Sunday, convinced that their Sunday prayers would be more effective if they came from church. It was three years later that Nico changed his prayers. He did it only once. During a frozen snow day in the fist of Wisconsin’s winter. He didn’t want to be in church that day, didn’t want to be in his nice pants and church shirt. Especially with all the great snowball fights going on outside. So on that Sunday morning, as he lowered his head in church, instead of praying for Jesus to bring his mom back, he prayed for him to take her. The Book had to be wrong. That day, his mother died.

Staring at the plastic tray of French toast and still kneeling by his bed, Nico, for the third time, asked, “What’s for dinner?”

“It’s meat loaf, okay?” the delivery woman replied, rolling her eyes. “You happy now?”

“Of course, I’m happy,” Nico said, flattening the Velcro with the heel of his hand and smiling to himself. Meat loaf. Just like his mom was supposed to have on her last night. On the day she died. The Three told him so. Just like they told him about the M Men… the Masons…

Nico’s father had been a Freemason — proud of it too. To this day, Nico could smell the sweet cigar smoke that wafted in the door with his dad when he came back from Lodge meetings.

Nothing more than a social club, Nico had told them. All the Masons did was sell raffle tickets to raise money for the hospital. Like the Shriners.

The Three were patient, even then. They brought him the maps— taught him the history. How the Freemasons had grown worldwide hiding under the cover of charity. How they’d perfected their deceptions, telling people they were born out of the master stonemason guilds in the Middle Ages — a harmless organization where members could gather and share trade secrets, artisan-to-artisan. But The Three knew the truth: The Masons’ craftwork had built some of the most holy and famous places in the world — from King Solomon’s Temple to the Washington Monument — but the secrets the Masons protected were more than just inside tips for how to build archways and monuments. The night before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he was in a Mason Temple in Memphis. “I might not get there with you,” King said that night to his followers. Like he knew that bullet was coming the next day. And the fact he was in a Masonic Temple… it was no coincidence. Fate. Always fate. At their highest levels, the Masons’ ancient goal had never changed.

Even the church stood against the Masons at their founding, The Three explained.

It was a fair point, but Nico wasn’t stupid. In the Middle Ages, there was much the church opposed.

The Three still didn’t waver. Instead, they hit him with the hardest truth of all: what really happened to his mother the night she died.