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It was a bright spring morning when I entered the rooms at 77 Slaker Street to find Mr. Zane pouring over a letter. He didn’t return my greeting, and I stepped near to peer over his shoulder. The letter showed a date and then listed seven addressees. For the receivers of this letter, there were no street numbers or towns, just names, and the names themselves were extremely generalized: Astrology, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, New Thought.

Then there was a paragraph for each addressee. I tried to read the paragraphs but didn’t get far since I know so little about each of the religions mentioned and the text was full of jargon apparently lifted from the religion itself. At the bottom of the page was a signature carefully calligraphed in capital letters, ATOZ. I could see that the paper had been folded in two places, and on the table lay a business size envelope carefully slit open as Mr. Zane habitually does with his mail.

Finally my friend looked up, noticed me, and said, “Stetson, what do you make of this?”

“Nothing,” I responded, “I can’t read it.”

“Now, Stetson, you can read the words of it, can you not?”

“Well, some of them,” I agreed.

“What of it can you read?”

“Oh, the first few words. ‘There are in the heavens . . .’”

“Good, Stetson. Now can you read the first few words in the next paragraph?”

“‘Is there anyone who has never . . .’”

“That’s right. Now the next paragraph.”

“‘Great men have always . . .’”

“Next.” As I read Zane wrote something on his pad.

“‘Danger follows those who decide . . .’”

I glanced at his pad. There were now four words in a row as the beginning of a sentence. “There is great danger. . .”

“‘To begin a new way of life is . . .’”

“Go on.” Zane sounded urgent, perhaps a bit excited.

“‘Freedom! Let freedom ring . . .’” I was more familiar with these words.
 One more paragraph. Zane was watching me.

“‘Now is the time of unity . . .’” I wanted to go on and read this paragraph, but Zane stood up and began to pace excitedly.

“Stetson,” he said, “do you not understand? This says, ‘There is great danger to freedom now.’”

“No, I do not understand,” I dallied. “Where did you get the letter?”

“That’s why it’s so urgent, Stetson. I had a very intense dream last night from which I awoke in a heavy perspiration as if I had been standing very close to an open burning furnace. When I got up and came out, here on the table was this sealed letter, the same as one I had seen in my dream. See, the return address is merely the signature, the same as inside, ATOZ. I saw that in my dream, and I think I heard it, too, but I can’t seem to remember now how it sounds.”

“Well, what, pray tell, can you do with a letter that materialized out of thin air and has a clown’s return address? Nothing, seems to me.”

“I suppose you’re right for once,” my friend conceded and slumped into his chair, into that thoughtful mode out of which no one could rouse him.

I dozed for a while in my chair since I had been out on a medical call very late last night. It was a gentle wake up, slowly becoming aware of noise and commotion in the street below, voices raised, feet scuffling. Upon gaining full wakefulness, I started up and quickly made my way down the staircase to the street level. I stepped out in time to smell gasoline fumes and see a girl bursting into flames amidst an agony of cries and pleading that someone save her. I was too late. I saw the gasoline can, abandoned by the side of the street.

Thinking I had left Zane in the apartment lost in undisturbable thought, I was greatly surprised to see him near the center of the commotion. I watched him thinking, listening, then his eyes focusing with fierce intensity. I followed the line of his gaze and saw for myself at the bottom of the ball of fire a small black box. At that moment I knew Zane would get that box.

I moved into the crowd, asking the identity of the girl. “Her name was Freedom,” they said. All around me, wherever I turned with my question, the answer always returned, “Her name was Freedom.”

I looked again for Zane, stepped up on the curb, and sited him close to where the fire was burning down.

I paid attention to the crowd dispersing now from the edges. “Her name was Freedom,” the people murmured, slowly shaking their drooping heads. Soon Zane would reach for the little black box. Freedom, where had I heard that word recently? Then I remembered, “There is great danger to freedom now.” That was the encrypted warning in the letter. Obviously we had missed the clues and the timing; we had failed to save Freedom from the burning. I felt sick; I wanted to vomit. I made my eyes hunt Zane again.

The box now rested a little removed from the heat of the fire. Had Zane kicked it free? I saw him brooding nearby, guarding it with darting eyes.

Then my attention was thoroughly distracted by a singular looking man in the crowd. He was tall with white hair and beard, dressed in white jeans and a white jacket, with silver shining eyes that darted even faster and more intensely than the dark eyes of my friend. Whenever this man moved, he seemed buoyed up by the crowd rather than impeded as were Zane and I. With smooth and lightening action, he came near the fire, scooped up the black box, and stood as if in the very midst of the fire, holding the box next to his chest.

As that tall man in white stood in the fire with the little box, I saw my world change colors before my eyes. First everything turned white, the clothes of everyone around me, the eyes of everyone who looked at me, the light post, the door and the letters of “77 Slaker Street.” It was an albino world. Second, everything went blood red, then black like the box, and it was dark. Soon the color lightened to gray, and I was able to discern white and red on people’s faces, and black and gray in the clouds, and a deep blank hole in the street where the fire had been.

Zane was at my side, tugging at my arm, pulling me after him up the stairs to our apartment. He had the black box. We shut the door on the stormy street now swarming with police investigators.

Before we reached the top of the stairs, we heard in rapid succession the sounds of a crackling fire, a sudden gunshot, someone vomiting, calling, coughing, fighting, and then singing. Zane set the black box on the table beside the letter. It contacted the wood with a ringing thud, my first clue to its weight and composition.

Zane was muttering. “His street name is Lam. He said his street name is L-A-M.” Amidst his muttering, my friend receded into that space where I could never follow him, a space in his mind so focused that nothing else mattered.

I sat across from him remembering the girl, the fire, the man. Oh yes, the man, the man dressed in white. Whenever I remembered him I liked him. I liked the tall and energetic bearing. I liked the darting eyes. I liked something about him that made me feel good in his presence, as if some day he might look right at me and actually like me.

I remembered the girl, Freedom they said her name was. I wondered, Who killed Freedom? I pondered the events, the seven times addressed letter, the seven colors that invaded my world on the street, and the seven sounds that bombarded us on the stairs. The letter had warned, “There is great danger to freedom now.” I wondered, Who killed Freedom?

His voice penetrated my concentration. “Stetson, who killed Freedom?”

Jolted by the coincidence of his question with my thoughts, I responded, “I don’t know. I think it’s bigger than one person’s doings.”

“Correct,” said he. “You’ve been thinking for some time; tell me what you think. Who killed Freedom?”

“Was it the religions, those listed in the letter?”

“Stetson, those religions received the warning; they did not create the warning or the danger.”

“Was it the colorful evils: lies, crime, taxes, illness, vengeance, pollution, and promises of relief?”

“The colors. Good. You’re thinking; think harder. The colors were what came from her fire.”

“Was it the sounds of governments trying to fix the evils: laws to regulate social health, disappearance of the middle class individualist, rape of the environment, laws to regulate sprawling cities, laws to regulate the computer, fitful peace talks, and more laws and more laws?”

“Stetson, all that is elementary. The steel block,” he nodded toward the table, “the steel block is involved. The man who called himself Lam almost disappeared with it, but in the midst of the darkest color, I took it from him. I’m not so sure I should have, now. I didn’t like him.”

I stood up to get a better look. The block was about fifteen centimeters long and five centimeters wide and five centimeters deep, the right size to fit in the hand like a dumbbell. I touched it’s shiny black surface and found it cold with a chill that entered and coursed through my body. I lifted it to discover it must weigh at least five pounds. There were marks on every surface, small gray and white marks that could have been some kind of hieroglyphics, and one sentence that I could read, “Whoever returns this steel block to its owner will understand.”

Zane was thinking again when I looked up, his eyes glassy and staring. I left quietly so as not to disturb him. The street was deserted except for two investigators. I nodded to them and went home.

My duties claimed my attention for several days. One evening I dropped by the Slaker Street apartment and found the fireplace cold, the bed unruffled, and two days’ bills piled at the entry. Both the steel block and the letter were gone. I wondered how Zane would go about trying to find the owner.

One week later, I again climbed the stairs at 77 Slaker Street to find Zane a changed man. He looked at me (where had I seen that look before?) and asked after my health, my family, my work. He fixed a decent supper for me with biscuit, eggs, and fruit. He asked what I had been reading recently. I kept waiting for him to tell me the news of his latest adventure. I had learned it was best to let him bring things up whenever he was ready, but this wait was turning out to be interminable. Finally, I asked, “Friend, where have you been?”

“I’ve been to the center, and I know the outcome!” he said as his eyes danced and glowed. “When you see again the man called Lam or his steel block, then you will understand.”

“So now you like that man called Lam? I thought you disliked him,” I puzzled.

“Oh, I like him. Actually I adore him, yes, I worship him. He so far surpasses my intellect and investigative powers that I am dwarfed in his presence, yet he still likes me. I can’t help but like him.” Zane was looking at me with that look I remembered from somewhere.

I went back to my practice and he returned to his lab instruments.

And then our world fell apart. I knew the approach of the disasters before others did. I read in the medical journals that there were now some strands of  bacteria able to mutate and multiply broader and faster than anything known before, way beyond our ability to keep up. Then the economy nose-dived so that shillings, and dollars, and rubles alike were useless for getting the goods. The environment finally released its vengeance in heat waves and droughts and floods and spreading contamination. Buildings collapsed, electricity failed, and I found myself frightened. The imminent danger of riots at home and terrorists everywhere made mockery of peace promises.

I walked over to 77 Slaker Street. Zane sat in the dark, waiting. I persuaded him to come and stay with us until this was over. I think I needed this strange new calmness that composed my friend. I wanted him near my family and me.

As we were getting his coat and hat and cane, he said, “Stetson, remember the man called Lam.”

How could he expect me to remember that now?

In fact, whenever I showed anxiety or frenzy, he would watch me with that new look and listen for a long time, then he would say, “My dear Stetson, remember the man called Lam.” His calmness calmed me.

I found myself saying it to calm myself, “Stetson, remember the man called Lam.”

One day I confronted Zane. I said, “How am I supposed to remember?  I never even knew this man called Lam.”

Zane said, “You did! You know him.”

If the governments can’t control the people, I guess the churches will, or at least they will try. So we watched as the different religions had their try at ruling the world, and then they raised their voices in a great grief. There was the grief of the scientific churches over the failure of science, the grief of the rich churches over the failure of greed, the grief of the mission churches, the cathedral and temple churches, the television and satellite churches, the ecumenical churches, and the Sabbath churches, each one stripped of power and helpless in the face of the disasters come on the world. Their grief was great.

When the churches had given up, when there was no more government, when people were dying on every side and all I could do was to hold their hands and wish them a good trip, that’s when what I thought was the greatest disaster of all came upon us.

He came from somewhere, I won’t even call him a human or a person, he was more like a dragon. They called him Dag. His mouth worked overtime in twists and turns of the cheek and lip that a person remembered for a long time. The words were crazy but they worked on a person’s mind.

“Whoever is happy today is dead tomorrow,” Dag proclaimed. “Peace is for cowards!” His slogans were taken up by the unhappy masses and slung from street to street.

With this new turn of events, I was really afraid, but Zane just said, “Remember the Lam, my dear Stetson, remember the Lam.” Those words calmed me again.

“Fight for your rights!” the new slogan cried. Then it was, “Gold ahead; seize the gold!” Dag was making nuclear weapons, they said. Dag would mount a great war. Dag would steal the gold from the huge spaceship coming our way.

Zane smiled and said, “Remember the Lam.”

The day I saw the spaceship was the most brilliantly happy and relief-filled day of my entire life. I shall remember it forever. It was as if the steel block had turned to shimmering gold and enlarged itself a billion times and more. And there above the golden block stood the man called Lam. He wore white jeans and a white jacket. His hair was silvery white, flowing in a breeze, and his eyes, like fiery silver, darted over the people of earth. Those eyes lit on me and then I knew where I’d seen the smile before. Yes, I could adore this man called Lam.

Then I found myself beside him. I looked around and there were my wife and family, and there also was my good friend Zane, right next to this man called Lam. Those eyes dart over us again. He seems satisfied. Then he turns to look at Dag and the people shouting the slogans of Dag.

Looking now at Dag and not the man called Lam, I think I will miss the main action. Instead, I get it all. Out of the Lam’s eyes courses a heavy sadness, so heavy I can see great drops drip from the line of sight, so that by the time it reaches Dag, it is only a sword’s width of fiery sadness.

Out of Dag’s eyes flashes to meet it a fiery sword of pride. “No pity,” he cries. “I want no condescension. I will fight you to the end.” And that’s what he does. Dag and his people fight until the fire within them cannot be contained and consumes them and all remembrances of them from off the earth.

We return to a brand new earth and create again. Years later, when we are sitting together at the new 77 Slaker Street, I finally get up the courage to ask Zane what he saw when he went away to return the steel block. This is as nearly as I can remember and reconstruct the story he told me of that adventure.

Once upon a time, Dag decided to make believe he was Lam, but he didn’t want to act kind like Lam, so he figured out a way to say he owned a world where he could rule the way he wanted to. But it wasn’t a happy world under Dag’s rule.

So one day Lam came. He was the rightful owner, and he came not as a warrior to take it back by show of strength but as a baby to take it back by show of love. Dag recognized the baby and tried to kill him. The child grew and showed his love and then went away to another planet. Then Dag made war on his mother, and all the friends Lam had loved, and the memorial commands he had given them.

The love inside these people was now contagious, so much so that when they died they simply multiplied. So Dag needed help and recruited the most powerful church on earth. This worked for awhile, but the time came when Dag needed more help and he successfully recruited the most powerful government on earth. Dag and church and government made an imposing triad. They found it so difficult to fight love itself that they focused instead on the memorial commands that seemed to grow Lam’s government right under Dag’s nose. They decided together to kill anyone who kept Lam’s memorial commands.

This is where my friend Mr. Zane happened upon the scene, looking innocently for the owner of the steel block. Dag recognized that steel block as the iron rod he had seen in Lam’s hand and had felt its power on his own mind. He reached for it greedily, but his hand crumpled and pained in the reach. He angrily arrested Zane and came in to his cell every hour to train Zane’ mind to track with his so he could use the steel block through my friend.

When I heard Zane talk about being used as a pawn of someone else, even if it was Dag, I had to smile—Zane, my super individualistic friend, who won’t even let himself be used by government investigators!

Zane says he felt his mind slipping. He claims that for once in his life he felt a consuming, crippling fear. He had always depended on thinking to find a way out of predicaments, and with this new threat to his free thinking, he knew his own game was lost. He turned the steel block over and over in his hands as he sat in his cell between Dag’s visits. One time he read the inscription, “Whoever returns this steel block to its owner will understand.” He thought of Lam and how he hadn’t liked him. He had hoped the steel block belonged to someone with the kind of brains and spunk that Dag had. But now he was afraid of what Dag might do with those brains and spunk. Lam began to look better and better to him.

He remembered how Lam had come at the time of the girl Freedom’s burning. Lam was there when trouble loomed. Perhaps Lam would come to him, too. The more he remembered, the more he believed that Lam would forgive him for not liking him at first and that Lam would come to him. It seemed to Zane’s mind now that Lam could do anything.

Then Dag opened the bars and came in. “We’re almost there, old friend,” he said with a smirk on his lip. “You’re almost all mine.”

Zane noticed himself quivering in the corner of the cell. He decided he would not be all Dag’s.

“Oh,” Dag said, “what was that that broke your concentration?” Zane thought Dag would strike him. Instead, he took a teaching pose.

“From now on you will think of nothing but what I tell you,” said Dag. “For now, you will look right here into my eyes, and this is what you will say in a masterful shout:

“Lam is a sham. Lam be dammed!”

Zane mustered a masterful shout. 

“Lam will stand. Lam, I’m your man!”

At the sound of that shout, Dag turned pale and green and gray, crumpled up, and slithered out under the door. Zane tried the lock and found it free. He swung the door open and there, as if about to knock, stood Lam.

It seems that Zane literally collapsed in Lam’s open arms and handed over the steel block. Zane realized he was being held close to Lam’s chest the same way he had seen him hold the steel block by the fire. And then he noticed that every nerve and cell in him was being energized and activated by that touch. He saw the colors again but they were bright colors this time, the colors of a rainbow and they centered around Lam’s head.

Zane said he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay near and do whatever Lam might need at any time. However, Lam sent him back to 77 Slaker Street. Lam gave him one message, “Remember the Lam.” He was to tell that message to anyone who would listen. He was to tell it when people were frightened. He was to tell it when Dag showed himself to the world and fought against the memorial commands. He was to tell it over and over again. “Remember the Lam.”

Zane begged to have a little more time with Lam before returning, and Lam consented. Because my friend asked, he was given a quick tour of events. He learned that the letter we had received was a warning to all, of Freedom’s demise on earth as Dag became more and more powerful. The burning of the girl Freedom was Dag’s most daring first act in his final drama. She had been carrying Lam’s iron rod because she loved Lam and he loved her and had given it to her in love. The colors we had seen were the evils that the churches couldn’t curb. The sounds we had heard were the evils that the governments perpetrated in trying to curb the other evils. Zane saw the origin of the feud between Dag and Lam, and how Dag intended to finish it off. He saw the disasters by which governments would learn their failures. He saw the grief by which the churches would mourn their failures. He saw Lam coming again and the steel block come to life as a golden city. He saw Freedom alive and unthreatened again on earth.

At the end of that tour Lam left and Zane returned to me. “Remember the Lam,” he said.

For either of us life will never be the same again. In this new world, I don’t treat the sick

There aren’t any sick people. Zane doesn’t investigate crime and murder because there are no crimes or murders.

“Stetson,” said Zane one day, “do remember what mystery we set out to solve shortly after receiving that letter of the seven addressees that was signed ATOZ?”

“Wasn’t the big question ‘Who killed Freedom?’”

“That’s correct. Now, do you know what was the larger mystery I had to solve?”

“Could it have been ‘Who is Dag?’”

“No, Stetson,” he said with great gravity. “The greatest mystery of all was ‘Who is Lam?’ I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked in my life. I had to know who the Lam was to me.”

One day after we had built again the apartment at 77 Slaker Street, after Zane had told me his story of the Lam, he said to me, “Well, my dear Stetson. Since you don’t seem to have any more work to do, won’t you please come with me on a piece of my work?”

“But what work do you have?” I asked in astonishment.

"I have yet to investigate who made the earth new after that dragon killed it.”