He ate a plate of scrambled eggs, French toast, pancakes, hash browns, and a Diet Coke. He scarfed them down as I watched, un-self-conscious, uncaring of the bits and pieces of food that fell onto his shirt and lap. Occasionally, he would pick them out from his lap and eat them and then dive back into his plate of food. And then take a slurp of Diet Coke.
After each plate was emptied and he was done, he took a deep breath and then said, "So, where are we now?" I told him what city we were in. "No, no," he said. "Where are we in the story? Is this still the rising action? I know we're not at the climax yet, we can't be."
I didn't know what that meant, so I said, "I'm supposed to bring you to the Wall."
"Of course you are," he said. "She wants the Wall to collapse. She wants to live again. Not that she was ever alive, exactly. She's always been dead. She was born dead."
"The ORACLE?" I asked.
"The Vision," he said, "of Days to Come and Days Gone By. The Queen of All Our Yesterdays. The Secret Rose. Do you know the poem?"
"No," I said.
"It's about," he paused, "well, I don't really know what it's about. But there's this bit at the end: 'A woman of so shining loveliness, that men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, a little stolen tress. I, too, await the hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, like the sparks blown out of a smithy and die?' That's what she is, you know."
"I don't..." I started and then stopped, because he stabbed his fork downward into the table.
"You would do anything for her," he said. "Thresh corn at midnight. You would bring down the stars in the sky for her, wouldn't you?"
I nodded.
He left his fork on the table. "Of course you would," he said. "That's what she does. That's how I wrote her. And you." He got up from the table. "Time to go."
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To find the third," he said.
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