The Book of Fate

6

Make it quick, Nico — no futzing around,” said the tall orderly with the sweet onion breath. He didn’t shove Nico inside or stay with him while he undid his pants. That was only for the first few months after Nico’s assassination attempt on the President — back when they were worried he’d kill himself. These days, Nico had earned the right to go to the bathroom alone. Just like he’d earned the right to use the telephone and to have the hospital stop censoring his mail. Each was its own victory, but as The Three had promised him, every victory brought its own cost.

For the telephone, the doctors asked him if he still had anger toward President Manning. For the mail, they asked him if he was still fixated on the crosses — the crucifix around his nurse’s neck, the one the overweight lady wore in the law firm commercial on TV, and most important, the hidden ones only he knew were there: the ones created by windowpanes and telephone poles… in intersecting sidewalk cracks, and the T-shaped slats of park benches, and in perpendicular blades of grass, and — when they stopped letting him go outside because the images were too overwhelming — in crisscrossing shoelaces and phone cords and wires and discarded socks… in the seams of the shiny tile floor and the closed doors of the refrigerator… in horizontal shades and their vertical pull cords, in banisters and their railings… and of course, in the white spaces between the columns of the newspaper, in the blank spaces between the push buttons of the telephone, and even in cubes, especially when the cube is unfolded to its two-dimensional version which then allowed him to include dice, luggage, short egg cartons, and of course, the Rubik’s Cube that sat on the edge of Dr. Wilensky’s desk, right beside his perfectly square Lucite pencil cup. Nico knew the truth — symbols were always signs.

No more drawing crosses, no more carving crosses, no more doodling crosses on the rubber trim of his sneakers when he thought no one was looking, his doctors had told him. If he wanted full mail privileges, they needed to see progress.

It still took him six years. But today, he had what he wanted. Just like The Three promised. That was one of the few truths besides God. The Three kept their promises… even back when they first welcomed him in. He had nothing then. Not even his medals, which were lost—stolen! — in the shelter. The Three couldn’t bring them back, but they brought him so much more. Showed him the door. Showed him what no one else saw. Where God was. And where the devil was hiding. And waiting. Almost two hundred years, he’d been there, tucked away in the one place the M Men hoped people would never look — right in front of their own faces. But The Three looked. They searched. And they found the devil’s door. Just as the Book had said. That’s when Nico played his part. Like a son serving his mother. Like a soldier serving country. Like an angel serving God’s will.

In return, Nico just had to wait. The Three had told him so on the day he pulled the trigger. Redemption was coming. Just wait. It’d been eight years. Nothing compared to eternal salvation.

Alone in the restroom, Nico closed the toilet seat and kneeled down to say a prayer. His lips mouthed the words. His head bobbed up and down slightly… sixteen times… always sixteen. And then he closed his left eye on the word Amen. With a tight squeeze of his fingertips, he plucked an eyelash from his closed eye. Then he plucked another. Still down on his knees, he took the two lashes and placed them on the cold white slab of the closed toilet seat. The surface had to be white — otherwise, he wouldn’t see it.

Rubbing the nail of his right pointer finger against the grout in the floor, he filed his nail to a fierce, fine point. As he leaned in close like a child studying an ant, he used the sharpened edge of his nail to push the two eyelashes into place. What the doctors took away, he could always put back. As The Three said, it’s all within him. And then, as Nico did every morning, he slowly, tenderly gave a millimeter’s push and proved it. There. One eyelash perfectly intersecting with the other. A tiny cross.

A thin grin took Nico’s lips. And he began to pray.