Jack got right to the point.

“Mankind is in imminent peril, and I, quite honestly, can't see how anybody other than you has even the slimest chance of saving its collective asses.”

Trying to look pensive, I opened a Dansani and took a long swig from it. God, the bullshit I put up with just to keep a client happy. Why can't he just send me my money and spare me the melodrama? What is it about me that the biggest nut cases find me so irresistible? Why couldn't it be rich dudes or hot babes? Jesus, why me? The sad thing was that until recently Jack had been among my more sane clients. I felt a real sense of loss. At the same time I couldn't think of a remotely appropriate reply so I kept my mouth shut.

“You have to find Quetzalcoatl.”

Cuckoo I can cope with. But this was reeking of mental malfunction way beyond cuckoo, delusional paranoia maybe, or some even more obscure textbook malady. Therapy for this promised to require a professionalism I just didn't have.

“I can't even spell Quetzolcoatl,” I said. “I don't know what he looks like. And besides that he isn't real.” The hell with humoring him. Maybe a bitch slap to the cerebral cortex would bring him around, although I doubted it.

“Hardly anybody can spell Quetzolcoatl,” Jack noted. “Some days I can't. I don't want you to spell him, I want you to find him. He's real, he's very real, and he's somewhere Downeast, or one of his portals is. Nobody knows the region better than you. He's playing hide and go seek with us, and has given us some clues. I need you to track him down. The human race needs you to find him”

“I am a Webmaster, not a Super Hero. Chasing down regegade mythological godlike beings isn't my thing. You need the Fantastic Four or the Silver Surfer or at least Jack Bauer.”

“I need you, my man. Mankind need you. You're the one slim chance the human race has. You're it, like it or not.”

Like it or not? My choice? Well, let's go with not. Definitely not. Dealing with somebody as crazy as Jack, no matter how faithfully he pays his bill , was something I would never really cozy up to. It didn't matter how often I told myself it's all just make believe, that I should just to relax and have fun. Why did I attract so many crazies? They're drawn to me, a mysterious attraction I have done nothing to encourage. Well, maybe I've made a few unwise moves. Quetzalcoatl really wasn't any more imaginary than Captain D, a character I had devised from thin air to represent my Internet business.

What had started out as a lovely early summer day in Ellsworth, Maine, was deteriorating rapidly. I had hoped to get out of my office by mid-afternoon, to get to Blink Bonnie early to warm up for the scramble. Outside the sun was shineing brightly in a clear blue sky, the grass was green as green can be, while I was trappped inside with a lunatic. Was there a nice way to tell Jack I was way more interested in honing my backswing than in pretending to save the bizarre world pervading his crazed head?

"How long have we known each other? Jack asked. “Four years, going on five? In all that time have I ever given you reason to believe I was nuts? I mean really nuts? Okay, I know you don't really buy into the Mayan thing. That's fine. You humor me. I tell you what to put on the Site, and you keep a straight face while you put it there. Most of the time, anyway.”

He must have been reading my mind. I've gotta admit Jack didn't look crazy. Or at least he didn't have the look of a wild-eyed stallion I've seen in some certifieds. Jack looked like what, at least until recently, he was regarded as having been, a respectible academic type, a professor with a neatly trimmed beard, gray flecks at the temples, sensible horn-rimmed glasses. Although he had taken early retirement from his university, he had until recently done consulting work for it. His field was archeology, his specialty the Maya, and he had recently returned from Guat where he had been participating in a dig.

And, yes, for the first couple of years that I did his site, Jack seemed really quite normal. If he attached more significance to the Mayan calendar that I would have, he had lots of company. Literally millions of people were sure that December 21, 2012, would herald an event of great significance. Opinions varied tremendously as to what this event might be. But they were all really quite certain that it meant something really big. My own suspicion was that maybe the Mayans just got bored with calendar making.

In the early going, it hadn't mattered at all that Jack and I were marching to distinctly different drummers. New Agey as he was, his take on mankind's future was really quite pleasant. His belief was that we would all have entered into a new, higher, more loving realm of consciousness by December of 2012.

At one point, his take on 2012 was that it simply meant the end of an old Great Cycle, the beginning of a new one. Kind of like an odomoter turning over at 100,000 miles. It would simply begin again at 1. No way did it signify the end of the car.

A year ago, however, shortly after his return from Guat, things took a turn to the dark side. Jack dropped a bombshell when he announced that Q had contacted him personally and had made him privy to many strange and terrifying things.

Jack confided to me that Q contacted him shortly after the university had told him he wouldn't be coming on any more digs. I felt a vague sense blame for this. It had been some of the more wild claims on his Website that had upset the faculty committee. Of course, I wasn't really to blame; I hadn't put anything on the site without Jack's express approval. Still I wondered if I couldn't have toned things down a bit. I could have used smaller, less bold type, a more conservative, academic font, muted shades of gray instead of bright primary colors. With my urging, Jack probably would have approved a more acceptible ambience.

Nevertheless, Jack was adamant that in late December of 2012 the Earth and its Sun would make a rare alinement with the center of the Galaxy, an alinement the Maya had foretold accurately although nobody could begin to explain how these primitive Indians with no modern astranomical instrumentation could possibly have done so, and that this alinement would cast mankind to a totally new era.

Jack had tenure and could have stayed with the university. But he had no interest in doing so. To Jack the idea of long-term security seemed laughable.

Creating Jack's Website had gotten me intimately exposed to Quetzalcoatl. Exposed, but nevertheless confused. Quetzalcoatl seemed to be not a single god, but various gods of the Mayans and Aztecs. Literally translated, Quetzalcoatl means “feathered serpent.” But Quetzalcoatl may also have been a real guy.

Compounding the confusion, Quetzalcoatl goes by the names of Gukumatz, Nine Wind, and Kukulcan among others. Quetzalcoatl maintaining a host of avatars with whom he is intimately connected with or represented by. There are also certain gods that Quetzalcoatl is involved with most of the time as well, such as Xolotl, Tlaloc, Xipe, and Tezcatlipoca. These "upper level" gods are either contrary, complimentary, or both at the same time towards Quetzalcoatl, creating a sense of duality.x

Get it?



Quetzalcoatl impresssed himself deeply on Mesoamerica. Some of the complexity stemmed from the fact that these people shared cultural components with one another. Civilizations worshiping the Feathered Serpent included the Olmec, the Mixtec, the Toltec, the Aztec, and the Maya. This deity was important in art and religion in most of Mesoamerica for close to 2,000 years, from the Pre-Classic era until the Spanish Conquest.

The worship of Quetzalcoatl sometimes included human sacrifices, although in other traditions Quetzalcoatl was said to oppose human sacrifice.

The Maya of the 1500s definitely thought Q was a real guy. Much of their religious lore had to do with his Second Coming. They were looking for a tall, fair-skinned, bearded figure, and when Cortes sailed in, he seemed to fit the bill. In their estacy, they weren't prepared to defend themselves. This comfusion made things insanely easy for the Conquistidores. Montezuma was blind-sided.

The historical Q may have been the founder of Tula, a great city. With Q's departure, it went into decline. The Site was about 2012, the end date of the Mayan calendar, a date many believed would be monumentally important to mankind. Opinions varied as to what all this meant, but millions of people subscribed to it to some extent.

Getting to know Q depends on interpreting things called gllyphs, or marks on stone. Jack was as good as anybody at figuring these out, but various other experts didn't necessarily read them as Jack did. The situation is made more confusing yet due to the fact that much of what we might know about Q has been passed down orally generation to generation. Story tellers have a way of improving their material, which often means making it up as they go along. This can make their storeies more entertaining, but disconcertainly less reliable.

This was all nice and scholarly and made for civilized discussions over tea and crumpets and gave countless grad students fertile grounds for writing long and winding disserations. But then Jack went off the deep end. He announced that Q had introduced himself in person and was making him privy to much heretofore unavailable information.

It didn't help Jack's case, shakey as it was, when he confessed that Q had first appeared when Jack was sitting in on a native ceremony that involved imbiding in ayahuasca, a brew that propels users into realms that seem convincingly spiritual and supernatual where, very often, they encounter deceased ancestors. Although Jack insists he can distinguish different varieties of reality, it was shortly after this that Jack's university stopped inviting him to come along on digs.

Jack insisted that drug-taking was a professional duty, a dirty job that somebody had to do, a sort of when in Rome obligation. To do his work he needed to ingratiate himself with the natives. For this I took him pretty much at his word. As far as I knew, when he was home he wasn't a pothead or cocaine addict. I never knew him to take a second drink. He wasn't one to engage in extra-legal activities.

There was a persistent rumor that the university had offered Jack a sweet, under-the-table settlement for his early retirement. It seems that Jack had been carrying on a torrid affair with a graduate student. Word had it that he had taken her to Guat and introduced her to ayahuasca. There was nothing illegal in any of this. She was a consenting adult well into her twenties. Still, this wasn't the sort of thing the university featured in its brochures. Not exactly the sort of thing that would go over well with alcready anxious parents.

Before long, Jack was explaining; to anybody who would listen that Q is a real guy, not a human being exactly, but an extradimensional whose job it is to monitor civilizations capable of developing technologically. It is a given that eventually such civilizations will develop a capability to leave their home planets. Most of these civilizations will be utterly unfit to spread their seeds elsewhere. It is Q's sole mission to snuff out such civilizations before they have a chance to ruin the neighborhood, so to speak.

According to Jack, Q had made it crystal clear that the human race was utterly unfit for colonizing. As far as Q was concerned there wasn't anything to discuss. Mankind was engaging in way too many wars, massacres, bombings, acts of terrorism, devious dealings, assaults upon all other species, and environmental crimes to ever be considered for membership in the Interdimensional Federation. In his billion years or so of monitoring civilizations, Q had never encountered a more hopeless cause than humankind. Jack was certain that no amount of begging, pleading, or cajoling would matter in the least. According to Jack, Q should have pulled the plug in 1969, when man first stepped on the moon. According to interdimensional policy, mankind should never have been allowed to get this far.

The human race would have been put to rest back then had it not been for a very strange happening earlier that year.

Orville Moody won the U.S. Open.

A marine sargeant with a name best suited for a bowler, a golfer who had never won anything, beat the world's best players in winning the national championship.

Q, who long ago had taken up golf in his spare time, giggled every time he thought of this. He spent much of 1969 giggling. Apparently giggling and exterminating the human race were incompatible activities. Giggling won out.

This was Q's first bout of giggling. Even after several billion years of evolution, Q had never developed a sense of humor. Irony was lost on him, as was cynicism and an appreciation for a sense of the absurd. He knew these things as intellectual abstracts and he wanted to know more about them. But he had no innate sense of them.

Giggling over Orville Moody made him feel giddy. At first he found the feeling disturbing, but before long he came to find it curious, even enjoyable. He began searching for other ways to bring it on.

If Q was lacking in certain distinctly human ways, his billions of years of evolution had allowed him to develop other remarkable traits. He could assume whatever form he wished whenever he wished. He could will himself instaneously to any place in any dimensions, of which there seemed to be no end. He could create solid objects of all descriptions by simply imagining them.

Early on I asked Jack how Q planned to snuff out mankind. Jack said th actually had asked Q this, and hadn't gotten a real answer. What he got was a shrug of the shoulders. Not a ”I don't know“ shrug, but a “don't bother me with insignificant details” shrug. Jack had no doubt Q could snuff out the human race effortlessly, by snapping his fingers or wrinkling his nose or just wishing it over and done with.

What he couldn't do at all well was play golf.

He had taken up the game some 500 years ago, joining Scottish sheepherders as they jockeyed roundish stones into small dug holes. He claims to have been first to suggest that different styles of crook might prove useful in hitting different sorts of shots. Q claims to have made countless eforts to be helpful to humankind, gestures that have gone mostly unappreciated.

He had maintained his enthusiasm throughout the era of featheries and gutta patcha, wooden, steel, and now graphite shafts. In various guises, he had played with Young Tom Morris, Harry Vardan, Walter Hgan, Sam Snead, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods.

At no time did he acquire any real competancy.

In playing golf, he had set certain ground rules for himself, the only sporting thing to do. The form he assumed was always within human potential, currently a carbon copy Tiger Woods. He always resisted any urges he had to simply will the ball into the hole. The equipment he used conformed to U.S.G.A. specifications. Although he generally teed it up in the rough, he tried to keep his nudges within a six-inch range. He seldom conceded himself putts of over four feet. And he seldom broke ninety from the whites.

There were times when he would drive the ball over 300 yards, but it seldom landed in the short grass. He hit hooks and slices with equal abandon. From 100 yards out, often as not he missed the green, skulling the ball too far or laying sod up under it and falling way short. Day in and day out, consistent as any physical law, he botched pitch and chip shots. There were times when his putter seemed to require an exorcist.

Q's marked futility certainly wasn't from lack of practice. He had plenty of time to practice, and seldom wasted it. He handled his monitoring responsibilities with ease. Effortlessly he could distribute himself to countless locations simultaneously. Seldom did he have to intervene in local affairs. He could scarcely recall the last time he had to extinghish a civilization. Almost invariably, they did it to themselves. If they didn't vaporize themselves atomically, they poisoned or carbonized their atmospheres, fell victim to runaway nano-technology, or created killer biological forms.

I found Jack's description of Q's golf problems intriguing. Jack, I knew, didn't play the game, had never been the least bit interested in it. Nevertheless, his remarks about Q's game seemed to suggest a certain intimacy with the problems players deal with.

I decided I didn't want Jack to go away mad. He was far too interesting a guy to let go lightly. I thought I'd humor him.

"So if I were to look for Q, where would I look? I haven't a clue as to where he might be."



“Lisa and I brought some ayahuasca back with us. and the very first time we used it here, Q appeared.


Jack, good old respectible Jack, was practicing gonzo archilogy, and seemed to think nothing of it. He brought to mind Tim Leary, allthough as far as I could tell, he didn't encourage all of his students to turn on. Just Lisa, and she was a consenting adult in an already intimate relationship with him.

"Q told me he really likes Maine, especially Downeast Maine. He said there was just one thing he didn't like—the golf season was too damn short. He said he had established a portal hereabouts, a doorway leading to his golf dimension. He called it Portal Green, and described it as a Master's Green. He said he had found a highly appropriate place for it. We have to figure out what Q would regard as highly appropriate. To do this, we have to conmsider everything we know about Q. “

"And just what do we know?”

“Well, we know he's a history buff. He's been tracking the human race for the past three or four thousand years, and I have reason to believe he's intervened on more than a few occasions.”

“So I check out historical sites.”

“Yeah, all of those, and I have some other ideas as well. Q likes to eat well, so an especially good restaurant is a possibility. Q is also a bit materialistic. Especially good shops could qualify And, of course, he's a golf nut, he might find a golf course to be highly appropriate. At times, he's been a bit of a mystic. I once heard him describe the intertidal zone in mystical terms, as a place that is neither land nor sea, but a magical inbetween.

“Guess he has a thing for periwinkles.”

“He also likes art. He told me once people should spend more time making pictures, less time making war.

“He seems like the typical tourist.”

“When Russia announced a determination to go to Mars, Q said that was the last straw. I think he was ready to snuff out mankind then and there. I managed to divert his attentin by bringing up Michelle Wie. Q seems to have taken a paternalistic interest in Michelle.

I did a website for a guy claiming to be an authority on string theory. His calculations pointed to the likelihood of countless althernative universes infinitesimally close together. Getting from onme to another, he posited, would require more energy than could be found in our entire universe.

Evidently Q had found a way to bridge the gap.

What the hell, I thught; I might as well humor the guy a bit more. “Just what do I do if I find Portal Green,” I asked.

“Get back to me,” Jack replied. “Get back to me as quickly as possible. Whatever you do, don't enter that portal. Don't even think about it. I can't begin to describe how disastrous that could be.”


See pages 11-20