Free The Night Watchman by Richard Zimler Page B

realize that the Spectre was a lot more efficient than anyone normally was at finding clues. He was able to decide real quickly what was significant and meaningful in a room – what had been removed or added, for instance. Dad’s tests trained him for that. They made him like a blind person who hears tiny, faraway sounds that other people can’t.
    When I was a kid, I figured the Spectre didn’t feel the emotions that living people felt. And because of that, he could focus on finding Ernie and exclude everything else. But now I know that he gets panicked. In fact, I think he knows more fear than anybody I’ve ever met, even my brother.
    Kids don’t have the experience to know what is unusual or unique, and I assumed that everyone was like me and got messages on their hand or some other part of their body. Only when I told Mom about them did I realize that I was more fortunate than other people. She said that she never got messages, and that nobody she knew ever did. She said that I ought not to tell anyone about them. It would be our secret.
    O nosso segredo, she said in Portuguese, with her hand resting on top of my head, as if she were blessing me, which made it seem as if she might still care about me in her own, mostly silent way. Although if I wanted to be mean, I’d say her own useless way. Because she didn’t defend Ernie and me enough. I try not to think about that but I do.
    When I was eleven, in September of 1981, we had a guest preacher from Denver – a theology professor named Thurmond – who told us in his sermon that angels didn’t really exist. He said they were metaphors for how God watched over us. The old man’s words stunned me with a kind of electric jolt, because I knew instantly that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
    That’s when I stopped calling whoever left me messages ‘the Spectre’. Instead, I started calling him by an angelic name, and I chose Gabriel, though I never meant that he was the biblical archangel; I would have had to have been a lot crazier than I was to think that a powerful angel from the Bible would come down from heaven to visit us at our ranch in rural Colorado and help me take Dad’s tests. No, I figured that my Gabriel was just a minor sort of angel who had only a tiny bit of God’s power – not enough to save our lives.
    Gabriel always calls me H in his notes to me, so I started calling him G. Before I get a message from him, I always lose track of myself. I usually disappear for between ten minutes and an hour. I never know where I go.
    The notes I receive are always printed – never written in script.
    At some point (I must have been twelve or thirteen), I began to figure out that G took control of my body. Though for a long time I wasn’t sure of that, because I never came back to myself knowing what had happened to me. I never asked Ernie to tell me what I’d been up to, because I didn’t want him to know that I hadn’t been there – in my body, I mean.
    My temples usually throb when he wants to take me over. But if G comes really fast, in an emergency, I get no warning – his entry feels as though I’ve been walloped on the back of my head.
    I’ve known for sure that G takes control of me ever since I asked one of my police colleagues to watch me when I examined the blood-soaked clothing of a restaurant owner who’d been stabbed to death. That was sixteen years ago.
    Staring at really bad bloodstains makes me vanish, though I can sometimes hold G off if I’m determined enough.
    My police colleague told me I’d rushed around crime scene as if the walls of the restaurant were about to collapse on us. The few words I’d spoken to him were in English. I’d also asked him for a cigarette, and I don’t smoke.
    Gabriel knows Portuguese, I’m pretty sure, but he refuses to write it. He runs around a crime scene like his mind has been set on fire. Maybe because there’s a countdown always nearing zero in his world.
    When I was fourteen, I