Augie always wanted to be a space rigger. His favorite stories were science fiction stories, and he'd started reading early. Robert Heinlein wrote a short story called "Delilah and the Space Rigger," and that was Augie's favorite story of all. He read it out loud to me a dozen times, acting out all the parts himself with great drama. He'd hang himself at strange angles from the furniture to simulate free-fall. He was great.

When he was a kid he cut lawns, delivered papers and did odd jobs, saving up every dime he earned for flying lessons. He got his pilot's license when he was 18. He joined the Air Force right out of high school and went to Flight School and got to fly what he called "the Big Stuff," which included the C-5a. But he couldn't get into the astronaut program so after six years, he quit. He took a page from Heinlein and decided that since he couldn't be an astronaut, he'd do the next best thing and become an aerospace engineer and design spacecraft — maybe he could get off-planet that way. He had a knack for engineering and plowed through his studies like a Saturn 5 through the clear blue Florida sky. He didn't stop until he had a PhD from MIT and a spectacular job with one of NASA's prime contractors. He headed up one of the design crews working on modules for Space Station Freedom.

Augie felt good about himself, then. He was doing work his hero would be proud of, work he was proud of. He was convinced that the future and the salvation of Mankind lay in the conquering and industrialization of space, and he was doing significant work, groundbreaking work, to further those aims. He was flying high, in them days. It was at this point of his orbit that I met Augie. I fell in love with him. I married him. I had two lovely daughters with him, Andromeda and Cassiopeia (Augie named them), and they are my Jewels of Great Price.

We had three good years. Then there were the cutbacks and the fallout from the Challenger disaster where all those nice people died. Funding for Freedom was a favorite political target by short-sighted senators and representatives running for reelection, and this circling of the vultures got worse after Challenger. This was a bad time for Augie. He saw the Future dissolving before his eyes, slipping through his fingers like silky sand at the beach. He watched his friends and coworkers laid off one by one, and he even had to lay a few off himself — he was a manager, after all — and this really took the fight out of him. The headsman's axe fell higher and higher in the pecking order, and when it fell on Augie and he was let go, I think it was a big relief to him.

He just sort of gave up after that, and he drank for a year while we lived off the savings he'd piled up, and I worked as an RN in an internist's office and sold some Amway. The kids were in high school by then and they tried to help out with part-time jobs. They also tried to help out getting their father back to the guy they used to know, and so did I. We all worked very hard at that. We failed.

What we did succeed at, however, was getting him out of the house. Except for quick, daily trips to the liquor store, Augie didn't leave our house for months at a time. He'd sit by the pool, stare into the water and drink himself drunk. Then he'd sleep. He only talked when he was really blasted, and then it was mostly yelling — at the girls, at me, and the shitty food we ate or the shitty cars we drove or the fact that his daughters didn't have decent clothes to wear. He was breaking our hearts. He wasn't doing himself any good, either. Trips to the Emergency Room were beginning to become something we all-of-a-sudden knew 'way too much about. When Andie and I were out one night Cassy, our younger, who was 14 at the time, had to pick Augie up from where he'd tumbled off the back deck and broke his arm. She dragged him to the Bronco and zoomed him to the ER. Well, after that we talked it over, the girls and I, and decided it was time for him to get some help. The girls had come to this conclusion some months before, but I kept thinking he'd snap out of it.

My brother Donny hauls oranges for one of the big growers, and his route takes him past our house every other week. He almost always stops to see us. He knew of Augie's condition. Donny'd been in AA for about ten years at this time, and the next time he stopped by the girls and I talked it over with him and, to make a long story short, Donny convinced Augie to come with him to a meeting and he did. Then things got worse for a while before they got better, but they did get better. By Christmas our old Augie was back, to all outward signs.

I say "to all outward signs" because the real Augie wasn't back at all. This new Augie looked and sounded very much like the old one, but he wasn't. The real Augie, my husband and bestest buddy, the girl's daddy and chumiest chum — that Augie was gone for good. It was like he'd died. I wish he had.

The new Augie, you see, still needed some propping-up. The old one did too, I guess — he was hopelessly hooked on his dreams of space, and on his contribution to the fulfillment of those dreams. At first he substituted pot for his dreams and it seemed to agree with him. That's when things turned around and started to get better. He landed an engineering job with Citizen's Space Systems, a civilian aerospace firm working to develop an independent presence in space for private industry. It was a good job and before long Augie didn't need the pot anymore. He'd found his old crutch again, but his work was on a much smaller scale than during his NASA-driven heyday, and the crutch didn't fit him as well as it used to. He needed some additional propping-up again. Instead of going back to booze or pot — Augie was never much for going back — he turned instead to something far, far worse: mysticism.

The girls were off at college — Andie in grad school and Cassy not far behind — when Augie fell afoul of Bert de Meister, one of the visionary long-hairs at CSS, who introduced him to Doubt in the aspect of Sufi dervishes, whirling. Bert showed Augie a film of the dervish rite and told him its meaning. It was a revelation to him. He'd learned several languages over the years, mostly as a hobby, but also to up his worth to the space program. He now began to read voraciously and I got a peek at how he must've been in college and the service: driven, monomaniacal, unrelenting, deadly serious and ready to argue the smallest points of his new interests endlessly — regardless of how the listener felt about it.

Augie quit CSS about a year into his mystical studies, no longer able to fulfill what had turned out to be the greater part of his new job, which was testifying before various congressional committees, college classes, state and county zoning boards and lecture at endless fund-raising events. He'd made friends while at CSS, and used his connections to get a generous grant from the Glaise Foundation. He set up on his own, his stated purpose being to attempt to come up with a method to apply cross-disciplinary engineering principles to the various metaphysical disciplines. A synthesis is what he said he was after — a dense-pack, elegant synthesis of mystical and metaphysical thought into principles of sound science and elegant engineering. In two years Augie went from an office over our garage to an institute located in an old, unused 130-room monastery in the middle of sixty rolling acres in central Virginia. The institute employed 57 and was funded by donations large and small from around the world — corporations, school kids, trade unions, foreign governments, international church groups and universities. The institute published books and a monthly magazine, and had an extensive public relations arm.

Ten years go by: it's 1997. Andie has three sons, a loving husband and her doctorate. She teaches Family Studies at NYU. Cassy has a son and a daughter, one by her loving husband and one by her asshole ex-husband. She also has her PhD, but no longer teaches. She writes. My girls have comfortable lives. It all got too complicated for me and I divorced Augie six years ago. I still sell Amway and work in Dr. Portier's office, but the good doctor finally spoke up and married me the night the Yankees won the World Series.

Augie, now, has taken a much different direction. He scares me now. Even when he was drinking, and screaming in red rage, fists balled — he scared me, scared the shit out of me — but never anything like how he scares me today.

I'll be succinct:

About two years ago Augie showed up unexpected on my doorstep, slim and strong and nattily dressed and, I'll admit, looking altogether too good for an ex-husband. We had dinner at a nice place and then went dancing. We went back to my place for a nightcap and elected to exercise our franchise as adults and joyously celebrated human sexual bipolarity in a manner I'll accurately and delicately describe as spectacular.

We slept and then it was the Morning After the Night Before.

Augie fried eggs and ham and made coffee, and we sat sated in the morning sun and chatted lazily over the food in a particularly funky Proust. He was flying planes again, he said. The institute had decided he did so much traveling he ought to have his own Lear Jet, so he'd gotten re-certified, or whatever they do, and now flew himself all over the world. He was not well-known to the public (Augie was always camera-shy) but he was very much in demand in certain highly-placed circles.

It was a cozy domestic scene and I thought for a while he was going to blow me away and ask that we get back together, but he didn't. The bombshell he dropped was a hundred times bigger than that. Here's what he told me next:

His research in widely disparate areas had been dovetailing for years, he said. A few months before, on Dec. 14, to be exact, everything came together in a single bomb-blast-bright instant of inspiration and congealed into a single, cogent Grand Unified Theory of mysticism. (As a sidelight, this blinding flash of revelation occurred while Augie was on the throne — like Luther, he said.) The net result of this supernova of genius was that Augie was now an Adept in the Art of Prophecy. Yeah. He was a true, genuine mystic, a holy man. He could see, he said, where few before him have seen. He was the Seer for the end of our millennium, the Prophet of the Transition.

He believed this, he said, because it was so — it was a matter of knowledge (gnosis) rather than belief for him. Not only that, as if that weren't enough, he announced that he was the one true Son of the 16th century mystic Michel de Nostredame, who we know today as Nostradamus, prognosticateur extraordinaire. This was predicted by Nostradamus, who said it would be this spiritual Son who would be the first to fully understand all of the quatrains in each of the Centuries that make up his Prophecies. That Son was he — Augie, Son of Nostradamus — and that he really could and did understand every one of the prophecies in every one of the quatrains in every one of the Centuries. They were as clear to him as a Heinlein yarn. He saw it all.

Knock me over with a feather! I was far too befuddled to argue and before I knew it Augie was demonstrating this proprietary skill of his by taking a quatrain at random and then supplying its meaning, telling little jokes and sidebars to enhance the interpretation. He read from his page-worn copy of the Prophecies, then translated the French into English and acted out the quatrain's meanings with wild contortions and great drama, just like he used to do with Delilah and the Space Rigger back when the world was new.

He began to rant, but mercifully stopped when I asked him to. We shook hands and he left, but not before he jotted down one or two of the more obscure quatrains from memory, and their meanings, on my kitchen pad. He said these were prophecies that fell due to be realized in the next couple months or years. He added a couple more of his own, one of which was that Princess Diana was going to die in a car wreck under unexplained circumstances. He gave the date and time.

And he was right. Goddamn him, he was goddamn right every goddamn time. Each and every one of those things he said were going to happen, well . . . they really happened. Just like he said they would. I can't tell you how much that's come to frighten me, to fill my days and nights with dread and fear and loathing.

Augie took his Lear Jet and flew off that afternoon, and dropped clean out of sight. I never saw him again. Not, that is, until a week ago when there was that dustup in Iraq and another line was drawn in the sand or something. CNN was showing clips of that world-class bastard Saddam Hussein and his family of well-fed cohorts interspersed with clips of people suffering and starving on the streets, people suffering and starving in basements, people suffering and starving in the lobbies of government buildings in the sunny Bagdad suburbs. In one of those pictures there was a closeup of that world-class bastard Saddam Hussein and there, standing off to one side, twirling a blue beret on the end of his finger and wearing a sly smile, was Augie. He was a new face in the Saddam crowd, and that caused some comment among the CNN commentators, but they decided he was just some new relative Saddam had put on the stooge payroll. Augie's swarthy and hairy enough and he's got the right disposition to be of Saddam's clan, but let me tell you: he's not just another family flunky over there. I was so deep-down chilled and scared by that that I wrote our government (and I hate the fucking government) to warn them, but I haven't heard anything back from them at all. I've written repeatedly.

As far as I know, Augie is still over there in Iraq, doing God only knows what — advising, I guess. Seer-ing. Whatever he's doing, he's up to no good and I think that if there's even the tiniest chance that he might be who he claims to be, somebody ought to go over there and shoot Augie full of bullets or, better yet, blow him up with a bunch of bombs until we're sure he's completely dead. And I mean we should do this right now.

That's all.