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.”

I tried to look pensive as I opened a Dansani and took what I hoped would pass for a thoughtful swig. God, the bullshit I put up with just to keep a client happy. 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.

“You have to find Quetzalcoatl.”

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 describe, 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 clear-headed.

“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 need 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 to 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 control.

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. Outside the sun was shineing 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 academic type, a professor with a neatly trimmed beard, gray flecks at the temples, sensible horn-rimmed glasses. Although he had taken early retirement from his university, he had until recently 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 are sure that on December 21, 2012, the day the Mayan calendar quits, mankind will experience an event of great 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 maybe the Mayans just got bored with calendar making, but what did I know?.

In the early going, it hadn't mattered at all 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 all be entering into a new, higher, more loving realm of consciousness. 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?

Sometimes he 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 probably would 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.

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 would cast mankind to a totally new era.

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 idea 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.

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 his pariah-hood with incredibly good cheer. He never seemed to waver from his conviction that the only really important thing was Quetzalcoatl's message.

Tenured professors can't be easily dismissed, but they can be shunned, and this is what Jack had to look forward to at the university. It assmed as though he didn't care. 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 leave their home planets. Most of these civilizations, including ours, will be utterly unfit to spread its seeds elsewhere, at least in the keyes 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, so to speak.

Jack's strong academic reputation withered and shrank. No way would anybody on the university's predominantly conservative faculty defend him. The kindest among them would simply sigh and say he obviously wasn't well and what a pity that was. One afternoon in early January they got together for tea, crumpets, and intervention, suggesting that Jack might want to brighten the new year by visiting a shrink. Jack, in less polite terms, told them to fuck off.

Jack had kept his claim of face-too-face meetings with Quetzalcoatl off his Website. This was not out of respect for the university's sensitivites, but because he felt that Quetzalcoatl had told him certain things personally and that publishing them would be a breech of confidence. To Jack, casual conversation was one thing, publishing on the Internet quite another. Now he said he wanted to get Quetzalcoatl's permission to publish it all, but, according to Jack, Quetzalcoatl had wandered off through Portal Green into another dimension and wasn't returning his calls.

Jack seemed to believe that posting all this online would somehow improve on mankind's chances of sticking around for awhile. While it wasn't in my professional best interest to downplay the Internet's impact, I found this ridiculous. How could Jack believe that any single Website was going to make mankind clean up its act? If Moses, Jesus, Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu, and Leon Hubbard combined couldn't make it happen, he and his Website had the chances of the proverbial snowball in Hell.

For commercial reasons, I was willing to humor Jack, but doing so convincingly was becoming impossible.

Never mind the sheer insanity of it all. Even at face value, it was silly. As far as I could tell, there were so many takes on who Quetzalcoatl was that Jack's, far out as it was, hardly mattered. While working on Jack's Site, I had read all sorts of stuff about Quetzalcoatl, and it seemed to me nobody had the remotest idea who he was. Plenty of people voiced thoughts on the matter, but no two of them agreed.

Much Quetzalcoatl lore had been passed down orally from generation to generation and was subject to embellishment. Storytellers from time untold have had a way of improving their material, which often means making it up as they go along. This can render their stories more entertaining, but disconcertainly less reliable if they're supposed to have some sort of factural basis.

From my non-academic perspective, Quetzalcoatl seemed to be not a single god, but various gods of the Mayans and Aztecs.

According to some accounts, he was priest-ruler-god of Tula, capital of an empire north of Mexico City between A.D. 800 and 1000. I once saw him referred to as a demiurge, which Plato defined as the benovolent creater of laws governing heaven and earth. Legend had it that he was conceived by virginal birth years after his father's death; his mother was supposedly impregnated from swallowing a piece of jade.

According to Jack, Quetzalcoatl says he can't remember his mother, but believes this story about his birth is utter poppycock. And he resented being called a demiurge. He was afraid it would intimidate future golfing buddies.

In any event, it appeared as though a real person called Quetzalcoatl ruled the toltecs for 20 years while living in Tula. Evidently he was on the losing side of a civil war and fled while vowing to return on a certain date. As fate would have it, Cortes sailed into the harbor on that date, and the natives thought it was he. They weren't prepared to fight him, which made them easy pickings for Cortes. The Maya culture never recovered.

Compounding the confusion, Quetzalcoatl goes by the names of Gukumatz, Nine Wind, and Kukulcan among others. Quetzalcoatl maintaining a host of avatars with whom he is intimately connected with or represented by. There are also certain gods that Quetzalcoatl is involved with most of the time as well, such as Xolotl, Tlaloc, Xipe, and Tezcatlipoca. These "upper level" gods are either contrary, complimentary, or both at the same time towards Quetzalcoatl, creating a sense of duality.

I had heard him described as the ying and yang of dieties. The first part of his name, quetzal, was a Mexican bird celebrated for its colorful plumage. The second part , coatl, was a local and lowly regarded snake. Together they combined soaring and slithering and everything in between.

Get it?

According to Jack, Quetzalcoatl hated being referred to as a god. Quetzalcoatl had said to him that the Mayans really couldn't be blamed for dragging religion into it, but felt that we should be sophisticated enough to discard the theological references. Quetzalocatl said the only thing he knew about God was that he wasn't Him. Every day Quetzalcoatl, who wanted to be regarded as one of the guys, practiced doing high fives.

Jack's case, which could hardly have been shakier, wasn't strengthed by his admission that Quetzalcoatl appeared only when he was tripping on ayahuasca. From day one, Jack had openly paticipated in native rituals involving ayahuasca, a brew that propels users into realms that seem convincingly spiritual and supernatual where, very often, they encounter deceased ancestors.

Although Jack insists he can distinguish different varieties of reality, it was shortly after he admitted publicly that he used ayahuasca that Jack's university stopped inviting him to come along on digs. And it was just after this that Quetzalcoatl started visiting Jack.

There was a persistent rumor that the university had offered Jack a sweet, under-the-table settlement for his early retirement. If the members of the faculuty review board needed additional grounds, Jack readily supplied it by carrying on a trist with Lisa Myers, a graduate student. Word had it that he had taken her to Tikal and introduced her to ayahuasca. There was nothing illegal or, depending on your point of view, nothing actually improper in any of this. She was 24, a consenting adult, a thoroughly modern Ms. Still, this wasn't the sort of thing the university featured in its brochures. These things didn't go over well with the already anxious parents of freshmen women.

“Lisa and I brought some ayahuasca back with us. and the very first time we used it here, Quetzalcoatl appeared,” Jack said.

Jack, good old respectible Republican Jack, was practicing gonzo archeology, and seemed to think nothing of it. A cross between Humter Thompson and Indiana Jones garnished with a bit of Tim Leary. In all fairness, as far as I could tell, he didn't encourage all of his students to turn on. He wasn't advocating being stoned out of your gord as a new and better way of life. I believed he turned on with nobody other than the natives of G and Lisa, and she was a consenting adult in an already intimate relationship with him. Besides that, the government hadn't gotten around to declaring ays illegal. I do't think he had anything to fear from the DEA. allthough somehow I doubted he declared it when he went through customs.

"Quetzalcoatl told me he really likes Maine, especially Downeast Maine. He said there was just one thing he didn't like—the golf season was too damn short. He said he had established a portal hereabouts, a doorway leading to his golf dimension. He called it Portal Green, and described it as Master's Green in color. He said he had found a highly appropriate place for it. We have to figure out what Quetzalcoatl would regard as highly appropriate.

Jack was more interested in his new-found friend than he was in the university. According to Jack, Quetzalcoatl had an intriguing personality. He informed Jack he wanted to be pals and buds, and sometimes called him pard. Jack said he got the impression that Quetzalcoatl simply wanted to be liked. Jack insisted that in Quetzalcoatl he never detected even a hint of malice toward the human race.

"Quetzalcoatl was afraid his name was off-putting,“ Jack said. “He asked me to call him cutiepie. I balked at this. I told him it sounded way too gay. I don't think he knew what I meant by this. I finally agreed to call him Q.T.”

“Kind of like E.T., but not quite?”

“Well, yeah, I guess. Anyway, one day I asked him who he was working for, and the question seemed to puzzle him. I began to suspect he may not actually know who he works for. Another time I asked him how often he has to check in, but just got a blank stare for an answer.“

While my inner English major parsed Jack's convoluted syntax, a snuck a peek at my watch. Three-forty-five. I was going to miss the scramble altogether.

“Whoever's in charge, including Quetzalcoatl, seems to take a very long view of things,” Jack added. “Eventually, according to Quetzancoatl, if human DNA was allowed to escape the bounds of the planet Earth, it would permeate the multiverse. This might take a billion years or so, but no matter, eventually it would happen. Time here definitely wasn't of the essence. No offense or anything, Quetzalcoatl would say, but mixing our DNA with theirs was totally unacceptable, absolutely unthinkable, so far beyond the pale that words failed prior to any discussion. So it was Quetzancoatl's job to keep us in our place. And if this meant snuffing us out, which was beginning to seem inevitable, so be it.”

Things got a bit more urgent when the huge particle accelerator went into operation in Cern. Quetzalcoatl pointed out that the accelerator produced minute black holes. This technology, in and of itself, was harmless enough, but letting mankind get a serious handle on black holes was risky. Eventually, he would learn to neutralize their tendancy to turn things into singularities; he would learn to pass through them into white holes and onward into other dimensions. And a couple of candlelit dinners later, he would be spreading his seed hither and yon.

“I once asked Quenzalcoatl how he, a single guy, was energetic enough to monitor the entire multimverse and play golf besides. He said it was impossible to run out of energy. Energy, he said, is everywhere. In the vacuum of an ordinary lightbulb, he asserted, there is enough energy to boil the oceans of our world.”

Jack seemed to find it amusing that Quenzalcoatl once said, 'It is almost time to toast you.' “Obviously, this didn't mean he wanted to salute us over drinks,” Jack pointed out.

”One day Quetzalcoatl told me our problem was seeing things as particles, not waves. He said that seeing things as particles might be useful in dodging saber teeth, but not in interdimensional transversals.”

“For a smart guy, he seems to have lots of trouble with the language.”

“I believe he may be fluent in several million of them, each with its own colloquialisms, although he did say that English was the worst. You need to cut him some slack.”

“Tell him I'm sorry.”

“Tell himself, after you find him.”

It would have been easy to infer that Quetzalcoatl was an insufferable snob had it not been for the fact that he sometimes found us incredibly interesting. Case in point: Bobby Jones once lost the U.S. Open in large part because he called a two-stroke penalty on himself for inadvertantly moving his ball in the rough. Nobody noticed this ever-so-slight movement, and Jones could easily have ignored it. But he didn't, and when commended for his honesty famously said one might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank. And this was hardly an isolated incident. The history of golf is replete with instances of professionals calling penalties on themselves.

“Quetzalcoatl has a strong regard for honesty,” Jack said. “Somehow he knew who could be trusted and who would rip you off at the first opportunity.”

“Sounds like he would be a hell of a bill collector,” I replied. “Too bad I can't sic him on a few of my more devious clients.”

“Q.T. thought there might be a glimmer of hope for humanity if Bobby Jones and the other self-sacrificial professionals were the norm, not the rare exception. But, alas, participants in other sports simply don't penalize themselves. Skill at cheating without being apprehended was a valuabled asset. A professional football player turning himself in for holding would be a pariah and no doubt drummed off the team and out of the league.”

Quetzalcoatl did point out that many civilizations had games involving testasterol-addled manlike beings running around with sticks, and, inevitably, they ended up bashing one another with their sticks. But golfers, amazingly, seldom did this. Quetzalcoatl found this curious, and had some interest in investigating it further.

Nevertheless, according to Jack, Quetzalocatl had made it crystal clear that the human race was utterly unfit for colonizing anything. As far as Quetzalocatl was concerned there wasn't anything to discuss. Mankind had always engaged in way too many wars, massacres, bombings, acts of terrorism, devious dealings, assaults upon all other species, and environmental crimes to ever be considered for membership in the Interdimensional Federation. An occasional instance of sportsmanship, however curious it might be, couldn't save the day.

“I think he was exagerating, but Quenzalcoatl once told me that in his many eons of monitoring civilizations, he had never encountered a more hopeless cause than humankind.”

Jack was certain that no amount of begging, pleading, or cajoling would matter in the least. According to Jack, Quetzalocatl should have pulled the plug in 1969, when we first set foot on the moon. According to interdimensional policy, we shouldn't have been allowed to get this far.

According to Jack, almost for sure the human race would have been put to rest back then had it not been for a very strange happening earlier that year.

Orville Moody won the U.S. Open.

A marine sargeant with a name best suited for a bowler, a golfer who had never won anything, beat the world's best players in winning our national championship. Just to get into the tournament, he had to go through local and sectional qualifying. Since him nobody else has done this and gone on to win the title. He was competing against the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Lee Travino. He would never win again on the PTA Tour, but no matter. Orville Moody's performance that week left the golf world flabbergsted.

Quetzalocatl, who long ago had taken up golf in his spare time, giggled every time he thought of this. He spent much of the latter half of 1969 giggling. Apparently giggling and exterminating the human race were incompatible activities. It was our great good fortune that giggling won out.

As it happens, this was Quetzalocatl's first bout of giggling. At first he found it a bit frightening; he thought he might be coming apart. Even after several billion years of evolution, Quetzalocatl had never developed a sense of humor. Irony was lost on him, as was cynicism and an appreciation for a sense of the absurd. Quetzalcoatl was as much a product of evolution as everybody else, and an appreciation of comedy wouldn't have helped him survive at all. He did, however, have an innate curiousity and had gotten to know these things as intellectual abstracts. They interested him, and he wanted to know more about them.

Giggling over Orville Moody made him feel giddy. After his first discomfiture, he found this curious, even enjoyable. He began searching for other ways to bring it on.

“I don't know why Quetzancoatl finally learned to laugh.”

“Well, I might.”

“Tell me.”

“If Quetzancoatl has taken up golf, he has had to learn to laugh at himself. Every golfer needs to be able to do this. The alternative, quite frankly, is insanity.”

If Quetzancoatl was lacking in certain distinctly human ways, his billions of years of evolution had allowed him to develop other remarkable traits. He could assume whatever form he wished whenever he wished. He could will himself instaneously to any place in any dimensions, of which there seemed to be no end. He could create solid objects of all descriptions by simply imagining them.

“How old is this Quetzancoatl guy anyway?”

“Funny you should ask,” Jack replied. “I once asked him that very question, but I don't think he found it at all meaningful. I guess if you aren't restricted to a single planet, a year gets sort of arbitrary. When I asked him his age, he just sort of rolled his eyes. He did say that for us a billion years seems like a very long time, but that was just due to our circumstances. He said that for him a billion years can seem like just a little while.”

“All about relativity?“

“I guess. Jack once told me time was a tool, and we had to learn to use it instead of letting it use us. Another time he called time a godsend, although at still another time he told me he didn't know if there was a God or not. Seems he is just as agnostic as you or me. He did assure me he definitely wasn't God. 'No way, Jose' was the way he put it.”

“How does he plan to snuff us out?”

“I asked him about this too,” Jack replied, “and again I didn't really get an answer. What I got was a shrug of his shoulders. It wasn't a ”I don't know“ shrug, but a “don't bother me with insignificant details” shrug. I have no doubt Quetzancoatl can dispatch us effortlessly, by snapping his fingers or wrinkling his nose or just wishing it over and done with.“

According to Jack, Quetzalcoatl would do pretty much anything he wanted, with but a single exception: He sucked at golf. Well, maybe he didn't suck exactly. At times he could go long. But he hit a lot of bad shots and for him breaking ninety was usually a struggle.

He had taken up the game some 500 years ago, joining Scottish sheepherders as they jockeyed roundish stones into small dug holes. He claims to have been first to suggest that different styles of crook might prove useful in hitting different sorts of shots. Q claims to have made countless eforts to be helpful to humankind, gestures that have gone mostly unappreciated.

He had maintained his enthusiasm throughout the era of featheries and gutta patcha, wooden, steel, and now graphite shafts. In various guises, he had played with Young Tom Morris, Harry Vardan, Walter Hgan, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

At no time did he acquire any real competancy.

In playing golf, he had set certain ground rules for himself, the only sporting thing to do. The form he assumed was always within human potential, currently a carbon copy Tiger Woods. He always resisted any urges he had to simply will the ball into the hole. The equipment he used conformed to U.S.G.A. specifications. Although he generally teed it up in the rough, he tried to keep his nudges within a six-inch range. He seldom conceded himself putts of over four feet. And he seldom broke ninety from the whites.

There were times when he would drive the ball over 300 yards, but it seldom landed in the short grass. He hit hooks and slices with equal abandon. From 100 yards out, often as not he missed the green, skulling the ball too far or laying sod up under it and falling way short. Day in and day out, consistent as any physical law, he botched pitch and chip shots. There were times when his putter seemed to require an exorcist.

Q's marked futility certainly wasn't from lack of practice. He had plenty of time to practice, and seldom wasted it. He handled his monitoring responsibilities with ease. Effortlessly he could distribute himself to countless locations simultaneously. Seldom did he have to intervene in local affairs. He could scarcely recall the last time he had to extinghish a civilization. Almost invariably, they did it to themselves. If they didn't vaporize themselves atomically, they poisoned or carbonized their atmospheres, fell victim to runaway nano-technology, or created killer biological forms.

I found Jack's description of Quetzalocatl's golf problems intriguing. Jack, I knew, didn't play the game, had never been the least bit interested in it. Nevertheless, his remarks about Quetzalocatl's game seemed to suggest a certain intimacy with the problems players deal with.

I decided I didn't want Jack to go away mad. He was far too interesting a guy to let go lightly. I thought I'd humor him.

“There is something I haven't told you,” Jack said. “It needs to be completely confidential. I need to trust you on this.”

“Okay, man, don't worry. My lips are sealed.“

“Quetzalcoatl took me to a virgin site. It's within a day's walk of Takalik Abaj, but completely obscured by dense jungle. He took me through thick jungle to a pyramid that hasn't been disturbed for a thousand years. I am going back there tomorrow. I am hoping Quetzalcoatl will show up, but I have no way of knowing if he will or not.”

“When you will come back here?”

“I figure two weeks. That will give Quetzalcoatl plenty of time to contact me, if he's about to. ”

"Meanwhile, you want me to look for him here? So if I were to do this, where would I start? I haven't a clue as to where he might be."

“Well, we have to consider everything we know about Quetzalcoatl.“

"And just what do we know?”

“Quite a lot, really. We know he's a history buff. He's been tracking the human race for the past three or four thousand years, and I have reason to believe he's intervened on more than a few occasions.”

“So I check out historical sites.”

“Yeah, all of those, and I have some other ideas as well. Q likes to eat well, so an especially good restaurant is a possibility. Q is also a bit materialistic. Especially good shops could qualify And, of course, he's a golf nut, he might find a golf course to be highly appropriate. At times, he's been a bit of a mystic. I once heard him describe the intertidal zone in mystical terms, as a place that is neither land nor sea, but a magical inbetween.

“Guess he has a thing for periwinkles.”

“He also likes art. He told me once people should spend more time making pictures, less time making war. And he's a reader. He told me he is a big Stephen King fan.

“He seems like the typical tourist.”

"He is turned on by the unique. The whole idea of something being the only one of its kind really interests him”

“Sounds like he could be about anywhere.”

“Well, not anywhere. We can rule out fast food restaurants and gift shops that sell anything made in China. It he's at an antiques shop, it would have to be a good one. He also doesn't seem to like chains—he wouldn't be at Home Depot or Lowes. He says he is all for individual initiative. He admires entrepreneurs. He does seem inerested in religions, espeically those out of the mainstream. He seems to be a bit of a maverick. He would most likely be associated with organizations bucking the established order of things.

“When Russia announced a determination to go to Mars, Q said that was the last straw. I think he was ready to snuff out mankind then and there. I managed to divert his attention by bringing up Michelle Wie. Quetzalocatl seems to have taken a paternalistic interest in Michelle.

What Quetzalocatl really wants is acceptance. He told me he wanted to be one of the guys. He said he wanted to be guy others would welcome on a scramble team even if his game wasn't up to par. He was afraid his name would put people off. He wanted me to call him cutiepie. I balked at this, so we settled on Q.T. He thinks this will encourage people to find him endearing.”

“Pretty high expectations for a guy poised to pull our plug.”

“He doesn't think we should take it personally. I have never detected even a hint of malice in Quetzalcoatl. And I believe I may have heard him say that our essence would survive it all.”

“Our essence?”

“That was the word he used. He wouldn't explain further. Maybe he was referring to our immortal souls, but who knows?

“So deep down, he's a nice guy.”

“Yeah, I think so. And that would be consistent with the way the Mayans portrayed him. They thought he was compassionate, eager to be helpful. You've seen the fierce gargoyles glowering from abandoned temples? Well these weren't Q.T. These were various other dieties, way scarier than he is. He says he gave them their calendars.”

"Surely, you've gotta realize just about everybody will say that all this is in your imagination.”

“William James said that the imagination is not a state; it is human existence in itself.”

”I have a feeling people pooh-poohed William James too.“

“I want your word that you'll take what you know about Q.T. and take your best shot looking for Portal Green.”

“Um, well, I am sort of booked...”

Jack reached inside his sport coat and brought out his wallet. From it he extracted a check, handing it to me. Five thousand dollars, made out to Downeast Directions, my company. This was money that could make a lot of creditors happy.

“Maybe this will encourage you to reconsider your agenda. I don't care if you think I am bonkers. You'll have plenty of company. I just want you to look, use what you know and take a good close look. I happen to know you fancy yourself an investigative reporter, a trained observer. Well investigate and observe. I'll be getting back in touch with you every other day or so.”

“No doubt. You wouldn't want me wandering off with your five grand, now would you?” I handed him back his check. “Here, take it. If it's that important to you, you can count on me giving it my best shot. Really, I'll try to find him. And I'll send an appropriate bill when and if I do.” Yeah, right. There's some money I better not spend just yet. But promising to look around was no big deal. I was on the road a great, reworking my online Downeast travelogue. As long as I was already going to all the most likely places, I might as well look for Portal Green.

“I'll be keeping tabs on you,” Jack said.

“Yeah, I know. I would be disappointed in you if you didn't. Just one question. “What do I do if by some miracle I find Portal Green?”

“Get back to me,” Jack replied. “Get back to me as quickly as possible. Whatever you do, don't enter that portal. Don't even think about it. I can't begin to describe how disastrous that could be.”


Questions or comments? Send them along to Captain D.

CHAPTER TWO