The PowWow

Chapter 1 - The Depth of Nothing

The man on the bench had been there since morning.

Not the bench — the pain. The bench was just where he'd ended up after three blocks of walking had become two blocks too many. He sat with the stillness of someone who had learned not to move more than necessary, one hand pressed flat against his side, the other flat on the bench supporting his posture. The park was February-empty. Dog walkers at the edges. A jogger on the far path. The city moving around its center with complete indifference to whatever any specific person was carrying.

The man who sat down beside him didn't announce himself.

He was just there — already present before anyone registered the arrival. He was not a young man and not a well-dressed one. The coat was heavy and had been washed more times than it had been replaced. The boots were sound but not recent. He carried a Bible — not a new one, not a study edition with color-coded sections and a ribbon marker. A battered one. The kind that had been read rather than kept. And read often.

He looked at the man on the bench with the attention of someone who had nowhere else to be and had decided that this was where he was.

"You're in pain," he said.

Not a question. Not a pastoral opening. Just the fact of what he saw, said plainly.

The man on the bench looked at him — the wary, lateral look of a person in a public space being addressed by a stranger. He had the face of someone in his late fifties who had been told the word chronic by a doctor and had learned what it meant in practice.

"Back," he said, after a moment. "Old injury. Nothing—" He stopped. Adjusted. "Nothing that gets better."

The man with the Bible nodded. Like this was information he had already been given and was confirming.

"May I pray with you?"

The man on the bench looked at him for a long moment. At the coat. At the Bible. At the face, which had nothing in it that was performing anything.

He nodded. Small. The nod of someone who had run out of objections rather than someone who had found a reason to say yes — but a nod nonetheless.

The man with the Bible reached over. One hand, placed on the man's shoulder. He bowed his head and he prayed — not long, not theatrical. Brief and specific in the way of someone addressing someone they knew. The words had the quality of a direct line rather than a broadcast. He prayed for healing. He thanked the Lord for this man by his full name, which he had not been given. He said amen.

And then the man on the bench went very still.

His hand came away from his side. Slowly. With the involuntary quality of a person whose hand has been resting against a pain that is no longer there.

He pressed his hand back. Harder. Checking. The way you check the absence of something you've carried so long that its absence seems like an error.

He stood up.

He stood up the way people stood up when they had forgotten how simple standing up was — not gradually, not with the careful management of a man who had learned to anticipate what rising cost him. He stood up and straightened fully and the expression on his face moved through several stages very quickly before it arrived at something that had no name except what it was.

He turned to the man with the Bible.

"What did you—" He stopped. Looked at his own hands. Back at the man. "What happened?"

"Nothing much," the man with the Bible said simply.

"But you—" The man on the bench was already in motion, already looking at his hands again as if they belonged to someone he was meeting for the first time. He looked up once more — something filling his face that was too large for the expression he had available for it — and then he was moving. Not walking. Something closer to striding. The gait of a man who had something to do and a body that had just remembered it was capable of doing it.

The man with the Bible watched him go.

Then, quietly, to the retreating figure already reaching the park's edge:

"Go in peace. Your journey has the my approval."

He said it the way he said most things — as though the words were already correct. He was not attending to the words. He was attending to the man. His eyes followed the figure until it turned the corner and was gone.

Then he picked up his battered Bible, stood, and walked in the other direction.

February had opinions.

Not the polite, retreating kind of February that understood its role as the year's least useful month and conducted itself accordingly. This was the aggressive variety — gray skies pressing down like a ceiling with structural doubts, cold that had long since stopped being bracing and settled into the hostility of something that had decided to stay and was billing for the inconvenience.

I was on the couch with a legal pad, a mug of coffee that had made the journey from hot to warm to ambient to whatever this is now in roughly the time it had taken me to write four words and cross out three, and two and a half pages of wedding logistics that had expanded from a single Post-it note over the last six weeks through no particular effort of my own. The list kept growing. That was the nature of the thing — Jacob and Naomi's engagement had put a kind of pleasant low hum in the family atmosphere, the kind that made Thursday dinners warmer than usual and made Rebecca look at Jacob with the expression of a woman who had very strong feelings and was being very deliberate about not expressing all of them at the dinner table, and the ambient warmth of that hum apparently generated logistics the way warmth generates condensation. Venue questions. Guest list considerations. The theological debate over whether Jacob would consent to a receiving line or whether receiving lines constituted an unreasonable imposition on the structural integrity of the institution of marriage. Notes on all of these. Two and a half pages' worth.

The legal pad was not, however, what I was thinking about.

Jacob was at his desk. Bare feet in the dog bed — which was not the resting place of any dog, had never housed any dog.

The Revised Geneva Translation was open in front of him. He had been reading since approximately seven forty-three. His coffee had been cold since approximately eight fifteen. He did not appear to consider these developments related.

Three months since Suriel's accounts had dissolved. Three months since Jacob had spoken the name in the cold outside the library.

Three months of nothing.

Which I appreciated. I genuinely, sincerely appreciated the nothing. Nothing was good. Nothing was restful. Nothing gave Jacob and Naomi time to strategically attack wedding plans, which for Jacob, meant doing nothing other than agreeing with whatever Naomi wanted. Whenever she got stressed over something, he’d wrap her up in a gentle hug, kiss her lovingly on the head and tell her the Lord had it covered.

Nothing was also three months for me to catalog every unusual story that drifted across my desk for a Riel Foundation fingerprint that wasn't there. Every funded project, every platform that grew faster than seemed natural, every anecdote of healing or community or spiritual authority — running the scan, checking the wiring, looking for the hand behind the curtain that wasn't on stage yet. Waiting for the shape on the horizon.

The shape wasn't there.

I kept looking anyway, which I had noticed but not yet addressed with myself directly.

My phone buzzed.

Roiya: Won't be in until after noon. Brunch date with William. Don't make a face.

I made a face at my phone.

William. I turned the name over for a moment. William was new. Curtis was still in the picture — I thought. It was honestly hard to tell. Curtis I had a general understanding of. William was unknown data, and I was not going to do anything with that information, because I had been specifically and directly informed that Roiya's social life was not my department, and I had accepted this designation.

I typed back: Have fun and a thumbs-up emoji. Then I stared at the thumbs-up. Then I added: Tell William nothing. Then I deleted Tell William nothing and sent only the thumbs-up with the confidence of a man who had learned something about himself.

My phone rang. Curtis.

"Tell me you have something," I said, because Curtis calling at nine-forty on a Tuesday meant either new information or a complaint, and the new information category had been running low lately.

"I have nothing." He delivered this with the wounded dignity of a man making an official statement. "I want to be transparent about that before I explain how comprehensive my nothing is."

"You called to tell me you found nothing."

"I called to tell you I found nothing in a way that should not be possible." The pause of a man composing himself. "Levi. Three months. I've given this case a significant portion of my available cognitive resources. Evenings. Weekends. I canceled something on a Saturday."

"I appreciate that, Curtis."

"The Riel Foundation's operational accounts dissolved across eleven jurisdictions in a seventy-two hour window. S. Riel Holdings, the subsidiary structure, the affiliated entities — all of it. Not frozen. Not moved. Gone, as in the records appear to have experienced collective amnesia about whether these entities existed in any meaningful sense." Another pause. "I've worked corporate dissolution before. Offshore structures. Layered holdings designed to resist forensic accounting. There’s always a footprint somewhere…except this time."

"To be fair," I said, "you've never encountered what he is either."

A longer silence. The kind Curtis produced when he was electing not to pursue a line of inquiry because the inquiry's conclusions lived in a neighborhood he didn't want to visit.

"I've been consulting with Detective Stryker," he said, with a shift in register that was subtle and completely impossible to miss. A certain brightness that belonged somewhere else in a sentence and had relocated here without asking permission.

"Yeah?" I said.

"She's been running a more official thread from the police department's side. We've had several productive sessions."

Several productive sessions.

"Very professional," I said.

"Extremely. She's thorough. Her documentation is excellent." A beat. "She uses color-coded tabs."

"Does she."

"Yes. It's a — it's a good system. Very organized." The brightness again, just at the edges of it.

"Curtis."

"The point," he said, with recovered composure, "is that the official thread and my thread have arrived at the same conclusion. Nothing. He moved everything before either of us could land on it. The money, the structure, the corporate history — gone. Dissolved." He paused. "I have documented this absence very thoroughly."

"Send it over," I said. "I'll give it the attention it deserves."

"It's a substantial document."

"I believe you completely."

He hung up with the quiet integrity of a professional who had delivered his report and maintained his dignity throughout, which was more than most people could say about delivering a report titled Three Months of Nothing: A Comprehensive Account.

I set the phone down on the legal pad.

"He found nothing," Jacob said.

Into the translation. Without looking up.

"Yep," I said.

Jacob turned a page.

I made a note about the venue question. Crossed it out. Rewrote it more specifically. Added a note about whether Jacob had a position on floral arrangements, or whether to just ask Naomi, because Jacob would just agree.

The phone buzzed again. Not a call — a text, from a number I didn't recognize. I opened it and found it was a forwarded contact from Jeremiah: Dr. E. Pryce, St. Catherine's Medical. One of the documented names. That was disturbingly like the financial trail we were trying to follow. It meant nothing to me. I could usually count on Jeremiah to find something to get my mind away from tasks that turned it to Jell-O, but the gelatinous feeling was creeping in.

The call came four minutes later.

He had heard about a man.

No church. No building. No platform, no Sunday service, no website, no stage, no Sunday morning with warm amber lighting and a full-bodied band and carefully managed sight lines. Just a man with a battered Bible who appeared in streets and in parks and on corners, and when he stopped, he prayed over people. And the people — Jeremiah chose the word with care — were healed.

"Verifiably?" I said. Jell-O gone, full engagement occurred. Engagement…did Jacob want to wear shoes? Hmm, ask Naomi.

"Medical documentation in at least two cases," Jeremiah said. "I have names. One of them I've already sent you."

"Dr. Pryce." The text made more sense then.

"She treated the patient before and after. She'll talk." A pause. "There are other accounts. Less clinical. But the quality of them is consistent. What happens when this man prays is not ambiguous to the people it happens to."

I was already sitting up. The legal pad had found itself in my hand again, the wedding logistics turned over to a fresh page. "How long has he been at it?"

"By the earliest account I've found — four years. He doesn't stay in one place. He moves." Jeremiah's voice had the quality it had when he was placing something in front of you and waiting to see how you held it. "No fixed location. No building. No organization behind him as far as anyone can tell."

I wrote that down. Underlined no organization.

"His name?" I said.

"The accounts don't agree," Jeremiah said. "He doesn't offer it freely. Most people describe him by what he looks like or where they encountered him or what happened when he prayed." A pause. "Go see what there is to see."

He hung up.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment.

Jacob had looked up from the translation. He was watching me with the patient attention he gave to things he had understood were going somewhere, waiting to see where they went.

"No building," I said. "No platform." I looked at the notes on the fresh page. "No Riel Foundation involvement." I paused. "Not as far as anyone can tell."

Something moved in Jacob's expression. Not the cataloging quality. Something quieter and less categorized than that.

The obvious thing — the thing that arrived first, before I had consciously assembled the question, that my nervous system had already written a full report on and submitted for review — was the familiar sequence: real gift, find the mechanism underneath, find the funding structure, find the hand behind it, find where Suriel has planted himself in the infrastructure of something that looks like ministry. It was a reflex. A practiced, field-tested, previously-validated reflex.

"Levi."

I looked at Jacob.

He looked at me the way he looked at things he had already identified and was deciding whether this was the moment to say what he had identified. It was a specific look. I knew it the way I knew most of Jacob's looks — from long, close familiarity and the occasional cost of not reading it correctly.

He held it a moment longer.

Then he looked back at the translation.

He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to. The look had said it completely, had delivered the full message without a syllable — the message that said I see what is happening and we are going to address it and right now we have work to do.

I looked at the notes.

No building. No platform. No organization. Four years. Verified healings. Moves. Battered Bible. Doesn't give his name. Go see what there is to see.

Not everything was a Suriel scam. I knew that. I had known that since before I knew what the scam looked like when it was running. I picked up the pen.

"I'll find him," I said.

Jacob turned a page.

The coffee was cold. February leaned on the windows. The dog bed held Jacob's feet with the patience of something that had made its peace with its situation.

The legal pad had a new page and a name at the top — Dr. E. Pryce — and the beginning of the shape of a thing I didn't yet have the full outline of.

That was fine.

We never did, at the beginning.

Lord, keep our eyes where they belong.