That night he sharpened his sword for the first time. A halogen lamp that he’d bought on the way home from Groats provided more than enough light for the task. He started by resting the blade across the block of wood and running the metal file along it with light downward strokes, being careful not to oversharpen as Jim had cautioned. He then oiled the whetstone and slid the blade across it at a thirty-degree angle, back and forth, back and forth, again and again. Finally, he wiped the blade clean with wet sandpaper. The task took over an hour and by the end Richard could barely lift his arms. He thought he’d done a passable job for a beginner. Many of the blade’s more noticeable imperfections were gone, and a faint suggestion of a gleam had seeped into the steel.

As he lifted the lid of the trunk to return the sword to its proper place beside the shield, it slipped from his oily hands and tore a hole in the trunk’s protective paper lining.

“What the…?”

Something was taped to the inside of the trunk. He peeled away strips of shriveled masking tape and worked the object loose. It was a notebook. Its red leather cover had been burned black and most of the pages were charred or missing, though a stubborn few had survived and clung to the spine for dear life. Richard recognized it instantly. It was his father’s journal, the one he’d kept locked away, never allowing anyone—not even his reverent son—to read it. Weird. It looks like he tried to destroy it but had a change of heart at the last second and hid it instead. In my trunk. He felt for the lump in his pocket. The parchment was always there now, like a second skin. Two unscorched pages in the red book contained writing in his father’s rickety pencil scrawl.

[…] appeared to me again […] not through with me […]

[…] brain wasting […] Big A. […] not safe to go […] One last journey?

[…] River-and-lake […], Veiled […], R[…].

Five orbs since […] my planets […]

[…] and I can understand them […]

[…] visit from K. S. […] crusty, stern […] has his own Gre[…] […] told him legends […] Sigurd, St. George, An[…] prays for rescue […] not sure what to tell him […] less than […] in my state […] no release until

[…] They want more stories. […] resident sage. […] […] in robes, like those strange gray-[…]

The spheres. Holy shit, they came to him, too. And he wrote it all down in his book, what they showed him, where they took him. Holy shit.

Richard knew he should have been floored by this discovery. But it was more like an idea clicking into place. Reading his father’s damaged notes seemed to coalesce all that he’d learned into a blurry but recognizable picture. They’re a part of the family. Old relatives come to visit. Richard immediately forgave his father for not telling him about the spheres. Ivan knew as he did that they work best on their own. Their mercurial nature is part of their methodology, and a source of their power.

Ivan had called them “orbs” and “planets.” That is so him, Richard thought, opting for poetic idioms. He also noted that “planet” derives from the Greek word for “wanderer.” An inside joke between Ivan and the Sphericals? He wished he’d been calling them “orbs” all along. Much better than “spheres.”

He went over to the recliner and plopped himself into place. Setting matters of diction aside for the moment, he refocused on the larger picture. So the spheres (orbs) had appeared to Ivan as well. Indeed, this was huge. His notes implied there had been at least five, maybe more. And the last, so it would seem, appeared to him at the onset of his Alzheimer’s (“Big A” was Ivan’s epithet for the disease). Richard thought of their shared passion—their dependence—on books and history. Could this be the answer to the spheres’ riddle? Had Ivan and Richard both dug so deep that they’d disturbed something? Or was it Ivan alone who had awoken the spheres and Richard who had inherited their legacy?

And where had his father ended up? “River-and-lake”…what? District? Country? The people there had apparently adopted him as some kind of wise man. No surpise there. He had learned their language, or part of it. And he’d even regaled this “K. S.” with stories from Western history and literaure. Again, no surprise there. And was this K. S. in some sort of distress? “Has his own Gre[…]” could be a reference to Grendel, and “prays for rescue” is telling. And what did Ivan mean by “no release until…?” This phrase was the most puzzling of all.

It was four-fifteen in the morning. Richard longed for sleep, but he dared not go to bed, not with a miasma of new possibilities swirling around him. He had to stay awake, had to be vigilant. (“It is close,” his father’s voice had said.) He switched on the TV and pressed the volume button until he got a solid green bar. A game of Family Feud was playing itself out. The host, dressed like a floor salesman at a Lamborghini dealership in his Italian suit, stiff-collared salmon shirt, and matching pocket handkerchief folded into a perfect equilateral triangle, asked the patriarch of the Feldman clan, an obese man in a stretchy gray sweater with a necktie nub peeking out, to name something that people do on a Saturday morning.

“Eat pancakes!” he bellowed. Stifled snickers from the audience.

“Go to Groats!” said Richard.

“Good answer! Good answer!” screeched the Feldmans.

With a suave twirl, the host raised his arm toward the board. “Give me, eat pancakes!” Three red Xs flashed across the screen, accompanied by that awful red-X sound, that “what are you, fucking stupid?” sound that must be copyright protected because it is heard nowhere else except on that show. The Feldmans looked like they were about to wail on their corpulent kinsman. A correct answer would have won them the game.

(For the record, the top five answers were: 1. Drink coffee/have breakfast—making Mr. Feldman’s answer seem all the more imbecilic; 2. Read the paper; 3. Go to the mall/shopping; 4. Watch cartoons; 5. Go for a walk.)

Richard switched off the TV. It wasn’t needed. He was good and wired. He thought of “The Wanderer,” which led him to another possibility. Could he have been wandering this whole time, even though he’d remained pretty much in the same place since birth? Grew up in Brooklyn, attended college in Massachusetts, moved to Brookline. A reserved, solitary man, Anhaga, left to the mercy of fate, lordless and lonesome. But ah, let’s not forget: he also had a sword. The Wanderer was a warrior as well (Hwǣr cwōm mearg? Hwǣr cwōm mago). He thought again about the extraordinary events of the past few months: the ice wasteland, the Beowulf ship, the runes on the hilt of the sword, Carver and Corgan, Jim Grange, Bertha and Otto. Bertha and Otto. Yes, perhaps that was the connection. The first sphere appeared on a bitter cold night after a long and miserable day spent working on Arrangements. The second just minutes after he’d been fired for chewing out Bertha. He took the parchment from his pocket. In a series of fluid movements contrary to his erstwhile inertia, he extricated himself from the recliner, stretched his aching trapeziuses, went to the desk, grabbed a pen, and began a new-and-improved reconstruction of Bertha’s prose on one of the blank endsheets of Old English Poetry.

[ … … … …]wer arrang[…] has taken as inspirat[…] el[… …] diversified as […]nting, sculpture [… … …]ture. […] Eden’s […] to your grand[…] […]able garden, flowers and p[…] ha[…] embodies ran[…] of sym[… … …] from the rose’s blood-[…]sion [… …] so[…] di[…] an orchid. S[… …] […]yptian times w[…] they first pla[…] […] flowers in a […]filled j[…] over 4[… …][…]go, the ar[…]ment of […]ssoms and […], lea[… …] buds into co[…] and [… …]y va[… … …]ons has flourish[…] amongst […] about every cul[…] planet. There has alwa[…] been [… …]out our botan[…] br[…] that exhilarates us [… …]ls us with awe. […] they are ut[…] as […] […]ugs, [… …]monial […], or [… …]ful dining-room [… …]eces, flowers [… …]ys rep[… …]ed one thing: the [… … … … … …]

––––––––

The perversion that is flower arranging is an inspired fraud that filches elements from diverse sources such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. From the hoax of Eden to your grandmother’s detestable garden, flowers and their putrescence have embodied a range of symbolic evils, from the rose’s blood-violence to the sordid disgrace of the orchid. Such affronts began 4,500 years ago in Egyptian times, when flowers were first placed in muck-filled jars. The arrangement of blossoms, brambles, leaves, and buds into contrived and insipiently abstracted affectations has flourished among every known culture on the planet. There is something about this botanical brainwashing that exhilarates us even as we are infiltrated by its awfulness. Whether they are used as neuron-popping drugs, as callous ceremonial offerings, or as frightful dining-room-décor feces, flowers never fail to remind us of the emptiness of life.

He scanned the basement, eyes darting like gnats, alighting on every object before flying off again. Trunk, recliner, golf bag, stairs, light bulbs, halogen lamp, stack of books, another stack of books, a third stack of books, Carver, Corgan, TV. The TV. He had turned it off. But now the screen was glowing. His heart slammed head-on into the back of his teeth as a shimmering white sphere emerged from the screen. This time it did not hover; it approached. Until it was floating inches from Richard's face. Tears streamed. So bright, so beautiful.

“I knew you’d come.”

He attempted to compose himself. He had no idea where he was going, but he wanted to be ready. He wore a pit-stained undershirt, wool socks, black corduroys, a brown rugby shirt, and air-cushioned Merrell hikers. Good enough. Cell phone? Yeah, right. Food for Scoot? He can go a-mousing. Mental note: the other trips took just five minutes of “real” time. If I make it back, it will be 4:21 a.m. on Monday, May 20, 2013. He retrieved the sword and shield from the trunk and left Ivan’s red book in their place. “Take care, Dad,” he said as he wedged the parchment into its customary place in his back pocket. With the sword in his right hand and the shield strapped to his left arm, he brought his face to the edge of the sphere’s whiteness. Scorching pain. He screamed, plunged in up to his shoulders, and disappeared.

Next Chapter: Part Four: The Third Sphere, Chapter I