June 23^rd:

Now then, as I mentioned last time, I came up with this whole idea about a private detective from Abraham.  He said he could get a detective to figure out who’s been breaking into my house.  That hit me a bit too high on the creepy meter, but it gave me the idea to hire my own private detective.  My boss, Frank Curry, said he knew this private detective who was in a play with his wife a short while ago.  Frank said he’d get him for cheap and foot half the bill if he looked into Abraham’s background.  That was something I had in the back of my head to begin with: figure out who’s been breaking into my house (or at least confirm it’s Karl in case it comes down to that) and maybe the detective could look into Abraham’s background while he’s at it.  Frank’s suggestion made me a little okay with my paranoia since Frank tries to sell his rampant paranoia as good business sense.  I kept telling myself it was just good business sense so I wouldn’t feel bad about it.

I was the one who had to be the liaison, so I went the next day to the address Frank gave me.  First of all, the guy’s name is Burden Eye Parnassus.  It struck me odd at first, but the guy’s all business.  He had a short haircut like he had just been in the military, and he wore a very nice suit.  He was younger than I thought he’d be, about my age I guessed, but my first impression was this guy is all around professional.  I was very curious where he got the weird name and why a guy like this would do community theatre.  The other thing was, he had this beaten up old box on his shelf.  He kept looking at it like he wanted me to ask him about it.  It was like in a story when somebody holds his chest and you know he’s going to have a heart attack by the end.  It was all too mechanical as if the next question in the script was, “What’s up with the box?”

Who knows where that question would have led me, but I decided to go a different direction.  After he had finished getting all my basic information, there was a long silence when he was entering it into the computer.  I said, “Are you military?”  I had a lot of family in the military, and I would hear them asking strangers that question a lot.

“No why?” he said.

“You just act military.  Plus the hair cut.”

“Oh that?  I was the lead in The King and I.  I don’t normally have it this short.  We’re doing Carousel next, so I want to grow it back out.”

Then I asked my real question: “You don’t seem like the kind of guy who would do theatre.”

He said, “If you really want to know, I was actually on the other side of the law for a long time.  I was an orphan, abandoned by my parents.  Raised by a private detective.  I rebelled when I was a teenager.  Used to work for Gulliver Lord, the gun runner.  I was in a group of kids gunned down by one of his enemies.  I was the only one who survived.  I knew God spared me for a reason.  Now I face all my fears and live a life of affirmation.  Now I’m happily married.  My wife is a very successful lawyer.  She’s able to support me in fulfilling my dream, being a private detective, and in all my other hobbies, whatever wild adventure I come up with.”

It seemed less like I was talking to an actor and more like I was talking to a character that actor was portraying delivering a speech he’d rehearsed and somebody else had written.  It was like a superhero origin story, that part of the story where the character all-too-conveniently turns to the damsel in distress and says he’s an alien or he was a bitten by a spider or whatever.  I didn’t think much of it, just a weird guy, I thought.

Well, this was maybe a week ago, when I got back from London.  I allowed him to come into my house and search my stuff while I supervised.  Here’s another important detail: this was around the time Abraham called and offered to take me to find another of those Lucky Charms with him: a daisy with pink petals and a yellow center – “Last chance,” he said.  I turned him down again, of course.  So Parnassus was especially interested in this notebook full of doodles (if you remember, I mentioned it back a few entries).  He flipped through it a long time.  He said, “Did you do these drawings?”

I said, “I don’t know.  It was probably one of my girls.  It might have been mine.  I hardly throw away anything, and I gave most of the stuff from when I was a kid to my girls.”

“You mind if I take this with me?” he said.  It seemed a little weird, but I let him.  What harm could he do?  It’s not like he was taking my girls’ clothing or whatever.

So the next day he called me into his office and he said, “There’s something I neglected to mention about myself the other day.”  Yeah, conveniently.  “When I was orphaned, when I was abandoned as a baby, I was actually mailed inside this box.”  He took the box off the shelf.  “Three babies all together in three different boxes.  The fourth box had human remains, unidentifiable.  We’ve never been able to trace the origin of the boxes.  The only clue we have is this.”  He pointed to one corner of the box.  There was a brightly colored doodle of an eye and a bird, obviously done by a child.  “That’s where I get my name.  Burden Eye.  Bird and eye.  Look at this.”  He opened up the notebook to a page full of doodles.  There on the page was a picture of bird and an eye, almost identical to the ones on the box.

“So what?” I said.  “There’s a bird and an eye that coincidentally,” emphasis on coincidentally, “look like the bird and the eye on your box.  I don’t get why this is a big deal.”

He said, “There are five other designs on this page.  Do they mean anything to you?”

There was a key, a fish, a skeleton with two circular ribs, a star, and a daisy.  It was unmistakable.  The star looked exactly like that blue star Abraham and Frank made such a hubbub over.  The daisy had pink petals and a yellow center.  It was too much of a coincidence.  I just couldn’t buy it.  “No,” I lied.

“Those are the designs on the other four boxes.  Please take this home and think about what all of this could possibly mean.”

I did think about it, but not in the way he probably wanted.  It was a bit too much like one of Karl’s fantasies, all the superhero nonsense, all the questing for artifacts.  But how could Karl, who never completed anything in his life, come up with some elaborate scam like this?  Then there was Abraham.  He evidently had the resources to pull off this scam, but who the hell was he?  Why would he want to screw with me like this?  Maybe he and Karl were buddies.  If this was some scheme to drive me insane, all it had done so far was piss me off.