Drake sat at the edge of the mineral pool, watching steam erase the Egyptian columns and restore them, erase and restore, as if the room itself couldn’t settle on a final draft.

“I wonder whether the main reason I can’t really write,” he said, “is that I dislike George Lucas personally.”

Alvin floated past on his back. “You’ve only ever talked to him at parties.”

“That hasn’t helped.”

Across the pool, Dustin opened one eye.

“I think he’s a talentless jerk,” Drake continued. “Not harmlessly talentless. Imperially talentless. He lurks inside my imagination like Brad in Albert’s head in I Heart Huckabees. Every time I approach some spontaneous Beat collision of jazz, sex, and prophecy—Lucas appears with a plastic helmet and explains that it’s actually part of a trilogy.”

“It’s the legal issues that suck the worst,” Graylyn said. “There are so many people ready to sue us if we say too much.”

Drake watched his foot dissolve beneath the disturbed water.“I’m blaming George Lucas for trying to install building codes in the unconscious. Star Wars is the opposite of the Beatles.”

“I was naive. I believed in a sixties I’d only read about—in the Beats, in Warhol, in the possibility that Pop Art meant you could seize whatever was flashing through the culture and make it spontaneous, personal, alive. Lucas is the cold reality: corporate mediocrity converting that flash into product. Pop culture without spontaneity isn’t culture. It’s death.”

The filtration system sighed beneath them. Outside, Wisconsin luxuriated in the lazy heat of the COVID summer. They had an entire spa in which to shelter—the pools, painted gods, and folded towels all reserved for the fortunate few—while the working classes huddled in their homes, probably streaming Star Wars.

Drake slipped into the water.

“I follow a sentence for six words, and then Lucas arrives with merchandising rights.”

Dustin closed his eye again. “Kill him.”

“In my novel?”

“In your head. We have enough legal trouble.”

Alvin rolled upright. Water streamed from his hair and shoulders. His expression had changed—not dramatically, but enough that Drake recognized the arrival of an angel on his shoulder.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Alvin said. “My guardian angel showed me who Lucas was.”

Graylyn lowered her sunglasses, curious.

“George Lucas,” Alvin continued, “is the reincarnation of the Emperor Constantine.”

For several seconds, only the fountains spoke.

“The emperor?” Drake said.

“The Emperor. He did to Christianity what he was born to do to Hollywood: emptied a living revelation into an administrative container. He watered it down, twisted its symbols, standardized its mysteries, and converted liberation into obedience.”

Dustin opened both eyes now.

“Constantine didn’t destroy Christianity,” he said.

“Not physically. That would have been honest. He preserved it as an institution while changing its purpose. The revelation stopped being something that happened inside a human being. It became something issued from above.”

“And Lucas is learning through repetition?” Graylyn asked.

“Through destruction,” Alvin said. “His karma is to discover what he has done by doing it again—building an empire so complete that eventually he can see there is nothing alive inside it.”

Drake stared into the blue water.

“So I’m being haunted by Constantine.”

“No,” Alvin said. “Humanity is simply evolving.”

A warm breeze moved through the open doors, carrying the smell of cut grass into the tiled chamber.

“You think Star Wars failed because you expected it to remain alive. But its fans came into this world for the whole experience—not merely to be dazzled in 1977, but to watch that first revelation slowly grind itself into dust.”

“That seems unusually cruel,” Graylyn said.

“Only if you believe disappointment is meaningless. They needed to love it before they could understand its limitations. They needed the toys, the lines around the block, the sacred anticipation. Then they needed the prequels, the sequels, the television products, the endless rearrangement of the same dead symbols.”

“Spiritual inoculation by content saturation,” Dustin said, “Just like Medieval Catholicism.”

“Exactly. The disenchantment is the teaching. They are exhausting their emotional dependence on the failed imagination of the Western world—its empires, chosen heroes, final battles, and promises that the correct bloodline will save history.”

Drake watched sunlight trembling upon the bottom of the pool.

“So the fans aren’t victims?”

“They are participants. Their grief is real, but it has a purpose. They came to watch the beloved galaxy become merchandise until they could finally stop waiting for Western culture to rescue them.”

“And then what?”

Alvin smiled.

“Anything they want,” Alvin said. “That’s the point. They have to stop being slaves. And really, Drake, you were enslaved by the Beatles. You’re more conscious about it, but it’s still something you have to work on.”

Drake looked up sharply.

The sunlight on Alvin’s face became Egyptian sunlight. For one sickening instant the tiled chamber lengthened into a hall of painted pillars, and Alvin was no longer floating naked in a Wisconsin spa. He sat above Drake wearing the double crown, magnificently composed, while Drake knelt below him with blood on his hands and the Pharaoh’s command sealed inside his mind.

“You enslaved me,” Drake said.

Alvin laughed. “Of course! That’s it! I didn’t even realize. That’s what we’re working through here.”

“When you were Pharaoh. I belonged to the palace. You represented divine order, and I couldn’t distinguish the divine from your authority.”

The fountains continued their mindless silver applause.

Drake understood the resemblance. The Beatles had not commanded him to become a writer. They had given him an image of freedom so perfect that it had captured his soul and he had spent his life obeying it. Alvin had once done the same thing with sacred kingship: made obedience feel like participation in cosmic harmony.

“They’re the same problem,” Drake said. “Loving the revelation until I surrender my will to its human container.”

“That’s exactly what we’re here for.” Alvin said. “The issue isn’t whether the revelation was real, its whether we can experience it without turning one another into its furniture.”

He drifted closer to the pool’s edge.

“I’ve always known I was the Pharaoh. But if you had accused me when we were kids of enslaving you, I wouldn’t have understood. I would have thought you were calling me cruel.”

“You would have cried,” Graylyn said.

“I absolutely would have cried. Then I would have spent three days decorating a room for Drake to prove I loved him.”

Drake smiled despite himself.

“It would have hurt my feelings,” Alvin continued, “because I only remembered being a benevolent king. I remembered loving you, trusting you, giving you a sacred office. I didn’t understand that privilege allows the person giving orders to experience coercion as affection.”

The ancient hall receded from Drake’s sight. Alvin was simply Alvin again: wet hair, bare shoulders, ridiculous dignity.

“But now,” Alvin said, “I have enough self-awareness to see the truth in what you’re saying. I loved you, and I enslaved you. Those facts can exist together.”

“And then?”

“And then we stop defending our old parts and move on.”

“What about Lucas?” Dustin asked. “He persists in time. Something should be done.”

Alvin sighed. “You don’t like anyone who makes more money from technology than you do.”

“That’s incidental. I maintain my original position: Star Wars is a childish imitation of Star Trek. It took a serious inquiry into consciousness, ethics, and social evolution, removed the inquiry, then added sword fights and teddy bears.”

“Calling Ewoks teddy bears is an insult to teddy bears.” Drake sneered. “What Ewoks actually are is psychic Tribbles, made horrifyingly real. Future centuries will record that our civilization died because the Democratic Party mutated into a bunch of Ewoks.”

Angela entered from the terrace carrying a silver tray of lemonade. She wore a white swimsuit and enormous sunglasses, like an athletic widow whose husband had died under extremely profitable circumstances.

“If civilization is dying,” she said, “we should make a time capsule.”

“Containing what?” Graylyn asked.

“Original Star Trek.”

Dustin considered this with immediate seriousness.

“So when civilization falls,” Angela continued, distributing glasses, “whoever crawls out of the wreckage will know what we were really like.”

Drake raised his lemonade.

“To preserving the Federation.”

“No,” Dustin said. “To preserving the possibility that humanity might eventually create it.”