A.W. Hill

Raszer’s metier was the infiltration and analysis of religious sects, doomsday cults, and other extremist groups which operated in the shadow sector between free exercise of religion and organized mayhem. His specific mission was usually the retrieval of a family member who had somehow come to be caught in the sticky embrace of such a group. These were the poor souls who had clipped out the ad that read 'Is Your Life Out of Control?', attended the first meeting, and never come home. Because the work was difficult, the preparation exhaustive, and the risks relatively high, Raszer’s services did not come cheap, though he was considerably on the shy side of what either good lawyers or feng shui practitioners charged these days. The money was usually not a problem for his clients, whose missing loved ones were the living proof of an axiom to which America-the-bountiful had yet to orient itself. Spiritual hunger seemed to grow in direct proportion to material success. If the hunger was not tended to before the organs of the spirit began to atrophy, it would manifest as depression, depravity, or delusion. Raszer’s lost sheep fell into all three camps. They were the neglected Bel Air wives whose despair lithium could not leaven, the children who came of age without benefit of real parenting, and occasionally, the breadwinners themselves, who one day woke in panic to find themselves wholly unsuited for their role.

These were the borderline lives, the lives without a convincing story, the stories without a worthy protagonist. Their numbers were growing exponentially. The consumer society was breeding them like rabbits, and Raszer’s business had grown.

The masseuse kneaded her palm into his tailbone, igniting a faint orange glow on his eyelids. She worked up his spine, fitting the pads of her long fingers into the spaces between his vertebrae. The color in his mind’s eye shifted to pink.

"This neo-Nazi," Raszer said, his words slurred. "This crocodile that my turtle has gotten himself mixed up with ... believes that his enemies live inside the Earth."

Serena braced herself, kicked up her left leg, and dug her bare brown heel into his lower back. "The Anasazi people," she said, with an incantory grunt, "the ancestors of the Hopi ... they had stories about cities beneath the ground."

"Do you ever wonder," Raszer asked, "if there might be worlds ... curled up in this one ... that most of us just don’t have the eyes to see?"

"I asked my father once," she replied, "if the shaman could really become a raven and fly to other worlds. He said that when spirit and will are joined as husband and wife, new worlds are made."

"Yeah," said Raszer, with what little breath she’d left in his lungs.

Raszer saw nothing ignoble about the appetites which drove his "strays" into the spiritual netherlands: he was a hungry man, too. He considered himself a tracker rather than a "deprogrammer," and though he’d once taken a course in 'exit counseling,' he rejected most anti-cult hysteria as agnostic envy. What fueled his rescue missions was his recognition that the growing market for the sacred was spawning a whole new kind of con man. The spiritual huckster had been around for centuries, but now he spoke in a pseudo-scientific jargon that spun heads and bedazzled souls. Raszer, who shared the desire of every boy who’d ever thrilled to an issue of Amazing Stories or an H. Rider Haggard tale to peek behind the veil, had set himself up to expose the religious racketeers, in hopes that by shoveling away shit he might find a truffle. It takes a thief, a wise man had told him, to show you where the jewels are stashed. He wanted gnosis like a junkie wants skag, and gnosis--as the ancients knew--rarely came without a trip across the River Styx.

Seven years earlier, on the edge of an oblivion fueled by methamphetamines and a failed acting career, he had nearly lost his adored and adoring three year-old daughter, Brigit, to a rare disease of the liver. Her death was all but foregone; there was no cure, so Raszer’s wife, a Connecticut Brahmin turned Beverly Hills Buddhist who had just completed A Course In Miracles, called in a Malibu healer who claimed to have cured Whitney Houston’s polyps with crystals. Hands were laid-on and facile exorcisms performed, but in the end, Brigit was still going to die, and Raszer, after rising to one last howl of impotent outrage, had decided to die, too.

While Brigit lay wired up to life support at Cedars Sinai, his wife and her new lover in attendance, he curled fetally in the back seat of his car, waiting for his heart to burst, wishing himself away. He did not think to pray, though there was religion in his past, even a youthful flirtation with a monastic order. He knew that only what the physicists call a counterfactual - something that didn’t happen in fact but might have in an altered reality - could cheat fate. And so, with all the doped-up, delusional power he could muster, he fashioned that other reality in the matrix of his mind, and offered his own soul as its guarantor. Brigit recovered, and though the skeptic in him refused credit for the miracle, he limped out onto La Cienega Boulevard with an itch at the base of his skull, a burst vessel in the iris of his right eye, and new faith in the phantasmic.

Two years later, after a scholarly immersion into the field of "emerging religions" and a required stint with the LAPD’s Missing Persons Unit, he received his P.I. license and opened the offices of Raszer’s Edge, a lost and found service for misplaced souls. On this very day, in Palm Springs, he was celebrating his fifth year at it, and the enterprise could be deemed a modest success. Raszer had pulled off what few men can: he’d turned his quest for personal salvation into a career.