SHAPESHIFTER
by Jon Rappoport
January 21, 2012
My phone buzzed. It was the president. He told me he needed me in his office. The revolution in Iraq was gathering steam, and an Islamist majority in parliament was likely after the next election.
I told him I’d be there in two hours.
“Where are you?” he said.
“New York. I had to fly up here. A few pieces of quick business. I’m almost done.”
Pushing through the late-afternoon winter crowds, crossing the line from Chinatown into Little Italy, I saw the faces change and I began to hear Italian, and I saw my man.
Just over six feet, compact muscle, wearing a black leather jacket. His eyes were closed. He was feeling his way between people. His bald head was shining under the sinking sun. His hands were large. He flexed them as he moved.
First came the brief sting of images: snake, lizard, dragon. Each with embroidery. Scrolled hieroglyphics, Chinese pictographs, Runes.
Next, nationalities: Dutch, Norwegian, finally German.
I glanced at molded propositions, a length of chain links he subconsciously deployed, the end of which was murder.
I caught the end of a red directional line and followed it. I turned from Mott to Canal to Broadway, knowing my map was scrambled, as it always was, because I was no longer, strictly speaking, walking the streets of New York.
In a small alley, there was a parked black Escalade. This place was also fantastical, and I would never find the actual one. I didn’t need to. I worked my end-game in an equivalent, which nevertheless carried its crucial moments into the waking world.
I had long since stopped trying to plumb the meaning of the change.
I was there, at the car, when he arrived. We were alone. He looked at me with open hatred, as if he knew I had been coming.
“Why are you photographing me?” he said.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” I said.
He opened his jacket. I observed transparent spheres containing gears within gears. I smelled burning ash. The sun, light blue, was overhead among clouds, floating in a lake of wandering corpuscles that orchestrated gusts of wind.
I was a 20-foot tall character in a children’s book. I raised a sledgehammer over my head and brought it down on the pavement next to him. The sidewalk shattered, and he fell silently into the hole.
I dropped the sledgehammer, walked over, and peered into it.
Twenty feet down, emitting a blue glow, a small stone castle stood on a carpet of moss. I couldn’t see him.
Suddenly, a welter of hot smoky emotion rolled up from the hole and struck me in the gut.
I was back in my cabin in the Andes. I heard running water from a stream, the chopping of wood, and farther away, the coughing of an old car laboring on a hill. I stood up straight and the pain was gone.
I looked around the dim room. The floor had gathered dust. My narrow bed was upended, and the mattress, lying a few feet away, had been cut into pieces.
Taped on the mirror above the bureau was a small rectangle of gray paper. Scrawled on the paper: “he was a terrorist.”
I had written it to remind myself where I had been.
I had cut the mattress apart, to alert myself that it was time to leave this place.
Then I was in rocky hills, jumping up to the summit, where I could see chunks of walking food. I spotted four of them. They all turned toward me and then ran.
I pursued one of them as it raced low to the ground, remembering the man in New York was dead, remembering I had taken my work seriously, remembering my father was living alone in a brownstone on West 90th Street, off Central Park West.
The son he knew was a lowly janitor on the High-line, a walkway built over an old elevated subway between 14th and 23rd Street.
My job was sweeping the concrete, spearing food containers, and wiping down the railings.
My father wasn’t proud of me. He was bewildered about what I had made of my life.
I caught the small thing between my teeth, shook it three times, and broke its neck. I carried it to a place between rocks, lay down, and took a bite of flesh.
When I had finished my meal, I head a voice say, “Let’s kill that boy.”
It was coming from a car parked near the equivalent of the corner of 17th Street and 10th Avenue. I walked over to the car, rapped on the window, and held my policeman’s badge against it.
The window slid down. I didn’t wait to see the faces. I blew a breath of paralyzing amnesia into the car, turned, and walked away.
I passed a bookstore. Inside the huge window, ducks in a row, were hardbound volumes with the title: SHAPESHIFTER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. One of my names was listed as the author.
Probably a misstep. I make them.
I walked into the store, along an aisle of best sellers, and into a room where a hundred people were crowded, listening to a woman in a business suit. She was channeling an entity and doling out monotonous advice.
I tore away the veil of surmise, and suddenly everyone in the room realized the woman was inventing the Other.
After a minute, the listeners began getting up and filing out. Disappointed hurricane watchers; today’s storm didn’t make landfall.
After the room was empty, the woman in the business suit stared at me.
“What do you want?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. “But would you like to become an elephant? I could teach you how to switch back and forth.”
“Get out of here,” she said.
Then, she was an elephant poised on cheap electric-blue carpet.
I waited a moment.
“Would you like to come back?” I said.
She flicked her mottled trunk at me.
At that moment, several federal agents walked into the room.
I held up my badge.
“NYPD,” I said.
“That’s okay,” one of the agents said. “We’re after the elephant. It’s a shapeshifter.”
“Lot of that going around these days,” I said. “Have they passed a law against it yet?”
“National Security issue,” the agent said.
“Well, it would be. They’re upsetting the very foundations of our way of life.”
He glared at me.
“You making a joke, Officer?”
I spread my hands.
“Hell no. I mean it. We can’t let these creatures roam the streets.”
The elephant made her charge and thundered by me, her mud-stained eyes glowing with hellfire.
I was sitting in the Oval Office, across from the president at his desk.
“Before we get to the Iraq situation, sir, I can give you a list of the precise lies you need to tell to be reelected.”
He scratched the back of his head.
“How is your list different from my list?” he said.
“Well, we’ll have to compare them,” I said. “But I assure you mine is the result of a lifetime of careful research.”
“Yes,” he said. “But if I read your compilation and I’m not satisfied, what then?”
“Then,” I said, “I can turn you into another man who stands a better chance of winning.”
“And what do I do with the old me?”
“Oh, you’d still be the president, but you would have undergone a complete personality shift.”
He leaned forward.
“You think I need one?” he said.
“Have you ever considered becoming a ferret?”
“A what?”
“Or an owl?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I could give you the personality of a ferret or a porcupine. People respond to animals. Nixon was a weasel. Bush was a kangaroo. Obama was an undernourished whippet. What do you want to be?”
The president stared at me.
“You’re serious,” he said.
I nodded. “Of course I’m serious. Without an animal persona, you’re basically invisible.”
“Well, I’ve always liked mules,” he said.
“That won’t work. How about a copperhead? We haven’t had a copperhead since Woodrow Wilson.”
He shook his head. “No snakes. But perhaps an ant. An ant is a man of the people. Member of a group, a collective.”
When I poured honey on his desk, he bent over and began lapping at it.
From the walls of the Oval Office streamed thousands of ants. They came in files and ascended the desk and approached the honey. I heard a faint chittering as they procured their drops and turned and scaled down the legs of the desk. The whole operation was very orderly.
“Sir,” I said, “you’ll win in a landslide.”
He smiled horribly at me and went back to lapping the orange goo.
I spoke to him in low confidential tones.
“Mr. President, now that you’re in full possession of the hive-nest-colony consciousness, you realize your sacred duty to act against serious threats to the collective. Twenty years ago, it was discovered that pharmaceutical drugs kill 106,000 Americans every year. That’s over a million people per decade. Your own agency, the FDA, has certified every one of those drugs as safe and effective. No drug can be sold without such FDA approval. Surely, you see what you must do in this situation.”
He looked up at me. He was clearly shocked.
“Why yes,” he said. “How could I have overlooked this before? I’ve had the report on my desk for some time. I must have been distracted.”
I waited while he phoned his attorney general and instructed him to issue search warrants for FDA headquarters and arrest warrants for the top tier of agency executives.
Not all remedies are perfect. My adjustment of the president’s personality was an attempt to make the best of a bad situation.
As the president’s national security advisor, that is more or less the core of my job. I make changes quickly.
And now I have a confession to make. All these tricks I’ve been playing here and there, these on-the-fly adjustments and solutions, and yes, even these shape-shifts, are merely a sub-category of something else…and it is the something else that is truly important.
What I am able to do is generated out of my imagination, an infinite well of possibility.
Finally, my imagination itself is born out of my imagining it.
If you can find a spiritual tradition on planet Earth which declares THAT, you’re not on planet Earth, and you probably aren’t anywhere in this universe.
Jon Rappoport
For information about the upcoming Magic Theater workshop in San Diego, contact me directly.