Chapter 22.

The immediate shock of disappearing into the rip in reality dissipating, Frank’s head cleared, and he assessed his situation. Thin Man—or ‘Zoltán’, as Corny had called him—steered him by the collar through an inky darkness. After several turns, Frank reckoned they trod a corridor of sorts, but he couldn’t see. Despite the dark, the space wasn’t cold and creepy, but cozy, albeit unearthly. It brought to mind floating on his back a warm, tropical ocean, and he sensed the sun, moon, and stars lingering just out of view.

Regardless, this was no vacation. He was Thin Man's prisoner, and Zac and Beefy were fixing to lynch the chef.

Fuck that.

He had to stop the injustice, so he planted his heels, trying to squirm clear from Thin Man’s grasp. No dice. The narrow fellow was far stronger than Frank would have guessed.

“Stop struggling,” Thin Man said, halting. “You’ll never escape.”

On realizing that struggling was futile, Frank relaxed, giving in as Thin Man eased him along. “Let me go, for Christ’s sake. Zac’s gonna kill an innocent man. I gotta stop it.”

“Not my problem,” Thin Man said, pushing Frank.

“Fuck it isn’t. You left an innocent colored man with a distraught barkeep, who has a mob threatening his livelihood, and a mean as piss good-ole-boy? What do you think will happen?”

Thin Man stopped, yanking Frank around, as if staring him down. “Like I said, not my problem. It’s their decision, not mine.”

“But the chef did nothing.”

Thin Man scoffed. “But the cops said—”

Frank landed a solid right hook on Thin Man’s jaw, cutting him off. “Fuck off, Zoltán, or whatever Corny called you. I told you I saw the arsonists. You know he didn’t do it. And yet, you knowingly set that colored boy up to be lynched, set up Zac to be a murderer, pretending to believe the police. As if that absolves you of guilt. The fuck’s the matter with you?”

Thin Man spun Frank around, grabbing hold of his collar firmer. “First off, call me ‘The Sultan.’ I only let old acquaintances like Papa Bad Leg call me Zoltán, not nobodies like you.”

A defiant sneer crept across Frank’s face. “Sure thing, Zoltán.”

To Frank’s shock, Thin Man hoisted him from his feet by his collar and tie, saying, “It’s The Sultan to you, you dumb oaf.”

Frank kicked out like a hanged man as he struggled to breathe, roping his fingers into the tightened collar to free his windpipe. “Okay, ‘Sultan,’ I got it,” he said, his voice thin and reedy.

“THE Sultan,” Thin Man said, with a distinct emphasis on the word ‘the’ as he lowered Frank to his feet. The idiot’s pomposity made Frank want to laugh, but he stifled the impulse. He wanted to live, not die, strangled in the lonely darkness. Besides, he still held a flicker of hope that he’d make it to Severance Hall to catch Peggy, and dying would monkeywrench that plan.

Thin Man—or, The Sultan—chuckled. “You feckless, febrile mollycoddle. I threaten the ‘big hero’, a teensie bit, and you run, tail between your legs, and abandon a helpless colored boy to a murderous peckerwood and a business owner in shock. You have the backbone of a jellyfish. All on a hope and a prayer that you can live, and make your precious, spoiled-rotten granddaughter’s concert recital.” He pushed Frank, who relaxed and complied as The Sultan hustled, pushing him onward through the dark, twisting tunnels. Though he told himself that he wasn’t giving in, but waiting for an opening, deep down Frank knew he had folded like a French map.

The Sultan stopped, and slashed open another hole in the universe, letting in a faint, yellow light, the unexpected scent of pork, beans, and cajun spices wafting through. Frank winced, squeezing tight his dark-accustomed eyes against the glare.

“Where you taking me?”

“Where Bad Leg isn’t,” The Sultan said, booting Frank through the hole and jumping through after him. “Since the gimp’s outside of Club Seventy-Nine, he can’t be in his apartment.”

Frank’s heart leaped as his eyes grew accustomed to the light. Indeed, they stood in Corny’s apartment on Shaw Avenue. And he knew it was October 13th, 1978, the same day: same overcast sky, same wind roaring outside, the same scent of red beans and rice lingering in the air.

He glanced at the clock and grinned. Seven-forty. Just enough time. His shoulders relaxed, releasing a knot in his breast he hadn’t expected. If he hurried, he could make it to Severance without speeding. He reached into his pocket, and his keys jingled. He nodded, encouraged. Peggy needed to understand she was his princess. Especially with her mother abandoning her like so much trash. She’d miss him. Maddie would too. And Paul would call out the calvary if he didn’t show tonight.

Pleased, Frank hooked his thumbs in his belt, leaning back on his heels. God, he loved his family. People looking out for people they love. They’d miss him like he had missed them.

The realization made his eyes tear.

And then he looked down, groaning. The riotous evening had turned his once-clean and crisp white shirt dingy with dirt, grime, and sweat. He figured to disguise the mess behind his suit jacket, but groaned, remembering he’d left it at Club Seventy-Nine.

Fuck.

He considered stopping home before the recital for a fresh shirt, but that would make him late. Instead, he’d have to show up looking homeless.

Fuck.

A police siren chirped underneath the apartment’s window, breaking his train of thought. Two young colored boys in their Sunday best stood, arms raised in the parking lot. Rif-raff, probably drug dealers, he reckoned since East Cleveland was a high-crime area.

The chef leaped back to mind, and the knot tightened again in his chest.

Frank turned to The Sultan, who gazed up with a whimsical expression at the wall Corny had splayed his delusion with its tangled swirl of text, lines and photos snipped from newspapers and magazines.

Frank asked, “What about the chef? Will he make it?”

The Sultan shrugged. “I do not know. Not my problem. Besides, that was over twelve years ago. My advice is to get on with your life, you dumb oaf. Live. Eat, drunk and be merry. Let go of bygone days.”

Frank’s shoulder’s slumped. “But he’s innocent.”

The Sultan sneered. “You weren’t so concerned about protecting him when you ran from my dragon, were you? You abandoned him to save your skin. Nor when you stood gape-jawed, watching angels battle demons, a mini Armageddon unfolding on the shores of Lake Erie, were you? No, you watched the duel like it was a Hollywood spectacle. Nor when you were playing soldier, calling in the airforce, getting innocent civilians killed, were you? Instead, you forgot about him to protect an insignificant bar on an insignificant corner on an insignificant street in an insignificant city… from what? Killing to save a business from destruction? Just like all you ‘high-minded GIs’ in World War II, killing civilians so GM and GE could expand its market, earning billions rebuilding Europe. Do you think America’s high command gave two shits about the people of Europe? Or you dumbass soldiers? Hell, no. They only cared about what matters: money, the bankers, the people with juice. That didn’t matter to you, though. You complied like a meek little pup, following order, and became a vicious, blood-thirsty attack dog.”

A flame kindled in Frank’s belly, and he defended himself, saying, “Jaysus, it was war, and I was a soldier under duress. We were fighting the Nazi bastards who exterminated helpless Jews in death camps. We stood against evil. You can’t expect a man…” His words dissolved into doubt.

The Sultan’s rictus grin grew wider and colder. “Tout au contaire, mon frère. I can expect a man to live by his best, or admit he’s a fraud. You failed. Ergo, you are a fraud, Frank. A wannabe. A nobody who thinks he’s someone with moral authority, like some modern-day Jesus. As if.” He paused, laughing, his tone caustic.

With memories of the evening flashing before his mind, Frank’s heart fell through a pit in his solar plexus. He saw true The Sultan’s words. Helping Zac, a man in need, had drawn him in. Then the action outside of Club Seventy-Nine had mesmerized him. And his survival instinct kicked in, like it had in The War. Lost in the technicolor action, he neglected the beat-down chef.

The Sultan’s comments also stirred memories of his soldiering days. To his shame, he remembered his time under Patton, marching across Europe and tossing grenades and firing his carbide willy-nilly, caring not one iota who he killed. Women, children, priest, nuns, elderly, or whatnot, it didn’t matter in the heat of battle. All he’d cared about was keeping himself and his men alive. Worse, he was no teeny-bopper, like most soldiers under his command. He was pushing thirty when the Army drafted him. He was supposed to be wiser, more mature. That’s why they’d promoted him to staff Sargeant. Despite that, he’d proved rash and heartless as the next, losing his head under fire, fighting only for his life. A monster no different from a stormtrooper torturing and murdering unarmed Jews in those horrific gas chambers.

He was no hero, but a fraud. The Sultan had hit that nail square, driving it true.

Hand on the doorknob, The Sultan, still staring at Corny’s spiderweb of crazy, whistled whimsically. “Damn, this negro’s fucked in the head.” A beat later, he turned to Frank. “You can go now, you racist fraud.”

Frank’s nostrils flared, and he squared to the Sultan. “I may be a fraud, but I’m no racist.”

“Sure you are.”

"Am not. My daughter's married to a colored man, and my wife and I approve."

The Sultan shook his head. "You mean, the daughter who's all-but disowned you after that custody battle over your precious princess, Peggy?"

"Well, that was before she married Hector... when she was on that hippie commune, and Peggy was starving, dressed in rags...." His mind wheeled, searching for evidence to prove he wasn't Jim Crow, lighting up like a slot machine showing three cherries. “And I marched with MLK, so there's that.”

The Sultan grinned, opening the door to the grimy hall with its dinged-up paint and soiled carpet, a stark contrast with the neatness of Corny’s place. “Indeed you did, but during the Poor People’s Campaign, where you had ponies in the race. You didn’t march across Pettis Bridge, putting your life on the line fighting for colored people’s civil rights. You and your union brothers marched to stick it to the rich, hoping Washington power-brokers would throw you and your white trash cronies some crumbs. Some ‘high-minded idealist’ you are.”

Frank couldn’t argue. The Sultan was right. He WAS a fraud.

“Go, see the brat, my faux-working-class anti-hero with his inflated sense of bourgeois moral high-mindedness,” The Sultan said.

And then something occurred to Frank. “Wait. How’d you learn about my life, inside-out? Best I can reckon, I’ve never spoken with you, yet you know about Peggy, her concert, how important seeking her perform is to me, that I marched with my union brothers in the Poor People’s Campaign, and whatnot. You know me better than my friends. How?”

The Sultan’s rictus grin grew manic. “Let’s just say… I know people, I… have my ways.”

Frank halted, remembering the man’s game: poke, prod, and provoke, like an eighth-grade bully. And he’d fallen into the trap.

God, what a dumbass.

It didn’t matter, though. Odds were, he never left 1978 and the chef crap was a delusion. One of those drug trips the young loved. Like the hippies that Tom Wolfe book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which he and Maddie had read to understand Peggy’s mom, the anti-war hippie Mary Lou, after she ditched Kent State after the shooting for a commune in Oregon.

Still, seen true in a certain light, he was a giant fraud, a hollow man with no moral backbone.

But the state of his soul did not matter right then. He’d address that in the confessional with Father Klein. What mattered there and then was that he stood within striking distance of his goal: Severance Hall. The Sultan motioned Frank out the door, saying with exaggerated civility, “You’re free to resume your insignificant life, my good sir.”

Frank stirred, rolling his eyes as he strode, thinking, Pompous ass. Before he reached the door, though, The Sultan’s jaw dropped, his gaze snapping down the hall to something Frank couldn’t see. The Sultan yelled, saying, “Not you again… but, how?…” A pulse of light threw The Sultan down the hall, a smaller shock wave knocking Frank backward, through the tear in reality and back into the dark. He leaped to his feet as the light pulse cauterized the rupture, which Frank clawed at, desperate as it closed.

After several minutes of futile struggle, the aperture had sealed, and all was dark. And he was alone, unseeing, unseen, with no direction home.

He slid to the ground, distraught and alone.

He’d been so close….

Fuck.