Rumors of war were troubling my mind. Every day I read another news story about the president’s mania for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Last fall I met a man who predicted that the war with Afghanistan would launch an apocalypse. The other day I sought him out to learn what war with Iraq might bring.
“The war will involve a great power,” he said. “The United States is a country that has done a lot of great things. Now, this was all written down in Grimms’ fairy tales. Grimms’ fairy tales were not written for children. They are for adults. The Grimms told a story about seven men who were trying to cross a river. The river was very deep, so to see if they could ford it they all waded in holding on to a spear. The man in front was wearing a hat. He was holding the spear very lightly, and he let go and drowned. But his hat kept floating ahead. So all the men behind him followed it, and they all drowned. The United States is the man with the hat.”
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I had not heard of The Third Eye. “You have not read that book?” he roared. “Then you have not read! I have read an entire library!”
Tariq opened his notebook. It was the size of an address book and contained many phone numbers and penciled notations. “I met a woman here in Chicago who was also an alien,” he said. “She was a white woman, but she was only using the body of a white woman. She wrote this in my notebook–‘We are not human beings having a temporary spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a temporary human experience.’”
Tariq waved his hand.
