Chapter 22 #3
What was he after? Some advanced cruelty? Would I be pressured to execute Reata? Would Reese be taking me prisoner, to ensure Reggie’s continued compliance?
“Andrew,” said Reata, “you don’t have to do anything, not for these traitors.”
“But Andrew,” said Reese. “Aren’t you curious? I’m not going to harm you, at least I don’t think I am. But I’m willing to use force, if you don’t get up here, right now.”
I started walking. Reese was bloviating, but I’d do anything to save Reata. I could hear Aunt Libby saying, “Fill the moment,” and my mom chiming in with, “Be a Birnbaum.”
I strode toward the altar. I wouldn’t beg if Reese produced some prized sword and prepared to disembowel me.
I’d be the imperious Marie Antoinette, in either the MGM costume drama (where all the French people spoke like hifalutin Americans pronouncing “milord” in a fancy school play), or some later History Channel investigative re-creation.
I’d approach the guillotine and stare down a mob of gibbering extras, about to check their cell phones the second the director called, “CUT!” Which was probably not a word the historical Marie would have wanted to hear.
I climbed the steps to the altar and stood a few yards from Reese, who said, to everyone, in his most pulpit-ready tones, “We’ve all heard the legend of the Diadem’s promise.
How its owner can foretell the future, dominate the present, and halt his or her demise.
In short, the Diadem would license that person to conquer or control fate.
Which has been my quest. I’ve been diligent in assigning my soul to Our Savior, in spreading His gospel, in nurturing my flock.
I’ve studied the kings and prime ministers of the past. I’ve hired presidential insiders from previous administrations to avert any mistakes, to guarantee a faultless campaign.
I’m only days away from the presidency, with, according to every oddsmaker in Vegas, a ninety-nine percent assured victory.
I’ve left nothing to chance. Except of course, for chance itself.
Some invented and weaponized scandal—an underage pregnancy, a drunken slur supposedly caught on tape.
The fallibility of the human mind, the wayward second thoughts at the polling place, the breakfast table diatribe against a spouse’s candidate.
When I’ve asked my most loyal advisors if there’s even a fraction of an outside iota that I could lose, at least one honest man said the most chilling words of my lifetime: ‘Stranger things have happened.’
“But if the legend is true, if the Diadem confers even a partial supremacy, a tipping of the scales, well then—the hunt and the money and the lives sacrificed will be all to the good.”
“You mean if you cheat,” said Reata.
“If I’m unstoppable,” said Reese. “But this entire effort might be in vain. The Diadem, even with the jewels in place, could be nothing but a pretty trinket, some not-especially-valuable keepsake from an earlier age. A gaudy curiosity. But given the historical record, such ineffectiveness is unlikely. But there’s also a downside: What if a mortal, any mortal, who wears the Diadem doesn’t amend fate, but enrages it?
What if that person provokes the Moirai?
The Fates were thought to be vengeful and proprietary.
Every human life, and turn of events, was theirs alone to ascribe.
The Fates have destroyed many who’ve dared to subvert or ignore them.
And I wouldn’t want to become their victim, not this close to the mountaintop.
So what I’m saying is—the Diadem must be tested. ”
“On Andrew,” said Reggie, adding things up.
“Why, yes,” said Reese, his smile broadening to Joker-like dimensions. “A guinea pig is necessary. Someone of little to no significance, an afterthought who would never be missed. A sacrificial nobody.”
“Andrew isn’t nobody!” declared Reata. But was Reese wrong?
In my life to this point, what had I contributed?
I’d been a dutiful son, a B+ student, and an aspiring actor—an aspiring everything.
My days with the Tuxes had been a portal, to not just a larger life but something more productive, like joining the Peace Corps, only with hotter gossip about the cute missionary or the beefy guy who’d restarted the village’s generator.
My life was in flux but to what end? And as for romance—could the Fates help me out, as if they were otherworldly Zoom therapists?
I was no better than Reese, because I’d take his gamble—I’d wear the Diadem, not just as his mouse in a maze, his experimentally vaccinated bunny, but as myself, a nice Jewish canary in a cosmic coal mine.
“Are you ready?” asked Reese. “You should be grateful, this is quite an opportunity.”
“Andrew, you can say no,” said Reggie, although this was mistaken, because Reese could have his strongmen jam the crown onto my head.
Better to suit up, to languorously puff a cigarette as the firing squad hefts its rifles.
This moment was pure pop culture, anime, TikTok, graphic novel, Spielberg Saturday afternoon serial, and World of Whatever Xbox nerd armageddon in one.
There should be music, either a pounding techno pulse or a John Williams anthem, but no—a chilling silence was more suspenseful than underscoring.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Reata studying me. She understood everything. She smiled, just a bit, to encourage me. Wearing the Diadem would be, at the very least, an adventure. I had her approval.
Reese lifted the Diadem from the pillow and dropped it onto my head, in some bizarro twist on a coronation.
I might’ve knelt but thought better of it.
If I was Reese’s victim, I was also his equal.
Although the Diadem did nudge whatever remained of my injury from outside the Vatican—I felt a twinge and wondered if some mystical jolt was in store.
I don’t think I’d ever worn a crown before, even a molded plastic toy from a rehearsal room dress-up box.
The Pope’s mitre had come close and been beneficial.
My brain rifled through every noted Hamlet, a role I’d, frankly, never sought—Hamlet is too damaged and morose, but he’s been played by everyone from Henry Irving to Richard Burton to Kenneth Branagh, along with so many aspirational guys and a smattering of women in my acting classes.
Would the Diadem lend me some woeful nobility? Not so far.
As Reese eyeballed me for side effects, part of me was pleased—if the Diadem didn’t enhance or obliterate me, it would represent a huge waste of Reese’s millions and scuzzy longing. I held out my arms, the palms upraised—sorry, no dice, hotshot.
Then I saw them, first as lengths of black netting fluttering in the gloom. But the figures became clearer: three wraithlike women of varying ages, beckoning but self-sufficient, a constellation in some hazy midnight sky. The Moirai.
I checked whether anyone else was sharing this. But everyone in the cathedral, including Reese and Reata, was frozen and oblivious. Was my mind projecting psychosomatic apparitions? Was this a lingering souvenir of my head injury—had I once again left rational thought far behind?
The women, while floating, grew more tangible, too distant to touch, and not flesh, but fully present and mobile beings, something beyond spirits or CGI.
“I am Clotho,” said the woman on the left, who was holding a few inches of shimmering thread from a spindle. “I decide who’ll be born and whether they’ll be worthy.”
“Worthy of what?” I asked without thinking, as if interviewing a Fate were an everyday habit, something I’d schedule in between grabbing a 7 a.m. multigrain brioche and unlocking my Citi Bike.
“Worthy of life. This is your strand, Andrew. From twenty-five years ago.”
Throughout the voluminous space, images began to shimmer, as if projected against clouds.
There I was, as a dissatisfied infant in my mother’s arms; as a toddler hugging a Paddington Bear (I’d been given a yellow rain hat to match Paddington’s); onstage in a middle school play condemning drugs and alcohol—I was dressed as an Ambien.
More memories accrued, of sitting beside Aunt Libby on the opening day of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the most scrumptious moviegoing bliss; of scrolling through photos of Justin Bieber with Jenn and rating his girlfriends from “major” to “she wishes”; of my dad teaching me to swim.
“Are you satisfied?” asked Clotho. “Was this a proper beginning?”
What did she mean? Did I wish I’d been born elsewhere, into a wealthier family, or maybe a clan without so many PhDs? Would my childhood have been happier if I’d been more athletic, less immersed in show business, and not so consistently both opinionated and fretful? Or if I’d been straight?
I’ve never questioned being gay, or considered it a drawback.
As an East Coaster from a liberal background I’ve been shielded from the sometimes violent prejudice the world can spew.
But as an actor, there’d been conflicts.
My almost-agent had asked if I was “openly gay,” or if I’d keep my sexuality “private” and hide or even lie about it, to be seen as more “castable” for a wider contingent of roles, meaning straight parts.
Clotho was waiting, my thread not yet spun.
Her question was infecting my brain, proposing an alternate take on myself, deep-kissing Sydney Sweeney or Florence Pugh in a rom-com or R-rated thriller and having our off-screen affairs become clickbait (even my projection of a heterosexual Andrew Birnbaum was hopelessly gay).
Did straight actors have it easier, or as Brock had once said, “Here’s what you have to understand: to the outside world, all actors are gay. ”
“I’m good,” I told Clotho. “Don’t change a thing.”
She raised her spindle, for a “last chance” pause.
“Taller,” I blurted. “Two inches taller.”