“That’s what I said,” agreed Danny as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of his suit coat to put it on.
“No,” corrected Gerlach, “we’re not wearing uniforms; we are meant to look uniform. People call us men in black because they remember the uniforms. They’re reacting to the look. But they can’t tell us apart. They could look at five of us and all they remember are the clothes, the sunglasses, the attitude. No one remembers what we look like. That’s the point.”
Danny looked at him. “Really?”
“If we all wore bright red cowboy hats, they’d call us men in red cowboy hats. It’s simple manipulation.”
The tech held his arms up and looked at the sleeves. “Huh,” he said. “I never thought of it that way.”
Gerlach smiled and looked down at the coffeemaker. “What color eyes do I have?”
“What?” asked Danny.
The agent poured coffee into his cup. “What color eyes?”
“Um … green? No, brown.”
Gerlach looked at him. “Blue. Maybe you’d remember my hair color. Maybe you’d say I was a red-haired man—if this is my real hair color and not a dye job; or maybe you’d stop looking after you noticed the suit, but you’ve worked with me for seventeen weeks and you don’t know my eye color, and you’d probably be off three inches on my height and fifteen pounds on my weight. These suits make us invisible. We’re stamped out of the same mold.”
The tech grunted. “That’s kind of cool.”
“It’s efficient.”
“I guess.” Danny glanced over at the screens. “So … where’s our boy tonight? You sure he’s not here in the church?”
“I’m sure.”
“Where is he?”
Gerlach smiled a thin little smile. “Working.”
CHAPTER 43
Beyond Beyond
6:05 P.M.
Angelo Luz carried a carton of sugar packets out of the storeroom and set it down on an empty table, removed his knife, flicked the blade into place, and cut open the box. The music that played from the speakers mounted around the shop were Gregorian chants. Church music. Sad, slow, haunted. The music conjured images of strange angels and dying saints and the light from stained-glass windows.
He moved from table to table refilling the wire sugar racks. While he worked, his eyes kept flicking over to the table behind the café register, where the pretty white girl sat with Sunlight and Corinda. She had such a lovely face, such a long and elegant throat, such fiery red hair.
The doleful music filled his mind.
CHAPTER 44
Beyond Beyond
6:09 P.M.
“How do you know that?” cried Dana. “How do you know anything about those autopsy reports?”
Corinda and Sunlight sat across from her. Neither said a word, letting her work it out.
Dana banged her fist on the tabletop, making the teacups dance. “This is not normal.”
“This,” said Sunlight, “is the larger world.”
Dana felt the room spinning, and she placed her hands flat on the table to keep herself from spilling and tumbling away. Corinda, seeing her distress, took one of Dana’s hands in both of hers.
“It’s scary now,” she said, “but the more you travel in the world of spirits, the less frightening it gets. After a while it’s so much sweeter and safer than the physical world.”
“How can any of this be real, though?” said Dana, almost pulling her hand away.
Sunlight answered that. “Reality itself is unreal. Reality is a perception. We each see the world in a certain way, and that is real to us, but we don’t all see it in the same way.”
“How’s that possible? I see this table, these teacups, this bunch of grapes, and even if you didn’t and I drew a picture of it, you’d see what I saw.”
“We’d share your perception of it,” he said. “And our perceptions greatly overlap. Sometimes we share a perception of a thing and there is an agreement on the soul level that this is how we will both remember it, because it allows us to communicate without needless complication. Humans do this all the time. It’s one of the ways in which we communicate on the purely physical plane, but it is not the only way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our minds are evolving faster than the physical form,” said Sunlight. He picked up a strawberry and studied it for a long moment before continuing. “Organic matter has limitations imposed on it, but the mind and the soul do not. They have the potential to expand and transform at exponential rates. Not for everyone, though, and not at the same rate of speed. What people call psychics or intuitives or spiritualists are those who have embraced this change to various degrees, and who, through practices such as yoga, meditation, and other forms of enrichment, encourage their own spiritual evolution.”