It is Written

“Write it,” Casey said. “Deadline’s midnight.”

“But boss, once I write it, it goes to print. And then, there’s no going back,” I said.

“What’s the problem, Gordy?”

“It’s just the finality of it all. This man’s going to wake up. His wife will hear. His colleagues. There’s no walking that back,” I said. “He isn’t even the big bad.”

“He’ll still have a choice. That’s how this works.”

“I don’t know if he does, boss. They mean to kill him.”

“Peter’s living large in an Upper East Side tower, paid for with stolen retirements. No minimizing it. He’s funding a syndicate’s war chest for something we both know would make your neck hairs do jumping jacks—whatever it is.”

“Maybe. But you know how many times he tried to back out?”

“You wanted to be an investigative journalist. A modern-day muckraker. There isn’t much left kid. There’s truth to power, OnlyFans, influencer fandom, and cult ideology. I can’t help you if you want to go for the last three.”

“It feels… opportunistic. It’s giving take down vibes. Why this guy? Why not wait until we tie in Mason or Claude?”

“You think the authorities are going to do anything? Not until the mob rolls out with pitchforks and torches in tow. It’s up to you to stir them up, stoke outrage. Peter is just a means to an end here.”

“So, Peter’s entire life is ruined, and the guys in the shadows may just stay hidden? While we play God. What if this guy is the only one who suffers?”

“It’s not this guy. It’s you. It’s me. Compromised. All of us. We are all this guy. Worshiping at the feet of graven images and digital dreams. Sad but true. He wanted to be some Ivy League stockbroker to the powers that be. He got his wish. And what came with it?”

“Then what’s the point? We’re all fucked. Then why even bother?”

“It’s a reminder. Didn’t you grow up in an evangelical church? You should read the good book sometime. There are books of account in there, Gordy. You die and your deeds are read back to you. What’s more final than that? And if you are worried about passing judgment. Don’t. How many people in the Old Testament alone did God rename. Nothing is more common than a fall from grace. The real question is what happens next. Some get a fresh start. Some push rocks up hills. Which is which falls under the heading of – not your problem. You are just the scribe. That’s it. So, write it. Got it? Good.”

The videochat window clicked off on my laptop. I began to write, “Peter, your secret is not safe with me. For the record, you will receive this article 24-hours before Casey takes the Substack live. Time starts now. If you turn yourself in and come clean and send proof, this will never go to print. But if you are like the others – this is your moment of truth…”

I thought, it is strange how written truths become true. True or not. And debunked lies become false, even if the debunking is a hoax. The written word is its own domain. A world where what is, is. And can’t be otherwise. Or so I thought.

But the musing sparked an idea. I knew it was a sham. But sometimes it’s too tempting not to test a taboo, no matter how absurd. I selected one of the color-coded index cards wrapped in parchment buried in the vintage Crayola Portable Storage Case given to me by Aditi at the Wind View Café in the Pink City after I quit journalism. I had told her that the journalism was all pandering, and I wanted to write something real or not at all. She had looked at me very solemnly and said, “As you wish.” Then handed me the package. Ironically, it was Peter that led me to Aditi. She was a contact of his at a retreat he had gone to when his marriage was falling apart, before he became hooked in with the syndicate. And the more I learned about her, the more I knew I had to find her.

I remember laughing at what she’d offered me. “What’s with the crayons and markers. Is this a kid’s coloring contest?” And Aditi had looked at me with boundless brown eyes that seemed to briefly swirl with merriment. “It is because to write something real – it must be full of color.”

Her voice was rhythmic – rushing and receding like gentle waves shooing seagulls gathered by a shoreline. I could swear the pink of her brown cheeks changed shades and shifted to a mesmerizing aquamarine as she delivered the line.

She never explained how it worked. She only said, “Be careful what you are writing into being, Gordy. Sometimes the writing has a mind of its own.”

And then she had turned. Her silk Dupatta had curled and gusted like wind, as if she did not simply turn out of view but exited through a portal to another realm. An invisible hand stitching tight the seams of the vortex with a firm pull of the yarn. Those words still tugged at me, but I brushed them off.

I took out the Might Marker PM-68 black sharpie that Aditi gave me, selected a yellow index card and wrote and underlined the word “Epilogue.” And I wrote the following words below, filling up the index card. “Peter turned over his hard drive to an ethical hacker who was able to recover and reverse the theft from thousands of pensioners, and like in The Merchant of Venice, not only were all the losses returned, but the victims awoke to find millions more in their accounts – all of the ill-gotten gains from years of criminal activity reversed with the press of a button. Peter fled to start a new life and still has not been found.”

I closed my eyes at my desk and laid my head in my arms. Seemingly a moment later, my eyes blinked open.

It was already morning. Casey with his scruffy beard and signature white Yankees ball cap was behind me tapping my shoulder. He slammed a New York Post article down on the desk in front of me. “The Substack is 86’d. How the hell did Danny Chilente break this? It’s not even 12 hours, kid. Peter is a vigilante. A cult hero. This is news kid, real news.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, still decaffeinated and unable to process words and ideas.

“Peter returned all the money. And then some. And now he’s on the run. From the law and the syndicate.”

“What?”

“Hey, are you doodling with kids crayons kid? Catch up, will you? Get yourself some coffee and meet me down at the studio later. This story is getting bigger. I need another Substack article out by noon. Our audience is going to eat this up.”

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“Peter chose door number three, kid. That never happened before.”

***

It was a Sunday. Sunday is like dead air for reporting and content. No hard news. Maximum readership. Distracted eyeballs fiending for a morsel will search far and wide for a fix. If you haven’t logged your story by then, it is too late.

Did I recycle an evergreen idea or recap a prior submission? Did I pay homage to the issue of the day? What was even the point?

Just then the bell to the front door of my walk-up apartment in Brooklyn Heights rang. I never had visitors. I pressed the button to let whoever it was in. I heard heavy footfalls bounding up the stairs. A moment later, Peter, with a day’s worth of stubble and a suit worth more than my life’s savings was standing at my door.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” he said. I turned away to buy time and went to the Nespresso coffee maker to whip up two deluxe coffees in my only two clean glass mugs.

“Make yourself at home.”

“Funny thing. I had one of those about a day ago,” Peter said. “But I really must thank you. I never thought I’d be free of this thing. Truth is, it’s you I am worried about.”

I handed Peter a coffee and took a hasty sip, nearly burning my tongue.

“Coffee. You’re kidding?” Peter said, handing me back the coffee.

“What’s wrong?”

“For the love of God, kid. Tell me you’ve got Scotch in this dump.”

“Will Johnnie Walker do?”

“Praise Jesus, there is a God after all,” Peter said.

I made a show of washing out the mugs. I uncorked the Scotch. Cold from the freezer, where it had waited months for this moment. I gave each glass a heavy pour, a puff of vanilla hitting my nose.

“Here you go,” I said. “Now what are you doing here?”

“I take mine on the rocks,” Peter said, swirling the whiskey and giving it air.

I grabbed a handful of ice out of an open bag in the freezer and dropped some in his glass, looking Peter in the eye while I uncurled my fingers and let the ice splash.

“Now that’s better,” Peter said. From the open window, the bouquet of Brooklyn rushed in with barbeque and pollen, a pastiche of refuse, the salty brine of the East River, and a potpourri of many perfumes. Car horns, shouting voices, and sirens gave accompaniment. All the commotion mixed with the acidic bite of the cold whiskey. And Peter’s nose hung a moment below the rim of the glass, inhaling. Then he took a long sip. He savored the taste; eyes closed in delight. “I’ve always loved Brooklyn,” Peter said.

I took a sip too. The Scotch was rich and earthy with the smack of heather and thick honey – sweetly burning the tongue – and rumbling down through the chest like a pinch of thunder.

“Now then, you mind telling me what the hell you thought you were doing?”

“Did you forget all my calls? The countless emails to verify facts? You knew I was going to print?”

“No, no. Not that.” Peter took another sip and studied me as he swallowed. “You knew that by publishing that Substack, you were writing me a death sentence, right?”

“Are you accusing me…”

“Kid. Calm down. Drink your Scotch,” Peter said as he got up and paced around the suddenly smothering seven hundred square feet of my apartment. I did as I was told, still not sure where this was going. “Trust me, you are going to need it.”

“I didn’t…”

“It is not that you didn’t – it’s that you don’t know what the hell you are doing. That’s the problem. And I have little time for babysitting.”

“What?”

“It’s like Aditi said,” Peter smiled. “A thing that is written can also be unwritten.” I stared at him without knowing what to say. What did that mean?

Peter pulled out an ancient Abacus and a counting board with holes inset with strange stones and gems.

“We’re going to need some fresh funds to get to Jaipur,” Peter said. “Let’s see what stocks are going to the moon tomorrow morning, shall we?”

I looked on as Peter made calculations on the Abacus and arranged numbers and letters in the slats and holes in the counting board.

Peter looked over his shoulder at me, amused by my expression.

“You didn’t think you were the only one that took the leap, did you Gordy?”

***

A character that is unwritten is even less real than a character in a Charles Dickens novel. But what happens when a character or their story is written, but then that story is rewritten. Where does reality lie?

I began writing about Mason. About Claude. About the syndicate. But these were not news articles. I was writing them into corners. Setting traps. Clearing the path so Peter and I could get to Jaipur. The colorful 3 x 5s were strewn about. The smell of the marker packed a punch. The threads of reality were sewn. But I didn’t know what happened next, so I could only go so far. It was just like with journalism. You reach an impasse, and the trail runs cold and what starts out as a promising lead becomes an apparent dead end.

At Jaipur International Airport, Peter was brooding again.

“We will have to be careful. They are here.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. “I wrote them a financial emergency in Mumbai and a four-hour layover.”

“They have an editor,” Peter said pointing at the Flight Board. The time for the arriving flight from Mumbai changed to thirty minutes before we landed. Peter grabbed his pretentious silver Globe-Trotter 007 luggage from the conveyor, I grabbed my backpack, and we were off.

“What is an editor?”

“You have writing implements. They have implements for editing what you have written.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Where are we going?”

“The Palace of the Winds. Aditi will be there to meet us.”

“And who exactly is Aditi, anyway?”

“No one knows,” Peter said. “But there is a story that she is a Rani who burned herself alive when her King fell in battle, and in doing so a part of her gained immortality. That you can hear the jingling of the anklets of her maids running behind her through the palace halls of Hawa Mahal on Teej nights, when they come to the windows to look out, searching the crowds for the faces of their fallen King. Others say she is part of the Indian Research and Analysis Wing – Indian covert counterintelligence. But, if you ask me, she is something supernatural, a force of the winds that comes and goes for reasons we cannot understand.”

A Toyota Delhi Cab carried us through the streets of Jaipur toward the Palace of the Winds. The night air in late summer was tropical with the flavors of the monsoon resting like a soothing lotion on the skin, a luxurious blanket of sea air hugging the arid lands.

“Write us an entrance by the back of Hawa Mahal.” I took out a 3x5 card and got to work, while Peter was looking out the window lost in thought.

Aditi stood at the top of the ramp, her silk Dupatta swaying in the wind before her. The two of us ran up toward her, but she turned and disappeared into a long corridor. We followed her through the dark and dusky innards of the Hawa Mahal, following the sound of her footfalls.

Then a fan of torchlight revealed the lefthand side of her face, and the hint of a grin.

“You two have come a long way back to this place,” Aditi said. “Will you go the rest of the way?”

She turned and placed her hand on a section of the wall, which instantly receded, revealing a room of sparkling white, whiter than white.

Peter and I walked in, amazed.

“The world is empty,” Aditi said. “There is nothing in it. No thing is named. This interior is unfurnished.” She smiled. The length of the room shifted. The ceilings rose. French balconies formed extemporaneously. A wall sprouted three windows. Then the dimensionless dimensions of the room rebounded to white. “It is maddening,” Aditi said. “I am like an interior designer forever trying to furnish a room that is always changing. So you can see my dilemma.”

“What are we doing here. The two of us,” Peter said.

“Don’t you know, Peter,” Aditi said. “I need your help. The two of you.”

“And how can we possibly help you,” I asked. “You literally have the power to rewrite reality.”

“I do not,” Aditi said. “I do not have this power.”

A set of three beautiful, upholstered wingback armchairs with beautiful Hindi script with long bars and soft curves materialized. Then a side table and a tea set.

“Have some tea,” Aditi said.

The three of us sat and drank the tea. Aditi explained. “I do not create reality. Only you can do that. But you cannot create a reality out of wish fulfillment or self-interest. It will do no good to do that. All you can do is create a reality that is a little better than the reality you know. A little more complete. More just.”

“And what about all the injustice everywhere around us.”

“It is a problem,” Aditi said, drinking her tea. “Which is why I have enlisted you. To help with this problem. To help with balance.”

“What would you have us do then?” I asked.

“That is for you to decide. You are the leader, Gordy. Peter is here to assist you. That is, if you both accept.”

“Accept what?” Peter said.

“These,” Aditi said, holding out two rings with a swirling symbol on the head of each. “And these,” Aditi said, brandishing two Indian ceremonial swords. “Knights of the Palace of the Winds.”

Aditi stood up and began walking, then turned. “I will leave the two of you to discuss your next moves. And I will be sending more help. But that is all for now. I have much designing to do.”

Aditi disappeared in a swirl of wind, and I looked at Peter with genuine fear.

“Where do we begin?” I asked.

Peter handed me a 3x5 card and the marker.

“Write it.”