Jack, for once, got right to the point.

“Mankind is in imminent peril, and I, quite honestly, can't see how anybody other than you has even the slimest chance of beginning to save its collective keisters.”

Jack's high marks for immediancy were dramatically offset by his abjuct failure in basic sanity. He had burst into my shop unannounced. That in and of itself is unremarkable; you hardly need an appointment to visit me. But Jack was one to always think things through. He had made it a habit to call ahead to see if I would be there. And I had never seen him so riled up. He was practically frothing at the mouth. Ordinarily Jack radiated a certain academic calm, a detachment befitting his status as a one-time highly respected university professor. He took immense pride in the ability of his first-class mind to entertain several conflicting points of view simultaneously. And, yes,he did love to hear himself talk, and was good at it, I had to admit. He would never use an ugly word when a pretty one was within reach.

“You have to find Quetzalcoatl. This is a debt your humanity has incurred.”

But now, alas, he was nuts. But Jesus God, why today? I had other things to do. Without breaking a sweat I could think of at least a dozen. I tried to look pensive as I opened a Dansani and took what I hoped would pass for a thoughtful swig. I offered Jack one, but he shook his head. No chance of dousing his agitation with high-grade spring water. That would be way too simple. Jesus, the bullshit I put up with trying to placate clients. Why can't he just send me my money and spare me the melodrama? What is it about me that the biggest nut cases find me so irresistible? Why couldn't it be rich dudes or hot babes? The sad thing was that until recently Jack had been among my more sane hosting clients (not much of an accomplishment, since I had attracted some real head jobs). I genuinely liked Jack, and had hoped he could maintain a tenuous grip on some presentable version of reality. But right then I was feeling a real sense of loss. At the same time I couldn't think of a remotely appropriate reply so I kept my mouth shut.

”His portal is somewhere Downeast. I know that for sure. He told me he had found the perfect place for it. He said it was Downeast Maine's most magical place. Nobody knows Downeast Maine better than you. I think you can find it, but if you can't, I am know damn well your psychic girlfriend can.”

“She isn't my girlfriend. And even if she were, she's totally defensive about her abilities. No way will she hire them out. Much as I might wish otherwise, she's hardly at my beck and call.”

“No matter. The fate of mankind is at stake. Are you telling me she won't do what she can to save the human race?”

Cuckoo I can cope with. Cuckoo can be fetching. Relentless sanity, after all, can be downright wearing. But Jack was reeking of mental malfunction way beyond cuckoo, a craziness I couldn't comprehend, never mind mend. Delusional paranoia maybe (is that a real thing?), or some even more obscure malady never mentioned in psych 101. Jack's condition cried out for a professionalism I just didn't have.

“I can't even spell Quetzalcoatl,” I said. “I don't know what he looks like. And besides that he isn't real.” The hell with humoring him. Maybe a bitch slap to his self-esteem would bring him around, although I doubted it.

“Hardly anybody can spell Quetzalcoatl,” Jack noted. “Some days I can't. I don't want you to spell him, I want you to find him. He's real, he's very real, and he's somewhere Downeast, or one of his portals is. Nobody knows the region better than you. He's playing with us; to him it's a game. To make things sporting, he's given us a few clues, so now I need you to track him down. The human race needs you to find him.”

For somebody so deeply muddled, Jack could seem infuriatingly focused.

“I am a Webmaster, not a super hero. Chasing down regegade mythological godlike beings isn't my thing. You need the Fantastic Four or the Silver Surfer or at least Jack Bauer.”

“I need you, my man. Mankind needs you. You're the one slim chance the human race has. You're it, like it or not.”

Like it or not? My choice? Well, let's go with not. Definitely not. Dealing with somebody as crazy as Jack, no matter how faithfully he pays his bill, was something I would never really cozy up to. It didn't matter how often I told myself it's all just make believe, that I should just relax and have fun. Why did I attract so many crazies? They're drawn to me, a mysterious attraction I have done nothing to encourage. Well, maybe I've made a few unwise moves. Quetzalcoatl really wasn't any more imaginary than Captain D, a character I had devised from thin air to represent my Internet business. Captain D had taken on a personality of his own, assumed an outlook on life I didn't comletely control. Captain D wasconfident and out-going, a crackerjack salesman. You really didn't want to fuck with Captain D.

Be that as it may, what had started out as a lovely early summer day in Ellsworth, Maine, was deteriorating rapidly. I had hoped to get out of my office by mid-afternoon, to get to Blink Bonnie early to warm up for the scramble. Once again I was hot on the trail of the Secret of Golf. My last few times out I felt like I was really onto something. The key, I thought, was to move the right elbow as little as possible throughout the swing. Focusing on this was putting me in an excellent position to hit the ball hard. I wondered how long it would last. Over the years I had discovered several secrets—moves or positions that seemed to bring miraculous results. Invariably they would dissipate over time. Golf could be a cruel mistress, full of tantalizing promises and ultimate betrayals. No matter. I always came back for more.

I wanted to be at Blink Bonnie. Never mind that the greens looked like mini-minefields after the battle of Armageddon. The down-to-earth guys who played there—worm diggers, clammers, delivery truck drivers, blueberry farmers to name a few—were sure to show. Outside the sun was shining brightly in a clear blue sky, the grass was green as green can be, while I was trappped inside with a lunatic. Was there a nice way to tell Jack I was way more interested in honing my backswing than in pretending to save the bizarre world pervading his crazed brain?

"How long have we known each other? Jack asked. “Four years, going on five? In all that time have I ever given you reason to question my sanity? Okay, I know you don't really buy into the Mayan thing. That's fine. You humor me. I tell you what to put on the Site, and you keep a straight face while you put it there. Most of the time, anyway.”

He must have been reading my mind. I've gotta admit he didn't look crazy. Or at least he didn't have the look of a wild-eyed stallion I've seen in some of the certifieds that have come my way. Jack looked like what, at least until recently, he was regarded as having been, a respectible academician , a professor with a neatly trimmed beard, gray flecks at the temples, sturdy horn-rimmed glasses. Although he had taken early retirement from his university, he had oce been one of its leading lights. His field was archeology, his specialty the Maya, and nobody knew more about these mysterious people.

And, yes, for the first couple of years that I did his site, Jack seemed really quite normal. If he attached way more significance to the Mayan calendar than I would have, he had lots of company. Literally millions of people were sure that on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar quits, mankind will experience an event of great, world-shattering significance. True, opinions varied tremendously as to what this event might be. They ranged from super, duper wonderful to the end of the world as we know and love it. But they were all really quite certain that it meant something REALLY BIG. My own suspicion was that the Mayans just got bored with calendar making, but what did I know?.

In the early going, it hadn't mattered that Jack and I were marching to distinctly different drummers. New Agey as he was, his take on mankind's future was really quite pleasant. At first his belief had been that by December of 2012 we would be entering into a new, higher, more loving realm of consciousness, the Age of Aquarius, the age that the kids in Hair were singing about forty years ago. That date would just mark the next stage of an ever-ascending evolution of man to a more godlike state. What's not to like about that?

In the early going, Jack referred often to a Mayan prophecy that in 2012 enlightened beings would emerge from a “serpent rope”—which Jack thought might be a stargate or wormhole—in the center of our galaxy. Jack's take on all this was that these enlightened beings visited Earth eons ago and left a spark of themselves within all of us and were coming back to help us pass to a more elevated state of consciousness.

As far as I was concerned, this was all great fun and more entertaining than regular reality. I certainly couldn't subscribe to any of it, but I felt no need to disparage it.

Sometimes Jack suggested that 2012 simply meant the end of an old Great Cycle, the beginning of a new one. Kind of like an odomoter turning over at 100,000 miles. It would simply begin again at 1. It certainly didn't mean the end of the car. People might want to watch their odomoter turn over, but nobody expected that its doing so would drastically change their lives. Again, fine and dandy.

Things began to get dicey shortly after dean Henley, a narrow-minded simpleton if ever there was one, told Jack he wouldn't returning to Takalik Abaj with the university's research team. Jack's academic status had taken a decided downturn, a demotion from first to last in an unofficial pecking order.

Privately, I felt a vague sense of blame for Jack's problems. No doubt some of the more wild claims on his Website had upset the faculty committee. Of course, I wasn't really to blame; I hadn't posted anything without Jack's express approval. Still I wondered if I couldn't have toned things down a bit. I could have used smaller, less intrusive type, fewer caps, a more conservative, academic font, Times New Roman instead of Arial Bold, maybe, and muted shades of gray instead of bright primary colors. With my urging, Jack mightyn have approved a more laid-back ambience.

It certainly hadn't helped matters when the National Gazette, a lurid, supermarket tabloid, got wind of Jack's site and featured it with a front page head, “Prominent University Scientist Predicts End of World.”

Nobody really listened to Jack's protestations that he wasn't necessarily predicting the absolute end of the Planet Earth, but the end of an Era for Mankind, an era that left much to be desired and could be improved upon rather easily.

What they heard was the adamancy of his claim that in late December of 2012 the Earth and the sun would make a rare alinement with the center of our galaxy, an alinement the Maya had foretold accurately, although nobody could begin to explain how these primitive Indians with no modern astronomical instrumentation could possibly have done so, and that this alinement marked the end of time.

Perhaps not the absolute end of the world, Jack was quick to point out, but the end of the world as we know it.

For sure, Jack's positioning on this matter would have made his university uneasy, but he had tenure and could have stayed however long he wanted. But he really didn't care. To Jack the notion of long-term security had become laughable.

The shit really hit the fan when Jack began talking about how Quetzalcoatl came to him after Henley told him he wouldn't be welcome on the next trip to Guatemala. Jack claimed that Quetzalcoatl had assured him he had been on the right track all along, and that the dean was, among other things, a flaming asshole. Jack claimed that Quetzalccoatl then led him to a heretofore undiscovered Mayan city.

Okay, deep down I realized I was being ego-centric when I blamed myself. No way were Jack's problems my fault. They really began when his translation of some newly discovered glyphs flew in the face of accepted teachings. They had put the being Guetzalcoatl in a whole new light as well as a damper on numerous academic reputations. Jack's cohorts had little choice but to reject his interpretation. This got a whole lot easier when Jack began claiming that Quetzalcoatl himself had informed him that he had been right all along, and that the dean of the archeology department was not only a flaming asshole, but also a jerk-off (Quentzalcoatl's words, not Jack's).

It wasn't only Jack's professionalism that had been rudely challenged, but his sanity as well. Nobody would have been surprised had he been livid with rage. But to the amazement of all he accepted pariahhood with incredibly good cheer. He never seemed to waver from his conviction that the only really important thing was Quetzalcoatl's message.

Tenured professors aren'tlk easily dismissed, but they can be shunned, and this is what Jack had to look forward to at the university. As invitations to faculty parties dropped off, he didn't seem to notice. Apparently undaunted, once he reached his present position, he went about explaining to anybody who would listen that Quetzalcoat is a real guy, not a human being exactly, but an extradimensional whose job it is to monitor civilizations capable of developing technologically. According to Jack, it is a given that eventually such civilizations will develop a capability to venture away from their home planets. Most of these civilizations, including ours, will be utterly unfit to spread its seeds elsewhere, at least in the eyes of the beings Quetzalcoatl worked for. Quetzallcoatl's job description involved little more than snuffing out such civilizations before they have a chance to ruin their neighborhoods.


Questions or comments? Send them along to Captain D.

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