One of my novels from long ago. (The paragraph format gets lost when I paste it in unfortunately, which may make it somewhat hard to read.)
The Illusionists
(2010)
I remember being born. Adrian Shaw, six pounds, joined the
planet during the hottest summer in a century. As I grew, and
as we all search through the thorns that always surround our
paradise, my memory recaptured visions from even long before
that summer night. At times I ached to tell someone my secret,
but ultimately I left the ache alone. Havens always have a price.
They will often leave the sheltered standing by themselves,
man and child alike. But that which is kept unseen and unspoken
is also kept safe, and sometimes any price is worth paying to feel
safe. I’m old now in terms of time. In terms of clarity, I’ve ended
up coming full circle right back to where I began. As a boy often late
at night I used to lay there, lost in the wilderness of my mind,
foreseeing my own death soon, and I would wonder if someone can
be born twice.
It was an early morning under a sky still colored purple on
the western horizon. The reddish-orange sun, half risen on the
opposite side, was mild enough at this hour to look straight into it.
Fields of top-heavy wheat stalks leaned from the weight of
their matured crop and the breeze that fanned over the fields. I knew
them well, since they filled my bedroom’s only window to the
horizon. I had awakened every day of my life to wheat fields, black and
bare after they were plowed, green and fleshy through spring, then
turned golden near harvest time. Lately, insomnia had familiarized me
with them under the moonlight, too.
Today, on my thirteenth birthday, I left home early before my
mother and stepfather felt the dawn breathing on them. I
wanted no presents or praise. I wanted to be alone. The wet May
month had softened the soil under my shoes, but a few dry days
had firmed it enough to walk across. The power in that soil, and from
all across the world, had fed me since the time I was nursing and
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even before anyone could lay eyes on me. That warm earth had grown
and gushed out every food and drink to stretch my skeleton and blossom
me up around it.
The same minerals in my bones had also built the teeth of
the snake that would bite me three hours from now. We had both
pulled ourselves out of the same raw fabric across which I was traveling.
We were related even before its venom found a way into my blood.
Long, low hills bordered the flat farmland where my house sat.
Standing on a high vantage point, you could see the hills make a
rough semi-circle ten miles wide. Combines would soon appear
like steel elephants to scoop up the wheat, which fueled the economies
of towns such as Vidalia, my hometown. I trailed my hands along the
stalks. I sometimes stripped one with my fingers to roll the kernels off
the stems and out of the husks. I did that a lot when I needed to think.
At the moment I was thinking of no more than to put distance between
myself and home.
Near the first hill, a mile from my house where the semi-circle began, I
almost stepped on a huddled covey of quail. They burst up in front
of me. Their wings battered the air in their frenzy to escape.
Some pheasants flew up a minute later, though they didn’t scare me by
waiting until I was right on top of them. The stirring scents in the air of
the plants and birds reminded me to love every breath. I got to the barbwire
fence that set off my family’s land. Three deer down the line ran and jumped
over the fence, which was almost my height but easy for them to clear.
I climbed the wooded incline. The top brought me to an overlook of
Vidalia on the other side. Having never left south Illinois, I needed
just a slight elevation to be in awe; to me this seemed like a mountain.
I had no intention to retreat home anytime soon. I had too much
energy to stay there. This last day of May was already an oven of
clammy heat, but it wasn’t enough to make me turn back.
I went another mile, then stopped to consider my options. I couldn’t see
my house at all now. Even the town was tiny enough to miss at a glance. I
stood then at an invisible crossroads, a place not so removed from my
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lanky physique, whose hormone saturation strived to push beyond boy
but was still so far from adult.
I kept walking, on and on away from civilization. I fattened my
sudden appetite for these deep backwoods where I had never been before.
The oaks and maples and leaf-bearing trees gradually thinned into
needles, of pine and spruce and more evergreens. I decided to hike up
to a meadow on the next peak before I went home.
I crossed through a sunken groove between the hills that held moisture
to create a small swamp. The heat down there had a humid, sticky effect
that made me itch. My lower back welled out with slick sweat. I wanted
to get through there fast and back to the rocky higher ground.
The snake was a thick North American pit viper, and this one was of
rare maturity. I didn’t see it before it bit me. I heard the hiss and a whir
of air. It struck from the underbrush beside my left leg. It’s dark face,
contrasted by the mouth of snow-white tissue, connected with my
thigh. In the first instant, I felt only a slight stick from the teeth themselves.
The snake was at least a foot longer than I was tall and thicker than my arm.
The teeth were a full inch, but the power and speed of adrenaline for some
people almost has supernatural potency. I yelled and leapt sideways, thrashing
to get away from it. The viper, true to their reputation, latched on
so tightly that I had to reach down and force it off. Tears of my flesh like
a rag came out with the teeth, as though I had torn off someone’s piercing.
I tripped into a tangle of sticker bushes that grated red lines over my arms.
My racing heart seemed on the verge of cracking my breastplate. All my
clothes were now soaked in sweat. My head swarmed with dizziness. The
day seemed a dozen times brighter than it had been just seconds ago.
I saw the snake sliding away, each scale like an ebony rock worn smooth
on a creek bed. The broad head and pits in front of its eyes were clear. I used
the last second to check its pupil. It had a sharp, vertical pupil, not the
round one of harmless snakes.
For one moment beneath my panic, a strange understanding emerged.
It had nothing to do with the danger my surface conscious believed I was in.
I only knew that my life would forever be different.
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My mind returned to my physical situation. I remembered how to identify
poisonous snakes. The realization of how fragile I was brought a fear I’d
never known and the onset of a weakness that would soon feel like wearing
steel clothes. The real pain of the bite began, but not from the puncture
and the tearing. On this afternoon, I would find out that a large enough
dose from the snakes that have blood-killing hemotoxins was one
of the most painful experiences a human being could have. The later
stages, I’m confident, were as painful as childbirth. The beginning for me
matched the impact of the car door that had shut on my hand a year
before. I could still function now; however, while the pain from
the broken bones had tapered off with time, this worsened at
shocking speed.
Don’t run, I thought to myself again and again. That will make it
spread faster. Relax. You’ll make it. Don’t run. Relax.
I went through an hour of repeating those reminders and
clenching my teeth against the pain. My hands gripped at my
shirt, twisting it into tight balls, until it finally tore. Though I was
beyond misery, I did not yet feel that my life was in true danger.
Should I head for town or back home? I could get to the hospital faster
if I went straight to town. Home is farther away. But I want my mom.
Why did I go so far? Why am I so dumb? I didn’t bring anything to
drink. I haven’t had a drink since I left home. I feel dehydrated.
Maybe it’s just the venom making me feel that way, but that’s so
much worse. I could pass out and never get back up . . . What
would a sleep be like that doesn’t end? Would I know I’m asleep?
I was struggling over a ridge that sloped on to a cliff, then dropped
straight down. While I had my head turned that way, I started to
lean and took involuntary steps sideways toward the drop. I nearly
fell while trying to catch myself and steer away. It seemed as
if I was being magnetized to death; any route to reach it could draw
me just as hard. I had broken the pull for a while longer.
A massive flow of venom circulated in me, but I had covered a lot
of ground so far. However, it was beginning to disorient my sense of
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direction. I climbed to the nearest high ground, though it was out
of the way. Finally I could see my house, just the size of a dollhouse
from here. The town looked like a model train town. For some reason
I thought of how my old drafty house in winter was like going
outside naked. You felt everything much more–when the wind
blew harder, when the temperature dropped off after sundown.
In summer the house stayed oddly cool like going down into a cellar.
The thought of next summer reminded me that when I lay awake
listening to nothing through my sleepless, dreamless nights, I at
least would have the company of crickets and frogs, maybe an
owl. On those nights it seemed that no one else in the world was even
alive, much less awake with me. Then again, I always wondered who else
might be out there lying alone, too, and wondering if there were others
like them somewhere.
How can you think of anything else right now? I shouted at myself in
my head. What scared me was that I had stopped moving, succumbed to
a wave of vertigo and forgotten what was happening to me.
Keep going but don’t run. Focus. Relax. You’ll make it home.
My leg swelled so much that I could feel the skin stretching. I also
cramped in odd areas such as my back. A grip like a vice pinched the
nerves and muscle all through my lower back. The shattered-bone feeling
crawled on up past my waist. I tightened up all over and my eyes watered
continually, tears joining sweat to coat the taste of sour salt over my lips.
What if I can’t make it? I don’t want this to happen. I’ll sit up all night long
forever. I’ll pay any other price to live. I just don’t want to pay this one.
I just want my mom.
My foot caught on something and I almost tripped. I howled from the
pressure my stumbling made me put on the leg. I found I couldn’t move
for a second, and again I forgot why I even tried to continue.
I noticed a little creek, lined by granite boulders, in a depression to my
left. “I’m so thirsty,” I said out loud. I didn’t know I was speaking; my
thoughts and voice seemed interchangeable. “So thirsty . . .”
The pebble floor made the water clearer and cleaner. The steady
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current didn’t allow the sun to warm it like ponds and lakes. I walked
right in and felt it fill my shoes like two plump bladders. I drank fast
and such volume that I couldn’t breathe immediately after I quit.
I walked out awkwardly because my stomach still trapped the water,
which my body refused to accept for use. I went on carrying it like a cold
pregnancy stuck at my middle. As much as I needed water, the
combination of the overabundance and my traumatized system was
too overwhelming. I coughed, bracing my hands on my knees,
and spit up every ounce.
Old water towers stood at the edge of Vidalia. The tops poked above the
tree-line and were close enough that I could see the weatherworn paint
pealing off the sides. There would be roads by the time I reached them
if I went that way. But the longer I focused on the distance, the bigger it
got right before me. I swore that the towers were drifting backward.
The wheat fields between my house widened out, too.
Those familiar fields were like quilts sewn by the needle and
thread of seed and man, crafting his will to return a little more than
the work invested. Nature’s force, the rains and sun and bed of
nutrients that the quilt covered, were like breaths blown
through a flute to transform into music. The same breaths had
powered my steps for as long as my own ancient memory.
They had powered the snake, too, from the breaking of its
egg to this day we collided. Nature had filled it with venom and
had filled me with a large brain; we each had our own unique
instrument. We were players in the same music, and neither was
to blame for only following instinct.
I took a detour of sorts while I continued walking straight.
It was like when you’re driving and realize your mind hasn’t been
completely there, yet you’ve kept yourself on the road. I could tell
no difference between thought and speech, nor did I recall what
was happening back on the invisible road down which I still guided
myself.
Yeah, the loving and tender things remain a mystery unless
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someone has known the opposite of them. What a new world I could
know about that feels good if I could survive the dark side of the moon.
I wonder why it happens that someone can live for so long the same,
feeling hardly at all and everyday just like the last. Then you can hear
a certain song or a new idea, meet someone who sees in a way you hadn’t
thought of, maybe sees you like no one else has . . . It doesn’t have to be
much, but suddenly there is a change, everything seems more real than
it used to be. In the end, it’s only another person you need like a reflection
that’s missing from a mirror. You don’t even have to talk, just be with
them, just feel something anything betherebeseelovepbyzabxkcmytzxq.
My pulse was racing out of control. My eyes must have been
like windows to a jungle of green pain behind my face. Veins heavy
with blood stood rigid along my forearms. I put my hands over my
booming head. The memory of today eluded me to find some evidence
of my future. “What’s happening?” I whispered to no one. “Where am
I going?”
Home, always home. I was bit by that huge thing, and so much
time has gone by, and I’m having even worse effects than
I should . . .
I made my legs perform again. For the bitten one, each step
was like an ax chopping at it. The other leg felt as light
and weak as air. My windpipe felt closed to a pinhead. I had
a shakiness that I had known on other days, not from nervousness or
cold or any apparent cause. It always pounded this tremble up
from the hollow of some deep drum that made me feel no heavier than
air on the inside. Almost watching from outside myself, I used
to see me as such a strange creature doing strange things in
a strange world, all while required to appear so ordinary.
I used to wonder how people managed to get through eighty years
of that pretending. Still, I had been happy enough, and curious
enough, to try so hard to survive this event. I had been curious about
so many new appetites in my life which as of today might never be satisfied.
I had been curious about relationships. Curious about sex. Curious about
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a different kind of love outside of family members.
The venom seemed to have replaced my entire bloodstream and
became my new blood. My body was starting to fail like metal hinges
corroded to the point that they would no longer swing. I bled
from my mouth; the trickle up from my throat mixed with my saliva
to turn it pink. Soon it was just dark red. My nose started to drip the
same from both nostrils. I had a sensation at my eyes that I thought to
be more watering, but these tears were too thick and burned
me. I touched my finger there and saw that the color was coming from
my eyes, too. It was watery blood that sank into the tiny lines
of my fingerprint instead of hovering over them.
I rolled my pants up to my knee and could lift it no further.
The centerpoint of the bite on my thigh raged like a sledgehammer
perpetually hitting me. The skin of my whole leg and even torso
was painted in redness, as if I were allergic to bees and had been
stung allover by queens. I had patches of purple bruising from
broken vessels. My chest felt like a clinking glass of ice water, cubes
stabbing their cold corners against the frenzied ball of muscle that
tried to sustain me. I was standing motionless, and my heart rate
was faster than at a full sprint. I put my fingers to my jugular to count
the beats–over three per second, passing 200 beats per minute. I
had gone so numb that I couldn’t feel my pulse anywhere except by
pressing on the largest veins. Popping balloons better expressed the
act inside me than to call it beats.
The next time I tried to check if the rate had increased, I
couldn’t detect enough through the numbness to measure it.
I envisioned a child’s rattle toy shaking in my chest more and
more violently. Then the toy seemed to break down to
the rigors, began ripping and slinging out a placental gush that
splashed against the insides of my ribs, backbone and bottom
of my throat. I recalled some faint knowledge of a type of
arrhythmia when the heart barely lets in blood anymore and is almost
beating dry, like a rust-clogged engine forced to keep working.
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I lost all self-control that I had left. I have to run. I have to run now.
I did try to run but was capable of no more than a fast walk. That lasted
under a minute before every inch of me wilted to the ground. A lava of
heavy heat flooded my internals to anchor me down for good.
“No,” I panted. “Please, please, no.” I fell to my knees. I would never have
the strength to rise again.
The first bulge of unconsciousness tried to drape its arms around me
into the nativity of a nightmare. It blotted me out underneath a cloud
like an insect plague coming to strip me of crops. I strained to hold
onto the last remains of me that hadn’t been devoured. I had reached the
top of the first woodlands between my house across the wheat and the
town on the opposite side. I was still a long way from people. But I suddenly
wasn’t concerned with that. I knew I was forgetting again. It was less
frightening this time.
I could see something . . . or was it a sound? I cocked my head a little
the way a confused puppy might. From the distance where the hills grayed,
to the small leafy plants right beside me, a new presence rose to the surface
of every detail. The land appeared just slightly liquid the way a candle
looks when warmed enough that it’s about to start flowing.
Everything seemed enhanced somehow–colors richer, substances
denser, a new reality to me now. Or perhaps I was just seeing a depth of
beauty that had always been there but which I had overlooked. The
presence denied me to give it an exact name. I sensed and partially witnessed
that something was approaching me, but I had no previous experience to
compare it against. I received the knowledge that it was there such as reading
a foreigner’s journal. I realized that every teaching my species shared with
each other was only a connector to experiences they had undergone
themselves. To learn always depended on accessing memory and then
adding a new version of it to the chain.
Pictures slipped by me of all my family and friends’ lives that had played
out alongside mine. I dusted for the fingerprints of others’ memories
that coated me, a cluster of maps–all their houses, their own families, their
daily routines–that wanted me to experience this day through every
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person I had ever met.
I rocked back on my knees and blinked in wide strokes. My legs made
a feeble effort to stand which was more reflexive than a request. I wanted
to get away from my mind and back to the exterior, if I still could for
a while. I hadn’t feared a danger, only being taken toward something too
powerful to face yet.
I could see with my normal eyesight now just as I always had.
I’m fixing to die, I thought, and not a trace of grief burdened my
self-awareness.
Mossy rock outcroppings jutted out beside the exposed roots of an old oak.
Erosion had scraped out a bank under the tree. My eyes marinated in
this hieroglyphic that the passage of time itself had whittled out and
tuned. It made me think of some brilliantly twisted organic orchestra.
Behind the stout roots the dirt had continued to break away, leaving
a natural shelter. A wonderful place for animals to live, protected from
weather and the supports sure to never let it cave in.
I imagined myself living in there through the next summer, sealed away
cool from the world that baked above. My imagining contained pieces of
true sensation. Though I knew I must have remained in place, imagination
outshined the doubt. I seemed to be down there for months, and slowly
the gentle umbilical-like nest of roots coiled around me. I felt I had been
made into an amazing new sensory organ for the tree. I settled into
my shelter and the same relationship with the oak as the mother to
the son or daughter guarded at their core.
I knew now that my own mother had loved me far longer than from
the moment I was born. She began to love me years before
then when she first realized that people were not here to gain
status or wealth. Every aspiration except love was just misleading and
truly a mirage. I saw how little death means to love, how little it
matters that the part of someone that moved and spoke has gone.
Time, too, would dwindle to a frail barricade. A love that had
life once, especially the love raised from one’s own core which only
mothers could know, would have life always. However deep
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a person’s roots were taken out of the world, the reaper could never
shear the one tie that endured above all.
So I was going away. I had known this might happen since
I was bitten so far from home. I had no animosity towards the snake,
which did no more than a natural reaction to defend itself.
I had taken a handle on and accepted my last journey. I hoped it
might be no worse than to fall asleep and just disappear into an
eternal night. After another minute or two, my mind should
never strike the torch of another thought. It did astonish me
that I could still see so clearly. My eyes fought harder to resist
dying than any other part of me.
Sometimes people reach a single moment when they feel their whole
life has just been a preparation to get there. Despite being faced with
only moments to live, I had never felt more like smiling. These woods
were just a common place, but to me it suddenly held all the awe of
climbing to the sky from ground level and finding how true elevation
rearranged the mind. Things I had seen everyday of my life and barely
noticed now sprang out like some crazy-beautiful jack in the box. How
remarkable it was that all the greenery knew when to wake up from the
dormancy of winter. Seeds and trees felt the coming heat just as mammals
knew to leave their dens or houses and stretch out of hibernation. I had
reunited with nature too early; another seventy years should have
passed before I would be lain back into the soil. Might I, too, know when the
season came to burst free and bloom again? Never, I had to remind myself,
because what’s left of me will just be an empty house lying there to
decay like dead leaves. There will be no more such thing as time. Time
will die with my light that leaves the house.
Then a harsh reality struck me. Time and the overall scheme never
died, of course. The world would go on unshaken without me. Except for
a small ring of relatives and friends who would miss me, nothing else
would alter in the slightest. Time and the existence of such soft-bodied,
delicate life forms must be estranged from each other, two ships going
toward opposite horizons. Such existences as my little part were the
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constant victim of time. Yet time always had to let the fresh fill the
emptiness left by the jaded. Because the great murderer did have
one great weakness. Without small lives like mine, unimportant
though I might have once called them, time would be unrecognized. Humans
had invented time, for nowhere except in their minds did a universe with
no beginning or end have any use for a clock.
I turned the reins of wherever these thoughts were taking me and
looked for another external focus. I would not let desperation
contrive myths of perpetuity for my lifeline.
The warming and pooling effect I had caught a glimpse of earlier
returned again. Objects in the landscape still held recognition but
were in a state as moveable as wet clay. The pools widened enough to
touch at the sides and began bleeding into one another. All the
same elements and vitality of the land were still there, just in
a different state. It made me think of ice cubes thawing back out
to flow again. This version of objects puzzled me. I still believed
I should be able to define the edges of a tree or a flower, the horizon or
the sky, but now I couldn’t tell where they divided either.
I excepted the pools to seal with each other to leave one all-consuming
sheet in front of me. I readied myself for that cloud of unconsciousness
to crawl over again, hiding its secret like lightening strikes behind
a dense thunderhead.
But my expectations were wrong. My eyes peaked in a new
surge like the slowly applied pressure point of a razor that finally sliced
through a skin. The explosive beauty I could see in the world right
then was so wonderful, I could hardly take it. I broke down into
crying and laughing at the same time. I barely knew who I was anymore
or what had happened to me. I only knew that it was amazing to have
become aware of all this. Has it always been here and I just didn’t
know? I thought. If I had only known. If we all had only known . . .
The exact location and limits of my body for feeling lost all boundaries. Of
both plantlife and animal, the movements of every organism I had
encountered today touched me now as if the ripples originated within
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my own nervous system. All my senses sharpened and gave me
hybrids. Sight mingled with touch; what I saw taught my hands the
nature of its texture. I could hear colors, musical hums at a different tone for
each; green was deeper than yellow, pink more feminine than
blue. Colors became as much of a physical experience as visual, with
caresses ranging from softer than rabbit’s fur to aggressive as mild sandpaper.
The oak tree at my side drew me to watch the inferno of revolution overcoming
it. The veins of the leaves glowed, connected to heavier arteries down in the
tree trunk that glowed as if being pumped by a source deep under my feet.
Each leaf moved on its own and grew in length. From there the new
green spines swirled like plumages of feathers laid over one another.
They bent along their lengths and opened slices between that let through
brilliant red standing out against the green. They shifted between
color pairs–white and the backdrop violet, yellow and blue, green
and red again. The inferno changed many times, once into a tower of
dice with fifteen sides spinning on the leaf stems. The shapes were numbered
on some turns, smoothed blank on others. Eventually they unfolded from
within into umbrellas of coloration, blinding and then fading an instant later.
The detail I could find in one tiny area applied beyond to every inch of the
miles of landscape and its inhabitants. It was too overwhelming to take
in, so I simply looked down out of self-preservation. At some point I
understood a design to all the chaos. There was purpose somewhere. I
sensed it, I just couldn’t name it.
I hid my face in my hands. My palms were like powdery ashes that
retained a tinge of the fire’s heat they once had. None of this is right, I thought.
It shouldn’t happen this way.
But what should be happening now? Nothing at all? I would accept
that because I had expected nothing. If there was more to learn, I should
savor it . . . but that was also a contradictory path to let my mind go down. I
surely stood at the threshold of nonexistence. Why would I be compelled
to take on the care of things which I would immediately lose? Yet I had
been doing that all my life, in the longest of mortal terms or the shortest.
Both were ultimately the same: a clock composed of one zero.
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My internal dialogue was as comforting as having a friend here
to talk to. Maybe chaos looks insane up close but can always look like a harmony
if you get far enough away from it. Yes, there can be war and all kinds of
horror happening to people down on the Earth’s surface, but look back
from outer space and it all just blends into one peaceful, glowing blue world.
On it drifts forever, and anything alive is moving . . . Just one thing. Alive.
I inched over on my knees to a large nearby rock. The moss had turned
to dappled purple. The whole rock pulsed like an infant reptile in
its elastic shell. On the flat face of it, dark bruising like a pen left on cloth
leaked up from inside the stone. The hole left didn’t appear to have a bottom.
I leaned forward to look into the opening. The temperature was cooler
inside, I could tell. I shuddered at the depth below like the ominous
tingle from fearing heights.
The sequence of the hole reversed. I blinked, confused. All at once
the rock–and the whole surroundings–reversed to when my former
reality had owned us. I should have again become the most scared
I had ever been in my life, but instead I became confused. Only
now did I have a sense of disconnection, as if I were a plant cut off
from my base that lay somewhere behind me. I had begun to
feel natural in my forgetting before this reversal. I wanted to continue
shedding all I had thought to be my limits and see where I would go
with such freedom to transport me.
I mourned suddenly for those I was leaving behind, not for myself.
If I knew what I knew now and had to go back to my old life, my
mind would be lost in the shifting sands of this haunted memory for the
rest of my life. The grains would crumble down into my sleep and hide
my fingers from ever touching a sweet dream again.
I could see myself in the normal rock. My reflection rose like braille
into a rough but accurate imitation. When I blinked my eyes, the
eyes on the rock blinked. When I turned my head to leave, I caught the
other turning to leave back into the rock as well.
I stood up on legs, at least it seemed. I took a few painless steps;
certainly it was painless to only have air under my feet.
15
From the level of the treetops I looked out across the Midwest
plains beginning at the foot of the hill. The wind picked up and made
me squint. The cool fingers of air combed through my hair.
There was a pull to the breeze, as though it blew right through me and
could take me any time it wished, or should I wish.
Concentrated storm clouds were rolling in fast from the south.
The front winds off of them reached me well before the actual storms.
The wind charged and sensitized me. I teemed with oxygen and
energy; my chest made an audible hum of power down to my
fingertips.
I looked on into a distance beyond distance, seeing nothing distinct
but everything in unison. I hovered there waiting and waiting for
more to happen. I seemed stuck. Two clashing sensations came,
one that I had found my old self again, another that I was missing
someone I had never even met. I believed there must be a mistake.
Life and death were both refusing me. Like a hungry cub too young to open
its eyes, I searched my instincts for a compass that would guide me
to something warm, something I could cling to and fill myself.
I tried to remember the human form I was in just minutes before. I
still had the full sense of possessing a being, only different from the
one that used to enclose me. I held off any panic that I was lost, but
I was motivated to find some reconnection with familiarity.
My mind reached hard for any thread of what I used to be. After
a while I relaxed some, and I actually became more bored than fearful.
So I withdrew my reach to polish some antique yesterday.
I looked toward tomorrow, a raw country like the skin below an overdue
shed and lit as if by newborn stars fallen to the forests and plains.
A beige circle materialized out in the air in front of me. Whether
it was made of metal, stone or even live tissue, I was unsure.
I couldn’t tell the circle’s distance or dimensions either. It could have
been the size of the moon or merely a hand. It had one hairline cut in
it started from the outside edge, tapered to the middle, and covered a fraction
of a percent, at best, of the whole.
16
I stared at the fraction, thinking, Is that part what I knew?
The cut began to widen. It came to a third, two-thirds, and finally the two
sides met each other. The circle had opened.
Once upon a time I illustrated a little book in pencil on stapled paper.
My habit of idle drawing took an obsessed and productive turn that afternoon
after school. As soon as I started work on my idea, I kept going all
night till nearly the next day. The pictures in the book started out
with people walking their dogs in the park. On the next page
that same picture was in a magazine someone read at an airport
terminal. On the next, the airport picture was printed on the postcard
someone was sending home from an island vacation. On
the next, that was an advertisement on the side of a bus
driving through some metropolis. On the next, a man from the
mountains, his hair like a lion’s mane, was painting that on a canvas out
in the woods. The scenes kept going back again and again. I can’t remember
for sure where they ended–I lost the book later–but I last recall drawing a
picture of myself, sitting there holding the book. Those people I
drew might have been certain that each of their realities was where the
unfurling hit a wall and finalized. I had been sure of mine until
that day and until this day.
I drifted back to ground level. With my arms open and my head tilted
back, I welcomed the least fear of anything I’d ever known. The snug
fit of my flesh relaxed away to become like a melted, flowing butter of
my warmth. Its coverage speeded in sync with rising temperature, and I
surrendered to it at once. The dissipation made me virtually weightless.
My nerve-endings for both pain and pleasure spiked with the
freedom of losing concrete measurements; and the increased strength of
one polar opposite awakened more capacity for the other. As free to move
as thought flying from the opened cage of a skull to use its own wings, I
rode out in a wave composed of my own anatomy through the forest.
Smaller detailed journeys within the larger one came as anticipated.
I passed through rocks that encased sparkling geodes. Through leaves
I examined the tiny vessels that carried their green version of blood. I
17
went inside maple trees and tasted the same syrup I had poured on
my breakfast before. I entered a single grain of dust and watched the
molecular workings at the scale of a solar system. Grass blades
caressed me the way they used to when I would run barefoot through
the dew and collapse onto my back, content in exhaustion, and lie looking up
bright-eyed at summer clouds to guess which animal’s shape they mimicked.
A marigold shook me out in pollen like gold-dust panned of impurities.
I slid into a thorny patch of blackberries, where inside each clustered bead
of reddish-black tartness, I popped as though a set of teeth and tongue
were around me and excited to taste something sweet. The glint of
light off of a single dewdrop stunned me in a glorious oblivion.
While my first motion continued in the bigger background, the smallest of
particles here had the power to move me to bliss worthy of tears.
I’m me but I belong to more than me. I always thought I was alone
but I never was.
I accepted that the life I had tried to recover could not be there.
It never had been. I was never alive to any other state except this spreading
essence, still weighed down by an aftertaste like ashes in my
mouth but pressed to enter a new frontier of ecstasy. I never tired of the
feeling of wholeness, of experiencing with each breath the equivalent of
my whole lifespan at once, in one moment of infinite repetition.
I would never let myself fear this.
There is only one moment. There has always been and will always be some
form of a continued consciousness. Nothing ever begins or ends. Either
event is a change in disguise. Energies can only change and be
redirected, never created or destroyed. Watch . . .
My nearest star, my own sun, showed me its formation in the supernova
of other stars colliding with vast clouds of animated material circulating in
the galaxy. Death engendered new life, the same here as on any other stage,
and what a lightshow it was for me on this one. The force of the supernova
ignited and compacted the cloud like a cocoon bursting in reverse, to reveal
something smaller but all the more concentrated in power because of it. The
sun’s inward explosion into being also sent fragments hurling into nearby
18
space. The fragments slowed and gravitated into clusters in orbit.
One of them had just the right distance from the new star for the vast amount
of energetic cells and material, mostly consisting of water, to multiply and
grow into infinite other forms. There were billions of more stars and the same
potential just in my galaxy, and outside of it were billions of galaxies. Yet the
size was less unimportant to chronicle than to simply understand that
light years of distance had no greater immensity or significance than each
tiny pulse like mine back on Earth. There were no absolute points of division
when the universal building blocks were seen from either very far away or at
microscopically close. For a reason I still couldn’t understand, the
in-between perspective was the least clear.
Take me to how the human form of it all should be. I don’t need
perfection, just balance. Show me what they could evolve into
down there.
I blinked and I was an infant again, lying asleep out in a place akin to
the ancient Redwood forests on a cool, early morning. The rising sun on
my skin stimulated me to awake, carried out of dreaming by the same
depthless wave of warmth that I remembered from birth. I believed
completely that this time it would last forever. I sat up among the
giantized flora and fauna, a rushing brook nearby, the oxygen-rich air.
In my greatest hope fulfilled, I could at last feel every living cell as intimately
close as having joined into my own flesh and flowed in my own bloodstream.
Every heart and mind shared the same pulse and peace with me.
Theirs had always been my own and mine theirs, all part of one shining
point of light in space. I had no desire to ever leave this condition. I couldn’t
even conceive of leaving. For the truth I’d found was that no other place or
state existed to reach or regain. I knew I could stay here forever because
I had already been here forever.
Then out of the blue, something slick and sharp like a claw laid
across me from the back. I wanted to ignore it but couldn’t help
becoming distracted out of my peace. I reached behind to shoe it away,
but nothing was there outside my back. It had to be something already
dug inside that just wouldn’t leave me be. The rip ever deeper into me was
19
relentless and fed on its own momentum.
Despite my hope to have stayed right here for good and stay the
same, it just wasn‘t going to happen. In my efforts to reach around to rid
myself of that clawing, I was unintentionally moving away from
where I had awakened. Farther dragged against my will, I was sometimes
upright but more often upside down or on my back and stomach. My
own gyrations to try to correct the problem instead fueled the pace at
which I left. When I stopped fighting it so hard, my new course wasn’t altogether
void of intrigue. Every surface along the terrain, from smooth flower petals to
the roughest tree-bark, rubbed so hard against me that I couldn’t tell what
I was really made of. Deep at the center of all the contact, I finally
recognized a tight ball of sensitive matter to occupy and find relief. No sooner
I did than the ball unrolled like a spool drawn up into a tight passageway.
The surrounding walls closed even further to absorb that which they contained.
The fusion was like mercury mingling with skin. The slide up the passage
wasn’t entirely hurtful or entirely euphoric but of mutual intensity.
I swam, it seemed, through some freezing fluid that stole my breath and
jolted soul-awakening shocks through me. That graduated into the clear
feeling of flying while I stayed in a still position.
The paradox of messages from my body, if a body was still my
definition, said that I was leaving at tremendous speed but not
in an external direction. I sensed that it would be more productive to go with
the motion than to fight it. Swimming with the current, I stared inward at
the vague contours of some sort of landmass–like seeing an island from a raft
after fleeing a sunken ship, under moonlit clouds the shade of plum. The
locality of this destination was crystal clear but still hard to accept. Because
the edge of the landmass, where frothing waves lapped the shore, was
scrawled into the backside of my own hide. I scanned the expanse like searching
a blurry map for routing clues. A map, that’s what my anatomy resembled when
turned inside out. My observation of it was suggestive of looking down over a
countryside from up in an airplane.
Have I left myself, if I‘m able to look at me this way from a distance?
Do thought and the body’s organs, even the brain, become useless to
20
each other and part ways? I flashed back to two pictures of myself after
the bite: lying on the ground one minute still clinically alive, the next
clinically unalive. Not a single ounce of the physicality disappeared between
the two. The only difference between the first picture and the next was the
relocation of a mild inner electrical activity, much resembling energy found
in the spectrum of the sun’s rays. No, I’m not leaving. I’m getting closer, to
a certainty, to a home I never knew I had.
In the map that was always within me, infinite size could easily start and
stop at the same spot if liberated from the bookends of an absolute origin
and termination. The understanding of what I could do now was both the simplest
and the greatest of any possible. I at last could feel the universe become me.
Infinity defied grasp because it did not live out in some fathomless distance. It
lived right against me, always there pulling toward the interminable core, the
spark, the light, from which the coat of tissues fell when their turn
was over to possess it.
Suddenly I could see wheat fields. They were still recognizable, though
thousands of years had passed since I was last present here. I rested up in
the air on gentle updrafts. Was this another portion of the map I had brought
into closer focus? Not that I felt any pressure to decide.
You’re tired, I told myself. Star-dotted sky dropped as my heavy
eyelid. You think you’d like to rest a while.
Rest tends to soon turn back into restlessness, however. Between
me and the ground, contraptions of some kind caught my attention.
They contained patterns such as the grain of wood but moved like two
elongated human arms of tendon and muscle gliding smoothly over each
other. Boney gears at the joints, linked by ropes of sinew, squeaked to find
stride and warmed up for usage. Though I loved this landscape and
would leave most of it untouched, I decided it was too bare. I guided
with my thoughts the first task for the arms: carve deep winding rivers
into the whole tract. They reached out with open hands over miles and
miles. The fingers hooked over the skyline, pulled back to me, and dug
trenches tapping underground waters to fill them. The arms worked next
like a carpet layer to spread out patches of trees for me. The forests unrolled in
21
crackles of green glitter to crash down and take root. I asked for the low
hilltops to be raised high enough to scrape the sky. The arms obliged.
I went overboard on scale, though, so I asked for the hills to fit into my palm.
It tickled me that whatever I imagined somehow came to be, if I wanted it
enough.
I could have fun with this for a long while, but I suddenly wished I had
someone else to share it with. The best times of my life had always been
short-lived, and those I would have married in the altar of eternity seemed to
depart before they scarcely arrived. I was content to remain here in bliss alone.
Yet to share the dream with someone else would be more than twice as good.
I asked, Are there others? I know I’m by myself, but I don’t feel alone,
never have. I feel others with me inside . . . But I couldn’t touch or communicate
with them outside me. I started to wish for a degree of anonymity between us.
I didn’t want to ever know all secrets about the universe, because I would
then lose any reason for curiosity and thus dwindle away. Absolute
knowledge couldn’t be salvation but merely numbing.
I shrank to a smaller but brighter version of my outline. When I waved my
hand in front of me, it trailed steamy spectrums of color pouring off from an
endless supply. I kept on distilling to smaller but more concentrated dimension.
The sequence was mellow and like reacquainting with a forgotten friend.
I was inclined toward a pinpoint somewhere out in the frozen gaps of space
between stars. I got smaller and smaller, beyond the power of the eye to the
cell, the molecule, the atom, and on to a drifting fragment of thought that
still found a way to fade. I finally escaped even that last trace of my identity.
Having erased myself, only then in such sweet amnesia could I know the
oneness that preceded and followed the separation of things. I had
dreamed of this once long ago . . . a dream I had while still in the womb.
I could see nothing yet; I couldn’t play or interact with any other life forms. The
purest of desire kindled a separation to begin putting distance between us
again, painful though it was. The harder and colder that space between grew,
the better. So that in turn, we could someday know the rapture of touching
again and remembering where we came from. The same energy reanimated in
numbers pointless to count during my return back to the same spot above
22
my planet. I witnessed the process all the way from old stars exploding to
stimulate new ones, down to a single drop of water in my world that passed
through lifecycles of rain in a storm, to ice, to thawed, to drank and joined
a bloodstream, evaporated eventually, and then gone back to the sky to
reform a drop in another storm.
So I was home again. This time I manifested into the Earth’s crust as the
fields themselves. I could feel eighteenth-century people wandering
over me, tilling with horse-drawn plows and sprinkling handfuls of seeds.
I could feel the crops take hold and shoot toward the sun. Next came the
combing of people’s harvest tools. There was a reverence to how they
handled me that made me willing to give them back a greater yield.
In rapid but smooth transition, I swept back together into a tighter
form and rose just above the treetops. I had limbs again, somewhat human.
Other presences similar to me were close by now. I couldn’t quite see
them, but I knew it when they brushed my transparent skin. Wherever a
touch happened, tiny minnows inside me darted to congregate at that spot.
At the rising intensity of contact from my invisible companions, the
minnows sprouted into fiery dragonflies with wings of diamond and
emerald and ruby. Eventually their congregating grew too thick to
move anymore, and I became jeweled over from hand to foot.
The sensations of others merged with my own. Sometimes rather than
touching my arm, their whole arm itself joined into mine. The designs
which covered us would interlock and reconfigure like the lively serenity of
a playground full of children.
I didn’t want the course to stop. I willed my body to become an instrument
tuned solely to express the will to accept. Each closer step my companions
made built us into a sum greater than its parts; one plus two could count for
the power of ten individually. Our voices together were like sounds from
a soft orchestra. Every note that played over my tongue, every shift of
my legs or hands–the subtlest of motion stirred them, and their movement
to answer played notes back through me. I already had true affection for my
half-formed companions, of whom I estimated at least two dozen nearby
and many already conjoined. I related the love in absence of sight to another
23
lifelong worship. Through all of someone’s years their heart throbbed right
below their eyes, but though they felt it always, they never did get to see it.
The very mind behind those eyes was never visible either. No one ever got
to see themselves, only wet circles of color staring back from a mirror.
I let go of any defensiveness left in my limbs against them. I didn’t find
an exposure to fear but a childlike keenness to invite all and reject none.
I had shared only moments with these people, but such emotion
fountained from me that I could only express it through music.
Only love matters, the love that is always there and starving to be set
free. Everything else is only there to mask it. I didn’t know if anyone
could hear me or would want to hear me, but that was unimportant.
Beheld or shunned, what mattered was that I told the truth.
It frightened me to realize how deeply I had always suppressed
love in my old life. I had tricked myself into a perpetual sleepiness
and indifference. I realized how words meant nothing until they were
lived instead of spoken. Compassion, acceptance, empathy–
“Clear!” someone shouted from afar. My head turned in that direction to
try to locate this stranger. It was just empty sky.
An electric tingling invaded my chest. The stranger shouted other words
many times but grew faint along with the tingling.
I was glad to feel lost again. My company was disappearing, however.
My great map sprawled out on the opposing direction from the shouts. Its
features were abundant but unsatisfying. The scene was too distant and vague.
I was impressed no more than looking at a paper map held up far enough away
to obscure the clearness. I covered my face in frustration. I was missing all the
splendor from before I heard those shouts. I couldn’t get any closer to the
map to investigate its source or at least revel in the wonders at the surface.
All my companions were gone now and the colors toned down. I remained
trapped there in grayness, in solitude.
There’s another place, I know there is. I’ve been on the way, or maybe I even
got there. But it has to last. There has to be a place that lasts . . .
I was as close as I’d ever be to knowing how the mother feels who
must have labor induced early to save her life from the stillborn child that
24
she would never get to cuddle and name.
“We’ve got a pulse–give him the epinephrine shot, now!” the shouts ordered.
Whoever they were, they stayed too remote to identify a face.
On the map, a yellow line of dawn faded down over the far edge in
a sunrise rewinding. I decided that those shouts were like the ruins of a shipwreck
that called me to paddle back and search for salvage, misleading me from
my destination. As the map blurred away, I did make out tall cliffs riddled with
caves. From the jagged openings, masses of winged animals poured out to
meet the day. Their size was a mystery. With such distance between us, my
perception could have made dragons into hummingbirds.
A cold pierce shot into the upper left center of my chest. The shock overrode
all ability to scream. It was like an iceberg sharpened at the bottom and placed
on top of the most sensitive nerve. The pierce found the desired muscle and
shot in its chilly injection. I halfway reemerged to a sweating, trembling state
that I hated to recall and hated to become.
Please don’t take me there, I begged. Anyone, please help me.
Something, or someone, did come into the emptiness where the map
had obscured and grayed. I could only make out their silhouette. I tried to go
toward them simply because that took me away from those shouts and the
assault on me.
The force of my motion to escape seemed to stretch me out and
shape me into violin strings, flutes, and other musical inventions. There
were long clusters of them wrapped together through which wind passed
into melody. The owner of the silhouette out there was playing me.
From their soft lips upon me at the tip, their breath had traces of mint and
aspen, as if they were a mountain blowing through me. The outline of
a woman kept coming into slight focus but always relapsed to uncertainty.
They were a constant shape-shifter, perhaps above the mortal title of a
particular gender. But the type of comfort I derived from them just
had to be maternal, or female in some way, because it was of the most
supreme nature. I wanted to think of them as a she despite their actuality.
It was someone who had always been with me helping through every step
of my life; not there to force me but to cultivate free will, not to direct but
25
invite me to reach for an open hand. She talked sometimes among the
music, but the specific wording was indistinguishable, overlapped and came
from everywhere at once–flying riddles with no solutions. I never could
figure out exactly where she was. I didn’t mind. All I wanted was to give
myself over.
I was comfortable to be played from now on if she would keep me. I would go
anywhere to be with her. I’d walk to the end of a continent, I’d cross the ocean,
I’d climb to the top of the world or die trying–anything as long as my hand
eventually found hers and would never have to part.
But the shouting returned in full-force and demanded that I drift out of
the music. I tumbled back to an uncaring state of division. I fell out of love.
The shouting was suddenly right in my ear. In the blur of a whitish emergency
room, a defibrillator hovered over me. I rocked up to the surface of this place for
an instant, then immediately started sinking again. I slipped back out of the
scene into blackness.
I fell and fell in a strange sideways direction, my instincts judged. At a dark
and isolated point, I came to a stall. There, a coarse and bass-toned voice
spoke from neither the direction of the room or back the way I wanted to go.
“Pain. It is the only real thing of which you creatures are made; the rest
is makeup to hide it.”
The voice was much deeper than mine but did bear a faint resemblance–the
version of my vocal cords turned into some mangling machinery. Other
voices were entwined with it in echoes that spawned more echoes. Of
the part that resembled me, I certainly wasn’t controlling it nor was it
sourced in my lungs. Yet it seemed to be right on top of me, under me,
vibrating through me.
Who’s there? I tried to ask. What do you want?
“You are all nothing but another expression of the great imbalance.
You are all outcasts from some place of irretrievable peace, and that haunts
you from your first breath until your last. Along the way you make up a
million different stories to convince yourselves that this really is more than
just a cold and lonely world in which you live.”
I covered my head and pulled my knees up to my chest. Get away from me.
26
A power like a rough man’s hands pulled my arms away from shielding
my face and sat me up. Suddenly I was in a grassy meadow with random wild
flowers growing around. Some allergy-causing pollen made me fight off
a sneeze. The meadow was nothing extraordinary, but the stark realism of it
was somehow absurd, like waking up from the most wondrous of dreams to
find yourself in the same old bedroom and faced with the same old routine.
The voice said, “There are no separate lives, only a fleeting coma spent in
the belief that they are. There is no such thing as age, dying old or dying young.
It is all one seamless and eternal flow of change, and the only constancy to it is
that it will hurt. And you know well that the more it hurts, the more joy you
will reap, when you become what you were meant to be.”
I just don’t want to go back to that hospital room. I just want to
feel something more. Can you take me away again?
The sun over the meadow moved in fast-motion across the sky. The whole
day passed in seconds and the next night in less. The next day passed at the
speed of one blink. The rise and fall of days and nights executed months
within seconds and years within a minute. I sat there watching generations
of flowers as one of countless cycles in the environment. Each new batch of
bare stems grew a while, then opened their blooms for a short, precious time,
released pollen, then dried up and crumbled to the ground to fertilize seeds
for new stems to start the process over again. The cycle of the flowers was
a more simplistic example, but essentially the same thing happened
everywhere else to everything else. But I had seen it all before.
I responded, You aren’t teaching me anything new. I’ve already learned–
Another round of assaults jolted me back to the emergency room. My
arrival there was fast and harsh, and the departure was just as violent. This
time I slipped away in a suction as if from a throat trying to swallow me.
By the time I stopped and assumed I was swallowed, I spun around and
found myself in an average neighborhood park. Spellbound, I looked across
at myself at eighteen years old on my wedding day. The outdoor ceremony
disbanded when the overcast skies opened on the crowd. The rain came
before the vows had been finished and before the kiss.
I spun around again to face something like green bottles crushed, blown
27
into a windstorm of glass, and tearing down a bloody tunnel. It seemed as
if I was standing in some giant’s vein. The scene was so fierce and confusing that I
had no clue of what it might be.
Next I dropped into the corner of a quiet bedroom. So quiet and motionless,
it appeared empty at first. The tick of a dusty clock on a shelf was
one of two exceptions. Over by the window also sat a very old man with
wrinkles like weather-carved barnwood and no hair or teeth left. He sat
there alone all afternoon in his wheelchair and stared out at the pecan orchard
beside the nursing home. He listened to the birds singing outside and eventually
fell asleep at twilight. The old man’s face didn’t ring a bell at first, but there was
no denying that his eyes were my own.
I skipped to a scene this time which by contrast lasted barely long enough
for a glimpse. It was in a house with a lack of windows. I saw myself down
a dim hallway. This time I was around thirty-five or forty, and nothing
remarkable was going on . . . except for the fact that I was in a wheelchair
here as well.
I resisted skipping to another scene. I fought to twist against the grain and
locate the cause of this. Upon attaining the bigger picture, I found
myself at the middle of a spinning, slotted circle–perhaps a ground-zero view
of the one I had seen once over the trees. The design of it evoked that of
a device used for a game. It reminded me of a roulette wheel. All the
slots around the outside contained different segments of my life like photo
albums in living color. While the circle spun and I kept looking at
one stationary spot, the slots repeated vast lengths of time in the
same instant–whether I lay on the emergency room table, or fleeing
the rain on my wedding day, or asleep by an silent orchard. I detected
myself out there in solid form–I felt the heart beating, the lungs filling
and emptying–at all apparent points of the past and future at once.
They coexisted in one continuum, all happening simultaneously. As
out of character for me as it may sound, though, I couldn’t really believe that.
Because even here, the distraction of how my looks changed over time was too
powerful of a trick.
One detail in particular did catch my attention again. Every year for
28
me over roughly age twenty-five showed me in a wheelchair.
“Why can‘t I go home?” I heard my thirteen-year-old voice say out loud
for the first time since around noon that morning. My voice was
weak and short of breath but no longer confined to my head. My eyelids flew
open. Chills ran through me at what met them. The existence of
the hospital room, hard as a rock, was a desensitizing whiteout to me.
“Don’t try to talk yet, young man,” someone with a doctor’s speech
quality instructed.
“I’ve seen so much,” I whispered. “I want it back. I want more.”
“Don’t try . . .” He began fading again, perchance to grant my desire.
I blinked. In that dash of sight, I saw the doctor and nurses crowded around me.
My mother stood on the other side of the room. Gloria Shaw’s dark-blue
eyes were the same ones I saw each morning in my own sleepy reflection,
absorbed from her as the window by the bathroom sink absorbed in the
fresh daylight. She looked as if she held back a scream only to spare
adding more distress to the place. Her attention almost seemed pulled to
somewhere else, above us, as if an invisible guillotine blade were
raised over her. The cord that kept it from falling could be no thicker than
the tubes stabbed into me from all sides.
Someone was asking, “Adrian, can you hear us? Adrian?”
“Dad? Dad?” said a little girl’s voice.
I blinked again. One of my hands was knotted into a sheet on
my bare stomach. The other hand squeezed a landline phone so hard that
the plastic cracked. A different bedroom materialized around me. A bachelor’s
bedroom, judging from the looks of it: yesterday’s clothes strewn on the floor
by the bathroom door, one pillow for the bed where I lay in the middle without
any lingering woman’s scent on the sheets.
“I’m here,” I said.
“What happened? You stopped talking. I thought we got cut off.”
My head jostled inside like a salt shaker, the brain nothing but thoughtless
granules. A migraine had kept me up most of the previous night. “What were
you telling me?”
29
“One of my spinner earrings also got lost.”
I remembered what she called her “spinner” clip-on earrings
that I gave her for her last birthday: little silver loops in which
free-turning bars impaled a prismatic jewel.
She sniffled. I could visualize the tears rolling down her cheeks,
and it made my own eyes quiver. I said, “Everything will be okay, baby. You
weren’t hurt, that’s the important thing.”
“But I’m all by myself in this hospital and I’m scared about Mom.”
“Is she able to talk? Can I talk to her?”
“The doctor is in there doing something . . .”
“Okay, don’t bother them. I’ll call the reception desk in an hour to let
you know if I can make it for sure. I’ll leave a message if you aren’t there.”
“All right. Bye.”
“Bye.”
The pale afterimage of flying glass remained at the bottom of my
mind. While the phone parted from my ear, she added, “Be careful driving.”
I tried to say, “I will.”
But she had already hung up.
I put the moaning dial tone back onto the bed stand table. With my hand already
over there, I picked up the beaten pack of cigarettes nearby. It had two left
of the litter. Their singed yet lovable smell for me each morning
equaled the proof of wakefulness that other people got from coffee.
I had chain-smoked three packs a day in my early twenties after my divorce.
After she left my side, I was remarried to cigarettes by the next month.
This year I had weaned myself off to a pack a day, but so far I was incapable
of nursing less than that. I lit up. The first inhale gave me a sweet-and-sour
sense of fullness. It was more frequent, in my experience, for devotion to
demonize lust than glorify it. But that inhale was still so comforting
and familiar, like a good hug. It warmed me up and gave me
something to glove; it literally filled the hollows. Of course I knew
that smoking cigarettes was terrible for my health, but intellect would just
have to take a backseat to impulse for now.
I exhaled. As the twirls of floating smoke thinned and wandered, my
30
thoughts went to my ex wife and daughter. My daughter, the meaning
of life. I already had an answer to the question of all questions.
My face probably looked blank while I took a minute to psyche myself up for
what I’d have to do today. But nothing ever fazed me year in and year out
when I had the greatest motivation that a man could ever ask for. Her name
was Asia, and she had the same eyes as I and my mother.
In a sudden hurry I got up out of bed. Through my legs ran swells of
satisfaction, sped by the blood flow that came alive to put me in motion. I
was clueless about why I should get such relief on this occasion from the
same thing that happened every morning.
I brushed my teeth in the bathroom. My free hand massaged the
corners of my eyes to help the headache. I preferred my reflection in the
black tiles on the wall better than in the mirror over the sink. I had
just turned twenty-five, but the first faint lines were starting to etch in hints
of an endangered youth. Later on I’d have to watch them deepen around
the eyes, then at the front of the cheeks into little wounds from smiling.
Those lines were how time slowly deflowered the young, at least it seemed
to me who had an admitted paranoia of time’s wrath upon flesh.
I think that becoming a father a decade too soon also made the
age of my soul outdistance the age of my years.
I left the shower handle for cold a hair from off. The hot water
quickly steamed up the bathroom like a rainforest. I enjoyed my showers
hotter than most people could even stand. To me it did more than
cleansing but a kind of healing, almost a wash under the skin.
By the time I toweled off, the temperature in the room had risen
a good ten degrees. I happened to catch a side view of myself in the
mirror as I walked out. A trace of lankiness was still in my physique, but
by now, maturing layers of grainy muscle had thoroughly reinforced it.
I put on my only clean pair of jeans. All my shirts were in the laundry
basket; I took care of that chore on Fridays before work at three. I
didn’t have time today to wait, so I chose the shirt that smelled the best to
get me to a store. I’d buy a few for the weekend if I could manage
to get free and start the long drive south.
31
I stopped at my kitchen window on way to the basket. I slicked back
my wet hair and squinted my eyes which were too sensitive to the glaring
light that streamed in. My tiny rent house sat on a knoll among
a hundred others identical to it. My one fondness for this neighborhood
was that it had a view. I lit my last cigarette and leaned on the window
sill. I gazed off east at downtown Chicago and past the buildings to
cobalt slices of Lake Michigan beyond.
Two kinds of folks were to be found at the Victoria Plaza shopping
center. Mercedes, BMWs and such brooded in most parking spaces. Few
came here who weren’t well-off except for the employees on the opposite
side; there was no middle class. An Italian restaurant sat as the studded crown
at the top of three shopping decks. I drove around to the employee parking
lot. I used the rear entrance to get to the restaurant quicker; I needed the
manager’s full attention before it opened. The first of the lunch crowd already
waited in a line at the main entrance.
I found the manager talking to two of our chefs in the kitchen. I said, “Steven,
can I have a word with you?”
“Of course,” he said. “What are you doing here so early before your shift?”
The chefs returned to their preparation. Larger than my house, the kitchen
was full of hanging utensils and spotless counter tops.
I leaned on the counter behind me. “I’ve told you about my wife and
daughter before, haven’t I? Nikira and Asia?” My failure to put ex before
wife was unintentional.
“Several times,” he said.
Steven and I didn’t know the other’s life history, but we had talked enough
to be more than acquaintances. He was the only person I’d really gotten to
know since I moved up here several years back. He already knew I was divorced,
which spared me having to correct myself.
“They were in a car accident this morning,” I said. “Asia is okay–not a scratch–
but Nikira has a severe concussion. A nurse talked to me first and said it
isn’t life-threatening, but it’s still scary for a kid that young to see their
parent taken to the hospital.”
32
“That’s terrible. What happened?”
“The nurse told me some guy tried to beat a light and hit them. Nikira used
to cut it close, too, on taking yellow lights as an invitation to step on the gas.”
“Ah. I’ve always had a heavy foot for that pedal myself.”
“People don’t realize how much force they generate in their cars.”
“Until it’s too late.”
I nodded, preparing to make my plea. “I’ve come to ask if I can have today
and tomorrow off, so I can go down there.”
Steven looked disappointed but bendable, too. “Well, it’d be tough to lose
my headwaiter on such short notice for our two biggest nights of the week.
It sounds like it isn’t too big of a deal down there. Is there nobody else who
can be there for her?”
“Nikira’s parents will go as soon as they find out. The accident just happened
a while ago, around eight.”
“You’ll have Sunday off. You could go then.”
“I know, but Asia needs me today. She’s really upset. I’m not asking
you as an employee. I’m asking as a friend. Can I have the time off?”
He opened his arms. “Hey, I wouldn’t tell you to stay or get fired. I
wouldn’t keep you from your child, either.”
“Thank you, I won’t forget it.”
“They still live in your hometown, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but Nikira wants to move them up here within the next year.
I‘m helping all I can to make it happen for them.”
I dug out the new pack of cigarettes I had bought on the way over
and peeled the top open. The first one to slide out of that crisp bundle
was always the best.
“I thought you quit,” Steven said.
“I’m trying, but it won’t happen this weekend, I can tell you that.” I flipped
out my lighter and lit up, then let my hands lower to my side with a bit of
embarrassment. “I can rationalize all the reasons to stop, but that urge to
just have it and enjoy it is stronger. I’ve tried every remedy I can find.
I’d hook myself to a nicotine IV if I could.”
He grinned.
33
I looked down at my cigarette sending up lazy white twirls. “Honestly,
I think I know what really has me addicted. It’s the routine. It’s
relaxing . . . and reassuring. I can count on it. Cigarettes are little lovers that
always want your kiss. I just wish I could get this effect in a harmless way.”
“Try smoking one cig per day, maybe in the evening.”
I chuckled a bit. “That would be torture.”
“Has to be all or nothing?”
“Yep.”
That seemed to mark the end of our conversation. “Hey, good luck down
there,” Steven said and began to leave.
“To tell the truth,” I said on impulse, “I’m going for more than just my
daughter. There’s someone else in that hospital who still matters to me,
and I want to be around.”
Steven nodded. “I’m glad you’re still on good terms. Kids go through
enough hell in a divorce as it is. I haven’t spoken to my ex in a year.”
“We promised each other to always get along, and that was for more
than just Asia’s sake. Our kid comes first, by far, but losing the passion
for someone doesn’t always mean losing the care. Of course the loss of
passion was kind of one-sided.”
I dropped my eyes back down to my ember-tipped cigarette. Steven
must have read some sign that another problem altogether was
bothering me.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
Surprised by how easy I could confide, I said, “Something happened
this morning when I was sort of half awake. No, actually I was awake
all the way, when I look back. It was so powerful that I didn’t dare stop
and think about it. I just ran–in my mind, I mean. I imagined that if I
let it take hold of me, I’d find out what it means to go insane.”
“Are you talking about a nightmare?”
“No, I’d have to call it knowledge. It’s hard to describe.” My hands made
motions to compensate for lack of articulation. “The knowledge that I’m
already gone before I’ve actually left, that I’ve never really been here at all.”
“Sounds weird. You had some kind of premonition?”
34
“It wasn’t like looking ahead or back in time. It was a feeling that someone’s
life here is just a momentary drop of forgetfulness separated from an ocean
where they really live. The feeling is still here, too, like wet clothes clinging to
me. The longer today goes on, it changes from a thing I could take off and
leave behind. It’s sinking into me.”
“We’re all just drops in an ocean, man. Have you been thinking
a lot lately about some event from your childhood that had a big impact?
Say, an important person who died too soon from an accident or another
unnatural cause?”
“No one has ever died that way in my past. Except . . .”
“Who?”
“Except me.”
His eyebrows raised. He waited with some discomfort for me to explain.
I said, “When I was young, I got bitten by a poisonous snake. I was
five miles from home, and I didn’t quite make it back. My mom had gotten
worried, though, and went out in the truck looking for me. She spotted me
from the edge of the last clearing before home. The people at the
hospital didn’t believe I had already been dead when she found me. The
doctor thought I was still barely alive then and didn’t actually die until
right before she got me to the hospital. He said it had to be a very short
timespan; otherwise I’d have brain damage after they brought me back.”
Steven said, “That’s quite a story. We’ve known each other for about
a year, right? How come you never mentioned this before? What did you
see during those minutes while you were out?”
A surge of words pressed at the bottom of my throat like high water at
floodgates, which I might never be able to close if I raised them. But none of
the words would be any good. Whatever I let across my lips would sound
awkward and have no real impression. Instead I just told him what I
had always told people: “I don’t remember.”
“Oh. Probably for the best, then. About this morning–all kinds of weird
things can happen when you think you’re conscious but you’re only partway
conscious.”
“I need to quit talking about it. I won’t be able to forget it unless I refuse
35
to acknowledge it.”
With my permission won for taking the days off, I decided I should aim
myself south toward my daughter sitting somewhere alone. I could almost
see her, as one might sometimes think they can already see their first
dream of the night taking shape from afar before they truly fall asleep.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Steven asked.
I gave him an honest smile as I turned to leave. “I’m fine, really. I’ll
see you on Monday.”
“Okay. We’ll go get a drink or something after work. Good luck on
your trip.”
“Thanks.”
I used the route through the plaza on my way out. I had a stop to make.
Most of the stores wouldn’t want me in them and I wouldn’t want to go in.
I did enjoy passing by the candy shop, which had a group of children inside
still young enough to be spared from categorizing people based on last names
and numbers. The upscale pet shop next door had the usual lollipop parrots
perched on sticks, shrieking and preening themselves. The smells of
woodchips and loneliness drifted out from the sad-eyed animals up in pens
and the babies heaped in big storefront containers like dry aquariums.
I made my stop on down the line at a jewelry store. I had no business
there on my income, but this was the only place where I find might the
thing I wanted. The sales clerk wore a tuxedo. He eyed me down his
sword of a nose when I walked in. I searched the display cases. A basic
replica of her earrings (I had bought the other pair here) sat in the
small children’s jewelry section.
The clerk strolled over, hands behind his back. “Can I help you, sir?”
I pointed. “That pair.” These were the least expensive in the store, but I
had some doubt as I pulled out my wallet. I had no credit card and a check
would probably bounce. I earned a decent wage due to sixty-hour work weeks
with lots of overtime, but I voluntarily paid double the required child support.
By the end of each month before payday, I was always close to broke.
My car had a full tank of gas which would get me down there and back,
and I had already put enough aside for she and I to eat while I was there.
36
Everything left in the wallet was fair game.
I straightened out the wrinkled bills. I slowed during the process in
fear that it wouldn’t be quite enough. The man had already taken out the box,
too. How embarrassing it would be to have to leave empty handed. The
ragged bills were deceiving, however. My tens got to fives, exposed a
surprise twenty, then left ones. I got down to my last dollar, which covered the
final cents. I had three dimes of change coming back.
I gladly scooted the pile across the counter and said, “My lucky day.”
I almost got right onto the freeway without even thinking. I hadn’t packed
a bag or readied my house to be empty for several nights. I drove back
fast, threw stuff in a bag, watered my plants, and turned off all the lights.
Down the sidewalk from my car sat a white sports car with the license
plate 2SXE4U. The teenagers inside were talking to three others leaned
in the windows. When they pulled away from the curb, the kid driving
spun the tires until smoke boiled like two chimneys. Though the
old-soul part of me disapproved somewhat, I still smiled about it. I took
my sunglasses out of my pocket and banished the sun glare from
my eyes.
As I got in my car, I had a twitch of some forewarning. It came from
a long ago image that the intervening time had eclipsed the purpose
of: a storm of bloody flying glass, green and shimmering. My hand hesitated
on the key while I lost my brief grip on the memory. It escaped back into
the erasure of the past, smooth and pale again.
During my days, anchored down with obligations, I stayed under the
sedation of routine. Repetition soothes the human brain, sometimes even if
the given tendency is harmful. Soothes it enough to overlook how
little opportunity it has to really function. My lifelong answer of “I don’t
remember” to Steven’s question, and others who had asked me the same,
did have truth. I really had lost grip on that day twelve years ago. In my
waking state anymore, I knew that a snake had pumped me full of
venom at one point, and at the next point I was revived at the emergency
room in Vidalia. Of what happened between those points, I could
37
recreate only a crude illustration. I never found any color for the sketch
or light to spill behind the closed doors in my head.
My nights were different, nights I could hardly ever recall later. I did
preserve the vibration of a subtle call to progress–to migrate–that rang
ever louder through my restless instincts, terrified that a coming winter
would murder me if I stayed still and stayed complacent. The nighttime
balanced my instincts on a compass needle trying to point at the
closest mark in my world to the nearest star–at the sun’s hottest and
most intimate bond to it somewhere on the equator. Somewhere
in a land I knew I had glimpsed before but couldn’t remember how.
I drove on out of my neighborhood and approached the onramp to the
freeway. Right then another memory overturned like a rock stuck in the ground
to show its underside: varied glass bottles broken by my friends and I
throwing them against a wall at the town junkyard. I hadn’t thought of
that since it happened, an unimportant event of adolescence, but the
imagery flew back at me now. Right afterward I remembered the time at
six-years-old when I fell into a window pane, by accident, and the glass
hit the biggest artery along my forearm. That was when I first realized how
much blood a person had in them, how hard it flowed . . . And, in spite of the
pain, I discovered a fascination with watching the exposed process of it,
before my mother had rushed in and wrapped a towel around my arm.
Flying glass. Why did I suddenly obsess over every memory of flying glass
that I could dredge up? Glass and an open vein.
I got on the freeway. I slipped right into the hypnotic state where I could
perform the act of driving while not entirely present. People leaving for
or returning from lunch had boosted the one o’clock traffic, which ran
heavily enough to surround every car. At last on the highway that would
take me to Asia, my thoughts naturally flocked to her. She had hazel hair,
between my shade and her mother’s, and skin sunned brown by this month
of the year. Like both of us she was lean and built for speed. She loved to
run–run through my house, run through the park, run from me, run to me.
I was fascinated in a childlike way with her, this little two-legged gazelle
running circles around my life. Her nature was a perfect blend of the best of
38
Nikira and I with none of our worst. Her huge, lively eyes were the reason
I got up each day, just to check one more square off the calendar until
I would see them again.
Last spring we were driving out by the lake. She was leaning on her elbow
out the open window, and she said out of the blue, “I wonder what souls are
made of?”
My eyes had smiled their secret smiles. Hers stayed on the water’s horizon,
which blended with the sky so that the precise boundaries of each were
indivisible.
I said, “Hmm, I wonder too. Maybe whatever you want.”
She idly went through a list of possibilities: “Music. Sky. Dreams.”
What would I do without you? I kept thinking.
There was a time, however, when she could have sat in the palm of
my hand and yet had frightened me more than anything I’d ever known.
The few magical weeks from eight years ago that had resulted in her existence
didn’t even seem real while they were happening. Nikira and I had both been
bright kids (we both made good grades in school), but that doesn’t always
equal common sense. Using birth control was the last thing on our minds.
I guess neither of us really believed a consequence so earth-shattering
could happen until it did.
The most crystal clear vision of my life emerged the first time I saw Nikira
across the street in front of our old high school. She must have just moved
there because I hadn’t noticed her around before. It was at a distance, but
something about her exploded electricity through me all at once. I stood
there staring and hoped that she would happen to glance over at me. Her
looks were a puzzle that I needed to solve. Growing up in this particular small
town, I had little exposure to interracial families. Out of habit, when I first
saw Nikira I thought she was Caucasian with an immaculate tan and jet black hair.
But she had some other exotic subtleties that I had never encountered before.
When I found the nerve to go closer, she turned out to be my first lesson in the
genetic wonderland of mixed races. She was a quarter Columbian, a quarter
Vietnamese, and the rest Caucasian. Her bone structure and complexion
introduced a whole new level of human possibility to me. Her eyes were
39
a phenomenon of multi-toned auburn, green and I swore even traces of
violet in the right light. Standing next to her, a rush went through me
as if I had jumped off a cliff. During our first conversation, her mind also
intimidated me; I began suspecting that she might be too smart for me
to keep up and hold her interest. My heart pounded while I tried to figure
out what to do. My inexperience delayed but didn’t prevent my way to
the underlying vibe from her that I had nothing to worry about.
The strongest driving force in the wild had built up in me for so long,
I would have almost rather died than continue to possess it. I used to
hate being around couples. I couldn’t stand to watch them hold hands
and stay close wherever they went. I hated it partly because I didn’t have
what they did but mostly because I couldn’t understand.
Then from the first day I walked up to her, my whole outlook changed.
She made everyone else around seem like characters in a fictional life I had
mistaken for mine. Through letting her know me, I finally knew who I was
for a while. Those following months, and especially the first half of June,
were certainly magical but too rare of a thing to escape extinction.
I knew deep down through the whole living dream that nothing so good
could ever last.
Neither of our houses had promised secrecy. My parents were at mine
too often, her siblings were at hers too often. If everyone was gone, we
still remained too skittish that someone would return unheard. So one day
we walked out together into the woods behind her house. We found
our hiding place almost at the edge of a secluded corner where the
timberline ended. Below a canopy of branches above, there was
a grassy area, free of underbrush, just the right size for a blanket.
The time of year was ideal to be outside with the season bridged
between spring and summer. The air off of the plains, warmed and heavy
with scents, sweetened the wind that drifted in around us. Wild orchids grew
nearby, although I never did actually see them. I smelled their undertone,
during an unreal moment before the rest of reality broke off from me in pieces,
all except for her.
I stood there, in front of all of my world left that mattered, with my shirt
40
off and scared to remove more. I was scared also because I didn’t know how
to hold her, how to touch her. The release she helped me to learn brought
more than my wildest dreams to life: The true revelation was that I
could go to places in my mind beyond where flesh, limited by gravity, could
ever ascend alone but did with such inspiration to gravitate towards. She
took me to places that had always existed in me but which I would have
never found without her.
We went back every chance we got both during the day and at night.
If it was after dark we would light candles around us and afterward
lay watching the stars as long as possible. I didn’t even know what life was
until these times. I could shut my eyes, give myself to her to breathe and
to breathe for me. She could reinvent me, then give me back to myself made
into a permanence where once was frailty. We learned to fly together.
I melted into her, got lost in her, seeing her all the time whether we were
apart or together. For those nights and long afternoons, we amounted to
only one soul between us.
The last time we went was during daylight hours. I was glad later so
that my last memory there had been bright and drenched into my
eyes. The light pulled out and magnified every detail, uncertain of
one being’s divisibility from another, lost together in a wonderful nowhere
place like the interim between a breath drawn and not yet released.
We stayed until all our strength had left us. Afterward we lay on our
backs with the wind cooling our sweat and looked up at the sky between
the swaying leafy branches. Different trees had grown so close together
here that sometimes the branches caught each other and became
locked forever.
No one had to tell me that I was an unwanted presence around
her for the short-term after her family found out she was pregnant.
That next year was like a trance that I drifted through as if on someone else’s
legs. I had no desire to even go on a date with anyone else again. I couldn’t
conceive of ever again feeling so defenseless while so loved and consumed.
Instead I kept reliving those few weeks over and over in my imagination. I
resigned myself to the odds that maybe a person’s real life was supposed
41
to occur in such a short timeframe, and all the rest would just be filler.
Eventually her parents warmed up enough to the idea of me to let
me start visiting. After graduation I took the plunge and proposed. Our
second and final break three years later happened for a reason I couldn’t
really put my finger on. We barely even discussed the fact that we were
going to part ways. I never stopped wanting her, and I doubt that she
exactly stopped wanting me either. There was some other heartless influence
pushing space between us that I was aware of but couldn’t name. I fought
hard to keep her from getting away from me, but she seemed destined to
slip into a different direction no matter what.
After that I abandoned the fruitless job market in my hometown.
I knew I would never live there again. I went down every chance I got to
go get Asia (I kept her most of summer break and any other breaks),
but I drove in and drove out of the town like passing a stranger on the
street. My other family had either moved away or passed away. I wanted
no more reminders than necessary of a setting for fulfillment that
I could never recover.
Last month Asia had assembled one of her forts in my living room
out of couch cushions, kitchen chairs and blankets draped over the top.
I had walked in and knelt at the low entry in front. It was dim inside.
I thought maybe she wasn’t in there until I noticed a foot sticking out.
“Are you asleep, kiddo?” I asked. “We have to leave soon to take you home.”
Her voice was a watered-down version of itself. “Dad?” she said, in the way
of telling me she had an important question.
“What?”
“When are you and Mom going to love each other again?”
When Asia was happy, she would often say, “if I had a tail, I’d wag it.”
I wished only to hear that while I tried to explain.
On the opposite side of the freeway, professionals returning to downtown
looked desperate to loosen ties and discard high heels. Another four hours
at the office seemed as if it might kill some of them. A Greyhound bus
drove up ahead of me. A couple of young boys in the back window of the
bus signaled for the truck driver on our left to blow his horn. The trucker
42
waved and seemed to wish he could indulge them, but that would
frighten other drivers. A woman in the car on my right attempted
to control three rowdy kids and stay on the road in the process. I
was remembering how once in a doctor’s waiting room, I figured out
a way to calm by imagining myself behind other people’s eyes, since the
experience had to be similar. You could use that technique anywhere
about anything.
The open vein was really a road. My head snapped into a forward lock. I
hadn’t been prying for any answer; it flared up on its own. After so long
now I knew: The flying glass tore down the line of a road, simulated by
the massive vein, and the contents were people and machines in place of
a blood flow.
Though I had traveled countless miles in my head, I had only driven two
or three minutes from my house. I thought I saw the same sports car partially
hidden in traffic up ahead. That wasn’t a huge coincidence, but I doubted it
until I saw the license plate. Same car, no question.
The understanding of what was about to happen ticked first in the
jittery muscles around my wrists and ankles. They tightened as if sensing a
mistake in progress before the rational mind caught up. I had heard about
cases of cellular memory passed from donor to recipient in heart transplant
patients. Perhaps clairvoyance could also reside there as well as in the rest
of the system. The tightness worked its way up through my arms, shoulders
and thighs. They strived to operate out of my control, tensing as if in preparation
for a shock.
Quit thinking like a lunatic, I told myself. Nothing is going on.
My hand nervously twisted the radio dial. I clicked over twenty stations
without paying attention. I didn’t know why I was having these reactions, if
I should laugh over them or heed them–but either way I wanted them gone.
The sports car whipped into other lanes without signaling. The passengers
kept distracting the driver. I noticed his head turned toward them more than
the road. My hands clamped like a hawk’s talons onto the steering wheel.
Suddenly I wanted to get away from here. I checked ahead for an off ramp
and if I could get into the exit lanes, but the traffic was too compact at
43
this second to get over. I looked up at the car. It went toward the right
lane with another car in its blind spot.
The rear of the sports car slightly tagged the front of the second car.
It wouldn’t have caused a major problem, but the younger driver
overcorrected while whipping back into his lane. The sports car went
too far back to the left and slammed into a pick-up. The pick-up shot into
the next left lane from the blow. The sports car, put into a spin, flew back
across into the other car it had first clipped. The last time I saw either
car, they had spun around to where the passengers were all facing me over
the hoods. Both cars for an instant were backwards and still at seventy miles
an hour.
The squealing brakes of every vehicle in the area stung my eardrums. The
vehicles ahead slammed together. Bumpers collided into rear
fenders. Some lost control and slid sideways or rolled. The noise was
like a mechanical thunderstorm. The Greyhound bus and the
eighteen wheel semi-truck arced towards each other. The front of
the semi lifted the bus up enough to throw it over on its side.
I had kept my car straight while sliding on the brakes, but it hadn’t been
long enough to lose much speed. The rear of the bus, swinging from
right to left, struck my car and threw it into the semi. The impact tossed
me inside my car so hard that the seatbelt broke all of my ribs. I caught
only fragments of what happened from there. At one point my car was
airborne over the black pavement. It flipped over a dozen times at
least and struck other vehicles along the way. Everything blended
into one distortion over my face. Dozens of other shattered windshields
rained together, catching light at a certain angle that greened them
over. Dazzling.
For a brief and surreal intermission, I was removed from all the
deafening crashes. I sank downward and could look directly below the
freeway, held up in the air on cement legs. I saw boxes where the homeless
lived among weeds and gravel and rain puddles. I skimmed along
the underside of the bridge, then started to drift up again. I passed through
the cable supports, through the pavement, and back into the experience I
44
was having in the car pileup. It hadn’t stopped during my absence.
Confused, I tried to figure out how I had arrived here. I couldn’t consent
to having any weight because I was sure I had never had any. I possessed no
history as a solid thing. I should have been erased, defined by darkness,
yet here I was in some measure.
Then I collided back into my injuries from the wreck. I lay buried at the
bottom of piles of sheared metal. Outside my rear window, the only one I
could see out of, leaking gas and blood wetted the asphalt amid other
piles of debris. My car was laying upside down and the bent roof
pinned me in. Even if I had the leeway to move, I was past making any
of my limbs respond. I couldn’t even contract my fingers. I could isolate no
specific areas where I was crushed and broken. I realized that wasn’t a
good sign because it probably meant I was destroyed everywhere.
Such severe damage to my system should muffle the pain soon, but the
minute or two of waiting might as well have been months. A napalm of
pain had exploded from the inside out through every part of me. Nothing
survived but the brain, aware of the entire rage pumping me into
an inward abyss, blackening my world in the rearview. I had little if any
blood volume possible to live on left in me. I distinguished whole sections
of my skeleton gone, perhaps splintered off inside me but also might no
longer be part of me. The brain, too, was going the way of the surrounding
flesh and bone that encased it.
The consumption of agony receded to spaced waves. I hoped
that would mean the onset of nothingness. Nobody could hold onto
my previous state over such a blessing. The waves dulled me,
suppressing like spoon after spoon that pushed everything down
and down. I still had my eyes open but they registered only black.
What feeling I did still undergo was like silk sliding against rust,
a hurt so dulled that I welcomed it.
I had a curious new sensation now in a still and silent place: my cheeks
all alone and warm with tears on them. My fingertips, inexplicably moveable
again, stroked the cheeks as if I were blind and searching brail for direction.
All that I knew had gone painless, so no injury could have caused me to weep.
45
It stemmed from an emotion that was brand new to me. Unlike the mourning
of the end to life, it was a mourning for something that had already died in
me long ago. I could almost make it out way back at the farthest corner of
my eye which defeated the darkness. There lay the edge of a telescope lens
to one blindingly omnipresent beauty long since forgotten but the yearning
never faded.
When I looked beyond my fingers, damp with the evidence of desire, I
wasn’t at the bottom of the rubble anymore but with a gap between the
top of it and my position. The view of the freeway and the surrounding city
grew in sync with my rising altitude. By the time I was near the clouds,
once divided elements of the layout blurred together and combined into
a larger pattern, where the edges of city bled into land and lake. The two
latter parts overwhelmed the speck of civilization.
The exchanging perspectives were interesting but began to unsettle me.
The fact that I had no sense of loss at all after what had happened below
should have been liberating. It wasn’t. Cold logic proposed that I should
be a nonentity since I had been physically destroyed in the accident.
Certainly once the last brainwave flickered out while a body was dying, there
should be nothing left to consider. Back during the escape from such pain, I
actually would have been grateful even to have nothingness meet me on
the other side. But in order for there to be nothing, it appeared that I had to
have the awareness that there was nothing. That explanation didn’t make
sense to me, but it was the only way I could work out what was happening.
I would have nothingness if that was what I wanted. Is there really
a choice? I questioned, half-expecting someone else to tell me. There was
just silence. I looked up above the clouds and at the bottom of where blue
sky began to deepen its shade at the edge of where outer space began.
My view suddenly rushed upwards, by appearance; however, the
sensation stirring in me was of going backwards. It speeded through
a long portal of myself into myself. The round walls expanded rapidly out
into a room too wide and tall to see the extremities. Out in the middle
of dark open air, spiral staircases looped their way up toward an
unreachable roof. The staircases formed rings sometimes and curled
46
around each other, some overlapping or ran parallel. Some wandered off
to diagonal pursuits or simply stopped in midair. Huge empty storage bins
were stacked in levels. A mangled construction of conjoined houses, enough
to populate the whole city where I’d lived, was raised into a crooked tower.
The rooms were all stacked helter-skelter with two or just one wall, so I could
look into most of them. The unexplored spaces multiplied in leaps just during
my short glimpse.
While the glimpse withdrew and backed me away, I made out one more
segment of scenery out in a vertical window, warped but the glass perfectly
clear. I stood awestruck at what was taking place out there through that
segment.
Here it was, after twelve long years of waiting. The memory of five
minutes from the early afternoon of May 31st, 1995 came back to me at
last. Indeed the entire memory did restore itself in full glory, but I had
an unexpected letdown. Because I was allowed to only watch it, as
an outside observer, and not actually relive it. I had hoped for it to rush
back at me with such strength as to rebirth the whole experience.
I had seen segments of my lifespan like this before. Except before I
had been facing thousands of them on a wheel that spanned many
decades. Some segments had accounted major events, others just an
ordinary day in the life. And back then from that vantage point in
the middle, watching them spin around me, I had been able to tell
that they were all the same moment of atoms rearranging over and over.
A process of change, not of time. From my current vantage point, I could
only see one segment, and currently the boy inside glanced up into it.
He spent less than a second looking into where I was. Then he looked on
to somewhere else as if there was much more to draw his attention than
my one piece spinning by.
It can’t be, I thought. I can’t accept that everything in my life for twelve
years since has just been one tiny little part of what’s still going on back
there. I’m not going to turn around and find that I’m still him, and
this whole life since was just a blink next to the consciousness of
eternity. I refuse it.
47
My defiant statements went on while I tried to back farther away from
the area. Eventually I was far enough that I couldn’t see out through
that window anymore. All my rejecting of the insinuation behind it
had not comforted me a bit. Now I was away from the vicinity, though,
and the typical law that out of sight meant out of mind applied here
the same. I lowered back down through a clouded night with no company
or any other disruptions. That was okay.
When the night ended, I lowered down out of the clouds at the same
point above the freeway from where I had left, and apparently no time
had passed at all. I looked down over the enormous car pileup.
I came to a stall hovering about fifty feet above it. The area was
crowded by now with police and paramedics who had arrived,
those who had gotten out of their cars unhurt, and those on the residential
streets below coming out of their homes to investigate the reason for
the sirens.
Out of all the activity, an inconspicuous spot caught my attention.
It was a single bolt on the back of a tow truck. There were a lot of bolts on
there, but this one stood out for a reason: it was slowly unscrewing itself.
When it came to the end of the threads, it dropped a few inches to
the bed of the truck and slid toward the edge. I looked out over
other vehicles and could either observe or hear minor pieces of them
working loose. When the smaller pieces had fallen away, the major parts
ensued dismantling.
In turn, all the people had lulled into slow motion and began coming
apart with a graphic beauty irresistible to watch. Like knots that
were tugged loose, in all directions drifted elements of bone, soft
tissue and blood globules. The way they came undone, and the way the
light gleamed off of their internals, had a surprising but undeniable
gentleness to it. The liquid part of them next separated from the fibrous
and mineral which left very little solid in the wake. The elements of the
people up and down the road congregated together into an airborne
stream. It moved away like a bright plumage that never ceased in its
opening. It flowed low to the ground for a while, gaining momentum,
48
and eventually disbanded in all directions. The inhabitants of the
neighborhoods and business sections of road flanking the freeway
were next to join it. From those who were inside houses and other
dwellings, their elements flowed out of the doors and windows, breaking
open from the pressure behind.
All the vast metals of the city shook free and flew together into a jagged
wave. The looming steel factories out on the southeast side, the train station,
the frames inside the downtown buildings–all metals swept into a tidal mass
rolling on out into the distance, back to the mines from which they had
been exhumed. Fuels from motors, under filling stations and from
refineries emptied over deep cuts that opened back into the ground. Rubber
tore free and flew off toward plantations of the far east. Rock and cement
rolled back to quarries. Wood flew in storms of boards and splinters
back to logging ranges. Roads uprooted like ribbons, lashed up into the
air and shook apart to crumbs. Some of the houses were still untouched.
Trees now grew up from inside them. Branches popped out of windows, enlarged
entrances and punctured roofs. The trees quickly outgrew their confines and
picked up the whole houses before bursting them apart. The last signs of
humanity disappeared below the full grown trees; the underbrush and tall
grass covered any flattened ruins that might have remained.
The width between my eyes wasn’t bound by an inch of bone.
It traveled to the span of the seaboards. The lay of the land changed in
expected ways under me as I went–the plains broken by jags of rougher
country to the west and east–but with the exception of no civilizations
left anywhere else either. I met both oceans at once, which like all oceans
of the planet were connected somewhere between the continents in
one overall body of saltwater. The movement throughout its global
currents was relatable to movement within any self-contained body
regardless of size differences. With my mind at peace and throughout
all the Earth’s water, the continents reversed through their ancient movement
of separating from what was once one enormous land mass. I felt them
move over the mind like patches of skull shifting back to the time when
they were all bound together. They reversed through all the infamous
49
ages of ice and drought, mammals and dinosaurs, aquatic forms predating
any animal legs to ever walk on land. In a condensed form too small for
the naked eye to see, I came to rest in a great silence somewhere far down
in the ocean, at the bottom of a trench where no light penetrated from above.
Here at the ultimate of dark and isolated places, the urge to chase after
another change, another action, was the clearest it could ever be. The
last thing I ever wanted was to just stop and stay still. I gazed up through
the freezing blackness, and though I could not see the sky above, I
I sensed an infinitely deep and loving connection to something up there.
From the point of only single cells could I rejoin terrestrial life forms and find
a renewed hunger for their experience.
At this stage all that played out were the most basic efforts of cell friction,
to generate enough combined energy to release new cells as offspring
and thus continuation. The masses of new clustering and growing
cells rushed away from those behind and took a little of me with them.
They swam to all directions, multiplying in a fury, gaining size and potency.
I had a small placement inside each of them and another placement watching
them from outside, while also feeling what they did. The offspring advanced
over eons into coral and starfish, crustaceans and eels, manta rays and fish
and sharks.
Then I experienced the gradual shock of the first aspiring land-crawlers
that ventured from their home of two billion years. The process of gills
changing to lungs ached me like a cold fever-sweat. Pebbles scraped my
soft stomach as I pulled myself from the wet comfort and up onto a beach
a thousand times over to make the switch happen. A muggy sea wind fanned
upon the first skin on the planet to become dry. Over generations they
overstepped the fear of going far inland. After a long transition of
living half in the sea, half on land, some became solely dependant on the
soil and freshwater rains.
The first inherently warm blood swelled through me, pushing out cooler
blood. The explosion of new species reached the highest level ever. Countless
generations were still required even for slight alteration, but next to the
age of the Earth, their entire rise and fall was merely a blink. I developed into
50
waves of carnivores and felt their jaws tear out hot flesh; then I became the
herbivores and felt it torn from them. Their cycle kept a reverence for each
other; the carnivores later died to fall and fertilize that which nourished
their counterpart. The continents by now were divided back out as far as when
I had known them. The atmosphere was free of the last ice age to a long-lasting
balm.
My passage concluded back at where I had left from, above where
a highway once stood and now overgrown by treetops. I did continue on to
something else, but this time I didn’t travel in an outward direction. Thrust
into the heart of a slow explosion beginning inside me, I faced the
mural of my old body’s internal regions. The organs and networks of veins
were clear to study along with the rest of the anatomy. Behind it all, light pulsed
somewhere in the background, a distant rhythm like a lighthouse guiding
the lost to their only hope. I turned inside back to outside, then outside back to
inside over and over as if repetition were needed to sharpen and perfect the
process. My sense of touch overwhelmed the other four to the extent of
making them obsolete. Touch defined me now.
It itched like a swarm of locusts under me crawling and flying. The itching
saturated me, the kind of itch that would have driven me to madness before
if I was withheld from relieving it. Here I had no fingernails or other capacity
to scratch. I had a will, but the itching encompassed even the intangible parts
of me. It wasn’t really hurting me, but I would have rather had a knife
upon me. If I could ever put that will into hands again, I would rake
my nails over myself until it nearly drew blood. After a while, however, the
sensation topped a plateau where it didn’t subside but I accepted it. Since I
had no way to get rid of it, I decided that would be the healthy alternative.
Afterwards it strangely attracted me. The shift to acceptance changed the
manifestation of it into more of an intense chill rippling over me. The
conclusion of that left no worse than a vigorous tickle behind.
The pulsing light reached its peak as I passed by close to it and then went
on past. Out the opposite way I could make out a dimly lit leafy terrain.
I was going in a diagonal course that sloped slightly down toward it.
With closer proximity, evidence arose that it would be solid when I got
51
there, like approaching a mirage–or a map–without ever stopping until
you must believe that it is real country you’ve seen from afar. I picked up
speed right at the connection point to go in among it. As if shaken through
a sift, I fell in a mass of droplets through the tree canopy. The droplets splashed
from leaf to leaf, closer to the painful landing I feared below. I dripped down
into it for the longest time with my full range of senses inhabiting each drop.
Each was a unique hue and left puddles of glistening residue on every surface
they brushed.
I could tell that some of the drops did strike a resting place below. The
number that contained me was dwindling, I suspected. They kept me
held up by moving me into the ones still highest on the leaf stair-step.
As they struck, the splash released a new part of the world below. I saw three
given drops balloon into a pond, a giant citrus fruit, and a flock of butterflies.
Some absorbed into objects already there. One crashed down as a bunch of
pot-bellied pigs that darted off with their tails flicked up. One released a
sleek lizard that jumped away from the fright of its own strange genesis.
I had no idea what might happen when I, narrowed to one drop left,
finally did land. Before I knew it, I lay on a bed of grass in my familiar
body trying to reform. Just above me, fine particles of white and varicolored
radiance made designs in tribute to the solar systems across the sky over
the trees. The designs burned out, then reignited like exercise tearing
down muscle and then feeding it to build back stronger. The constant decay
and cremation resonated with reinvention. They dipped down and almost
brushed across me, their heat intensifying with the closeness.
I tried to laugh, but my attempt at a voice hung out of reach; I was still too
immaterial. The designs plunged on into me and rose out again, sewing me
into existence. At my thickening toward a solid shape, the white-hot particles
lowered to orange, then crimson, which deepened ever more toward flickering
out altogether. I believed that in each particle, a face was smiling at me while
it died. If they had given up their energy so that I could have it to live, my
tears were completely of gratitude.
“Get up,” a female voice said.
I rubbed at my eyes. I doubted if I could stand yet or even roll over.
52
“Get up,” she repeated with more urgency. Her tone suggested that I was
in danger if I stayed sedentary.
“Who are you?” I asked, surprised to hear my voice sound identical to
the last time I heard it as a mid-twenties mortal.
“They’re about to catch us, and we’ll leave you here if you don’t listen
to me. If they get you, you’ll be gone forever.”
“If who gets me?”
The last dying embers of crimson disappeared. I could no longer
even see my hand in front of me. My legs shook and threatened to buckle
but I did what she asked. The darkness was absolute. I remembered a trip my
family once took through a national park cave. At the bottom, our guides had
turned off the lights so we could experience true pitch-black. This environment
even felt similar to that cave–cool, damp, the air charged and pricking at me.
I heard other people talking. “Where did he come from?” a kid asked.
“Focus on saving yourselves,” an older woman’s voice said. “He’s
no use to us.”
I heard the taps of shoes moving away. They didn’t run–probably couldn’t
run, due to their own blindness–but they all took hurried, nervous steps.
They seemed eager to be away from here, or perhaps just away from me.
Judging by the sound, around two dozen of them made a close group
leaving me behind.
“Follow the sound of my steps,” the first woman said, who lingered
behind by me. Her voice was all I had to conjure an idea of her. I
guessed her age to be around mine. “Follow me but don’t touch me.”
I slipped on the rocky floor. My hands extended out to orient myself.
They instinctively tried to locate her arm.
“Keep your hands away,” she warned. “If my kind touches, we get sick
and die. You will too. The others won’t wait for you. I can’t help you unless
you do what I say.”
“Where is this?” I asked. I understood my exact same physical vulnerability
from my human self. I had come to a stop in my reformation, and I trusted
that this would be permanent. I was merely a one-hundred-sixty pound
man again.
53
“There isn’t time to tell you.” I heard her take several steps away. “Come
with me or you’ll never get out of here. I can’t wait any longer.”
She sounded serious about leaving me behind. She wanted me to
follow, I gathered from her tone, but she was unwilling to overly endanger
herself to save me. Judging from the rest of the group’s reaction, I was
only baggage to these people.
“Okay, I’ll go.” I put my hands down at my sides to be certain they stayed
to themselves. “Don’t leave me.”
She talked to me no more but did lead me along. She walked slowly so I
could trail the sound of her steps, but she didn’t lag enough that I might gain
ground and accidentally make contact. I tripped several times and
hurried to get up on my stubbed toes struck by the sharp, abundant rocks.
She would wait for me only a second or two. If I couldn’t keep up, it was
obvious that she would abandon me. I focused all my attention on setting
my feet down at dependable spots. The duration of our walk was probably
shorter than it seemed to me. The discomfort of it made the minutes drag
out into hours. At the end I could think of nothing but the soreness in my feet
and pangs of thirst.
I expected that leaving this place would be like approaching the mouth of
a cave. The daylight did filter in gradually ahead but also from either side.
We were already outside, had been all along. The exit from captivity
instead delivered me into a glow already present but which I had failed to
perceive. Some reflective angling trick had suspended me in a state like
funhouse mirrors confusing where was an opening and where was a wall.
The surface under my bare feet smoothed out but was still either stone
or hard dirt; the woman’s sandals ahead of me left no shoeprint.
I could distinguish her from the knees down a little bit, but the rest
was obscured. I was still clothed except for my missing shoes. My shirt was
missing its buttons and hung open. My jeans were still in good shape.
“Who are you all?” I asked.
“My kind doesn’t have a name,” she said.
“Do you have a name yourself, then?”
She waited, as if deliberating on whether to tell me. “It’s Aurora. Don’t
54
talk anymore.”
More light came and her back cleared for a full examination. She wore
a snug dress that defied description as an inanimate object. It flowed around
her making the skin beneath and the cloth evoke layers of wet running paint
that ceased to ever dry. I couldn’t tell which was which. It alternated between
hugging to her and then relaxing away as if to exhale. It gave more room
from the waist to the shins and stopped above her ankles; the upper parts
contoured to her in perfect replica. The shifting color themes were
absorbent of her mood, brighter or darkener in unison. It performed
as a rose in instantaneous phases of blooming and closing. Currently
it was white with red streaks and shading. Pink and blue pairs were
on the next turn.
We were on a dry lake bed, perhaps, due to the abrupt forest lines behind
and ahead. I then decided it was a dry riverbed, since I couldn’t see any banks to
left or right. By the shade of early light, I would have guessed the time to
still be pre-dawn, but I was too incomplete to make a sound judgment.
My idea of having formed back to myself all the way yet was premature.
Still weighed down by a kind of stupor, I kept losing pace at her back and
found my own stumbles to be the height of humor. I had gotten the message
that our situation was serious, but that didn’t stop me from laughing.
I had to bite my tongue to make it quit.
“Hurry up,” Aurora said.
The anxiety in her voice sobered me. I looked back to check for any pursuers
after us. The riverbed sat empty. The other distant bank was just a hairline
between the chalky ground and the black-and-blue sky.
“What are you so afraid of?” I asked.
“Keep going. We have to reach the other side.”
The other side revealed itself to be overly lush foliage dripping with the
look of a tropical region. Up the bank behind the first bushes and ferns,
a small crowd waited–the people who had left us to save themselves.
They spared me an uncomfortable meeting when we got there. They all left
except for two, an older bearded gentleman and a girl of about sixteen.
I still hadn’t seen Aurora from the front. Short of hearing distance from the
55
others, she told me, “Don’t be angry with them. They had no choice.”
“I get it,” I said. “If we can finally talk, my name is Adrian.”
She finally turned around toward me, which let me see her eyes for
the first time. They should have been impossible, these otherworldly
hues that burst out from the center and were morphing right before me.
For the rest of her, back in the dark I had given in to wishful thinking
that she might look similar to the wife I once had. Her voice already
had me possessed. Aurora didn’t look completely identical, but her reality
still lived up to the fantasy. I couldn’t say what, but something else about
her seemed familiar beyond the voice and the face.
She said, “You’re safe now to go your own way . . . or you can come
with us, if you want.”
She went on over to the waiting gentleman and girl. The tone of her
invitation had no preference. It would be fine if I desired company but also
fine if she never saw me again. If I procrastinated at all on which choice to
make, my legs already knew the answer. I went like a tail-tucked dog,
tracking strangers to a possible new home, up to walk behind the three
pushing through thick leaves. I thought, So, what else can I do but just take
the ride?
The bushes along the banks led into fertile trees much wider than
their height. A few by contrast were completely leafless, gnarled and pale;
they could have passed for the skeletons of some prehistoric beasts that
had died standing up. We hiked on toward some sort of settlement. The
taller portions of the town–roofs sloped and curved, throngs of sharp spires,
the top of a waterwheel turned by crystalline water–stood above its
surrounding wall of marble and brick. From several tree limbs around
the wall, enormous pinecone-shaped assemblies of moths hung, either
mating or sleeping. They kept their wings slowly motioning, perhaps to
sustain circulation. Here and there atop the wall, sculptured gargoyles sat
hunched over in postures of contemplation rather than anger.
I followed Aurora along a grassy path toward the gateway to the town.
Beside the path, a group of young women with new babies, or their stomachs
full with the promise of one, used aboveground roots for chairs.
56
They sorted through earthenware bowls of tiny, delicate plants and filed
them into separate jars. I guessed that the plants were medicinal instead
of for food due to how they handled them. The women talked energetically
and giggled even more so, which was contagious to their baby sons
and daughters. One mother had a particularly cheerful prize perched on
her knee, bouncing him now and again when his arms flailed for attention.
None of their group looked at me or my group except for this bald baby.
When he first saw us, he grew a tad solemn. Then the joy fizzed up
again tenfold. His heavy head lolled and uncoordinated limbs batted
as if he meant to swim out into the air. His smile was a crescent moon.
He pointed awkwardly at me and cooed with elation. The women didn’t
seem to ignore us on purpose but acted as if we weren’t there at all.
“What’s the matter?” the baby’s mother asked him. He now sounded
as demanding as jovial. “Are you hungry?” She started to give her breast, but
the baby pointed his stubby fingers away from her. “You want down?”
She lowered him to where he could crawl. Through grass so green it
was almost bluish, the baby tried to catch up with us. We gained too
much distance before he even got to the path. He let out an astonishingly
loud and frustrated cry but still seemed to be having a good time.
It startled some nesting birds overhead. They fluttered out in a hurry.
They had built their homes in the circular gill-flaps under the caps of
mushrooms as tall as the trees. The scope of my awareness had missed
them thus far. Their stems began way back to either side of where we had
passed. Rising and winding outward, they stretched into a sporadic
roof over the path. We could stay fairly dry here in a downpour.
The vintage architecture in the town owed itself to true thinkers. A full
span of European presences bore wild contrast to the Oriental styles. The
fact that nothing matched did multiply the intrigue, once I got used to it.
The citizens’ attire was as diverse as their dwellings. Lower level streets
crossed between the brick streets up here. Down there, markets and more
dwellings were all packed together. The town was designed to accommodate
as many people as possible in as little space. The streets weren’t too crowded,
though, which made me wonder if most of the residents were nocturnal.
57
There’s something else besides people here, I decided. True, all the
ones I passed looked normal, but superhuman fields of vibrations ringed
them. I collected a subtle illumination from them exposed at the rear
corners of my eyes, pushing them to the edge.
I looked into a deep gouge in one of the houses. I faced an unknown
distance back into the depth of that street block. The blocks didn’t have
backyards in the middle but were solid constructions and on the move
in self-containment. Entire homes themselves were twisted into the cogs
of gears. They turned slowly interconnecting with each other to keep the
operation going.
I shuffled backward and jogged to catch up to Aurora and her friends. This
time I went right on up beside them. The man with the beard growing to
his belt was closest to me. “I’m Tommy,” he said.
“Adrian.” I extended my hand to shake his, then quickly changed course
to scratch my head instead. If my kind touches, we get sick and die, I recalled
what she had told me. Of course I wanted to question them about why and
what that meant, besides the obvious mystery about their reproduction. I had
a dozen questions leaping at my mouth like starved dogs for meat.
Aurora suddenly stopped and splayed her hands slightly, as if tuning in to
tremors in the ground or the air. She gestured to us three to be still and
quiet, giving her senses clearer channels. “They’re closing in again,” she
said. “We have to hide.”
She scanned for a place to go. I looked around to see who she was talking
about. “There’s no one around,” I said.
The others were already headed toward an alleyway barely the width of
shoulders. Aurora waited at the entry for Tommy and the girl to go through
first. She turned back to me. “Come on.”
“Who are we running from?”
“I can’t tell you yet.”
One step before I made it into the narrow space, something congealed
all of my movements like an attempt to run in a dream that results in a standstill.
The same unrelenting shakiness from my preteens gripped me all over. It
then pulled at specific sections at a time as if taking me away in small pieces
58
and reassembling me somewhere else. Panic, the machine fueled by
the desperate mind, started to spin its wheels of razors through me.
I foresaw the speed building to a complete physical displacement.
Pieces of me really were being taken away: a hand missing here, an
organ missing there.
My previous momentum helped to get through that one last step to reach
the alley. If I had two to go, I would not have made it. Aurora came
in behind me, and everything shaken out of place realigned; my missing
parts blended back into me. The end of the alley delivered us into a great dome
like Roman ruins open to sky at the middle. A poverty-riddled community
lived here. Most families had single-room huts built out of sticks and mud.
All of them were undernourished, especially the children who were
barely clothed for the most part. The atmosphere was of one solid shadow.
In the bright center circle shed from the overhead cavity, however, some of
the youngest children found solace at a mud puddle in which they
played like piglets.
Another blessing thrived here: a spring from a crack in the wall. I crouched
to get a drink. The gush down my throat healed me like setting a dried sponge
under a faucet.
Aurora passed me. “Over there,” she said, directing the other two to an
empty nook between the huts to conceal them. Stepping up by where
they sat together, I suddenly felt like an unwanted stranger again.
Aurora noticed and said, “You’re still welcome with us.” She smiled and
spun my doubt around.
The gladdest I’d ever been to sit in the dirt, I took a seat between her and
Tommy. The younger girl was in front of us and appeared quite nervous. She
had tattoos, by first glance, but they were neither fixated or unchanging.
Flurries of bird and fish-like flocks raced over her stirring a whirlpool of
patterns. Reeds with albino tigers among them swayed. Swelling inkblots
ruptured on into coloration that ended only at her fingertips, where
they could grow no farther. She shifted color with a chameleon’s skill and
a shark’s speed. Marine life swam in the spray of breaking waves that
caught rainbows from an underwater light source. The girl had short hair so
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not to block her neck or back. She reminded me of a fawn with those
eyes agape and her thin, jumpy build. After we stayed there a minute,
she calmed down. The overexcitement of the tattoos slowed as well. She
looked at me.
“Hello,” I said.
“She can’t talk,” Aurora said. “Her kind are born without voices.”
“Oh.”
“That’s Sabel. We found her wandering alone in the wilderness a few years
ago, so we took her with us.”
“How did I get here?” I asked in a more demanding way than I intended.
“I don’t know how it happens, but sometimes we get pooled together in
the place where I found you. We’re all the same there in that darkness. No
faces, no differences, just on our own. All just trying to find another like us.”
Reflecting back, it did relate to a sleeper’s space between dreams scattered
through the night like the space between stars: complete blackness, complete
emptiness, conquered simply by the sound of her voice to bring me out to here.
She continued, “Of course, empty spaces between things is what makes them
matter and for the most part defines them. You aren’t the first of your kind I’ve
found there , but you’re the only one who ever made it out during my life.”
“My ’kind,’ your ‘kind‘? You talk about us like we’re different species.”
I looked between her and Sabel, myself and the people in the huts.
She said, “The ones who live here in this town and the rest of their
kind . . . much of their world that we can see is invisible to them. They feel us
when we’re close by sometimes, but they aren’t quite sure what it was.”
“Do you three live here?”
“We don’t live anywhere,” she said. “We spend our whole lives traveling.
Their cities and towns are always similar, though. Easy for us to come in and
find food or to sleep for the night.”
“Who were you talking about back on the street who we had to hide from?”
“They call themselves by a lot of different names, but we call them
all the Illusionists.”
“How do they look?”
“Different to everyone. If you see them at all, you’ll lose grip on any
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clarity of it afterward. I’ve been close to them before.”
“I think I was, right before I made it to the alley.”
“That wasn’t even a graze. If you ever get your time to really be with
them, you’ll never be the same.”
“Where exactly are these individuals who are chasing you?”
“I hope behind us, so we can stay on the run. We’re in the middle of
two sides that are fighting each other. We don’t know which is right
or wrong. I’m sure that they both think their side is right. But all we want
is to just get away from their war.”
“They’re fighting each other? How?”
“It isn’t a war of weapons and bloodshed, but it’s still the same as any war.
They try to remove your own will and implant the beliefs that they want
you to have. Their agenda is about minds who want to control other minds, use
them as a tool for the war-machine, and get richer taking what the other side has
if they win the fight. We’ll keep trying to escape, but we have to live the best
we can in the meantime, too, since we may never escape.”
“How long has it been this way?”
“Many generations I know of. The urge to run is probably in my genes,
besides what I learned growing up. If we can get far enough away someday,
we might be able to leave them behind forever. There’s only about six thousand
of us left like me. We travel in small groups. If the Illusionists infected one of us
while we’re all together, it would spread fast. The more we spread ourselves,
the more immune we are. It’s getting harder all the time though. I’m afraid
that one day we might have to travel solitary to stay alive.”
A skinny brother and sister huddled in the hut across from me. They
picked at crumbs left in a bag that had once contained bread. Their father,
a tall, scowling man, towered over them as he entered the hut. He dropped
a bowl of runny food in front of them. He sat and stared hatefully at
nothing in particular. The children shared the bowl. The brother stopped
at a few bites and let his sister have the rest.
“How come you don’t touch?” I asked.
“It isn’t a matter of choice,” she said. “It’s a matter of survival.”
What a polarity my kind had to hers. Hers perished if they touched; mine
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perished if they didn’t. “So what would happen,” I asked, “if you did die?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an elevation somehow, to see clearer, something
unimaginable from here. You might have known before, in a rare moment
or two, what it’s like to feel your consciousness move outside of your head a little,
and to realize that it isn’t confined to just that six by six inches of skull.”
I swallowed, thinking about the last few hours. Finally I said, “Long ago, I
used to think that death would be a blank. No, actually twice in my life I came
to think that, because I forgot about the first time I found out differently.”
“You can conceive of a blank. For there to be nothingness, you will have
to know later on that there has been nothing. A blank could only exist because
a consciousness returns to recognize it as nothing, and instead it turns out
to be life-affirming.”
I shook my head. “Nothingness is the only state that can exist outside of
any knowledge of it. I think that every pair of eyes sees the world as their
own, but a blank would be the same for everyone. If you’re right, then I don’t
understand why you’re running. I mean, if there’s never going to be an
end, why would you run from anything? What would be left to fear?”
“There are worse things than the death of whatever arrangement we
happen to be in, human or otherwise.”
I withdrew into silence for a while. I watched the little girl stop midway
through the bowl and try to get the boy to eat.
“I know you want to know what this land is,” she said, sounding uncertain that
she could fulfill my curiosity. “Most think I’m crazy, but I believe the whole
place, millions of square miles, is all a living thing. We’re playing out roles within it
just like microorganisms in our own bodies that keep us going. There may be
someplace we could reach someday to, well, enter another level behind it. A way
to become dissolved together into one being and enter its thoughts. And become it.”
Tommy cut in, “Don’t tell him these things, Aurora. We may only be imaginary
playthings, but there is no proof. You think it’s possible to not only see the big picture
but become the big picture. The rest of us think you’re holding onto myths you should
have outgrew. That’s all smoke and mirrors.”
“We all keep myths alive in our own way,” she said, “because we all feel
something more to the truth than just what‘s on the surface. We keep it alive
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every time we imagine a future where we can have lasting peace; every time
we take another step when we’re so tired we can’t even speak.”
Their discourse ended there, and they both went back to observation of the
area to tell if we could leave yet. I was rapt with watching Aurora
watch the foreground. She had the kind of eyes that were honed to
always watching out for others. They looked impervious to ever becoming
weary. A question spilled out of me before I could control it. “You’re the
one, aren’t you?
“Who?”
I already wished I hadn’t spoken, but it had attracted her interest now.
I felt unable to successfully lie while those eyes were searching mine.
“You were there with me at the end . . . from that time when I was a boy?”
Her interest left me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The bowl slipped out of the girl’s fingers and splattered over the bedding
on the floor beside her. A squeak of alarm snuck out of her throat.
She inched toward her brother, and panic beamed in her eyes.
“You!” the father yelled and snatched up the bowl. “Look what I did
for you.” He shook it at her and squeezed her arm in his fist. “Then you
spill it over my bed on purpose.”
“It was an accident,” her brother said. “Let me clean it.”
“You stay put. I’ll straighten her out.”
The man didn’t do his straightening immediately but sat back and pondered
the solution. The girl, trying not to cry, now did something that broke my
heart. She reached around to use her own bedding to wipe the mess off
her father’s.
“Stop!” he ordered.
She cringed and dropped everything.
“Just leave it be,” he said.
While this pathetic event developed, I looked to Aurora. She shook her
head a bit. I was unsure if that indicated her own disgust or if she was
telling me not to go over there.
Sometimes my stepfather used to treat my mother like his child instead
of his wife. His methods favored a dog-like belittling, jerking her around
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on a verbal chain, and once or twice a year he’d slap her for a random
disobedience. He never drank when he did this; in fact he seemed at his
clearest during those times. I used to wish I could provoke him to draw
him away from her, but I always just froze up. I’m too small, I would think
over and over. I had grown up another hostage, like the girl, in circumstances
beyond our control. There are never enough of the strong to protect the
meek who are too raw, feeling too deeply, needing so much while
getting so little.
The girl jumped up to run away. The father reached out and caught her
wrist. He yanked, threw her to the floor and made tears literally squirt from
her. “Don’t!” he shouted.
She clung to her brother as if he might open a door in himself and hide her.
The father took a fistful of her hair and guided her over to the mess.
“So you want to clean it up?” he proposed. “Fine. Let’s clean it.”
He shoved her face into it and rolled back and forth. He left her
smashed into it and stood afterward peering down, apparently satisfied.
The girl sat up and tried to wipe herself off with her blankets.
“I can’t ignore it,” I suddenly told Aurora. I sprang up on my legs like two
exploding pistons.
“Wait,” she said, “you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t care.” I assumed she meant that I was about to get stomped.
This man was bigger than me, but I had to do something. My temper
wanted me to hit him right off, but I decided to start with unloading
a piece of my mind and we’d see where it went from there.
He didn’t even glance at me while I approached. I yelled, “Hey! What’s
the matter with you?” His continued indifference made me decide to
give him a shove at least to start. As I got within reach of him, I
realized that like the women back on the path, nobody here, or in the
entire town period, had looked directly at me the whole time.
Simultaneously, my hands went right through the man. Thrown
off-balance by empty air, the rest of me followed, tumbling into the
area past him. I detected nothing solid the whole way. While I was falling
through him, I could momentarily see inside his torso, the organs working,
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the blood teeming. I hit the floor on the far side and stared back the other way.
He nor the children even knew I was here. I gazed beyond them at Aurora.
My expression begged for help, an explanation, anything. She looked
sympathetically toward me but had no relief to give.
“Just come back,” she said.
The father seized the boy by his shirt collar and declared, “You’re going to
go work in the ditch.” He dragged the boy off.
I stood and stepped to the front of the hut. The girl sat in a pile of tears at
my feet. She had cleaned off her face, but new runs from her eyes cut fresh
streaks. On impulse, I bent down to pick her up. I didn’t expect my hands
to meet any substance; but they did. Her weight was light but very much
present in my hands. One arm underneath her knees, the other behind her
back, I picked her right up to my chest. Her eyes flew wide open. The
tears stopped at once. Her hands clutched at my arm and her stunned
eyes explored for the source of what had elevated her. She couldn’t
see me, I’m sure of that, but she was highly aware of me.
Your spirit is beyond him, I tried to think toward her. He’s bigger,
he’s stronger, but he has no power.
To me she was like holding a kitten or a baby bird–achingly fragile,
hollow-boned even. I could feel the little heart in there beating everywhere
due to her thinness. The pulse was as present in her limbs as in her middle.
Aurora, Tommy and Sabel all got up to leave out. “We can’t take her,” Aurora
told me.
“We can’t leave her, either.” The girl didn’t react to our voices. Substance
against substance appeared to be the only sense we could share.
“She can’t see us.”
“I’m holding her. I think she can see me, at least with her mind.”
“Her mother may be coming.”
“Maybe not.”
“It isn’t your place to take her, Adrian. Put her down.”
With great hesitation, I did. Right as she settled back into the ground, her
mother did come around the corner. The mother was even thinner than
her children from probably giving them her portions. I left but kept checking
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over my shoulder. The mother gathered up the pieces of shattered emotional
glass. Her ability to comfort had become glue for broken souls. I worried
about how many times the same pieces could be shattered and repaired
before it wasn’t possible anymore. I wanted so badly to stay right there
and try to help them.
Outside the alley, Aurora paused to tell if we were safe. We walked on
across town. None of us had anything to say. Disinterested now in much
of anything, I stared at my feet.
I heard violent noises in one of the buildings. We were passing a tavern.
The tables and bars were all ablaze with glamour, the finest glossy wood
and silverware. A crowd of gnarled, obese farm hogs inside were dressed
like men, gluttonous over bulging plates of food. They reveled in loud debates
and an occasional brawl. They wore fine suits, had carefully trimmed
whiskers and greased hair. Big pocket watches on chains hung out
of their jackets. Shot glasses the girth of watering cans abounded.
Their cheeks, like pairs of tomatoes, adorned the continuous flush of
overindulgence. They had heaps upon heaps of food on the other tables
not in use. Past those, muscular fruit and vegetable plants had broken
through the floor boards to fill a large tree’s worth of room. Tons
of overripe crops hung there, all spoiling on the vine. More sustenance
was around than even this crowd could consume in a year.
“Who are they?” I asked Aurora.
“Greedy for more than they deserve.”
“The local politicians, in other words?” I contemplated stealing some of
the food to take back to that family. If the children couldn’t see me, they
might fail to see what I brought as well. Or maybe an armload of food would
just float up to them. I decided to give it a try, but when I turned to retrace
my steps, a brick wall built itself lightening fast from the ground up
and locked me out.
“We can’t often go back to places we’ve left behind,” she said.
“What do you do then?”
“Keep going ahead.”
A bunch of kids who held kite strings ran across in front of us. The kites
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were decorated with streamers that left bright trails burned on the air.
The kites flew in aerobatic patterns by an uncanny wrist control
from their pilots. The kids’ shadows that ran along beside them all
flamed in colors like autumn leaves. After they passed us, I discovered that
the kids, being transparent, had caused the effect in their shadows. The light
rays traveled through them to imprint a mobile cast of their insides onto the
ground. Pointing at them, I asked Aurora, “What is that?”
“The Synth when it’s young. The Synth is power that moves between
people. Some learn to let it thrive in them while they grow, but most
forget how to keep it alive once they get beyond that stage.” In longing, she
watched the last of the kids run by.
“Power to do what?”
“There are no limits. You could do as much as you let yourself believe. The
process is by an exchange of your own effort, though–yours given to another,
theirs given back. Sometimes the benefit is much greater on one side, but an
exchange always has to happen.”
“Can someone kill with it?”
“If that’s their choice, but they would probably lose their Synth later. It
doesn’t like to destroy. It’s the same as an animal that will choose to migrate
if its home becomes unwelcoming.”
I stopped and examined my hands as though if I tried hard enough, I might
see light pass through me, too. In my concentration, the quiet deepened to
where I could hear nothing besides my own breathing. “How do you know if
it’s there?” I finally asked. She didn’t answer and I saw that she had kept
walking. She was way ahead now with the other two.
I heard Tommy say to her, “We’re getting close to another bridge. Do you
think we’ll be able to use this one?”
“If we can get there fast enough,” she said.
A fountain between the buildings distracted me off to the side. Two figures
stood in the water who each had a shining encasement around them. It lit
them as well to the point of almost hiding them. Their overall shapes looked
human but their gender was undefined. They performed slow dances on
their own while gradually closing the gap between them.
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Aurora had come back to me. “We have to move on now, with or without you.
It isn’t in our nature to stay anywhere too long.”
“What are they doing in there?” I sensed a wonderful event happening
beyond what I perceived.
“Creation in four dimensions.”
I squinted, straining. “I can’t even tell if they’re creating anything in one. What
is the fourth?”
I stared on, intent to see again with my eyes already open. The couple
approached ready to embrace. Their focus on each other made them oblivious
to any audience. When they met, I expected something other than the expected.
They didn’t stop where they should have but stepped right into each other.
They made as seamless of a merge as two pools of water slid together, the
elements mingling to where I could never differentiate them. Like water,
they were allied in the same blueprint beforehand; while water joined
water, vein joined vein, skin joined skin and so forth. Then with their
completion achieved, the shine closed them down to a thin line and ebbed
them away from sight altogether.
I said, “Is that really what happened, or is it only what I think happened?”
Aurora didn’t answer. I saw that she had long since left me again. A strong
pull to follow her tugged at me, but too much attracted me here to
leave yet. Another minute wouldn’t hurt; I was sure I could catch up.
I stepped into the fountain, empty now. While I stood there asking myself
where I anticipated to go, the realization of it meant to realize I was already
there. What I would encounter besides height, width and depth should
have been an unknown. But an echo in me older than my age in years held
the answer. The fourth, with no name but older than the rest, revealed
an inner space that overruled the other three dimensions. It opened up the
space they were meant to quantify into the entity of thought, untouchable
by any measurements. It was pleasurable to stand here, but I didn’t really go
anywhere. I wondered if maybe that couple before had gone into their
Synth together, and in the wake of such power, I was just picking up on
a residue left behind.
I laid into the warm water and blacked out for a period. I was content
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to stall, bathed in this perfection. When I came to, as if woken up on
another’s feet, I was already sleepwalking through the infrastructure of the
town. I vaguely remembered wandering through the open door of a house.
Now I was lost deep in one of those filled street blocks. I’d never find
Aurora again–surely they wouldn’t wait for me–but to grieve here seemed
as out of place as laughing at a funeral. It might take days to pick my way out
of this maze of multistory connected homes, hallways and stairs that slanted
every which way.
I came across two adolescents crouched by a fireplace. They inspected
a heap of jewelry spread out on a towel. Halfway discerning their
watcher, their heads swiveled as I passed by. I wouldn’t scuffle along
timidly. Back in Chicago, if anyone thinking about robbing me saw
that, I figured that the advertisement of fear in simply how I carried
myself would show them a more likely victim. Nobody enforced
any ill will upon me here; they acknowledged me but left me alone. How
come people are starting to notice me? I wondered. Where am
I going?
I sensed a presence sitting at my side. I turned my head to face a fox,
its nose level with my height, that had approached in stealth. It had shaggy
ginger fur with a white chest and black-tipped ears. On its back, a boy rode
who wore only a pair of underwear. Skippies, I used to call those. He clenched
tufts of the fox’s fur to hang on and clasped his bare legs against its sides.
I figured the fox would bite me in two. Instead a pink tongue rolled out
and licked me. It drenched my whole arm. The bareback rider grinned at
me, his bangs so long that they obscured his eyes. I petted the fox. The
wetness on my hand made the strands of fur stick to it.
“He’ll give you a ride for a belly scratch,” the boy said.
I smiled. “Maybe next time.”
The boy thumped its flank and the fox strutted ahead of me. It leaped out
of a window into a woodland on the other side. I stopped at the window
and considered going in, but the drop down was too far to take without
hurting myself. There were additional windows to the left and right. One led
to a red country of mesas. The only life there was of scavenging birds that
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glided on updrafts. Next to that window was a fertile country like green
fresh paint. On the opposite side, another window overhung the Rockies or
somewhere comparable to it. When I looked sideways into the windows,
their contents went out of sight to both sides, despite other windows just a
few feet away.
I walked into a baby’s nursery. The baby, pacifier in mouth, wore pajamas
with the feet sewn in. Above the crib hung one of those toys that played
gentle songs while it circled. Standing upright in the crib, the baby leaned
on the bars and watched me pass. I couldn’t be sure, but this nursery
reflected the one where I spent my first years. My memories after
birth recommenced at age two or three, beginning at a time when perhaps
everyone, and certainly I, believed that if they were thirsty enough
some night, they might get milk from the Milky Way.
At a screened porch by a thicket, I found a sparrow that had gotten
trapped inside. It flew around the porch trying to get back through. Its
beak searched the screen everywhere to try and solve the mystery to this
blockage. It chirped desperate songs that made me remember childhood
pain. It flew in open air sometimes but always on a cyclic return to the
screen. The only choices its instinct offered were to eventually either beat
itself to death in the fight to get home or die of dehydration.
I waited for the bird to tire some and pause, then I scooped it into my
hands. Cupping it as lightly as I could, I took it over to the rip that it
must have squeezed in through but was unable to locate again. The bird
had a scent taken from the home it longed for. These primal fragrances could
only brew miles from civilization. Its shiny, alert eyes examined me.
It trembled in my hands, the blood heated from its struggles beforehand
now warming me. Surely it must have thought that this giant meant to eat it,
yet in the final seconds it allowed itself to relax a bit. I let the bird go with a
little push out of my hands. It took to flight as if I had sent it zigzagging far
out into the trees, chirping this time in freedom songs.
I searched on for hours. When I found the old man, I had wandered into
the house at random searching for food. He had been dead for years. No
tissue remained. His was left a sunken, sad net of bones under a blanket
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pulled up to his neck, as if he had been cold at the end. My hunger left
me and I swallowed tears instead. I got out of there at once.
While my mind reeled, I passed the contrast to that place. In those houses
that were the cogs of gears, rolling into view for a time and rolling on,
children played an elaborate game of hide-and-seek. They spurred
emotions in me that made even death seemingly justified for celebration.
I heard one of their hazy voices come out to me. “What do you call it?” she
inquired.
I said, “I’m not sure yet. What do you call it?”
“The Fantasm.”
I turned a corner and walked next into a peculiar silence that closed off
everything behind me. I staggered at finding I had walked into my
own house. I looked back at only the open door to my bathroom
behind me. I might have never left that morning before the car accident.
Then I saw my plants in the window sills: they had withered and curled
in on themselves from lack of care. The house had been unoccupied for at
least a month.
Testing for a way out, I shifted from one position to another on
whim alone. An invisible hand seemed to sketch my movements before
me, and I followed without choice or comprehension. I felt miles away
from myself. I latched onto the visualization of me solving this maze, my
own home. It became the way a drowning victim will cling too hard at
someone else–sometimes drowning the other, too–who tries to save them.
I refused to drown in my own fear. I also feared I was trying too hard.
If I meant to trust my own depth perception, I believed that the house was
shrinking. I had to duck my head and fold in my arms to go through my hallway.
Next I wondered whether I might be growing instead. The insinuation stemmed
from my nucleus out to tips of me other than fingers and feet. I could
swear that I was budding new appendages, from the backs of my shoulder
blades, perhaps, and other odd sites. Whether a shrinkage or an enlargement
was happening, it was the same difference. Lovely sunlight–the kind that
exposed dust motes dancing in constant churns that were always there but
needed the right illumination angle–filled my living room through the
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two tall windows by the front door. I squinted, unsure if what I experienced
could be called joy. I felt wet and newborn, all my fibers stretching and aching,
vessels and blood volume bulging. A tremendous weight pressed from the
backsides of my bones. My frame squeezed out until ribs started to divorce from
cartilage. My heart labored to gain another beat as if a boa constrictor tightened
harder around it between each stroke. It had to get stronger as a result.
None of this was a bad sort of pain; it felt productive. It was the kind that
conquered dread of the unknown and thrust the timid into progress. At the peak
of sensitivity, as if I were skinless and every bare nerve exposed, the frenzy of
sensation guided me toward the window in my bedroom. Outside to the
horizon lay a desert. It looked more hostile the farther someone might dare
to enter. It was wasteland so dry, so lethal, a person would resort to drinking
straight from a poisonous fang just so their mouth could know moisture one last
time before they died. Those sips might soften the final hour and leave the
drinker unaware of dying, because having lived was forgotten.
By all appearances, the place had nothing to offer. I wasn’t interested in
appearances. There were secrets out there buried underground; my
gaze across the surface missed them, but nothing could hide from my heart.
The sand flats and dunes started to shake for miles around. From beneath
grew up forests of flowering plants. They trickled out a purple nectar as fast
as boiling honey. It funneled into canals slicing away to every horizon. I leaned
over through the open window to the closest flow right outside, splashing against
the side of the house. I touched it with my finger tip and tasted it. With
a single sweet drop entering my throat, I came unglued to the pliability of
air. The entire forest breathed, pulled me in through its lung crust of
the topsoil, and then sent me back out strengthened to return the
act. I breathed in the terrain like the live watercolors of a genius
running off the page. I breathed the petals, the emerald stems below, and
at last the rich burgundy soil that parented them. The mixture joined my
bloodstream and lifted its oxygen content into a windstorm. It lent to
breathing in other sensual beings the texture of vapor. We shared our
act at the intensity of a blade so sharp that it is painless to be cut by.
A pair of loving arms that once held me tight had to be very close
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again. The nearing feel of them was unmistakable; even blindfolded I’d
know their magnetism. Pulling me gently forward into the window sill,
they were on the verge of being revealed in the flesh. I whispered, “Is it you?”
All I wanted was to go out there again through the window and never return.
A sound from behind, back down the hall in my house, caused me
to look around one last time. The bedroom and hall looked so normal,
it was frightening. The perfect normalcy, however, was the very
paradox that deserved another exploration. Surely it couldn’t hurt if
I took one more walk around in there.
At my first step away from the window, Aurora’s voice came from
somewhere which if I had to guess, I’d say was far above my head.
She seemed to be saying, “Don’t let them take you,” but she was
muffled as if I were underwater.
That other sound inside my house was also a voice. The sound
which had first caused me turn around was in fact a combination of
voices, synchronized. I shuddered, knowing I had heard this before,
and that a coarse duplicate of my own voice was among them. By the
time I could tell what those combined voices were saying, they had
increased the volume of one of their own eventually speaking by itself.
The final voice was a man’s, and his part grew enough to rule out
the rest.
“Are you listening to me?” he said. “Your future may depend on me. You
better listen hard.” This was a man I knew well; I had called him a friend.
My ears were hearing him from somewhere else, too, and I knew that
I lay somewhere else–on a hospital bed among equipment keeping
me alive. I tensed my eyes shut hard and recited, I’ll count to three
and I will be gone from there. That self will be gone. I’ll be free.
Already aware before I opened my eyes, that self had become me because
he always was me. I could turn to nowhere else or be anyone else.
I was just me.
Steven sat in a chair beside the bed, hands clasped between his knees.
I fought against really acknowledging the place. But I failed to ignore the
knowledge that I could no longer feel my legs. I could neither detect or budge
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any part of me below my collarbone.
“So, what now?” Steven said. “Are you just going to talk on and on about
it? You know that these doctors won’t shrug it off much longer. During
those weeks when you were in and out of your mind, coming up and
telling about what happened in your hallucinatory world, they’d let you off.
But you’re lucid and healed enough these days that people will start to
question your sanity.”
I said nothing.
Steven sighed and continued, “You were injured so terribly, and I know
that the surgery they put you through, all that medication, all that stress–it
was just too much to handle. It would have been for me, too. But you’ve been
here over a month now, and your stories are finally starting to scare me.
When I came last week, Asia was here with her grandparents, and you were
talking like the old Adrian again. It’s a blessing that they haven’t happened to
be here when you’re not. I’ve come by as much as I can to defend you from the
hospital staff. I can’t keep on using the same excuses, though.”
I listened to him, but I listened harder for another change to take me
away. No changes even whispered. I was tied in a knot to this state, this
human condition. With no surprise, I next accepted that I had been paralyzed
in the car crash. My head rested in a metal halo, screwed into my temples,
to keep my broken neck steady. A neck broken so hard that little more than
loose skin still held it between my shoulders. A machine supported my breathing
through tubes funneled into my lungs. I tried to speak but couldn’t because
the machine was performing an inhalation. I had to wait on the exhale.
The first question I used my air for seemed less significant than
some, yet I wanted it answered more than any other. “Is Nikira out of the
hospital?” I was sure she would be, but to know that she was safe would
plant a seed of comfort in me.
Steven dropped his head. “Oh, Adrian . . . They already told you. You don’t
remember?”
“Remember what?”
“She passed away a few days after your accident. Her head injury
was much worse than they realized. Her brain started bleeding
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internally, and . . . she’s gone. I was standing right here when
the doctors told you. You really can’t remember?”
The shock through me prevented any reaction at all on the outside. I
must have looked like stone to him.
He pulled out a book from his pocket. “I brought this to help you begin
to understand the truth.” He held the book up for me: a dictionary.
“You know what you called that place where you said you went? At least
I heard a word that seemed to be the name of it.”
I couldn’t nod due to the halo, but my lips mouthed with a dab of
air, “Fantasm.”
“Yes,” he said gravely, “that’s the one.” He came to the bedside
and flipped through the pages. He turned the book around open
toward me. He underlined a passage with his finger. “Can you read
what that says?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to be the one to say it out loud? It needs to be said out loud.”
I waited on the exhale and read, “A thing seen only in one’s perception. A
deceiving idea; a fantasm of hope. A mental representation of a real object.”
Steven closed the book. “Do you think it’s a coincidence you chose that
name?”
I waited on the machine again. The loss of control was already
like a giant fishhook threaded down through me. I couldn’t imagine the
horrors I would encounter later in this state. “I don’t know what to say, Steven.”
He returned to his chair and picked up a folded umbrella. He regarded
the soft rain that pelted the window. I hadn’t noticed the rain until now.
“I’m going home, but I’ll visit again soon,” he said. “Nikira’s parents are
bringing Asia in two days, so you’ve got that to look forward to. Your
doctors say they plan to get you into a wheelchair by September. I can push
you over to the nature retreat behind the building. There’s these goldfish
and koi ponds with weeping willows around them. You’ll enjoy it.
We’ll go there and just sit in the fresh air. It’ll feel good, I promise.
You still have a lot of good feeling ahead of you.”
He paused at the foot of my bed. “You have to close your mouth and your
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mind on this whole delusion. Don’t talk to the staff about it. Don’t tell
anyone who visits. Just think about your child. She can be your anchor
to reality that nothing can break.”
I couldn’t quite look him in the eye. After he left I lay there digging for the
reason why. I was upset to unearth a kind of shame.
I spent the next six hours until nighttime in solitude. Every tick of the clock by
the TV, mounted high on the wall, pounded into my head. A hammer driving nails
beside my ear would have bothered me less. Nurses swept through
once in a while to monitor my support systems. They rarely stayed
more than thirty seconds, which was fine with me. The less contact I had,
the safer I figured I would be.
Silence now appeared to be the sanest thing in my life.
The last half hour of the day in which kids are finding their way to bed can
be magical. I once had a routine of stopping by the bedroom with rose
wallpaper and listening to Asia’s wayward, unguarded talk while she readied
to board the dream ship. That time can soften worries and turn minds into
an open book, if you’re willing to be the reader. You can learn about
their questions and hopes that they may keep hidden out of shyness
the rest of the time. I had felt like a photographer awaiting just the right
light to glow on some masterpiece. You just have to be there often enough,
giving the crutches of patience for them to lean on, when eyelids
are drooping and thoughts ready to bloom right out into naked sight.
My heaven on Earth had been stolen from me now. I lay awake late
in the hospital room thinking about a lifetime of paralyzation in my
future. The sheer bluntness of it, hour upon hour, convinced me that
this was all true. Truth might have to be misery for me to know I could
commit myself to it. So backwards it was how you could go along always
thinking that things had to get better before you could be happy. Then
suddenly something happens that shows you were happy–happiness could
simply be to guide your own urine into the toilet, feed yourself with your
own hand, draw air with your own chest.
The whole hospital had fallen asleep, except for me. The ticks of the
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clock destroyed me. They filled me like coin after coin dropped into a
meter guaranteeing a permanent stay. Sometimes I tried to sleep but knew the
only way I could would be from pure exhaustion. My attempt at sleep while
paralyzed felt like slowly sinking underwater. It swallowed me legs first until
the top closed over my mouth. Then I’d snap awake sure I couldn’t breathe,
but only because I forgot that even that power was lost. And a true physical
awareness was only a dream that yearned to form, because only there would
I be able to get up and run again. Those snaps awake were really just a mild
external stir. I would have sat up hard in bed, but my abdominals refused
the command from my brain to contract. Instead I lay there stuck flat with my
deer-like eyes wide and wild, maybe a dew of sweat risen on my forehead.
Long after midnight, a mocking bird lit up the late stillness outside.
The inventive songs served it no purpose, but maybe the lack of reason
for spending a life in search of them was purpose enough. Are you trying to
speak? I wondered. Telling us to forget logic and hang on to the open life of
the young? To savor every moment and forget the point of it? Back in my
youth, I used to listen to mocking birds at night too. Then I would find
myself without the need to ever use words again. Only kinship to the
frailty of words brought kinship to their strength.
Eventually the singing tonight stopped, and I was left again to the reminders
of my ruin. The list never ended of activities I’ve never get to do again.
To never run and play with my daughter had to be the worst. There was
another experience that also hit me very hard: I would never again know
a lover’s touch.
I closed my eyes, the last bit of me I could control. Just take me away,
somewhere far from here, far from me. Take me to where the wind ends,
wherever it does go. I clenched my teeth. No! Don’t even think that. You’re
still a father and you’re not going anywhere, even if you want to. You don’t
get a say in it.
I snapped awake again sometime later from a thin doze, awakening from
one nightmare to another. A clammy wad of sheets was tangled around me.
I couldn’t know that, however. Temperature and pressure were gone from
my registry. I couldn’t tell anymore if I was being hugged or slipping into
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a nice bath. My eyes twitched back and forth across the room boxed in
by the night. It had been decades since I had seen the night this
way–like a monster that stood open-jawed and ready to tear into the
blood I no longer felt running through me. For those seconds I truly could
not separate the night from where I ended and it began. For that, I had turned
back into the real me, a child. An adult child; that’s what adults were. They
just shrouded their lives with procedure and accountability to disconnect
the lines back to the small hometown of real self-awareness.
I knew what was happening here in this hospital room on the surface–just
a confused, sweaty patient jerked out of sleep back to brutal circumstances.
I was below the surface, like a shadow’s shadow, in the sense of a whole other
framework. There I was a prey that could flee in any direction and still run
straight into the mouth of a predator. I couldn’t flee from or destroy something
that was already part of me. My helplessness down there echoed the worst
of childhood dreams whose edges had dulled and were almost disappeared.
Except for within the subconscious cemetery where none were ever really
forgotten. Down deep enough, the bad dreams outlasted the good ones.
My thoughts raced ahead of my full persuasion. We take love into our
existence because we can’t help it, and then we’re left alone with too many
hours to pass and screams for time to overturn. We take love in even knowing
what the later certain loss of it will do to us.
Gradually I calmed. I reasoned out that I had come awake as if by a
cattle prod and had succumbed to a lapse of lunacy. I idled down now
like carbonation losing fizz and froth. I angled my eyes to look out the
window at the pole lights in the hospital parking lot. The tint of the bulbs
had weakened. It was weakening at this very time, too. I blinked in heavy
strokes, wishing I could rub my hands over my face, to help shed the illogical
impression. The yellowish glow sank into airborne pools like black dye, staining
the light. Upset, I focused on the areas of luminosity nearby: a lamp around
the corner of my door, a layer over my ceiling that traveled in from the moon.
All lighter shades around burnt up like bubbling tar.
Waves of nausea rolled through me, though I doubted I should be able to
know that while paralyzed. As usual, the more I tried to deny the nausea,
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the worse it got. The sensation didn’t exactly have the goal at hand of making
me throw up, however. There was something else I needed to do in order to
feel better. It would be hard to get through, whatever it was, but to just keep
fighting it was a dead end road.
“Come on, I’m ready,” I said.
An invasion of rough heat scoured across me. I should have only detected it
on my face, but its needles pricked across my torso, arms and even legs.
My instincts recognized that this heat was not generated by a stove
or anything artificial. This was live heat that could only come from
an animal of some sort, and it had to be quite large to radiate this much.
I was lying in my bed at my house again. Physically I was in the
same condition as that first morning when the phone rang. The
room immediately crushed my optimism that none of the events since
then had even happened. The walls and ceiling opened in slashes as if from
a set of claws on the other side. The gaps filled with red oily fluid that
gushed down the walls. The height of the walls distorted to put the ceiling
in spots a few feet above my head, in others several dozen. The door was too
tall to reach the handle.
I moaned and writhed. I was hurting yet grateful because I had feeling again.
I’d rather feel pain than feel nothing at all. I sank down into the mattress
and through the floor. Objects became elastic and a soft consistency like taffy
that lowered from my weight. I sank to bottom out among a mist thicker
than on a cold morning in England. Visibility was limited to ten yards at
best, but I knew I wasn’t by myself here. Around me a hidden thing was
moving in the obscurity. I could hear enough to tell it was circling me, scenting
me, sizing me up perhaps. To run might be pointless, but I did anyway. The
mist quickly cleared off and revealed that I was in a cave, no doubt, with a few
cracks above in the rock that let in smoky shafts of rays. The place where Aurora
found me I had thought was a cave, as well. This could also be some kind of den.
I looked over at a corner where there sat a mound of dried bones, the
disassembled skeletons of a mass of people. And these bones were too little
to be from adults. I had no idea where to go. It didn’t seem to matter, either;
I was suddenly so fatigued that I failed to keep holding myself up. My
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stomach felt shriveled down to a penny. The top felt sunk into my ribcage
like the leather stretched over a drum worn from time and use and lost
its tautness.
Up at the dimly lit jags of rock overhead, there were pouches hanging
linked by the web of a vast membrane between them. The shapes inside
that the pouches surrounded were undeniably of people. To the tops of
them, cords were attached that led up through one of the cracks into
a light too intense to look at and toward an unseen source feeding them,
or which they fed. Questions spread like a crazed firestarter in my
head, but I really wanted none of them answered. I just wanted relief, to
have a simplicity assured to last.
Forgetfulness of this place blessed me. With no concept of how long
I had been there, I found I was a stranger, even to myself, lying half
asleep somewhere soft and numbing. It was perfect. Crimson fires sprawled
the sky as if the deepest of bloody autumn sunsets had come right
down to kiss the Earth. Flames approached me, but I knew nothing aside
from a mild trance. I could have been engulfed in fire and I would
not have cared. What I was lain on, I couldn’t tell. The nearest thing I made
out seemed to be the top of a building a good distance below me.
“Don’t let them,” Aurora called from far away. My lethargic eyes searched
a little. My trace of interest led to concentrate on a rectangle vaguely
formed in the air at my side. “Keep pushing,” her voice encouraged.
My arms worked themselves into position to where I could crawl. The
rectangle turned out to be an open door. I pulled myself halfway up into it.
I started to slip and swung my other leg up hard to bring me to an
awkward stance in the doorway. I balanced there holding myself from the
drop onto what I could only assume was the top of the hospital building
down below. It was daytime there now and clear as a bell. That was the
same building, yes; I recognized the parking lot poles.
“You saved yourself this much,” she said somewhere behind me in the
opening. “Don’t stop yet. Come all the way . . . I want you to.”
I could still step back down to known places and faces. There were strong
reasons to take the drop, promises of seeing loved ones, even if my body there
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was a useless trap for me on that bed strapped to life-support. I teetered on
stepping one way or the other. I desired both and hated to choose.
Ultimately a chance shift of my balance chose for me, and I fell back into
the opening. Dazed, I looked around at the area from where I had left–the
gears with the children, the porch with the bird and so on. The inside of
my house was the opposite way now. The doorway open to the sky was
even beyond that. My one backward step couldn’t have taken me a
hundred feet back through the layout, so another physical pull must
have helped to take me this far. My tailbone throbbed from the drop to
the hard floor. I tried to get to my feet and made it only because Aurora
steadied me. She wasn’t able to touch people, though, I remembered. How
could she hold me up with such influence?
The power of this hold on me paired to the moon that directs the tides, the
monsoon that cures the drought. I saw her standing across from me. The
profile of a slowly winding drill churned within her transparency. Its spirals
of radiance and colored light outshined any of the other wonders beforehand.
It didn’t surprise me to see the same designs here again that had sewn me
together before. Tentacles of it had reached over and alighted on me at
a few spots to help me stand. Is this your Synth? I wondered. The tentacles
retracted to her and the display disappeared, as if my seeing it had frightened
it away. I then had to hold up my own weight, which buckled my knees but
I didn’t fall completely.
She drew closer and knelt to my level.
“Is it over?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I opened my mouth but couldn’t even begin to tell her how confused
I was.
“The Illusionists took you,” she said.
“What? No, that was real. It was as real as you and I right here, right now.”
She shook her head. “How can I explain it to you . . . Okay, you know of
holograms convincing enough to trick the sense of sight, but this is far more.
They have a similar technique for each of the other four senses. In combination,
it’s enough to make you believe anything. The ultimate hypnosis.”
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“Why? What would they get out of it?”
“No one has ever stayed long enough to find out and then escaped to
tell me. None of that was real starting from when the man started talking to
you at the bedside. I had come back from the street and was about to catch
up, but I lost you after that. I know it’s difficult for you to accept, but this is
what I meant when I tried to tell you how powerful they are. You’ll never
be the same after a revelation like that. I never have been.”
I sat there trying to digest everything. Finally I said, “You came back to find
me?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
Instead of answering, she said, “You were gone several minutes with the
Illusionists. I would have left if much longer passed.”
“It wasn’t minutes. I was there for many hours–all night. I know that for certain.”
“Time is a complete subjectivity. It’s the most bendable figment of all. They
would have kept you there your entire life, whether it was another year or
fifty years, believing you were in your truest existence and had no choice but to
stay. Meanwhile they would be leaching out your real energy for their own use.
You’d be nothing more than a tool.”
“How can they know me so well? They reproduced everything exactly the
way it would be in my whole reality there. It was so real.”
“I don’t know how they do it. They’re beyond my understanding.”
I disliked the softness in her voice. I said, “How do I know what to believe?”
I was torn between which version of me to chase after, the able-bodied
one here or the paralyzed one back there. My baby girl was there. If I went
back, I might never be able to leave again. If I stayed, I might never be able
to return home. The pull to that bed had the raging strength of all my paternal
instinct behind it. While here knelt Aurora, a person I barely even knew,
waiting on me to make the decision of a lifetime. She had given her input
and added nothing more. She displayed a slight indifference in her
expression now. She had searched for me when she could have gone on,
however. She might have even risked her life to come this far.
“How do I know what to believe?” I repeated.
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She went over to the start of the maze of connected houses. The last
look she gave me stated her intention: She would help me if I wanted
help, but she wasn’t going to beg me to let her.
“I have to choose,” I said. “I know you can’t do it for me.”
She left. I followed her.
On the way out I was paranoid about getting separated; I stuck
as close to her as she would tolerate. I had to hand over my trust that we
were going the right direction. I couldn’t have begun to find my way out
of here to the street. I kept looking over my shoulder, and I had to give it
all the effort I had to fight the urge to go back. I could hardly believe the
miracle when she at last led us outside. The environment had unmatched
definition and brightness. It filled my head like raising all the blinds that kept
a house shut up until the explosion of a clear dawn.
We walked into a courtyard of fountains, some of which no longer
flowed and were in partial ruins. If we were still in the same town, nobody was
around but us. Farther on, the fountains still lived, full of coin piles thrown in
enough to raise and overrun the water level. I looked into one of them. It
contained lobsters with normal heads but claws longer than me. The brick
and stone work of the walls was crude, every block hand-chipped,
yet more admirable for the labor put into them. The water from the overrun
fountains funneled between the spaces of tall tan bricks in the ground.
Each streamlet of water followed a miniature labyrinth.
My companion was the intrigue above all. I had to pretend to be disinterested,
face straight ahead while rotating my eyes far enough to the side to
still observe. Her Synth, in secret, stayed in a constant state of mild
arousal. I caught it flipping through stages of geometric plumage crossed
between a peacock and a kaleidoscope. From this angle, her paper-thin exterior
showed anything else internal as well. I could watch her heart contracting in
striking detail. The individual pumps of rich blood surged from the thickest
arteries attached to the heart itself out to hairline capillaries right at the
skin surface. After a while I could tell that she was nearby even if I was to
look away and cover my ears. Along with rising or falling temperature, there
was a connectivity that vibrated if we got closer and receded when we were
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farther apart. Even if I was blind and deaf, I could have easily trailed her
by feel.
We rounded a corner. Unbroken marble replaced the brick in a court carved
out of one giant slab. It was full of murals and monolithic sculptures.
I stopped to take in one of the murals, a stratum of different paintings that
framed each other in reducing size to end up vanishing at the center. The layers
included faces within faces, wildlife of all kinds, starry space and seas, more
diverse faces as a continuity. My study of it penetrated through each layer to
where they all united and mingled. I didn’t notice signatures on any of the
murals or sculptures. I supposed that maybe their creators preferred the
anonymity to help spread the message that such abilities weren’t exclusive
to only those who let them out. Everyone had music or an art of some form
in them. Some knew how to let go, some just held back; but all arts branched
from a single global work, a cycle from one mind emerging out through
muscle contraction into sounds or images, into another ear or eye, and on
into another mind. Art forms were the telepathic spine that supported the
spines of bone. Gravity pulled hard to tear the latter down, but dreams possible
to not only share with others, but live out together, pulled harder to keep
them up.
“Amazing pieces,” I said. “Who were these creators?”
“Ancestors.”
“Of you?”
“Of everyone, I would think.” Something ahead attracted her. “There’s
another gift they’ve left here, too. This is the bridge we were searching for.
Everyone else is already there.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“You’ll be able to join us anyway. This will speed our travel across the
land many times over. A bridge is a place of short-term conjunction where
many different people are able to join their Synths. The effort builds up
outside their individual control and becomes mutual. Then together
they can step on board a single creation that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
While we’re inside of it, there’s only one Synth. It won’t last too long
but it’s wonderful while it does. We found a bridge once that we got to use
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for two weeks. We covered more distance than in six months on foot.”
We were at an arched tunnel that apparently dropped off into the
rainforest outside the town. She said, “This may scare you, but go
with it anyway.”
At the end of the tunnel, narrow enough that my arms reached the
sides, Aurora disappeared in the midst of the exit ahead of me. Before
I could halt from stepping any farther, I was sucked forward into an enclosure.
It had all mirrors for floor, ceiling and walls, glassed into every last corner.
I gaped at myself reflected by a million and a million more in each singular
duplicate. There were renderings of me in every degree of distortion.
Fumbling to take in the entirety, I couldn’t hold focus on even one reflection
ringed by copies spilling me away out of sight. The slightest shift of my
position twisted the reflections by titanic proportion. When I was a kid, I
used to think I could get a glimpse of infinity by simply holding two mirrors
front to front with me between them. But this arrangement, which imprisoned
me, removed the lightheartedness and became terrorizing.
I picked up that vibration as characteristic to Aurora for me now as
associating her with a certain perfume. She couldn’t be too far but was still
outside my walls, which showed proof of only one occupant. “How do
I get out?” I pleaded.
“Why would you want to leave?”
“I can’t stay in here. I mean it. I’m claustrophobic.” That word came to
mind, though I couldn’t tell the actual size of the space. “I’m here by
myself. I want to be wherever you are. On the Synth?”
She said, “You have to be comfortable with your own flesh before you’ll be comfortable
with others. You can’t expect to be anyone else in this besides you, but at fuller
potential. Tell yourself you want to find out how much intensity you really
have in you. Make it happen, let it happen. Tell yourself to just . . . let . . . . go.”
I focused on all my different selves at once focusing back on me.
Given the chance of real appreciation, I grasped that Aurora’s reflection outlined
each one of mine like the faces in the mural. Similarly the borders then
leaked together and the overlapping turned into equal absorption. Her pupils
and irises beneath every pair of mine floated to the top to occupy the
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same sphere inside each white.
I smiled. “You’re here?”
“I’m here.”
“Only in the reflections though, right? We aren’t really together?”
My hands tested for my own firmness from my chest up to my forehead,
fingertips reading my own terrain. I wasn’t in an enclosure anymore. I was
outdoors again and standing on a sort of platform like a window-bottom boat
to tour over reefs and fish of the tropics. In this case, the eruption of foliage
and floral giants that we drifted over filled the underside. I looked from
side to side and upward as well, trying to get my bearings on this device
of transportation I was aboard. There were still pieces of reflections out
there but like mirrors busted over and over into shrapnel suspended in flight.
There were areas walled off, too, enough to conceal the contents. There were
a multitude of organic signs to its construction–a root system here,
a joint and tendon system there. In my estimation, the whole of it was
actually not that large, maybe forty feet in diameter from sides to sides
and up and down. I could have been way off either way, of course. I heard
people talking and moving about through other areas, some partially
viewable, most hidden.
“Take your time,” Aurora said.
I turned to find her near enough that I could concentrate on her real image
and not another copy. The focus helped me gain enough equilibrium
to be sure I was actually upright.
“The bridge takes getting used to,” she said.
I hesitated to take my eyes off her for risk of losing what stability I had so far.
I said, “There are no words for this. Do we power it? I feel like I’m attached and
that it’s put me to work, but it isn’t draining me in any way. There’s an incredible
stimulation here.”
“We do power it, and it will wear you out. It powers us in return, too. We
get back what we give, but eventually we’ll lose our footing like skating on
ice that’s melted too far. It won’t hurt us when we lose it, but we’ll be left at
walking speed again.”
“This isn’t like entering a vehicle of some kind. It feels more like climbing
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up onto something alive to be carried.”
“Think of it whatever way that helps you understand.”
I surveyed again. The crowd she was traveling with before they split up had
reunited; that’s who the people were in those other rooms. My sudden
awareness of them each rose to an extreme; I could almost believe
that twenty different faces were sealed over mine, twenty different shoes
around my feet. I said, “Can I call this the Synth now or still a bridge?”
“You can with me but don’t around the others. Synth is a sacred word, rarely
used out loud. They might be suspicious of you.”
“I figured they already were.”
Many plants of this rainforest did rival those colors found so concentrated
in tropical fish and birds. There were probably birds and other beasts all over
the place here, but they blended in too well to provide much of a count. The
leaves and general undergrowth was also so thick, I couldn’t see the actual
ground too often.
We had already covered a surprising distance. The Synth made no noise
which made the rate of its pace deceiving. At the front of it to lead the way,
smoothing out the path for us, a tsunami fell forth from liquefied
extensions of the makeup back in the meat of it. Vines and elongating
blooms explored the air alongside continuous live muscle growth. The lead
wave of elements flowed with a consistency much thicker than water; it was
more in the fashion of melted chocolate. I watched the front for a while
as it reached ahead, with vegetation aiding flesh to overgrow, split open
and then prime for a new level. The vigorous red and pink tissues went through
clear cycles of present and post-exercise. Wounds opened temporarily from
the effort; the moist, raw layers inside glistened. Then a nutrient-packed rush
of blood would soak in to rebuild it heavier than before. I thought about
how my grandfather had cut the limbs off his trees down to the trunk,
and how awful they looked; but years later the trees had regrown much
stronger and fuller than without the pressure to perform.
Another rolling ball of momentum seemed to build privately in
my core. The aggression of it implied that a peak would come
to rip the force right out of me. The Synth, still noiseless except for
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splitting the air, began to gyrate even more wildly around us. New
components with sharp edges whirred by me at intimidating closeness.
An instrument like a falling ferris-wheel made me cover and duck.
A cluster of razor-lined gyroscopes jerked by over above my head.
Fans like warped helicopter blades chopped past either side. I already
had enough trouble trying to define exactly what the Synth looked
like. These new developments were more than I could handle,
especially the glass and metal parts so cold and nonliving. Yet right
among them, there thrived a mass of the parts warm and breathing.
I tried to follow her advice and let go, to be here with a calm, fearless
and uninhibited approach. I didn’t succeed. I put my hands over
my head in a feeble attempt to hide. “Aurora, I don’t think I can make it.
I have to get off this thing.”
She stepped over in front of me and said, “Hey, look at me.”
For the first time I really did look her straight in the eye without the need
to be talking or glancing away intermittently. That simple act gave me
a rush of confidence, unblinking, unafraid.
“All you have to do is relax,” she said. “Trust me. Everything will be okay.”
Just as the line between pleasure and displeasure was fine, so was the line
between fear and euphoria. I needn’t have any doubts in this environment
because I had been born, after all, already a part of it. “All right, I’ll trust you.”
I stepped back toward the leading wave to watch it build. I didn’t
wince anymore. The network of muscle flexed at the front with inspiring
power, all the fibers pumped and glistening. Every act around me could
in a way also occur within me if I was open to it. I was sprinting without taking
a step; my own lungs and heart were energized and glad to be working rather
than sitting stagnant. I hadn’t realize how much energy these organs contained
until I gave them a chance to really exercise.
The Synth wound out through the forest and conformed to even the
smallest branches to pass without causing harm. The hard materials in
it must have turned with the utmost precision to avoid taking down any
trees. The window bottom, which made up most of the floor, kept us lifted
above ground, but we didn’t ascend enough call it flight. Like the individual
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bodies that powered it, it was most accurately defined as a traveler of
terra firma. I looked to the rear to see if it left any trail, but not a single leaf
had been shredded.
Patches of open grassland sometimes broke the thickness of jungle. I stood
at the best opening that faced outside to watch the land go by. I pointed at
a row of carefully flooded sheets across the ground for about an acre.
“Are those rice patties?” I asked. “I’ve seen them in pictures but never in
real life.”
She didn’t respond. I checked over my shoulder. She had left me. I
heard her speaking to someone off in another room. I wanted to go meet
and befriend them all, but my status here again seemed to be a trespasser
among them. If they didn’t intend to greet me first, I would keep to myself.
I squinted up to the sky. A single intense star for the most part lit this place.
The one I was accustomed to overpowered the others in the sky during
the day and only let them show at night, while the planet blocked it on
the other side. Here the others in the background were bright enough to show
a little at all times. All together, they enhanced the main light like multiple
candles that could make a room shine, whereas one only illuminated the
basics. There would probably would be no genuine night but a day that
varied from super bright to a soft gloom. As stars lowering to the horizon set,
new ones rose from the other side merely changing the pitch of light. I planned
to ask Aurora how I was supposed to sleep. I needed to sleep but doubted
I could without the period of darkness on which I depended to lull me.
Fortunately I had forgotten to ask by the time she returned. Without intending,
I went to sleep by accident which brought the best kind of sleep. She sat
down close by. The faint knowledge of her presence helped to deepen my rest.
I didn’t have any dreams during this sleep which was common for me when
I truly needed rest.
Right before I awakened twelve hours later, behind my eyes shaking with
REM, there did materialize one brief vision. A boy seemed to be lying nearby,
and in contrast to my current deep sleep, he was wide awake. He put out the
question, “Where are you taking me?” I couldn’t answer him, so he answered
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himself, “into metamorphosis.”
Metamorphosis. The echo of the boy’s word lingered during my rise
from a deep sleep to a thin one. Soon I was dreaming nothing and clear to
nothing but the hard floor on which I was about to awake.
White flashes crossed over and penetrated my eyelids. Pulled out of my
long and healing shutdown, I squinted in this glimmering from
far below like mirrors angled with a sun to land it right on my face.
I lay on my stomach at the edge of the Synth. The floor under me was the
most pristine glass in history; not a single smudge gave it away. There
was nothing visibly solid at all to keep me from falling. My right arm
extended to the outskirts where the will did fade to hold me up. My wrist
angled down from the lack of support there. I quickly drew the arm
back in against me.
We were going along the top lip of a steep slope. I made out a lake, rippled
by wind, that filled a valley below. A city-scale settlement had once filled
the valley but had long since been flooded, perhaps by a broken dam.
The highest towers still broke the surface. The glimmers which had awakened
me shot up from angles across the water ripples; they intersected between
my position, the reflected main star and its relatives. The flood must have
been saltwater, or a mix, because grand predatory marlins swam among
the underwater ghost-town, inherited by a rich marine populace. The marlins
exploded in streaks of speed to chase smaller fish schools, which fled in
unison with striking choreography. When the marlins raced just under the
top of the water, the same glimmers bounced off their sleek bodies and
pointed back fins. Since I was a good mile from them, it wouldn’t have
surprised me if they were big enough to bite a car in half without breaking
a tooth. Not that their size made a big impression; they were just another
wonder among the many before.
Aurora still sat by me, her legs folded under the dress that clung with
its possessive way to her. She was staring down into the valley as well.
“Do you ever wonder if fish are like us?” she said. “Living under a film at
the surface that closes them off to another world above. Sometimes
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they’re caught and eaten by something they never even understand,
but that’s the highest awareness of it they may get.”
I cocked my head. “Who knows where the surface is, I guess.” I raised my
head on to check what was above us right now. Nothing but clear sky
without end.
“It wouldn’t have to be above,” she said. “Could be right against us, between
the very cells where the surface of an eye separates from the outer air.”
I watched the fish bloodying the water in their roles as hunter and hunted.
The valley passed on by, and the steep region leveled into grassy rolling hills.
The land could change here with little transition phase to speak of.
“Do you think I’m strange?” she asked.
“You’re different than the rest of those people you’re with. I’m strange, too.
I’ll always be out of the ordinary, but that’s okay.”
“I’ve never had a good fit anywhere or with anyone.”
“That was my story as a young lad, but later I had my wife and next
my daughter to fit in with.”
“I don’t belong with these people. I do care about them, but I’m positive that
we’re holding ourselves back in serious ways–life-threatening ways–and
they refuse to believe me.”
“Holding back from what?”
“Put it into words? That’s part of the problem. I can’t come up with the
right ones in the right order. I just sound crazy to them. Talking never works;
I can’t even start to communicate what I see in my mind.”
I nodded. “Probably they would have to realize it on their own. There’s
no changing people who are set in their ways, no matter how good you are
with words.”
“When you teach someone something or they teach you, you’re helping
each other realize what you already know. We’re made of the same handful of
atoms that make up all the universe, and within them are just energies and potential in no certain form except whatever we can make of it. The
universal elements have no age or limitations. It’s all a constant thread. The knowledge was already dormant in you both before either unlocked it together
or alone.”
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“Is that like feeling you’ve known someone all your life right after you
meet them?” I had a hopeful tone that I wanted her to reciprocate. I
wished she would say, Do you feel that way about me? Because I’ve
been feeling that way about you.
Instead she seemed a little perplexed by my comment. She went on
with what she was saying before. “Long ago, I think we were set up to
form into temporarily separate beings because we needed a challenge–in
order to comprehend our own rage and desire, to reconnect at a higher level
than before. But the paths for true reconnection were thrown off balance
somewhere along the way. Now we’re separate and stalled with no way
to carry on with evolution. We can keep running from the Illusionists, but
even if we stay out of their reach, we’ll still go extinct eventually. But at least
we’ll die free.”
I couldn’t think of what else to say. She got up to leave.
“Do you have to go?” I called after her. “You could stay out here.“
I twisted my neck around at her departure. She went off into the swaying
pendulums of the walls and too much else to stare at without getting dizzied.
I turned around to watch the miles drift by and wait.
Out across a prairie swept tight thunderstorms, sharply defined around
the edges. The storms were bruised from their centers to the ends but
with clear blue right around the perimeter. They emptied massive rains
wherever they roamed. They made reservoirs out of every low spot.
Later, a gentler rain followed me. I kept dry despite having no apparent
ceiling over me. The rain softened to the kind that is so good for sleeping.
During my old days of insomnia, I used to open my window at night every
chance I had to let in that sweet scent of rain.
I dozed off even though I didn’t need the rest. When I came to, we were
passing a farmer and his family standing outside their porch. Their farm
had burned to death; the barn and the field were piles of ashes. The
man patted his son’s shoulder. They went back to his wife waiting at the
door. After they shut themselves in, the house started to crumble apart,
except the pieces went up as if a tornado were taking it with surgical care.
Midway up, the family stood at the kitchen window left intact. They went
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to sit, denied a meal, at the table. The son lingered a bit longer looking out
at me. Then the house blew on off in a loose assembly toward better horizons.
We next passed an arid stretch. People there worked at cutting stocky
cactuses like barrels and drained out the wetness inside to drink. Blue tortoises
had glowing puzzle shapes on their backs that shifted like a board game on
auto-play. The tortoises chewed on spiny lettuce they pulled off the bases of
the cacti. A few were alert enough to crane their long necks to watch me go by.
Of the hairy tarantulas with eyes too intelligent, none failed to give me a sharp
scrutiny. Lean jackrabbits, their hind legs with all the rippling sinews of
a horse, bounded off in an overkill of excitement. Some scissortail birds
had less fear of me. Two birds lit on top of the Synth for a while.
Next there were people on ladders harvesting a colossal vineyard. Two
workers used each ladder; the one at the top picked a grape, wide enough to
take took two palms, and dropped it to their partner who set it in a bucket
on wheels. The vines would yield a bottle per grape. At the end of the
vineyard, some deer nibbling on the fruit leaped away into the bushy
woods. Their legs propelled them over clumps of undergrowth too
heavy to pass through head on.
Far off foothills stair-stepped up to mountains in the clouds. I saw them for
a long spell before we got to the start of the climb. After the next time I
slept, I woke up to a high altitude. Around me, the jagged crests of rock
broke through clouds like puffed cottonballs. Although there were no nights
to count by, I estimated at least forty-eight hours since we left
the town. I spent almost all of those hours on my own. Aurora consistently
brought me cups of water and food that her group must have been
carrying, since we hadn’t stopped for any supplies. It was hard to
believe, but I had actually fallen into a routine here. It was amazing what
you could get used to, enough that any amount of shock hardly registered
anymore. My essential routine now wasn’t so different than any I’d had
before; I slept, ate, worked, repeated. When refreshed, my energy levels
drained off involuntarily to feed the momentum of the Synth along
with everyone else. The effort happened even if I stayed still for
long periods. I could tell I was engaged in much more than just sitting
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around. I most closely related the sensations to hiking, lifting weights,
and solving tough math problems mentally while under pressure to keep
it all going at once.
When we were down to lower altitude again, I noticed someone other
than Aurora come toward me. Tommy leaned around the side of a door. He
seemed to make an assessment of me, then retreated out of view again.
I vaguely heard he and Aurora having a discussion afterwards. I made out
every fifth word or so. Whenever I turned to gaze into the Synth, the
land the other way would alter during any lapse of attention however short.
She came to me when they finished.
I pretended this was the morning of the third day. We were on a balmy
lowland mountainside, dwarfed by the previous highland mountains. I
studied the vista below which exceeded any jungle yet. It was unnaturally
thick, in fact, overcompensating as if it had something to hide behind the
obsessively layered growth. I became distressed the longer I stared at it.
A subtle wrongness out there grated against my nerves like nails across a harp.
Out at the ten or fifteen mile limits of my focus, the land seemed to lose
integrity, colors wash out and substances thin out. It appeared to stop altogether
at the end of frayed threads to leave the empty white-space of a blank page.
No, that wasn’t quite right; another place did connect at the far reaches.
It was so far away and such a strain to tell, but I did pick out the faint sign of
wheat fields, another town with rusted water towers, a hilltop from a day
of May. Aurora’s arrival shook my concentration slightly, backtracking to the
impression of a blank page past where the jungle’s tightly woven purity
loosened and tattered.
“What is that?” I pointed in the direction that increased my dread
with each passing second.
She faced out the same way. A new reddish quality to the daylight
magnified itself upon her. “I don’t see anything,” she said. The quality of
her voice sounded honest. The rest of her reaction explained otherwise: the
tremble, the stiffening of her ligaments, the pupil dilation. I rejected that she
knew she was lying. I decided that she did see it through a subconscious
scope, but was frightened enough there to convince herself that she didn’t.
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I sipped the smoky-tasting coffee drink she had brought me. After she
left, the distant question mark in the land continued on parallel to our travel.
For hours, our course stayed alongside distanced enough that I never got
a closer look. For that, I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or grateful.
Gradually we bent away from it, as did tiredness bend me away from
waking. By the time I resurfaced, the geography had stabilized again out
to all boundaries.
I walked to the rear of the area I had confined myself to for about
a week, I imagined. I had always wanted to explore the rest of the Synth.
I had put it off because it would undoubtedly make me dizzy and perhaps
pass out a number of times in the process of getting used to it. If I got to
where I could move throughout at will, I planned to first step it off in square
feet so I‘d know just how wide and long the floor was. I stood at the onset
of walls like tranquil fan blades circulating. I caught a picture in the
recesses of a playroom for the children aboard, walled in by plants with
elephant ear leaves. Light-bending shards passed between me and them.
There were ingredients that I could stand there and count forever, but
I couldn’t just stand and observe.
I lifted my foot to take the first step in. Before the foot touched down,
I realized Aurora was passing by me right now on her way out. She
said, “You aren’t ready for that. This is where you belong.”
Sabel and Tommy followed her, then the entire group I had last seen on
the bank of the riverbed. “We’re going to stop for a while,” Aurora informed
me.
“Stop? Will we be able to get going again?” I asked.
“Yes, as long as the bridge is holding, it doesn’t matter much if anyone is
on. It will last as long as it’s going to whether you’re using it or not.”
“Wonderful. So how do we get off?”
She seemed amused. I figured out why. We weren’t on board a contraption
independent from us that we could step on and off of. As soon as I decided
to stop and they decided themselves, we all lowered to the ground and
only our own legs supported us. Mine were unsteady, testing for balance
with less grace than a toddler. I had to get used to directing my individual
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weight again.
“Doing okay?” she asked.
“Good enough.”
“We have to get more food.”
“How do we do that?”
Everyone else went in a general direction as if their noses knew where to
go.
“They’ll do the job. All we need to do is stay out of the way.”
“I see.” You’re my babysitter, in other words, I thought.
She led me along at leisure to pass the time. My curiosity wandered.
I neglected where I was stepping and almost tripped several times. Up in
the prehistoric trees clung a sort of chameleons. They didn’t appreciate
me watching them and shifted their camouflage to blend with flowers,
bark, leaves, or the vibrant fungi that grew in circling discs around the trunks.
One noticed me catch it standing at a bare spot without any immediate
backdrop to blend with, so in a last resort it adopted the shade
of the sky.
We went by Sabel reaching into a beehive. She dabbed out honey into
jars. Her tattoos mimicked the honeybees that flew around her, landing on
her by the hundreds, but she and they stayed serene. They kept their stingers
tucked inside.
“She’s the only one who can do that,” Aurora said.
I stayed there a second watching Sabel. She waved her honey-glazed hand
at me. I waved back.
Along the forest floor, frogs sang and puffed out their throats into
skin balloons on the verge of bursting. A fuzzy koala nursed an armload
of offspring. Her rounded ears perked up at me. Young owls lined on a limb
turned indifferently away from me. Like every owl I had ever seen, these
were too serious to consider my human frivolities. Their downy breasts
pulsed with each quick breath while they waited for their mother to bring
a meal. The trees became more densely grown together. Strange pale
leaves, as lengthy and supple as sheets pulled off a bed, dangled down from
occasional branches. Tall bamboo and stalks of sugar cane grew around.
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Ivy climbed the trees, and ferns loomed to the treetops. Assorted flower
blossoms were as clustered as spawning salmon eggs.
The undergrowth then reduced to grass as short as a carpet. We walked
over gentle green mounds with streams between them. Suddenly the
ground slid underneath me. An incredible mass of the friendlier
insects–crickets, caterpillars, praying mantises, all of which the child in me
had known as pets–rose up like a sail filled by wind that blew them
smoothly away. Their keyed-up chirping from having been disturbed was
too loud to hear Aurora right next to me. I caught her last line at, “–a compass
will spin here, if I haven’t told you before. That tree over there shows the
reason why.”
She indicated a coat of sap running out of slashes in the bark, perhaps from
a bear that had sharpened its claws. The sap lost an already slow pace
and began hardening. Meanwhile, a directional twisting had ensued that
formed holes in the sap, dilated out in a sweep around each circle. She
said, “The global magnetic field switches all the time. We don’t have two
poles but limitless poles.”
I remembered learning once in school about old volcano pourings found
with inexplicable holes. Scientists had believed that at some point in the
Earth’s history, an event similar to what she just described could have
happened.
“How do you navigate, then?” I asked.
“We don’t. We just push on no matter what.”
“You mean you have no idea where you’re going?”
“Any direction that goes away is all that’s important.”
We arrived at where some of the people had finished their work of stacking
up water containers. They sat waiting for the rest to return. They were
spaced enough to avoid contact but closer than I figured they would get,
since according to her, merely a touch would lead to death. They
had also brought pieces of those enormous pale leaves and wrapped
them around themselves. They all had a hypnotic look and seemed gratified
out of proportion with what they were doing.
I kept my voice low. “What are they doing wrapped in that?”
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Aurora said, “For a while those plants can compare to the feel of
another person. It’s better than nothing.”
“How’s it work?”
“We try not to question a good thing too much. It’s there, so we just let
it happen.”
Other people arrived who carried bags from harvesting wild fruit trees.
A couple of men crawled out of the biggest stream nearby with a seine
and decent catch of perch and bass.
“So you’ve never known a home in your whole life?” I asked her.
“Well, that depends. Home can be found in surprising places. Sometimes
it’s invisible–in the feeling of what you’re doing . . . or who you’re with.”
We waited together while everyone finished gathering back into a crowd.
She took the chance to introduce me to most of them. Twice my arm started
up to shake their hands and I had stop myself. It was so odd to think
I could never again shake a hand, pat a back, or hug someone in the name
of pain or levity. Each stranger and I would manage an exchange of
“hellos,” then would fall the kind of silence like when nobody laughs after
someone tells a joke. Aurora would simply move on for me to meet the
next person. Her mannerism assured me that my awkwardness was
nothing to be ashamed of.
The restocking of provisions seemed to be near a close. The youngest
kids had been allowed to pass the time in a shallow pond while the
general group watched over them. From under the lily pads they had roused
up a frog built as sturdy as a bulldog. The kids did their best to tackle
and ride the frog, which was very intolerant of a passenger, but that didn’t
deter them from getting bucked off over and over in a delirium of laughter.
They were the last to join the rest of us.
Aurora laughed softly at them, the first time I had ever heard her laugh.
Her state of transparency made a reappearance. Inside, her individual
Synth was jumping alive. My attention on her caused me to almost miss
everyone else, including myself, stemming into the same expansion. Different
designs grew out of us and interlocked into greater patterns. Separate
energies, both mental and physical, fed off of each other to mutually heighten.
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Our reanimation into the single Synth followed the same formula as before.
But this time, my experience let it happen with a lubricated speed that truly
made me realize it was just a different expression of actions I’d been doing all
my life.
I settled into my habitual spot. Hours later Aurora came out and leaned on
a wall nearby, watching her world go by outside. She looked drowsy but peaceful.
The sudden hope struck me for a treasure I might have had with me all along.
I dug in my jeans’ pocket to the bottom and found the earrings. I handled
them as carefully as newborns, smiling at the delicate prisms they shone up
at me. Aurora was looking at them, too.
“For my daughter,” I said. “Asia.”
“Beautiful name.”
“I miss her so much. I bought these for her the day I met you. If I could
just hear her voice again, or the way her shoes used to click on the sidewalk
when she ran . . . anything.” I spun the jewels on my thumb. “She took the
sting out of the mornings, made me excited to get up. She could make the
most terrible day seem good again. Her life in my life reminded me to always play
after it stormed, and that dreaming together is better than dreaming apart.”
Aurora didn’t offer any consoling. She must have understood that withholding
promises for our reunion would be kinder than a lie that would only help
a short while. I knew at once that I would always carry the earrings in my
pocket. They were the same as those items I used to keep in storage or on
dusty shelves, while knowing I would never use them and seldom even look at
them, but I wouldn’t dare lose track because they reminded me of someone
or of a sweet moment.
“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said. “If you can’t touch, then
how can these children be here? I know there’s other possibilities besides the
old-fashioned way to make a baby. Where I’m from, it would involve
scientists and a lab, but somehow I doubt that’s needed here.”
“There’s another way.”
“Well, I hope you’re willing to tell me.”
“I’ll just show you. Not to the conclusion, of course, but enough so you’ll
start to learn how it can keep us going.”
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“I’m ready.”
“Okay, walk out to the edge as far as you can. Forget about what’s going
on where I am.”
I went out to where the floor still barely held me up, which was hard to
determine since I couldn’t see it. I had to judge solely by the resistance under
my feet. I was far enough out to be in the full sun and starlight over the
tropic mountains. “This is my limit,” I said, “or I think I’ll fall off.”
“Give it some time now.”
I tried for several minutes to discern more than was apparent outside. It
was a gorgeous place, but nothing happened to me. I looked back at her. She
gestured for me to face forward again. Am I expecting too much? I thought.
Maybe I should ask about what’s supposed to happen.
She said, “You will be extremely tired after, but you won’t mind.”
Her voice sounded impossibly far considering she was ten yards away at
most.
I put my hands to my throat. I had just tried to speak again, and my
voice did work, but it came from far behind with hers. Both were
almost silent. This was turning out to be the exact opposite of what I expected.
I was more isolated now than ever from other beings and progressively
from even myself. It was a disappointing experience, but I decided
that to dwell on the regret would just make it worse.
The sceneries outside continued with the same bizarre diversity and abrupt
changes to the land. I was allowed to connect with no inanimate objects
and certainly no living ones. At the very worst of the isolation, a level
of empathy for others was born which I could have attained nowhere else
but in this condition. A spark lit up in the dark room of my body. Pure
instinct convinced me that all the tactile experiences over a lifetime were
already latent in live cells. The interpretation of an outsider rubbing against
them awakened the dormancy. But for a life spent alone, the potential
survived regardless. Two people who were meant to spend their lives together
but never got to meet were still both out across the world, taking step by
step in hope to close the distance, waking up each day on a raging, relentless
obsession to reach that moment to finally be together, one way or another.
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There was a force pushing me beyond my proclaimed limit of the floor.
The same tentacle-like extensions from the miracle inside my friend had
helped me resist the Illusionists. My limits were far greater than I had known,
her force quickly showed me; I had been on par with a baby unable to even
walk yet. The one doubt that always led to a downward spiral was the doubt
in oneself. I teemed with the crushing strength of my own life and the life of
the whole country going by. My vision went out of control into a growth
like sensitive fingertips out to learn the texture of wood, of a mountain slope,
of a balmy lake. I was slow in my attention to catch up, perhaps as a defense
mechanism. Golden rays fell from all the different stars’ angles down through
the trees, and fell through my head simultaneously. Eager to tell what was
really happening, I turned around and around in the air like a puppy chasing
its tail. Except my own eyes seemed to be the coveted toy I was chasing,
just out of grasp.
My effort lulled to a slothful crawl and gave out before making much
progress. Am I afraid of something? I thought. Afraid to truly play a part in
this world, and any other world, the way I should be doing?
Nobody was with me–I wasn’t even entirely here–but the meaning
of isolation had escaped all memory. It seemed I had lived blind since
birth and grew up with no one ever telling me about my blindness. So
it never occurred that people had an experience any different from mine.
Against me cooling strokes, as if from a hand just dipped in snow, raised
chills from me starting at abdomen, lower back and lips. The ripples from
there consumed the rest of me. A warmer water-based theme slid through
me tracking the chills. The contrast took my breath away, and to put up any
resistance would be useless. The two opposites built on each other, one
multiplying the intensity of the next, until they became like a storm with
me at the eye. Great pain, great joy, great sorrow, great love–every range
of sense and emotion shined in a hurricane of light and demanded equal
acceptance to maintain such heights. The surge of it all had to be coming
from a vast intelligence beyond my own: the cradle to which my
mind owed itself.
Yes. All of these landscapes I had watched go by, all those that mapped out
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my whole life–they clicked together for this moment to reveal the terrain of
a conscious foundation. As the limbs, head and torso were for a man, any
surface terrain was a manifestation to stand for something much greater
behind the scenes. That was why wandering out into the woods had always
instilled me with such a feeling of coming home.
Then the moment ended. A letdown ensued that I hadn’t believed possible.
This can’t be the end yet. I need to go farther. Because my original question
had gone unanswered, from what I could tell. How this could result in the
development of an embryo and a physical birth process of some kind, I
was still in the dark about.
I returned to Aurora. My hair and clothes were dampened from a thorough
sweat. Indeed I was quite exhausted. My legs declined to support me once
I got close enough to where she waited. I dropped too quickly to the
floor, and the jar knocked my breath out a bit.
“Well?” she said.
My task to tell her about the letdown at the end seemed ungracious. There
were abundant high points to divert me from the lowest point, anyway.
I said, “Why aren’t all of you doing that all the time? I would be.”
“Aren’t you exhausted?”
“Very.” Like a leaf fallen to a pool, I felt all curled up and self-possessed in
my warm ache, floating in the afterglow. “It was worth it, though.”
“I wish we had more time to spare.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
She seemed to read into the underlying bewilderment in my tone.
“Remember, I did say that I would have to hold you back from the conclusion.
I know you aren’t satisfied yet or really understand. I just wanted you to find
out that there are secrets about us, including yourself, that you haven’t
discovered yet.”
“That makes a difference. To be honest, I’m more confused now than
I was before, but I’m glad because I’m also more awestruck. There’s untapped
potential; I learned that much, believe me.”
She gave me a minor smile. Then as I figured she would, she went off into
the depths of the Synth and left me by myself. I didn’t expect her to visit
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me again for more hours than I cared to think of.
After waiting over a normal day, I sensed someone behind me. Glad that
my longest desertion yet was over, I said, “Where’ve you been for so long?”
Sabel stepped up by me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought you were Aurora.”
She shook her head, beaming, and crossed her arms.
“Well, it’s nice to have anyone. Have a seat.”
She did, then composed a string of sign language of her own invention.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
She looked disheartened.
“Maybe you could teach me?”
She brightened. She seemed to have desired to be around me for a long
time but was too shy.
Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit. The best friend I have here doesn’t
even come around that much.
The message in the girl’s eyes dismissed my skepticism. She wanted to be
friendly . . . probably more than friendly. I couldn’t help smiling back, but I
thought, I can see there is an amazing woman in your future, but now the
happier you become, the younger you look, and the more untouchable in
every way.
A cliff loomed half a mile high over us. It blocked out most of the stars on
this side of the Synth. I crawled forward to look at the vertical wall carved
into a mountainside. Caves peppered the rock far up near the top. From the
cave mouths, flying animals dropped out into the long line of a flock. The
flock stretched away off into distant clouds which perpetually held onto
the coloring of sunsets and sunrises. From down here, the animals’ details were
blurred, but there was no denying a scale assuredly grand if I ever got to
see one up close. They were easy for me to associate with certain beasts
I had known of since I was in diapers. I could see aspects of birds up
there in feathered wings, in ten pairs down their backs instead of one pair.
I could see aspects of the Chinese dragon in the structure of their heads and
elongated middles. There were scales and frills of both an exotic fish and a
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reptilian look. The scope of the journey this flock might be beginning,
I couldn’t imagine, if mere butterflies were able to migrate thousands of miles.
“I’ve seen this before,” I told Sabel. “I can’t remember when–maybe when I
was a boy–but I’ve seen it.”
She crawled forward beside me. She laid her hand on top of her forearm
and slid it out to the fingertips, angling up toward the flock.
“Yeah, they are beautiful.” I shouldn’t have known what the gesture meant,
but I did anyway. “Dragons, birds, some kind of flying fish . . . I have no idea
what they are exactly, but I could watch them all day.”
“Me too,” Aurora said from behind. She joined us.
I said, “Of course, there’s only one day now. I keep forgetting.”
“I wish I could be in a night sometime. I’ve dreamed about nights before.”
“They’re nice. Better for sleeping, that’s for sure.” I moved back to
where Aurora had knelt on her knees. “Good to see you again.”
“You, too.”
Sabel’s back claimed both our interests from the display outside. Her
tattoos reanimated that entire picture upon her and went far beyond the
two-dimensional canvas of skin. The depth into the picture appeared endless.
“Incredible,” I whispered. My stare acted as a hypnotizing whirlpool from
her to me. I was helpless to swim against it. By the time I realized my terrible
mistake, it was too late to withdraw. My hand stretched not meaning to touch
her but curious about whether the apparent depth into her was real and if an
object could go right into it. Immediately the picture congealed and blackened,
responding to what her emotions must have experienced. Only my
fingers were against her, upon the nubs of her backbone, but I underwent
every steel-like tensing that shot through her to me. The blow threw
me off, shaking and horrified.
“I told you to never touch us!” Aurora yelled at me.
“I’m sorry. You said she was another kind . . . I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’ll be okay.” She knelt to check on Sabel, who balled up and hugged
herself but remained in one piece. “I exaggerated about the danger,
but I needed you to understand . . .”
“That it will still hurt like crazy?”
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“Yes.”
“Can I help her in any way?”
“No. You need to just stay away, understand?”
“I understand.”
She led Sabel, staying turned away from me, off into the obscurity where
I couldn’t tread.
My next solitary confinement then fell on me like a collapsed brick building.
How long will I have to stay by myself this time? When will anyone come
back? Will they ever?
An eternal while later, I was tossing and turning in a feverish sleep. The
rejection by the others influenced me even while asleep–perhaps
especially while asleep–to roll steadily the opposing way across the floor.
That way toward the edge at least put up no walls against me. I had
passed my breaking point. I would do anything to change this state
frozen and numb here on my own, and to hesitate over any resulting consequences
became laughable. I followed the drive to roll on out however far it took
to feel something different. I didn’t even care what.
I did come to a stop eventually with a surprising lockdown in place. The
sudden halt almost shook me awake. I believed to be having a conversation
then with someone in a dream, but when I started to wake up, the talk
ceased to stop. Something was terribly wrong with the surroundings that
began to materialize. It conjured up the nightmare of all nightmares coming
true. Another fear spurred me as hard from the fact that I could no longer
name a good reason to be afraid. I had lost the clear sense of another
existence anywhere else, let alone that that was my true placement. I settled
into my speech already in operation, and the erasing of any other past
concluded.
“I have to make an analogy so you’ll understand,” I said. The synthetic
breath allowed me no more than a hoarse murmur. I waited for the machine
strapped to my chair to give me outward air again. “Say what happened
is that I had been falsely sent to prison. Well, I would rather die fighting for
freedom today than spend forever hiding and scared of my own shadow.”
Steven’s voice: “What are you trying to do? Justify bringing someone to
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assist in ending your life? Don’t you want to see Asia grow up? You’ll
never convince me to help you carry this out, my friend.”
He was sitting on a bench next to my chair. He was leaned over and had his
hands clenched in a worried clasp. In front of us out on a dock, kids filed quarters
into a food dispenser. They threw cups of granules out to the crowd of ducks,
geese, giant goldfish and koi. Around the banks of the pond, the wind swayed
the weeping willows. The long, flexible twigs dangled to dab at the water.
The overcast sky was the shade of iron but still too penetrating for my
unaccustomed eyes. They seemed to have been shielded from the
daytime for weeks, maybe months.
“I can’t take this, Steven. I could handle it if it was just the loss of my legs,
but I can’t even move a single finger. I don’t have anything, anywhere. You
know how you can lay on your arm wrong at night and it can go so deadened
that it really feels dead? Imagine that a thousand times worse and over every
inch of you. Can you imagine what I have to go through every moment of
every day?”
“No, I’ve never been in your shoes. Between what you say and how
people hear you might as well be the Grand Canyon. I can only sympathize
that true despair and pride are a bitter combination to live with. But I do know
that giving up is always the wrong solution.”
Steven continued arguing with me, but in my mind I did my best to
splice apart from my verbal role in the situation. I dislodged my train of
thought onto an independent track.
This man isn’t me, I concluded. I would never be weak. I would never be
so selfish and hurt my little girl that way. To lose both parents would destroy
her. I’d fight to stay alive as long as I possibly could, if I was really there.
And that’s the proof that I’m not really there.
The conversation, and all additional background noise, stopped
at once. I was gone, on my feet again and in that same old cold place where
a hidden presence was circling me in the dark. I could hear it salivating
and snorting aggressively, as if to take my scent deep enough would prime
the emptiness in a starving stomach.
“What are you?” I screamed. “You think you can scare me? You think I‘m
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afraid of pain? Afraid of being mauled and eaten?” It was surprisingly easy
for me to just start laughing at this thing. “Whatever you’ve got, I’ve been through
worse before. So either kill me or let me go. Quit wasting my time.”
The circling and other sounds paused. Out of the darkness came the
voice I’d heard twice before and the base of which was the auditory
equivalent of looking into a shattered mirror. To me there was not a genuine
shred to the tone, either. This was the voice of the stranger with candy.
“You have no grasp of a truth,” it said. “You creatures are always searching
for the next distraction. You are never satisfied because that which would
satisfy you does not exist. You may be content to be lost in a comfortable
madness, but it is not real. We can keep you in what is real. You may
not like it, but you will be able to trust it.”
Aggression swelled through me. I wanted to strike out, but I had no idea
where to direct the anger. I would just be hitting air. “Kill me or let me go.
That’s all I have to say.”
I awakened back on the Synth. The borderline of the floor held me by the
fringes, but I hadn’t fallen yet. Aurora had come at last and was saying, “You
should never go that far when I’m not around. Why would you go out there to
lay down, anyway?”
I looked around, disoriented. “I must’ve crawled while I was asleep.”
“I heard you talking right before I got here. Were you having a bad
dream?”
She stood over me where I was sprawled and trying to raise up. I was sore
all over as if I had been slammed flat into concrete. I couldn’t even sit up.
I didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but internal bruising wracked me
everywhere. “I can’t figure it out,” I panted. “I feel so damaged, and sick.
What’s wrong with me?”
My spirits sank when her only reaction was to leave me to heal on my
own. Before she was gone I heard her say, “Sometimes the one who can
see a change the least is the one who is changing.”
In her absence, while I lay letting the soreness fade slowly but surely,
I started thinking of my hometown. I had always tended to avoid examinations
of history; I only cared about the future. Even when that specific history was
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the present, I had wanted to just get away from small town life and
never look back. It wasn’t until age fifteen that I got the chance to travel.
That year, my mother took me once up north and once to Colorado.
She knew that I needed to get away, and I admired the bravery it must have
taken for her to stand up to her husband and say that she and I were taking
these trips whether he approved or not. She never told me about any
of her struggles behind closed doors, though. She did once tell me that if
I ever really wanted to help someone, I should do it without pointing
it out in a way that made them feel indebt. The farther from home we
used to go, the closer we would become.
I remembered Vidalia in summer. I could visualize it out from where my
head was turned sideways on the floor. I squinted under a single mid-afternoon
sun stabbing into my face. Without sprinklers, all the grass in the
neighborhoods shriveled. The ground petrified like wood and developed
cracks. The daytime winds only worsened the boil of the temperature.
Those winds blew right through the pores and inflated you like wind
catching a sheet strung up on the clothesline of a family without
a dryer.
The memory intensified to put me standing right in the middle of my
old hometown. The sidewalk was a baking sheet that could nearly melt the
soles of shoes. Any citizens outside battled the flood of sweat that even a
minute of exposure could wring out. I wiped at runs from my own hairline.
I walked past one of the poor streets off the west end of Main. The
first house on the corner had peeled from decades of weather chewing at
the paint. Cheap toys, a good deal broken or worn out, were strung around
the yard. I stepped as if into the next photo of an album to stand in the parking
lot of Super Seven, the rundown grocery store across town from the newer one.
Down the street, my mother was meeting my future stepfather for the
first time by the local clothes store. I saw my seven-year-old self lingering
behind her. The boy ignored the adults’ small talk, which didn’t look trustworthy.
“Can I go get a gumball?” he asked his mom. He pointed at the Super Seven.
“Yes, but come right back,” she said.
I followed myself through the door, past the gumballs and on into the isles.
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The younger me inspected things as if he had a secret purpose in mind.
Half the stock on the shelves was usually either expired or gone and neglected
to be restocked. The place made him think of unwashed dishes in his
sink and lazy days under a ceiling fan whisking the humidity into a
soup, days he spent watching game shows and talk shows and whiling away
his first summer vacation from school.
Why the store interested him, the boy couldn’t quite say. Maybe it was the
pony . . . the chipped wooden pony ride outside the entrance. A miniature stallion,
there since the 60s but the saddle kept shiny by the two and three-year-old
riders’ friction. Its dramatic face looked elated but frustrated, even driven a
little mad. The pony seemed glad–call me crazy, but I believed it–to give the
dime ride for some kid little more than a baby. He or she would smile and look
glad to be alive, money or no money, shoes or no shoes. And seeing that made
the boy happy. These kids were poor, dirt poor, but no different from any others.
He always left there with a guilt imposed by the knowledge of his own
inability. He knew he would never be able to change the whole world; yet
he wondered if he should devote his life to try anyway despite the certainty
of failure. It was easier to avoid thinking about those who had to go hungry
last night, though anyone would have to if a child with ribs showing stood
right in front of them. In the process of reminding himself about all the
great injustices, the boy also took this endless return to depression. But he
had to keep the light turned on to illuminate something stronger than
circumstances. Everyone was the same at the beginning; before abuse, before
mental illness, before cruelty in the name of survival. Early enough,
they were all part of the same pure, unwritten page with unlimited potential,
before they had to grow and the world got the chance to rip their heart to
pieces.
We both left the store. Down the street I stepped a year ahead to my
mother walking on her new husband’s arm. A son apparently invisible
to them trailed the newlyweds. The three went by me. I smelled the vanilla
fragrance that she used to always have when fresh out of the shower.
Her husband’s spiced cologne soon overpowered that. The way the boy
looked at him was as if mesmerized by his towering shape. The way she
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clung to his side more resembled a girl sticking close to her father.
His true self, kept concealed until he had tucked them beneath his wing,
had just started to sink into the new family. Families were machines; either
oiled and sedated or dry and mangling, each gear was forced to stay
interlocked regardless.
The floor jolted and brought me out of the memory. I almost tumbled over
the side for real, as well. I hadn’t actually closed my eyes the entire time.
We were going through a heavy snowfall, obviously back into high country.
My hands gripped like clamps at the ends of my arms to hold me from falling
off. I still glimpsed out through the blizzard the receding afterimage of my
childhood home, and there was my seven-year-old self fossilized in time and
unable to stop thinking about the pain of others. To witness their suffering
was so much worse than to have it himself. He wanted to take his organs
out of himself and trade with them. Anything except having to hold in such
a need to love with nowhere to ever put it.
The silent white-noise of snow and tiredness lulled me to a daze. I did my
best to stay alert, but the lethargy force-fed itself to me anyway. I drifted from
a complete blackout to a hair lighter, enough to notice Aurora peek out at
me sometimes but avoid disturbing me.
I first saw the searchlights fanned out as they rose to stop only where occasional
clouds blocked them. “Can I have some water?” I asked anyone who might
be around. I couldn’t lift my neck to tell if Aurora was there, until she set a cup
down for me. Those lights swaying in a dance had an imperfect, natural
look, the way a firefly’s light was instantly recognizable as nature rather
than manmade. I said, “Are those something alive?”
The shine lit up her face like the city’s nighttime forest fire of
skyscraper windows back where I had my last adult home.
I said, “I wish I could tell what it is I’m trying to find again that I had once
in my life, so long ago. The words won’t come.” I set my empty cup aside.
“I feel cold.”
She fetched a knife. She trimmed off the generously long tail of her own
clothing and draped it over me. I burrowed in and compressed it around me.
The material was like a favorite shirt that had been worn and washed limber.
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It was quite thin, but it sealed tightly over me and insulated out the cold.
I had much more heat in me than I knew; I’d just been laying here with
nothing to keep it against me.
The Synth imitated a train’s rhythm of mellow racket underneath me.
It took me back to getting set beside a washing machine and dryer to help
me nap in a portable crib. Now my crib in the endless day for this country
became softer than any moonless night. What part of that country were
we in now? The animal or plant-based searchlights were just the size of
car lights in the distance; we’d come at least a hundred miles from there.
The closest model I had caught yet of a morning emerged during a lapse
of light sources straight overhead. Defined lines of fog hovered over
snaking rivers. A flat cloud formation caught orange rays along the bottom
side. The air had a pregnant quality of quiet power. All signs pointed to
miracles waiting to be unearthed in a new day proposed right in the midst
of its own infinity.
“If you can cure whatever‘s wrong with me, I want you to,” I said.
“I can’t cure you,” she replied, “but when we stop again in a much
warmer climate, I’ll try to find you one of the very rare places where the
seeds are growing.”
“The seeds of what?”
“It isn’t possible to tell you. You have to be there yourself. For some people,
to stand in these places is all it takes to realize what you’re meant to do. But I
can’t promise you anything except that I‘ll try and help.”
I nodded. Anything you say.
“We might have to walk quite a while,” Aurora said. “Can you make it on
foot okay?”
We trudged through the leafy underbrush aimed away from everyone else.
I still had the cloth around me from the shoulders to the bottom at
my shins. “I won’t lie to you. I’m not feeling too healthy, but I’ll do my best.”
True sunrises and sunsets were just a memory for me now, but the sky still
sculpted clouds among the fluctuating light to echo the beauty for which
I longed. I was pleased right now to be watching pastel emerald graduate up
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through strokes of oranges to reds to deep violet at the top. It used
to be, every time I got to witness the sun born into my hemisphere and
then flee toward the planet’s next side, I stood in awe simply that the
clockwork blessing occurred without a toll. Mother nature was the
greatest of all artists.
We walked by vines that clenched stone ruins built up in a circle. There
were small cracks through to a grassy yard inside. At the middle stood a cottage
twice as tall as its width and V-shaped. A stream ran through the yard; a tangle
of miniature trees and a garden grew along the nourishing waterline. Whoever
lived in there had all their necessities and no need to leave.
We came to a river that she doubted I could swim in my weaker shape.
In a rowboat up the bank, a weatherworn, blind boatman sat holding a tin
cup. His mustache grew down like twin squirrel tails out to fine tips coiled
into the bottom of the boat. “Pay what you can to cross?” he offered. “If
you have nothing, I will still take you.”
Aurora fished about a dozen coins from her pocket and dropped them in
the cup. “This is all I have.”
“Thank you. Please, step in.” I marveled at how the boat was carved from
a single log, whittled to scarcely an inch thick in a half cylinder. His paddles
took long, leisurely strokes. Aurora sat at the front, I at the rear. The clean
splash and swish of the paddles was the only sound around.
I reckoned that I could keel over at any time. I sheltered myself tighter
in the cloth and looked into the water churned by the boat gliding across.
The ripples over my reflection were fitting, since I was barely hanging on
here by a thread. My physical condition was like that of someone who had
almost bled to death and was balanced on the razor edge from the point of no
return. There was imagery down past my reflection superimposed above.
Way down, there was another sky, on a cloudy day over a pond with willows
around it, a dock, a bench and a chair, two people who sat talking . . .
“Not this again,” I begged.
The sequence of the paddles stopped. I looked up from the water to face
the boat. My ears had already known what I would find there: Aurora and
the boatman were gone. I sat alone. Residual momentum carried the boat a
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little farther. Then both I and the boat could no longer move. The water went
still and glassy. I remained looking at the other bank, but a wheelchair had
clearly replaced the wood seat I was on. I dithered between both environments
bearing a portion of each but a fullness of neither. Just under the water, pleas
came out to me from the few friends and family I had had left. The
dogged, sentimental part of me still wanted to believe in them and answer.
Tears came from knowing I could not. I was in the wheelchair but it remained
sitting here on the boat. Still hearing my daughter’s faint voice, and in spite
of knowing it was a simulation, I was in no hurry to fight all the way free yet.
Having had enough of our current standstill, the Illusionists said, “We are
not your enemy.”
“But you’re wanting to use me in some way,” I said. “Isn’t that right? An enemy
is certainly what I would call someone who’s trying to use mind control on
me.”
“You’re swimming against a tide that you will never defeat. Sometimes
there is no choice between prison’s security and freedom’s risk. We can show
you your best version of the truth. There is another life you have that you’re
ignoring, and you’re hurting those with a love for you that is deep and undying.
Tell us, what do you want in your depths?”
“I want truth, not a ‘version’ of it. Just the truth all by itself.“
“There is no single truth. There are only a vast many interpretations of the
same set of ingredients. A truth to one will always be seen in complete
diversity by another somewhere. What you’re living in here is merely chaos
sustained by desperation. It’s a house of cards that will not last for you, and when
it falls, you will be lost and alone beyond recovery. The level of the world that
we have for you to live in might be a very limiting and harsh place, but it is
reliable. Believe us, we have much greater wisdom than you.”
I took a minute to breathe and think. “You know, a wild thing always knows
to trust its own instincts, and people could learn from that. My instincts tell
me that you have delusions of grandeur. Nothing more.”
“You will never escape the pain that’s necessary before you can reach the
thing you want most. Only then you will be guaranteed that the reward
isn’t a fantasy, because it was truly earned. Loneliness defines the human
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condition for a reason. Your mind is using every resort possible now to delay
the real work you have to do. You’ll never find peace until you face that and
fight through it with all your heart has to give, before you can reach
what awaits on the other side.”
Unexpectedly I was at a loss for words. I didn’t have any reply in argument,
but I still refused to give them a statement in agreement either. The minutes
ticked by. Their silent frustration with me put a tension in the air that had
actual weight like a fist squeezing me.
“I don’t believe you,” I yelled out at last. “Aurora has always been telling
me the truth about you. I could see it in her eyes. You won’t even let me
see you at all. I understand now why they call you the Illusionists.
You’re very good at the game you’re playing, but you’re not going to
conquer me.”
“You’re much less wise than we had hoped. If the chance for real love isn’t
enough for you, maybe you’re the sort of man who would accept our
truth in exchange for another breed of power. We know how ravenous
you creatures are for your stacks of green paper.”
I hitched a lunatic laugh of disgust. “Are you saying you would give me
money if I believe you? What a joke. And you don’t know as much as you
think about these ’creatures,’ as you call us, like we’re some kind of livestock
to you. If I could, I would rake all the money in the world into a big pile and
throw a match on it. It would be the greatest service to humanity of all time.”
I tried to rock in the wheelchair. I wasn’t quite able to yet, so I started
with simply trying to wriggle inside this bag of dead nerves that had swallowed
me. I found a sting deep in me and did what I could to aggravate it into
spreading. Loose beads of chill hardened up my spine, but that was satisfying
too–that red rope welded back together, tightened back into sensitivity.
In the close to nonexistent space of a blink, the chair was gone and the
boat was to the other bank. Aurora was getting out at the front. She acted
as if she had noticed nothing unusual happening with me. I had no desire
to mention it, either. I climbed on out as well. The boatman tipped his
ragged hat to us. “Good day.”
“Thanks,” I said.
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I was more tired than ever, but it was an angry sort of tired where I
wanted to lash out in defiance of that which tried to curb me. Free of
hesitation, I trailed Aurora and her new vigorous pace. She must have
sensed that I was willing for the increase. She pushed through a
stretch of foliage so thick that it obscured her just five feet in front of me.
I still had the cloth around me, though the atmosphere dripped with
all the humid warmth of an equatorial summer solstice.
I held my arms out and my head down to keep the brushing branches from
poking my face. On the other side we came to a small meadow. She
said, “We should find what we need here.”
I surveyed for what she was referring to. The place was heavy with a wide
range of flowers, from those of petite stature to those with strikingly beautiful
deformities in the manner of elephantitis. No particular breed seemed in
higher numbers than the rest. All they shared in common was a prolific
sensuality to the interaction between them. It was visible through
observing the whole and a constant rhythm rippling back and forth across
each other.
She led me across the meadow. Swollen bumblebees hummed from flower to
flower. They aspired to perhaps fill themselves to the bursting point so that
they could start all over drinking their sugared livelihood. The bordering
trees were in blossom, too, flaking off a snow of fluff that drifted on the
barely moving air. After the flakes coasted a ways, each pocket unfolded
wings and flew on its own. They journeyed on to each make a child for the
tree that had shed them. The weight of the local season finally hit me. I took
the cloth off and folded it up to carry; the ball fit into my hand. A fat red wasp
half my size drifted by among the other nectar-feeding insects. The wasp’s
abdomen of poison was so full that the overflow dripped out off its stinger,
which pulsed tranquilly at the back unable to draw all the way inside. I
looked to Aurora, who didn’t display any fear of it, so I supposed I should do
the same.
She went to a dapple of shade under a shedding tree that overhung the
meadow. “Let’s stop a while,” she said.
I plopped into the soft knives of blue-green grass. “Why are we here, exactly?”
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“Well, it doesn’t really matter where we are. The seeds are everywhere on the
planet, but this will be an easier, more intimate place for you to get in touch.
You see, of all the incredible plants that cover the world, from a clover
that lasts a week to a Redwood that lasts a millennium, there is one
you’ve never seen but which is the parent of them all. It’s called Yxairium.”
She left the y silent but included the x. “I’ve never seen one grown to adulthood
without taking on any of these other appearances. But they do exist in
their original form, far away in remote places where no one has ever set
foot. And if you can open your senses fully enough to everything that surrounds
us, you may be granted the line that connects where you are to where one of
them is, even from a thousand miles away.”
The lowest limbs of our shade tree hung within reach from sitting height.
Aurora reached up amid the leaves and picked a bloom of tear-drop shaped
petals with markings like purple on fire. She examined it with great care, stroking
the petals. She seemed to have gone into a mode of killing time.
My attention wandered out to the meadow. I didn’t have to go crawling through
it to have every tingle and fragrance gush through me. For my longtime
mark on the change of seasons, the first sign of summer wrung out a
telltale, stupefying sweat more accurate than any calendar. The summer
insisted: be hot, be extra aware of your body, and be the animal that you are.
Each year the season’s craze always slipped through my veins in a slow
honey drip like an IV to the sun. A highlighted swirl of air, catching the
shed blossoms in the flow, circled me and then turned skyward. It propelled
up into the dazzle of the stars which blurred them away. I searched that sky,
a golden splash of clouds deserving to be overrun with worship. Surely every
eye in existence must be turned up at this same moment with me.
With a sort of loving aggression, the bees dipped into the flowers and drank
of the cooled refuge within to fend against the heat. Then they flew on lazily
in the air currents to seek more untapped nectar. Right by my head
some of the bumblebees passed like floating grapefruit. Birds that were
no bigger than horseflies zipped around my head, then zipped away. One
lingered long enough in front of me to disclose its every detail. A woodpecker,
it resembled, but the needle of a beak was intended for nectar extraction.
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The bird zipped around above my head and dived at my face, veered
away before collision, then came right back. It inspected me with great interest.
I was smiling but still flinched, ready to shield myself. “I think that little bird
mistook my eye for a flower,” I said.
Aurora handed the bloom she was holding out towards me. Without
thinking my hand reached to take it from her. Our fingers came dangerously
close. I stopped as soon as I caught up to what I had done, and our eyes
caught at the same time. My fingers paused in the small gaps between hers.
She could have set it down for me to pick up, but she hadn’t. Whether there
was a reason or not, a mutual confidence bonded that gaze into the other’s
eyes. My heartbeat spiked quicker, sharper, like an excited wing in my chest.
Tingling buoyancy filled me like a balloon. I held the bloom up close to where
I could appreciate some secret to the subtlety the way she did. Meanwhile
I wished I was in a position to tell her, This might sound kind of different,
but would you let me see your hand for a moment so that I could put
my thumb to your wrist, and feel your heart beating? Just the thought of such
an act made my eyes roll back and the lids droop.
The tingling was changing, strengthened into a gravitational pull
at the external from 360 degrees around me. I breathed it; my skin absorbed
it; my blood ran wild with it. I said, “I think. I think I’m starting to understand.”
“I should tell you,” she said, smiling, “your body is going to become so
relaxed that you may wet yourself. I won’t tell anyone, of course.”
I smiled back. “Glad I can trust you.” And I’m trusting you with a lot more
than that. My life, for one. Ever since I met her, I had tremendous
vulnerability and full exposure to her will, but it likened the first time I ever
let someone see me naked. The scare and excitement stirred into an
explosively magical mixture.
As for the prospect of wetting myself, until third grade I had kept wetting the
bed several times a year, and before I would wake up and get embarrassed,
it hadn’t really been unpleasant. Just an easy letting go in an easy sleep.
We enjoyed the quiet a while, backdropped by singing birds that took
their own cue in the air. Each minute I got to spend with her poured in
like a drink that joined my bloodstream to become part of me.
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I said at random, “Back when I first moved to Chicago, during a January,
I used to boil a big pot of water to help heat my first apartment. I was
low on money and didn’t know anyone. Those are already strange days
between New Years and the end of winter. By the time morning is through,
it seems like twilight for the rest of the day. Those first months before I found
a job and met a few people were pretty rough. If it hadn’t been for the
thought of being with my kid again someday, I would have started to
wonder if life was worth living.”
She didn’t have anything to add. She had seemed more concerned with
listening than just waiting for her turn to talk.
Finally she said, “We get to experience so many beautiful things, but what
is beauty in the single, rawest definition? I think that anywhere beauty
emerges is to give us a hope for what we can’t see–the purpose that moves
behind appearances and truly has more good than evil in mind.”
I drew my knees up to my chest. “I used to think about the stars during
the day where I’m from. They were always there; human eyes just weren’t
able to tell. All the light that supported my world came from one star closest
to us. We worked by it to invent our own and keep it in glass balls, but there
was really just one light.” I started to go limp and my head lolled. I’d want
to lay down soon.
“All blood is the same, too. All from the same rain taken into the roots that
fill one family tree. Do you remember the statues back at the town? They were
already in the stone before the sculptors chose to use that particular block.
They only needed willing hands to chip the disguise away.”
“Hmm,” I murmured. I had already tilted onto my back without knowing
it. I doubted I could contribute much more to our talk but made an effort.
“When I’d lay in bed that first winter alone in the city, like when I was laying
paralyzed at that hospital, I’d picture the Earth as a tiny dot lost in all the
other dots in space. Everything I had ever known, just another grain of sand
in a desert. And that grain was me; I was made of all the experiences every
human being has ever had. All those people were me, and I walked with their
lives toward something new and wonderful, sensing it all the time from
a distance . . . but could never quite reach it.”
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“We will someday,” she said.
My neck dropped to the side to insure that she wasn’t departing. She was
still nearby. There were stories in her eyes, lifetimes to be lived in a blink.
I noticed myself reflected on the curves over their glossy finish. She
watched the trees shed, which had picked up to nearly a whiteout. I imagined
the waking dream of kissing her. Her lips would be several degrees warmer
than mine, and I would whisper beside her ear, You give me chills, while
our hands held to the other’s cheek. Then we would roll like mad children
through the grass and flowers under stars promised to shine on us eternally.
I remembered swimming in the local lake as a kid and how the water on top
was the mildest. Below that balm the water turned icy around my lower legs.
So I had drawn them up to float at only the highest and hottest part. I
sought out my most concealed anatomies as if my complete being could focus
there–beneath a muscle, inside a bone–and pacify them to the very bottom
of the well. Until now I had never understood how to be calm. Even while
asleep, an unwilling stiffness remained. I hadn’t known true relaxation before;
I hadn’t even imagined it could be this way. An instant of this could make up
for a whole lifetime of insomnia. And it kept on going, nourished by
acceptance.
I became aware that the flowers around were so full that they were sore
and overspilling, some alleviated by the drinking of an insect or bird to take
a little of me up with them into the air currents. I had a residence and point of
reference from both there and below. I brimmed over the rims of all containment;
like wine flowing over a tongue, I parted from any comprehension beyond
a bliss uncomplicated and primal. I got to revisit a time when there was such
a thing as dusk and dawn. I was both the sphere and the hemisphere of
heat and light continually healing the dark half. Above in the illumination, I
admired the wilderness and scattered cities that my crawling dawn exposed.
Below, steeped in those places, I worshiped the nearing flood into the sky
that washed away the night.
I was walking across the meadow again already when I returned. Aurora
wasn’t around. I ventured off through the forest and came across
Sabel. She was up in a tree that had a lizard skin look to the bark. She
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was up among branches too far apart to have climbed. She was eating
from large crimson fruits. I debated on saying anything; she might be angry
with me after what I had done to her. “How could you get up there?”
I called out.
She looked down at me and made sign language. How could I not? my
mind translated. Her process slipped through my forehead as clearly as mine
did into her ears. We are water that will evaporate too. How much doesn’t
begin rising after the last day of standing? None. If later is to be forever, then
forever is right now.
I was just thinking of how dry my mouth was. “I’m pretty thirsty. Can I have
one of those?”
She seemed reluctant, perhaps to punish me for touching her. Then she cut
one of the fruits off the stem. It dropped and busted open; it was a cross of
a melon and strawberry with a tough plum skin. The insides burst out
a perfume along with the splattered juices. I waved to her and scooped
up a handful. The tangy sweetness nearly stung my tongue. “Thank you.”
I swam back across the river. The workout stirred up new vitality. On the
next bank I heard Aurora’s voice off behind a mass of ferns. While I pushed
through, another speaker, slow and soft-spoken but deep as an abyss,
answered her. A wind straight from the polar icecaps gusted through me.
That voice isn’t human, I thought. It’s too big.
Curiosity overwhelmed dread and got me past the freezing but short
hesitation. I stepped into a round clearing. Aurora was to my left, and ahead
sat one of the hybrid dragons that had brushed past my life twice before.
Up close, its looks were fairly accurate to the impression I had gotten from afar.
Except, there was a faint addition to the facial structure of a person, it
seemed to me. I would have been asking Aurora about its ancestry if
I hadn’t been speechless.
She leaned over to me and said, “It’s called a Majaura. He chose
this spot to rest a few hours along his migration course.”
Scales like flat pearl and jade plated his length. The oversize tail coiled all
the way around to the front where his elbows rested upon it. More
jewels encrusted by rock as in their natural state were fixated between
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scales and layered up his throat. Chains of wings, from shoulders to tail
base, were folded up against his sides in repose. His smooth underbelly was
scrawled in corkscrewing patterns that could have been a radiant tattooing.
His upper half sat like a person with their spine straight and head erect. The
fingers each had six joints compared to my three. He had ivory teeth and
claws like tusks. His dinner-plate sized eyes made me feel hypnotized and
helpless. His eyelids floated half way down and he squinted, as if staring into
a great distance, but the focal point of his pupils never left mine.
We both immersed in thought over the other. He addressed me through
his tone of remarkable gentility but an ominous power even for such lungs
to utter. “I can tell your love is real, my friend. You love like a child, and you
wish you desired nothing more . . . But there is an ache.” I suddenly noticed
that a tear had ran down my cheek. More through me than to me, he
echoed, “There is an ache . . .”
While the dragon stared into me, he blew rosy smoke from his nostrils. The
exhale filled the area like a silent firework burst, then just as fast departed.
For what I had missed in the middle of the clearing until now, I was willing
to die for another split second of sight. It eclipsed and humbled me to
my knees.
The two Yxairium plants behind the dragon loomed a cornucopia of
blueprints for change as the sole conviction. A comforting familiarity to
their clear outer flesh showed me an entire world at play within. Mountainous
systems of veins reached up toward skies and across seas. The veins
carried naked living shapes, human among them, cast forth through lines
like evolutional graphs. A cast from each one before died in the effort to
propel the line afresh. Across the plants’ exterior, rings stretched as if from
raindrops sprinkled into green liquid flame; the concentric circles built
outward, met those from other drops and stacked up towers of rings.
Each plant played through slow tantric coils in self-containment, while
gradually widening toward one another as if on the intention to join.
Observed in their entirety, they were impossible to grasp. I had to proceed
in pieces. Wherever my eyes happened to land, I seemed to be standing there.
As at any site in the universe, all creation expanded from that exact centrality;
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every being was the pivot of the universe. Their anatomy would have kept
me standing here and staring for hours until I fell over from exhaustion.
Aurora told me, “It’s okay to look, but not for too long at once.”
I realized I hadn’t blinked in several minutes. My eyes were thirsting
and burning. I attained the plants in a wider frame when I looked again
through freshly wetted eyes. Their overall shape, I had to relate to a stack
of lotuses flowering in nomadic swells. The hundreds of petals ranged
from as small as my teeth to larger than my full length. Through the ground
around the heavy stems, a shine rose from below the grass.
For a flicker of exposure to me, both Yxairium leaned slightly to where
I could look down into them. The open, concaved tops pulsed with thick
petals moist and bunched together. Each top each bedded a symmetrical
skeleton like the human breastplate seam which held the multiple legs of ribs.
The bones shimmered, and the whole plants radiated electric color in quakes
toward the other’s in reception. I had a sureness that there were two here for
a reason. Were they male and female? They shook the closer they got to
one another.
Amidst connection, they lifted to show me a veiled hollow between them
where a lagoon resided. It was not water in the lagoon. For at the middle
sat a massive beating heart, bare and rendered in obsessive, popped-out
detail–every ridge of muscle fiber, every web of capillaries. The pace of the
heart contractions was slow and calm as long as it had been hidden. Upon my
sighting of it, the forcefulness of the beating heightened intensely. The
beats sent impact tremors over the surface of the blood lagoon and lapped
at the shores. It didn’t escape me that the pace was in time with the
same rush of my pulse. The feeling I got from witnessing such a thing, the
connective secret place which these two organisms shared and had allowed
me to glimpse, flew me as high as the one and only time true love ever
chose me.
The dragon focused on Aurora again. From his bottomless voice came, “Mine
is knowledge that you already possess of your own. You need look no further
than yourself for an answer.”
She said, “I’ve searched all my life, and I haven’t found the answer.
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A huge number of possibilities, but ultimately, they’re all just theory. When
I came across you, I thought maybe . . .”
He made a sigh. “I cannot give you an ultimate answer because there
is none. Anyone who tries to convince you they have it is using a tool
invented for the purpose of controlling others. Live by your own instincts.
Remember that compassion is the strength over every strength.
Never take more from the world than you give.”
She said, “Could it be that we are in a waiting place, waiting for the
world to equalize and become what it could and should be?”
The dragon curled one of the six-jointed fingers at her in a come closer
gesture. He leaned down. When she was too close for me to overhear,
he told her a few more lines, after which she turned to leave. She had an
expression short of satisfaction but not devoid of optimism. “We should
go,” she told me on her way past. “The rest will be ready to leave.”
I hung behind. My feet cemented themselves to the grass. After a minute the
dragon looked over at me. I quivered with exhilaration in a race against
intimidation. I knew that he could reach out and kill me with merely the lift
of a finger. Yet I believed in my security enough to begin, “Can I . . .”
“Yes?”
“Can I tell you about something that happened to me when I was a boy?”
He set his open palm down for me to sit on. I held onto his thumb while
he picked me up to his ear.
Later while I ran to catch up with Aurora, I breathed at a whole new
fullness of intake and release. It was like breathing in autumn itself after
having held my breath all year. I caught up to her through a gorge
of saw-teeth rock formations, arches and rain puddles. The red rock stood
out against the current blue overhead. We were almost to the end
when we stopped simultaneously. Just ahead, a solid black silhouette
like a shadow standing on its own legs went across the pebbles and puddles.
It played slow, hypnotic melodies on a dark flute with a Native American
sound. Its back was humped and plumes wider and rounded at the ends
crowned its head. The legs constituted less than a fifth of its height. The
height was an enigma; it could seem towering, then seem readily
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caught in a butterfly net. Growing behind its footsteps, a traveling
oasis spread. Pools sprang up from dry dirt; sprouts and flowers budded from
rock. New playgrounds raised for the bees and birds which trailed in the
manner of pilot fish.
“Right on the tip of my tongue,” I said.
“What?”
“The name of it. My grandmother was part Aztec and told me this story once.”
She watched a bit longer with me as the humpback player drifted on
away. “We should go.”
I walked at her side until I got up the nerve to present the question burning
a hole in me. “What did the Majaura say you at the end?”
“Not what I wanted to hear,” she answered, “but probably what I needed
to hear.”
“I see.”
She changed the subject. “I’ve been thinking of what you said earlier
about light where you‘re from–how it all came from one source. Imagine
a live person and a person who died maybe ten minutes ago lying side by side.
Between the two, what is their purely physical difference?”
“I don’t think this is the first time I’ve faced that question.” I tried to
think of a difference. Everything would still be present–organs, brain
tissue, blood and so on–just gone motionless in one of them. Although, the
process of decomposition and evaporation certainly did involve movement,
just imperceptible in the short-term. I finally said, “That’s a two part answer.
Looking at them right there up close, we’d say they have a night and day difference.
In the big picture, and seen objectively, there’s none at all. Even the electrical
activity that’s gone out of one, it’s just moved to somewhere else, back out
into the environment.”
“Where exactly, though?”
“You think I know?”
“We’re here for an exploration, not a resolution. You’ve faced that question
before, as you said, so maybe you can help me. Light from one star or another
is the power behind that electrical stimulus. It’s the weightless key to anything.
Light can neither be created or destroyed. It has always been and will
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always be. That is the consciousness.”
“Well, I don’t know how to get there because I’ve already been sure
twice that I had passed away and moved on to something else. But here I
am once again back at the same level I was born at. The places and characters
around me have changed, but I’m still the same thing. I really wish
I could help you, but I can’t.”
“It’s okay. I’m just worried about a future where we have to always stay
on the run. There has to be a way for us to either stand and fight
or to escape permanently. Those are the only two paths I’m looking for.
I don’t want us to have to live this way forever.”
“Forever?” I said, far from pleased by the idea either. “What does
that even mean, one lifetime, a billion of them?”
“Numbers aren‘t real. You should know.”
We walked for a ways without speaking. Before we reentered the Synth,
out of nowhere I said, “I don’t want to be immune to dying out of this
body or any other. I never have. My kind calls it ‘rest in peace’ for a reason.”
“Do you wish you were resting in peace now instead of here with me?”
“I didn’t say that. But if death means rearrangement into a different set
of the same opposing forces, I don’t see a point to it all. To try so hard
to create a better place, a better self, only to find you have to keep on
doing it in some shape or form elsewhere . . .”
“How do you know who you are? Your name is just a word. What are
you, really?”
“Well, I think people are each a sum of their actions. We know ourselves
by how others react to us and feel about us, and all that they have to know
you by is what you do that affects their world.”
“So if through all your life nobody is aware of you, then you haven’t existed?”
“It would be impossible for someone to spend a whole lifetime in absolute
isolation. Others are at least aware of them somewhere, somehow.”
“No, there is absolute isolation.” She looked sideways at the safe gap we
kept.
“Oh, I didn’t know you were only talking about physical isolation.”
“I wasn’t.”
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“What do you mean?” She wouldn’t respond, which frustrated me to
no end. “Come on, tell me,” I urged.
“You have to figure it out for yourself.”
I wasn’t sure where to begin. Instead I said, “You really miss people, don’t
you?” I laid my hands together. “I mean missing this.” I knew that she must
have been able to touch in another time in order to know about it. She
may have even loved someone once.
The Synth gathered us all like loose ingredients stirred together and carried
us on. She and I stood together a while, but neither seemed able to overcome
the shyness that had suddenly developed. Eventually we went different ways.
I sought my usual spot and laid down. With all my rest stocked up, though,
I knew I would lie in wide-eyed wakefulness for a long time. Perhaps from
now on.
Yxairium. Again and again I imagined going inside one, feeling it surround
me and press in a nourishing force coupled with the womb that I recalled so
vividly. Like their Redwoods back in my old life, the Yxairium were older than
any other organisms here. A plant foundation underlay all lives and
all food chains. On my pathway through evolution, even the carnivorous
had depended on those that fed from plants. Any being’s mass didn’t just
appear out of nothing, after all. Plants made the oxygen for breathing.
They used sunlight, water and any live material after its death to regrow
fresh. Basic lessons I had learned in grade-school took on a whole new
meaning now.
I trickled over into an afternoon I once spent with Nikira. About a year
into our marriage, we had rented a little house on the outskirts of town.
It was a rainy weekend. We were off work and Asia was with her grandparents,
so finally freed and justified, Nikira and I lived in bed for the day. The weather
cooled the sheets. One of her arms draped around me while we napped.
The fingers of her other hand tied themselves with mine. After the latest
shower, a break parted the rain clouds. Rose-tinted light streaked in through
the window curtains to splash across her face. I was looking at her when
her eyes opened.
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“Watching me sleep?” she said.
“I do every morning for a little while. I always wake up before the alarm.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about why we work so well.”
“It’s because we’re best friends.” She stroked my cheek.
“Hmm, I don’t know,” I said, “we were never exactly friends. Two people
of the opposite sex have to turn into one of two kinds of magnets: They either
go together with force or go apart with force. There’s no staying neutral.”
She didn‘t care for that. “You think we’re too unalike. We aren’t. We’re just
raised to focus much harder on the handful of differences. Inside, or even
magnified close enough on the outside, we’re all the same.” She put one hand
behind her head under the pillow and left the other in my hand. “Where is
the place that we cross a line between us?” She lifted her hand to where only
the tip of her finger touched the tip of mine. “This is where you stop and I
begin. It seems clear from here, but if you could see that point close enough
right where we’re touching, you couldn’t tell where one stops and the other
begins. Sometimes when we’re together, isn’t it hard to tell in another
place, too?”
“Always.”
“And what if during that beautiful uncertainty you found yourself
envisioning a way to get past the skin-to-skin barrier even from here, and
a future where there won’t be any lines left at all?”
I made a smile in the semblance of a question mark.
“I’ve been having those dreams again lately,” she confessed. “The same
ones you told me you were having.”
Later the rainy day gained speed and lent us speed, too. During the
calm before the storm, I woke up to find her missing. Outside occurred the
rare sun turnout on such a day. Through a rip in the western clouds, the beams
polished the south thunderheads full of water and roaring this way. The
leading edge for a minute gleamed as bright as the sun itself.
I stepped to the window confident that I knew her inclination. She was
standing out on the lawn, hands on her hips, eyes closed, face up to
the thin shower as a prelude to the downpour. I walked out at her back
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and cupped her shoulders. Her clothes were damp and hair wet enough
to drip.
“This is magic,” she said. Her face stayed on the storm supercell racing
toward us. “Sometimes I think there are other beings right here on this
planet that we can’t even comprehend. For us it would be like, the
concept that an ant might have of a human being.”
“I could believe it at a time like this,” I said.
“Sometimes I think they turn and reach out to touch us. Sometimes
they get far inside, too.” She put her hands over mine. Splinters of
far-off lightening cracked the sky. She tilted her head farther back. I
kissed her neck and she leaned into me. The water formed beads over
our skin and ran together. “It’s all just so beautiful,” she whispered. “What
else can anyone say?”
We hurried in from outside hand in hand down the hall to our room.
Our hands held tighter than we did at any other time. Our awakened
blood flow, like the driving rain soon to hit, had already blushed and
sensitized us all over by the time we were free of clothes. Through her
kisses on my chest I knew that she could feel the heartbeat far too strong
for the cage of bone to muffle it. Our formerly different rhythms could fall
only one way: to breathe together, to move together, to lose track of
whose pulse was whose. She exceeded me in many ways, not least by
how every part of her was able to reach higher temperature than every part
of me, as if we were seasons in flux and between our genders was the
difference of mid-spring and midsummer.
In the memory I had misplaced the face of my partner. I couldn’t really live
out a memory again, just as I couldn’t live out present fantasies about Aurora.
Memory provided a better substitute than nothing but would never replace
the real need. I could have my lost love again and again from afar but never
again in the flesh, and that made me want it most of all. Nothing was more
desirable than the unattainable.
I told that piece of my past, If I could I’d just forget my life in the here and
now to go running after you.
Aurora had gone to sleep nearby, lain on her side facing toward me. I hadn’t
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noticed yet through the absorption in myself. I was certainly not dreaming,
but for that instant, memory was as convincing as living.
The Synth neared a sterile frontier like a dried seabed. It appeared desolate
on top but shimmered with some bright promise far across it. It made me
think of driving toward Chicago from downstate after dark. At about eighty
miles away I would start to see a low, blurry shine from the horizon, and I
could almost think that was something alive, too. Nighttime did impart
gifts, and I felt a real deprivation from never unwrapping them anymore.
I tuned into the wish of everyone in the Synth: to quickly get away from
this wasteland ahead, so parched that to call it a desert would be flattering. The
temperature burned above any I had ever experienced. Even at this diluted
distance, I welled out a suit of sweat. The intensity if I was bare to it might kill
me within hours.
And, calling myself mad, I wished to go out there and walk across that
wasteland to the extremity, either of the land or my stamina. I could tell
that long ago this place used to be inhabited. Distant iron buildings,
discolored from ages of rust buildup, stood like dead watchmen. Lower I picked
out hints of an urban layout. People had once attempted to live here; their
remnants were still standing but on borrowed time. If only grazed, it seemed the
structures would crumble like char paper. I reasoned that my urge to go
out there was dangerous and proved its own insanity. Overly reasoning was
also one of the locks on the door between prison’s security and freedom’s
risk; I’d known that by instinct since I was just a kid. The most radical of
changes only occurred through the most fearless and revolutionary of
processes to reach them.
I still hesitated. Because change was hard and the outcome unpredictable,
it would be easier for me to turn my cheek on this opportunity and labor on,
numb and complacent. The chance for a passion so strong was rare and slipped
away fast if not seized upon. The moment could collapse right back to
stale, predictable repetition for years, even decades. Pains that could
always be counted on, I used to favor over ecstasies that were fleeting
and unreliable. The resulting death from such favor might take mere seconds
or eighty years to complete, but death could begin to manifest long before
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a heart actually stopped beating.
We bottled up too much rage over the inability to free the wildness in our
bloodline. The subdued version of it had kept us pumping and creating new
numbers thus far, but the true power behind the dam remained unknown.
Something did await out there past the present restriction of my eyes and
mind. The pull to go worked a tide into my own blood, and it flowed away with
me in tow. I could fight it no more than I could stop snowmelt from sliding off
of mountains in springtime.
We had come to a stop at the edge of the last forest. The Synth disbanded
and everyone lowered to the ground. They remained asleep and undisturbed,
lain among treetrunks and velvety undergrowth. I didn’t bother anyone.
I walked the other direction on my own, out into the wasteland.
The hike up to the abandoned city was long and monotonous. The
temperature was unbelievable; sweat ran so heavily over my eyes that I
could never take my hand away from rubbing it out. I saw through a
wide enough break in the houses and buildings, and conflicted signs of my
location hit me. The bare, toothed hills off to either side promised continuing
aridness. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of waves lapping at a beach.
I trailed the sound through the streets of dilapidated neighborhoods. I came
to a bay that opened on a sea. I dipped my finger in at the edge and
touched to my tongue the taste of saltwater. Blue haze like the curtain
of a distant rain shower blended the sky into the water’s upper line. A fiery
wind from the side countered the sea breeze. The wasteland wind grasped
like a reaching hand for me, wanting me to go right back out to where
I could die inside an hour. I needed to stop and think before I went on.
I resolved on the shade by an old storefront window. Inside sat dusty
antique furniture (or abandoned for so long that it had become antique).
The temperature had roared close to 140 during my walk, I figured.
The shade mellowed it off by twenty degrees but it was still staggering.
I really am on an equator, I thought. That short exposure had wrenched
a fountain of my strength down to a seep. The salt deposits in my eyes
burned no matter how much I wiped at them. I needed protection until
nightfall. Nightfall. I should have dismissed my strange expectation of
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a night sure to follow day, but I didn’t even question it.
I roamed through the store and found a hand-dug cellar. For people to
live out here, these would be as common as ceiling fans. I spent the afternoon
sitting in silence on the floor. I waited on the brighter stars to leak away
outside and for whatever would take their place to appear. I had nothing to
eat but wasn’t motivated to seek food. More notably, I hadn’t had a drink of
water since I left, but I wasn’t starved for that either. I should already be
knocked down from dehydration. Yet every stimulation I would need seemed
internally present. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt it so I just had to trust it.
When I returned outside, the temperature had idled down. The
wind fanned the sweat that did still teem from me. Twilight had finished
sweeping through. The full richness of a night wrapped me into its arms.
I could guide myself, however, because without any obstruction, those
same living searchlights were visible in the distance. They illuminated all
the way to this region enough for me to walk without running into anything.
I left the city on the opposite side from where I had entered.
The stars were minuscule now but still brilliant as a diamonds thrown
across the night sky. They had returned to their degree of brightness at which
I used to know them. Dust roiled up like whirlpools from the ground
and whipped and danced overhead. The clouds were a dimly lit mix of
purple and maroon. By now my dehydration should have been so severe
that I couldn’t walk. Indeed I was starting to wonder if I had gravely misjudged
my invincibility. Fresh water would have been difficult to locate at the
abandoned city, and I would’ve had to carry a lot to make a big difference.
The circulatory system in this swelter should need a quart every hour to
stay balanced.
What I feared was also the same mysterious thing drawing me forward.
I moved as if air pockets under my feet aided them to slide over the sand. My
entire encasement of nerve-laden skin turned more sensitive the further I
pushed my endurance. Both boundaries stretched to accommodate me. On
the equator, days and nights lasted a flawless twelve hours on the solar
illumination line that divided night from day. That line and the equator were
both great circles, and any solar system’s lighting arrangement depended on
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spheres that faced one another. Spheres of moon and sun, spheres of
planet and eye. There had to be a reason why I was drawn to this particular
region, that it was an intersection of some kind. Other people had known,
too. Over my same steps they had journeyed–tens of thousands over the
ages–and some relic of them remained. I was here on my own but knew
it wasn’t a solitary effort I put forth.
I stopped at the edge of an area of minor to sizable dunes. I had visited the
preface to this from my bedroom window in what seemed a thousand years
ago. I stood wobbling from my depleted veins, by now physically thickening.
The very sand seemed to have crept into its flow. I had given it all I had
to make it here, but my all turned out to be enough. As before, the area
quaked and shook as if the land lay in a colander. Saplings shot up through
the sand, crumbling into richer dirt beneath for a seedbed. Dense growths
of Yxairium filled out the vacancy. They raised into the forest of blooms for
miles around. They swayed and transformed, rolling on the stems off of
a wheel of eyes at the centers, and had petals like stained glass and reflective
glass, yet still flexible. They collected my own reflection in shredded pieces
watching me watch them.
A tight stream of wind gusted through the Yxairium and sponged out
nectar. Their blood may have been sugary whereas mine was salty, but
both were certainly colorful. They didn’t weaken with their spillage; rather
than draining them, the wind seemed to challenge their energies to excel.
Closer to me the wind spliced out into streams of only a rope-width and
encircled me. The gliding airstreams enclosed independent wills, moved by
their own plan. They were as children having divided from a parent.
They condensed to a firmer rotation until they sleeved me, and I
hesitated to move or breathe. They caused me no discomfort, though,
or much sensation at all. The texture was of fog, barely noticeable.
My lungs pleaded for relief, so I finally opened my airway. The
airstreams rushed down my throat. I trembled, watching them enter
and feeling their cool spread out from my lung walls. I next acquired an
impartial standing and was as comfortable with breathing them as
regular air. Then the mood cropped into one more satisfying, verging on
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ecstatic: a roller coaster drop that ceased to end. The air now coursing
throughout me condensed further into liquids that replenished every dry
nook. My veins swelled with new blood, my mouth moistened again, my
undernourished brain brightened with lucid thought. The plants liberated
full geysers into me at the next breath. It moved the entire forest of them
like tilting a wet painting until the whole image ran.
Out in the middle, a rocky figure pushed out of the soil. It turned out
to be an entrance that sloped down a slight grade lit by moonlight. The moon
happened to be straight overhead. I was able to walk right across the forest
because wherever I stepped, the Yxairium contracted down to allow
my passage. I went to the bottom of the short entry. There, the underside
spread out to a wide-open vista stretching all the way to underground horizons.
A system was at work across the whole breadth. It seemed to be a mass
elaboration of interplay such as that viewed among human cells under a microscope.
It was expanded into patterns in individual chaos yet a complex overall timing
like the entrails of a clock. Some cells seemed to be working together,
others were killing each other. Each a pattern within the pattern, each cell was
impregnated with a maze that revolved inside it. Each glowed at a center of
self-awareness, but none withheld from colliding with any others. They had to
mingle to uphold the overall rhythm vital to sustain the individual parts. The
mass of interplay would unfasten and break them all if any part from smallest
to largest withdrew. By seeking growth on their own, the cells accomplished
the same for all. Their vigor meant to test how far their outer shell
must bend until separations imploded. Then they could learn to alter
from one to another and allow emotion to become motion.
Sure this was to be the next leg of my journey, I started to step forward.
I immediately froze. The mass of cells dimmed, retracted from me and
left an invisible field of resistance against me from going in. There was no
way that just my normal strength could overcome it. Even if I did, it didn’t
look as if I would be permitted out there the way I was now, as an
ordinary man.
I followed the moonlight back up to ground level. The once glorious
forest had wilted back into sand dunes. Disappointed, I leaned against the
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wall of the entrance. I touched the rock, abrasive, cold and unwelcoming
to warmth and softness. Flesh needed flesh. There were no substitutions.
Aurora and her kind were ultimately doomed even if they were never caught
by their pursuers. Even the greatest of love, after enough time with
nowhere to go, could eventually transform into violence and turn around
to kill the heart that contained it just to get relief. After all the effort I had
put out, the final revelation was just something I had already known.
I had no idea what to do now. I faced the moon, the same moon I’d been
looking up at all my life. Something was happening. It wasn’t outside me in any
vast or foreign magnitude, but something small inside. It was an offhanded
thought at first about what I had really just seen in the underground:
I was looking at where the Yxairium grew from . . . at their roots.
My flow of thought gained tributaries from others who had come here to
discover the same. Our true bodies have been denied us. The time has come
in this world for us to evolve into what we could be, and once were but have
forgotten. We must return to the seedbed and fertilize that which will
redefine us. You’re here to make it happen.
I prepared myself and was ready for anything, but I did wonder why it
was me alone brought to be the catalyst, if the change meant to cover the entire
globe. There were no defined origins of the colliding powers that struck
sparks or started ripples spreading. But often there were defining points at
which a spark did ignite and where an invasion started a ripple spreading.
The ripple now began, right where I stood, at another defining point and the
brightest cinder to alight the way ahead: in my heartbeat.
It throbbed quicker, hardly noticeable at first. Then it jumped to
a speed as if I had just ran for several minutes. I put my hand to my
chest to count the beat number: three per second, four per second. Five.
Impossible, I kept thinking. Its speed already hovered around 300 beats per
minute. That was a hundred more than the pulse reached even under the
most strenuous exercise. I knew that the young human heart could withstand
a phenomenal strain before it dove into cardiac arrest.
But the heart within me was no longer entirely my own.
The tempo increased hard again, far past where I could count. I could
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only estimate. 500 a minute. 700. 900.
I kept shaking my head in disbelief. “This isn’t possible, this isn’t possible.”
I was just as stunned that I could still vocalize during the event. The beating
surpassed the speed of humming bird wings. The heart material itself
felt elastic and ringing. All my muscles were engorged and the full wires
of veins cinched into the fibers. Snowed over by the pounds so fast that
I could no longer discern any gap between them, I fell back panting against
the wall. The velocity ran at a number I could only fathom to be thousands
of beats per minute. My bloodstream raced past the speed of sound. The
speed kept multiplying on toward the unreal but apparent aspiration: to
reach that of light.
“No, stop, I’m afraid. I’m so afraid.”
There should be pain, tremendous pain. That I felt none–that my internal
reactions despite the intensity were rather satisfying–disturbed me even
more. I also battled to overcome the fear of the unknown, fear of what I
didn’t understand, and allow it to happen rather than struggle against it.
While teaching each other that the moment of passing to dust is unforeseeable,
we subconsciously place that moment still in a far off and improbable fate.
We overlook that our every cell is on the course of leaving during the whole
time we think that we only precede it.
I stared at my palms as if I’d never seen hands before. I tingled everywhere
so hard I could feel nothing else; it invaded me down to the very marrow. I had
a strong desire to survive intact. I held onto my elemental self inside my
head. I could name none of my surrounding physical part the way it used
to be, but there was something else there as yet nameless.
The pulse balanced to one continuum–what I had once read as the text
of lifelessness written on the flatline. I seemed to raise up into the
pulse manifesting as a separate entity. It created a warm and silky pod
maintained by the uninterrupted hum of the beating. I moved through
its slicked walls like the inside of a cheek, to come to a halt and await
more. My outgrown state behind paled to where it seemed to have
never imprisoned me at all. Whites and pinks were the only colors I could
make out so far, with all other objects and obscurities cleansed out
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of the picture. The pod enlarged, perhaps to accommodate my own
development. It grew to either side slowly but as relentless as lightening so
constant that pure night could turn white. The first small rip from pressure
in the pod happened below me. I still had no idea what was actually
happening to me inside, but through that rip I could see what
was happening to the immediate world outside.
It broke down with the intensity of splitting its atoms to attain nuclear
potential over every inch. In this case, such power which man had
formerly used for massive destruction instead went toward the opposite
purpose. As if rinsed down by a drink of liquid light, the land had been
swallowed into a stomach, and the acids swarmed to dissolve and prepare
it for use within veins.
I refocused on where I was since I hadn’t been released yet. I was sure I had
more to go here before I could join the outside.
“Who’s there?” a young woman’s voice said behind me. She sounded
as if she had just awakened from a bad dream and had not quite shaken it
off yet. I turned around and was at the foot of a bed. The lights were off, but
even in the dim glow from a security light in the backyard, I could tell
it was a room I’d been in before. It was Nikira’s bedroom from the house she
had been living in when I first met her.
No one’s there, I heard her thinking, as she unwound a little back into her
pillow. No one’s with me, ever has been, ever will be.
I had to believe that this night was from just before we met, maybe the
very night before.
“Who’s there?” someone whispered. It would soon be inaudible. I turned
around at the foot of another bed where she lay wrapped in bandages. She
was unrecognizable except for a portion of her face not covered. The random
cuts on her were not the reason she could barely speak; it was the abrupt
hemorrhaging behind her temple that no one in the hospital was aware
of. I knew it was happening because I could see right through her skull, but
anyone else could look right at her and think she was just falling asleep. She
herself knew something was terribly wrong, but it was already too late to
call out or get her finger onto the help button to alert a nurse. Chances
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were at this small town hospital that they wouldn’t be able to save her
this far gone, anyway. Already she wasn’t even able to whisper again.
No one’s there, she thought again. It was my imagination. So I’m about to die
here alone.
Toward both of them, one with so much life ahead and one with none,
I tried to say over and over, I’m here, you’re not alone. Maybe for the
moment but not forever. Just hold on a little longer.
The older one waited to answer. The younger one seemed to understand
that something was communicating with her, but her reaction was far from
comfortable. She twitched in the bed and moaned in a way that could have
quickly progressed into a scream. I knew what she was going through;
I had also spent most of my teens tossing and turning all night on the
dark side of my mind. She was torn between a loneliness so deep that it
spurred suicidal urges and a delirious ecstasy from only the thought of
having someone to be with someday. Her hormones overflowed and
left her outright sore from staying unrelieved. She wished she could sleep,
but it seemed as if compressed springs in her were jumping to full extension.
Her energy soared when she wished it would shut down. She could
try to lay completely motionless but still felt as if she was flying.
Heart palpitations came and went, sometimes barely with room between
spells. Entire nights she sometimes spent with her whole body pounding,
and parts of her felt tensed enough to cut glass. On this night in particular,
when she felt she was about to explode and would sooner take a blade to
her wrists than keep fighting the internal war, I thought towards her as
hard as I could, Just hold on. All you have to do is relax. Trust me. Everything
will be okay.
She suddenly went still, and the melting away of her stress was so
clear that I could feel it in the air. She couldn’t really understand what was
helping her; the moment was only real and freeing. It seemed that someone
was taking her hand and leading her out many miles away from here to
help keep her eye on the big picture. We were airborne together in route
toward the nearest ocean. I needed to take her into it, to feel and become
it, to show her how to stay in tune with another reality. The tides that saturated
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her made her, like the ocean, subject to a lunar gravitational pull. Instead of
feeling crushed by the power there, she could take its lead, nurture it, give
it exercise, let the wonderful heat build an armor over her life. Up onto the
nearest beach we spread over dryness met by the ocean’s nightly rise. The
waves climbed to immerse the dry sands, each layer drenching higher,
each a shell that cracked open a brighter glaze for the world of which we
were made.
She opened her eyes back in the bed. She wasn’t let down to find that
she was really just a tiny heartbeat surrounded by thin bones and supple
cover lying alone in an unlit room. Her present form could rather intensify the
effects through such concentration of power. She closed her eyes to slip
away a little again but remain half here too. The rising tide over the adjacent
land soaked into her senses and awakened capacities she’d never dreamt
could be her own. The unearthed strength in her legs and abdominals was
stunning; the range of flexibility was stunning. But what could blow her mind
all the way to the stars was the sudden discovery in the sands of a hypersensitive
pearl which was once dormant by contrast and now responded to even the
lightest feather-tap. She completely gave in and milked every ounce of
epiphany she could from this liberation, and just when she thought the
fever of it had to peak, she found a way to pump herself to a whole new
height. Sometimes it verged on becoming unbearable, blending into a sting.
But her racing pulse refused to quit and strived to test that tiny yet so
powerful muscle in her chest. The heart may have been located there but
now seemed to throb universally throughout her. She found that she
could compare herself to one entire heart.
Such revelations out of the blue tonight had to be something as healing to
share as to keep. She realized the possibility of how one touch might cure
a lifetime spent with none. She realized that the ultimate pleasure could
only be to pass wonder to answer of what it meant to know the
world through another’s eyes and feel it through their body.
She lay at rest now catching up on breaths. She would have to get
up for a drink before she could go to sleep; she had lost enough fluids that
she was left quite thirsty. She looked up through her window. As if seen for
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the first time, the stars made it clear to her that light was a relative of water.
She was still in the dark now, but light needn’t flood people for them to
always shine; they were always flooded even while still unborn. Each
speck overhead burst through her mind to blaze as bright as individual
suns, should she ever be able to get close enough to them. The star canopy
was like nocturnal flowers that closed at dawn and opened at dusk. Flesh
was of another flower strain which opened and in a fleeting, impassioned
effort, strived through pain and then an elegant decay to become light. For
all light was their star reflecting on the assembled image of bodies, created
by the same shine to begin with. They could only know what light was by
what it shined upon. Light conceived eternity, and so eternity was found
in them; for they conceived the mirror that colored it.
There were bandages over my face. For a second I feared I was back where
I had been deceived to think I was lying paralyzed. This wasn’t quite the
same room, however; the door was on the wrong side, the clock on
a different wall. Though this person I was in now couldn’t move, there was
still some feeling left in their limbs and torso. Who are you? I asked but
received no answer. Am I . . . you, and would have to be the one to answer
my own question?
I had already been released from the pod and had not even known. On
a chance downward rotation, I suddenly faced the crust of the planet
purified down to a writhing, varicolored liquid base. I was made of
nothing but sensation, and those coursing through me could have filled
an ocean with adrenaline releases. I had no cage of soft or hard matter left,
none of the former sight or other senses upon it like fogged glass. I
reaped new senses–new windows thrown open–that bleached away the
old senses. Their descendants were still an echo of them but as sharp
as the clearest instants of a lifetime compared to all the rest that just ran
together. The old emotions were still here but like a single splinter
once carved out from a tree and now rejoined to the trunk. If I could have
held on and lived forever in the exact moment when I had watched my
child being born, only that might have prepared me.
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I finally see now. Telepathy does exist but we had a misconception about
what it means. There are many forms of it that branch out. The reach goes
beyond hearing the voice of a thought to fully become their mind and
heart. It attains the greatest of empathy that is to become their emotion.
And it attains the greatest of intimacy that is to have physical telepathy.
Most human beings spend their whole lives fluctuating between
just two or three levels of consciousness, and the truth is that there
are an infinite number of levels above–not a thousand, not a million,
but infinite.
Up from a vibration in the liquid below, such as a fish coming almost
to the surface of a river and disrupting the flow, a portion of the material
rearranged into an average neighborhood block. It looked a lot like the
ones right around where I had last lived. There were a few people below
walking their dogs, some kids playing in a sprinkler in a yard, a man mowing
his grass, a few cars on the streets, trees swaying in a breeze down
the sidewalks. As fast as the transformation took place, its atoms slid right
back into the nature of that which could reenter the flow.
Splashes of the liquid came up in a shower to me. An exhilarating
shiver of pins and needles went through me. I took on a form with weight again,
and the ability of its tendons and muscle to stretch suggested that it could
encompass the entirety of another’s within the same space. We could have
evolved into an organism of any size or shape, but it felt right somehow to
use that of the human body as a canvas off which to further develop.
I could turn around and appreciate it with the care of one designing a medical
illustration of the skinless and bisected. It was easy to see when the skin was
gone how relatable any human was to any of the other six billion. Once
the exterior was removed, an observer would have far less left to tell
male from female or one race from another.
The given canvas of this body progressed with an aggression supplied by
veins grown like lightening strikes. They spread out in titanic webs to meet
the demand for sustenance. Some of them were of the familiar bright red,
but many were of blue and the rest of the spectrum. As any singular
body was composed of billions of individual cells, so was this one being
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composed of many other beings allied in the same continuity. It had to be
massive; yet if I desired, I was able to get down to examine a single nerve ending
and give the full attention it deserved. Sometimes the raw parts of this
being, which encompassed my own, recoiled slightly from me, however,
as if it were timid or questioned my intentions.
If you’re really who I think you are, I implored, hold nothing back. I want
to feel you right in my own veins. Let the union between us become all that
it should be, between us and every connecting fiber in space. Believe that the
process by which two become one is not what matters. Because any process
is only there to help them realize that they already were. Everything moves
together in endless circles, each surrounding the other. Let me feel through you
and you through me. There could be no greater heaven than a single moment with
you this way.
I waited, my expectations high. Further reaction seemed delayed. I looked
around to the side. While I had been distracted, the night was coming to
an end. In the east the sun was already half risen with a faint corona around
it. Overhead, out sprouted webs of unlimited reach for our veins which
streamed out the color of a clear sky. In turn, the sky acted as a sponge to take
it in while transitioning from night to morning.
The same type of vibration surfaced again below, but this time it
unfurled over the whole curve of the planet‘s sphere to eventually meet
itself on the other side. The liquids solidified at varying degrees into the
jumble of objects that had made up the world from the first two and half
decades of my life. The loose puzzle pieces of that world casually hovered and
circulated up on a course toward this organism looking down on them.
The mass below was bound together the way a rain cloud held together
moisture before release. The most attracting to my eye were those
pieces of animal life, which tended to cluster together during the ascension
and did not segregate human from that such as bird or elephant or whale.
Closest on the approach to me, a given cluster further assimilated to breach
into and out of itself like a revolving door of flesh. It peaked at a smooth,
embryonic sphere that swallowed itself and then reversed simply for the joy
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of repeating the act, granted the capacity of box sexes and procreating itself.
All the product of the solidifying below stayed on the course drawn to
me, and I was just as drawn to reciprocate. To try to help close the gap, I
paddled something like arms and legs moved by the cleanest of instinct,
much as a newborn will swim if delivered underwater. Strangely I felt
motivated the most by the seemingly inborn sense of loss that came
with being human. That sense was still with me, even after everything I’d
been through.
For this canvas open to any contributors, the play was truly limitless. The
things from below that adjoined it on all sides gave me the feeling of having
a lifelong amputation reattached. In a love-driven orbit, the countless life forms
ingrained themselves throughout it, layering into any random bone or muscle or
nerve. At the center of the overall body, a pair of limbs like twin doors followed
the allure to open and wrap all the way around its back. The opening progressed
for the most intimate of exposures to have bloomed outward until the
body was completely inversed, and inside itself. Our reciprocal and
full-bodied peak never let off. We managed to forget who was who and
liquefied back into the state of purity able to run through each other. There
was no possessiveness left to restrict us. The speed of light was unexpectedly
benign and somehow akin to a standstill, as if we could leave from one spot
and arrive back before having left in the beginning. The deepest fulfillment
I could ever have carried me away in the bright blood of this one being
surging together and shattered all the boundaries of time and space.
There was a particular twelve hour day that passed on Earth, though, the
same as it ever did in the background. It went against the grain of my resolve
about an absolution, but here was an impending dusk nonetheless.
I couldn’t conceive of why I would still have my own set of eyes. Here they
were, and much as I hated to, I couldn’t ignore the first distant evening
stars that appeared in the quiet sky, also the same as always. I kept
thinking, This can’t be right. This is normal, and that can’t be right.
I felt cold, stripped down from the ultimate of connections to as if thrown
outside naked at night without even a candle. There was barren ground
below where nothing grew or walked. I descended down amid dark ice flurries
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coating a tundra that had banished all other aid for life on the planet. The
sun’s productivity was almost exhausted. It sat a shrunken shadow of its former
self. There would be no moon showing because the sun didn’t put out enough
light anymore to make the moon visible. It barely made the Earth’s surface
visible even during direct hours. I turned in a circle on my bare feet over
the freezing ground. There was nowhere else for me to go, and I figured
frostbite would start setting in within minutes. I wonder what year it is
now?
The same galaxy of solar systems still twinkled above. I wondered if
perhaps around those other suns, other pairs of eyes had once stared
in wonder at the outlying star of my own before it had begun to
fade out.
I walked for a bit, since I had nothing else to do. The first time I caught
my foot on a rock and fell, I was already too weak to get back up. To
freeze to death was not the worst way someone could go, I knew. It would
hurt for a while, but the numbness that set in would quickly sweep
out any pain. My eyelids drooped, and it even seemed crazy to me, but
as I gazed out across the beads of ice like sand of a desert, I still held onto
the belief that even in the most desolate of wastes, each grain could still
count for a new possibility. Large, empty spaces around deceptively small
and filled spaces could be misleading. Maybe it was just my imagination,
but I came to believe that someone else did breathe close by in the dark.
Music lived on their fingertips that held me, and their calming heartbeat rested
against mine like two interlocked hands.
There is nothing else you have to do, they communicated. You can
stay here with me undisturbed. The clocks will submit. We won’t have
to watch them anymore. And we’ll shelter in the other’s dream beyond
where the coldest truth may ever reach.
Whether hand in hand or mind in mind, I trusted that we were drifting
away together and that one way or another, I would never be abandoned.
I could ask for nothing more. I wanted nothing more.
The sighs of mourning doves answering each other passed over the
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twenty people lying right where I had left them. Trying not to be too noisy,
I walked in among them. Aurora, sitting up first, saw me coming. I hoped
that I looked as refreshed as she did.
The countryside ahead emitted clean, unripe smells that enlivened me
from the nasal passage down. The smells rumored of times for imminent
transition like the bridge between winter and spring–predating the tree
blossom to when the bud first pecked at the underside of bark; seeded
soil still smooth as the baby’s gum hiding teeth; the mother’s shine before
her stomach first showed a curvature.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
My mouth opened but immediately closed. My hands squeezed each
other behind me, and I looked around as if to locate some clue for how to
respond. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure why I’m here, or how I can be here. I
don’t remember coming back.”
She stood and stretched. Everyone else did the same. She looked equally
concerned and curious about me.
“Can we take a walk?” I suggested.
Tommy said from across the group, “We should leave soon.”
Aurora nodded to him, then said low to me, “Just a short one.”
I told her as soon as we were away, “I’m so confused. I want to tell
you why, but I don’t understand myself. I may not even be able to say it.”
“You don’t have to.”
We stopped to share the look of understanding we had made a habit.
Jarred apart pieces of memory clicked together in my head. “Because
it was you. It’s always been you. How long have I known you? Who
are you, really? What are you?”
“I’ve been hoping I would find out through you. I’ve always hoped.”
“How can there be more for us than what we just shared? I’ve been sure
so many times that I had reached some kind of closure. But instead
I just find another open door.”
Someone called, “Time to go, Aurora!”
She last said to me, “All we can do is see where the next one leads.”
Later on the Synth, I was in no mood to just sit in my usual spot.
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After I made the decision, I put my shoulder into it and jumped right into
the center expanses. My eyes shut involuntarily from expecting a blow
of resistance. They may have covered the eyes, but my lids turned clear
like lowering two silent waterfalls rimmed with eyelashes.
At a cubed room without furniture, I stumbled upon Tommy sitting
in the middle of the floor. My attendance startled him. I quickly said, “Sorry,”
and spun around to leave.
“No, stay,” he said. “You surprised me, is all.”
I lingered at the side of his room, knowing that if I stepped out, I probably
wouldn’t find my way in again.
“Stay if you wish,” he offered again.
I sat across from him. Sabel came in after me. She looked surprised, too,
by me appearing somewhere else. She sat opposite he and I so that we made
a triangle.
I gathered my courage and said, “I want to find out some things without
letting Aurora know.”
Tommy, easygoing in his manner, said, “She’s a very different source of
knowledge than you’ll get from anyone else. She is seeking too much and
looking too far. She’s useful sometimes–I expect creativity from her–but
her ambitions for the most part are unrealistic.”
I rubbed my hands together. I was in no rush, either. “I never cared much
for history. I was always just interested in today and tomorrow. But I want
to know your history.” I looked at one and then the other. “Since I’m lost on
what is really happening, and I don’t have any history of my own here
before she first found me. At least none that I remember.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, “because we are all forgetting
our lives as we go.”
My eyebrows arched. I looked at Sabel who performed hand signals to
say, It’s true.
He said, “The effect starts gradually at a point trailing behind us in time,
then spreads back and outwards, erasing us.”
Sabel’s sign language explained: Think of skimming your finger across
water. A trail follows that is narrow at the start and gets wider the farther
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your hand moves away. It makes such a broad V that it finally loses
definition, and you can no longer tell that the two spreading sides are
even there. The water looks the same again. Nothing is left that shows you’ve
been across.
Tommy was telling me out loud the same thing she was conveying,
but I preferred to watch her hands.
I sat needing to think for a minute. “Then how do you even function?”
I finally asked. “I mean, if one person has amnesia, the only way they can
regain their life is through people around them who tell them about themselves.
But if everyone has amnesia and it’s constantly restarting, how can you avoid
always staying at the toddler stage in your brain?”
Tommy said, “Remembering real past events or making up a story in their
place both have the same power to make you who you are. Amnesia happens
at different depths, but some depths are untouchable.”
I said, “I’ve heard Aurora talk about people in the past tense. Can you
remember each other?”
Sabel: The name and the face aren’t important. What matters is to still
recognize what’s behind them no matter what appearance it takes on top. We
lose where we’ve been and what we’ve done, but by knowing that we were
together, we can know ourselves again through the reflection of another.
Aurora helps me more than anyone.
I said, “What can you tell me about her that she wouldn’t tell me herself?”
Tommy said, “My only advice to you is don’t become attached to anyone.
They can disappear at any moment, and you’ll be all the worse off and
all the more alone. She’ll become more cold and distanced than any of us by
trying to evolve a way to destroy the distance. Instead she’s destroying
herself.”
Sabel disagreed, That’s an opinion, not a fact. I don’t know either, but
I think she will survive and finally succeed at whatever she’s trying to do
for us. Sabel looked at Tommy. His eyes stayed firm in opposing conviction.
I supposed that was all they were going to tell me. I stood, said, “thank
you,” and tried to retrace my steps.
I passed where the kids of the group had gathered to draw with chalky
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crayons on the ceiling, floor and walls of a room. They all worked on the
same project. I found myself more engrossed with the creators than the
creation. No single trait overruled each style in which they worked–never one
only intellect, one vulnerable, one innovative, one innocent–yet they still
managed to each be unique. They were all-encompassed murals themselves,
ever redefining. No creative endeavors such as this one were ever finished;
they were just left behind and called done. The lives that left them as footprints
were the only ongoing projects. They all added strokes to a thirsting blank
page everywhere around them, grown richer with every addition on the
continuous drawing of one face. I saw the kids as the real work of art, and
it was a perfect symbolism to the hauntingly beautiful confusion and wonderment
that I knew deep down I would probably never escape. But that wasn’t such a
bad feeling.
I came out to where Aurora sat, her feet dangled over the side, watching
evergreen hills roll past. I knelt at her back and said, “Would it be okay if I
braided your hair?”
“Sure. Why?”
I divided out three locks to start weaving together. “My daughter always
used to ask me to braid hers when she came up. I miss the feel of it in my
fingers.”
What have you done? My hands froze. I had touched her. It was only her
hair, though, which obviously didn’t have the impact of skin. Hair didn’t
bleed from its cuts, of course. She didn’t seem unnerved, either, so I continued
braiding. The silkiness of the hair overpowered any doubt in my fingers.
I wondered if Asia was thinking of me at this moment, too.
I told Aurora, “I don’t want to just see what I want to see. I want to see
what actually is. Even if it hurts. And regardless, I want to share it all with
someone. With you.”
“When we’re ready,” she said. “We haven’t scratched the surface yet. We’ve
barely even glimpsed the surface.”
“How do we tear right through it, then?”
“Something is bound to happen if we just keep pushing on and keep
our minds as wide as our eyes.”
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After I finished her braid, I became drowsy. I let my head go limp to
the side and carry the rest of me down too. Far ahead I could make out
a great mountain range for which we were destined. It made me think
about driving toward the Rockies with my mother and how their size was
so deceiving, I’d judged us to have about ten miles to go, and she had assured
me it would be more like fifty miles. She was right.
We had stopped for water. Aurora stood, arms crossed, below jagged
mountain crests hooded with snow despite the relative balm down in this
green valley. She heard me walking to her side and pointed at a burgundy
patch partway up the ascent. “If we hike up there we should find these berries
that are really good, if you‘re up for it.”
“You bet.”
The climb quickly surprised me by how the view broadened below. We
passed from open areas to abrupt timber lines. Going under the shade of aspens,
we instantly cooled and going out instantly warmed. The overall cooling,
though, by the time we got to the berry patch had turned plain cold.
The highlands of solid snow looked the same distance from here as they
had at the bottom. It would take two days to reach that last white mile.
A collision of seasons occurred midway. The glow of the light was as inviting
as any baker’s oven, but occasional dollops of unmelted snow like whipped
cream sat on fir trees or in crevasses that received less sunshine to melt them.
The berries dangled among wooly stems like miniature barbwire. I started
picking. The stems caught and grinded at my hands. The protective barbs around
the berries seemed to bite at me on purpose and laugh in their own little
language. “This isn’t too gentle on the hands, huh?” I said.
She hadn’t complained. She had picked twice as many, too. She made a
one-shoulder shrug. “I can do it, if you’d rather sit somewhere and wait.”
“Ah, that won’t be necessary.” I stuck both hands into the mess this time
with enthusiasm. I filled the carrying bag she had given me to take back,
then filled my stomach. Something in the berries dropped through into
my energy level in seconds, much better than coffee. On the way down I
felt ten times better than at the start.
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We went along having more laughs than conversation, me in particular.
I bit the inside of my lip to slacken it. Laughter was often one, two steps at
most, away from the madhouse. I’m just like some young fool with
a crush, I thought. Strange how you don’t really outgrow some things.
Strange but fortunate.
Nobody was around at the bottom, which seemed odd. Quite a while had
passed, and we always reformed the Synth at where we last left off. Aurora
stopped in mid-stride as if she’d just had a heart attack.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The hand that held her bag went slack and it fell to the dirt. The berries
rolled out split and leaking. “They’ve found us.”
I tried to read the fine print on her face for the hope that she didn’t mean
what I suspected. “You mean the Illusionists?”
“They’ve taken everyone. Everyone is gone.”
“How could it happen so fast and out of nowhere?”
“I don’t know.” She looked from left to right, choosing a direction to flee.
She chose the direction we had been going ever since I joined them–the
same direction I assumed her kind had always been traveling. She only said
one more thing, all that the demands of the next hour would give us any
breath to say: “Run.”
From what I could tell, we were still on foot. I did have some impression
that the Synth as I knew it before was trying to take shape again for
just the two of us. That design seemed to have depended on many more
in a communal effort and had to strain to hold together for two. I seemed
to be in a limbo with it that didn’t really benefit me. I wasn’t going any
faster than my normal running speed, and I also had to endure all the painful
tightness that quickly set into the legs and lungs from such exertion.
It was amazing how fast running could tear you down, and especially
at higher altitude. I tore through the woods that led into next valley
raking my way through undergrowth, climbing over logs, tripping and
scrambling up, and shielding myself from limbs that smacked me.
At times I just dropped my head; I was nearly running blind anyway.
I had to quit once in a while and lean over gasping. However in danger
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of being caught, I also knew that my muscles would simply fail and drop me
if I stayed at an unbroken run.
I got separated from Aurora in the trees. Worrying that I might be too
far ahead, I slowed down. Next I got frantic that I was behind and now
losing more ground. I finally located her in my periphery. We veered to close
the gap. We came out of the wooded stretch at the same time and both had
to stop to breathe without a choice.
Swelling dots like balloons inflated by drained bruises instead of air
popped up over my eyes. The terror of losing consciousness distracted me.
I avoided staring at any fixed point, which let the dots congregate too much.
But my turning head made my brain like a balloon itself nicked and on a short
but chaotic flight.
Suddenly I saw in our apparent surroundings, shreds of my hometown
the way it was back in the snowstorm. Down a street boiled in July, people
crept along on another identical small town day, and over on the sidewalk
stood a boy who looked afraid of something invisible to any other
passerby.
The images within images switched to the city that the boy would move
to years later. I heard the jangling traffic. Ant trails of cars churned through
crisscrossing streets under stone and glass skyscrapers. A passenger train
clanked by on a railway overhead. Three business men, toting briefcases,
walked by rapt in discussion about the big meeting that afternoon.
I put my hands to either side of my temples and pressed as hard as I
could. Shut it out, shut it all out and get ready to run again–always running,
that’s the great arrangement, and there’s no way out of it.
“We can’t get separated again,” Aurora said. She was stooped over and
could hardly talk for the lack of air. The amount that we could take in was
like using a thimble to fill the need of a bucket.
I narrowed my focus onto her and resisted turning away. That let the
dots return, but it also blocked out the half and half shredding of
this environment with others.
“We can’t keep this up,” I panted. “I’ll collapse.”
“Me too.”
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I looked back the way we had fled. “What are we really running from? Do
the Illusionists look like people? I know you said they’re different for everyone,
but help me understand more. Anything. Please.”
She didn’t look back or look at me. “I think we can slow down some. We
should be safe, for a while.”
I didn’t provoke her or chase the sidestep from my question. I just accepted
her ambiguity as I always did.
We were limited to a walk now regardless of our situation. We had both
gone shaky from the overexertion catching up with us. We kept breathing hard
for a long time, as we labored to refill our oxygen stores. We found a cracked
boulder gushing spring water. The hydration and splashes on our faces
cleared us up tenfold. By then I felt mostly recovered, though if forced to
run hard again, I wouldn’t last too long.
We crossed a series of grassy embankments that got steadily taller. Each
cut off what was ahead until we climbed over the next. We topped the
second to the last one and both waited to proceed. The ground ahead had
become thick black ribbons folded over one another like an armadillo’s back.
They curved to either side so that the incline was rounded both vertically
and horizontally. I thought that it did more resemble the pelt of some
animal than a tract of land. I detected an overall expansion and retraction
as if it was breathing under us.
“What do you think will be on the next side?” I said.
“We’ll find out.”
Toward the top where the contour leveled, we both lengthened our stride,
eager to make the discovery like sharks that smelled blood in the water. As
soon as we made it over, we halted to soak in what lay ahead. I had not
foreseen it, exactly, but it seemed ominously fitting.
A circular valley ringed the centerpiece of a lake, and around it were
hazy portions of tall buildings that I couldn’t deny I had walked past before.
Their images wavered in and out as if no more than a superimposed
projection. But then the sections of mountain scenery between them would
take a turn to do the same. Neither imagery had a firm claim on this
setting into which they both tried to squeeze. Out of the middle of
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the lake, a four-sided object tapered as it rose to a sharp point at the top.
The stretching pyramid was as clear as the lake into which the bottom
widened beneath. Its diamond-like interior modified light into all ranges
of tone and concentration. Rivers all around the brim of the valley
spilled over and flowed toward the lake, north meeting south and
every opposite.
So easy it should be to relate the global flow of waters and anatomy
to a scaled up version of any other body. It was quite clear from
orbit but could also be just as clear at pointblank range. The very
nuances that once disguised it up close now made it the most obvious.
Anything moving was alive, after all, and every bit of water and land
was moving, some rapidly and some immeasurably slow, but moving
nonetheless. But through the eyes of the body I was currently in,
it seemed that living things were supposed to have limits. She had
told me that her kind had been crossing this place for unknown
generations. They had encountered no limits, either. I looked at my
hands, knowing it should be clear where I ended, but on this endless
day the lines were hard to write in stone.
On the lake, smaller pyramids rose out dripping off the bottoms
as they broke the lake surface. Brilliant electrical currents danced
around and through them, and as well jumped to the nearest neighbor
to share. About half of the smaller pyramids were made in the
nature of classic diamond, but half were of an alien black diamond.
Refracting light handed off from one to another and enhanced with each
turn taken. The mutual energies ignited between them called to me
like food set before the starving. The shock of getting close might outweigh
the reward, but I’d never been one to second guess my instincts.
Aurora stepped over in front of me. I knew by the intensity in her eyes that
she had already made an unchangeable decision. For a moment everything
else disappeared in comparison to her image, rendered as if by painters who
used single hairs to propel normalcy to divinity.
“I’m going out there,” she said, quiet but settled. “I think this could be
what I’ve always searched for. Will you go with me?”
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Whenever she looked into my eyes long enough, it was as if she broke
through dam after dam to a release that allowed me to really see for the
first time ever; to really see another and let them see me.
“I will.”
We went down the long, lush banks toward the lake shore. Across our
immediate area besides surrounding the lake, pieces of the competing
environment emerged like bubbles from someone expelling a breath
underwater. As we walked, both sceneries alike curled in from our lead
edge and rolled into a barrel wave trailing our passage. It too tall for me to
see over the other side at where we had come from, but I was sure there would
be nothing at all there.
“You know they’re close, don’t you?” she said.
I did have that sensation again of being circled and sized up. “Real close.”
The understanding was unspoken that there would be no turnarounds,
no fleeing this time. I believed we would find nowhere to flee, especially
under the direction of fear. Over the last stretch of shore, I gradually detached
from the prints my feet laid down. My steps lost track of the usual weight
supported by each leg in sequence. We both slowed at the discovery that
we were placing our feet down with several yards of a gap below. We
had left the reeds at the water’s edge, and empty air cushioned us from
its mirroring surface below.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“I might be if I had to go alone.”
“I wish I could take your hand.”
“So do I, but you’re here. That’s enough for me.”
The smaller pyramids floated midway up the large one. They twirled
themselves while threading into varied orbital paths. They incubated
gyrations like wet hands set to a clay spinning wheel and about to
erupt with creation. As we took our next steps out above the water,
the sound of our heartbeats became loud enough to hear, but remained
at a serene rate, and locked into a mutual rhythm even if our hands
could not. It seemed that my physical integrity held together for the
most part but did not feel necessary. The part of me that mattered was
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more like the music that inhabited an instrument or the flight that inhabited
a wing.
Aurora had risen slightly ahead and higher than me. Her dress unpeeled
long flowing strips in slow ripples out to the ends. It derived off of her at
the center like the opened heart of a morning glory. Relieved of gravity, her
arms hovered at her sides without supporting themselves. The dress, aspiring
to reach for new territories to perhaps wrap back into her, left her shoulders
and back exposed. It tapered down to a tip above her tailbone. Her hair
lengthened upwards the way the rippling fabric did. The dress still lived for
her imitation and as if it had learned, from adhering to her, now went out
with the highest prospect to flourish. The reaches from her coincided with
increased activity in the pyramids.
After a serious of timed cracks, all the pyramids began opening from the
four sides to the pointed tops, as well as the bottoms. They expanded five
clusters of new designs such as that of the most majestic Persian rugs.
Each subsequent section released again, multiplying the area of coverage
so fast and fluidly that the whole sky began to disappear behind the
mass of designs. Again I stood at a precipice where I felt as if I’d been looking
through the wrong end of a telescope all my life and now suddenly it was
turned around.
The growth from the largest pyramid and its children overlapped and
walled us over on all sides. The number of opening buds defied a numeral
grasp. Each spinning fleck had its own revolutionary existence–the works
of obsessed calligraphers that had dipped their pens into liquid rainbows.
The complexity of patterns included the spherical, the curly-cued, the
straight-sided–all manner of geometries stacked and interwoven to the
point of a sweet madness. Glad to give in and join the pattern, I watched
Aurora go through the transformation I felt occur in myself. Our images
lengthened and became free-flowing to where we could enter the
pattern. Both compressed and expanded, we fit naturally into the
adornments as if the most ingenious of Persian rug makers had gathered
and sewn their works together by the millions. To be here meant I
had to have the willingness to bleed in order for another to heal.
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Then in return they would bleed for you when your time of need
came. To accept and be accepted, our existence in mutual pattern
meant to share the same lungs, the same eyes, and at the fleeting
pause when the bag-like muscle inside a heart has filled with
blood and has yet to pump it on, eclipse two pasts and shine on
one future.
I did come to desire to see her again the way she used to be. Amidst
the universe of patterns, she redeveloped easily back into her
normal dimensions as human as I. But we were too involved in the
greater configuration to completely let it go. Fingernails to toenails,
and Siamese twin to her skin, a miniaturized cast of the patterns covered
her. I had it all over me, too, when I checked. The kaleidoscopic pieces
constantly swiveled for new fittings and possibilities. I smiled at
her, and her pieces reassembled into a perfect copy of me. Then I was
across from myself and converted to her position. Where I had been, she
was now standing. She must have just seen me transform into her also.
“We’re interchangeable?” I said.
“Always.” She smiled back.
Then something darkened her happiness. My consequent darkening
absorbed the reason. Some falling shadow blotted us out to usher in
the next predictable end to tranquility. Because ravenous things were still
after meat and would never leave those alone who might be fed upon.
“Get ready,” she said. “I’ll keep thinking about you. I hope I’ll see you again
after they’re done . . . if I survive. If I don’t–”
I didn’t get to hear her finish. The entire miraculous pattern in which we
had thrived suddenly fell apart. Back came the two wavering sceneries of
the buildings and mountains. Where I still hovered a ways above the
lake surface, I also stood on an empty street among skyscrapers on either
side. I looked around in anger for whoever or whatever was coming for us.
I was ready to tear them apart, and my will was quite at the kamikaze stage
to either win or die in the attempt.
I kept looking for someone, anyone, to appear to me so I could go
and fight them. I wouldn’t care how big they were or if I was outnumbered.
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I ran down the current street and turned onto another. The emptiness
there continued to banish any such deliverance. I was on my own.
At the next block I ran into a downtown square like a small park surrounded
by the buildings. It had landscaped grass and some trees and shrubs. I ran
out into the middle which was an architectural dream of concrete
steps, sculptures, a fountain and more. The square and all the streets that
branched from the outskirts of it were empty. I didn’t know where else to
go, and already my running was tiring me out again. As I went across a
stretch of flat concrete out to the middle, I put my hands over my face in
despair and yelled as hard as I could, “Come on! Come on!”
A portion of concrete about ten yards in front of me broke upward in chunks
and powder. I slid to a stop, falling forward onto my knees. Before me rose
a rectangular metal shape, black in base colors but highly glossed and
reflective. I watched it rise, inscribed from top to bottom as if a headstone, to
the full stature which towered over me. The fact that I was speechless occurred
not from shock but the removal of any free will to tell me what to do. Fractures
went through the length of the shape and out poured a content which
splattered it over from glossy black to glossy red. I felt wet trickles go down
over my face and sides of my head in the same directions that occurred over
the metal. The sensations were free of pain, however, and at first that
seemed compassionate. It also meant that I couldn’t make an estimation of
the damage.
Like the second wind for a wounded animal, I was given a brief
window of opportunity where if I wanted, I knew I would have enough
strength to back off and retreat. I could probably get away, hike all the
way out of this valley and just go back to staying on the run like before.
If I were to do so, I might, or might not, find Aurora somewhere out there
to accompany me. But either way, I knew that was a dead end choice for
us despite being the easier choice.
I used those last twitches instead to puppeteer myself forward on my knees.
I threw my arms wide, my head back, and declared, “I’ll take it all. Whatever
you’ve got. I’m not afraid.”
The great metal shape sliced and broke itself repeatedly on toward full
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disintegration. My bones and teeth shattered and my soft matter was
sliced into a living confetti. Of course the pain was indescribable, but it didn’t
impress me. I couldn’t speak anymore but I thought, Is that it? Physical
torment, that’s the best you can do? You may be able to use it to rip me into
a million pieces, but you can’t use it to own my mind and heart. You’ve still
got nothing on me.
All the present noise and violence jerked to a stop. I opened my eyes to
a fresh, painless self. I was off on one of the nearby streets now and still on
my knees, but not a thing was wrong with me. I stood and walked. The
square was about a block behind me now. It was just as quiet and empty
again as everywhere else.
A mild drizzle began to fall. I looked up alongside the vertical front of a
building so tall that it seemed to lean slightly over the street at the top.
From a sky of solid cloud cover fell new raindrops which already
looked too large, and they hadn’t even gotten to the tops of the buildings
yet. While I stared up, the drizzle making me squint, the raindrops prolonged
out and hardened into long shining blades. I might have had time to
flee out of range before they landed, but I didn’t even budge. In an
apparent flurry of anger with my indifference, the rain of blades shook and
then softened back into a harmless rain. I had deja vu of my pre-school
era on late nights of half-awake nightmares about my first days away
from home and everything I knew. Over in the corner from my bed I kept
seeing this clown with a shark’s jaw too full of teeth for the mouth to even close.
It never came to actually bite me half but just lingered there, watching me.
After several nights of acclimation, I ceased to awaken in a sweat, and
upon this nightmare I had stared unblinking with a heart iced a little further
into age. After that I wasn’t so nervous to be away from home and out to
face the unknown.
Right on the sidewalk, I tripped and fell into a tiny, confined space
like a closet with the light off. There was no torture or intimidating visuals
here, but the unforeseen use of claustrophobia caught me by surprise.
I tried but couldn’t stop the waves of involuntary panic that crashed through
me. Strengthened by my reaction, the same unseen presence that had
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been close before now seemed in this space to be moving within a few feet
around me. It didn’t actually brush against me, but I could hear every
aspect of its bristling and clicks on the floor. Its breathing was cold on me
this time instead of hot. The hair on my arms and neck stood up.
“How many of you are there?” I demanded. “Put yourself in front of me,
out in the light. So I can fight you.”
“You all have such obsessions with what you can fight,” the Illusionists
said at last. “Do you want to grab onto something and twist it until
it screams? Do you want to kill? Would that satisfy you?”
“I’ve never wanted to hurt a thing. I’m just out to defend myself and
my friend. You are causing all of this, not me.”
They said, “You creatures hide in the fantasy that there is good and there is evil
with no grey area between.”
“I believe . . . sometimes there’s some good in evil, and vice versa, but not
always. Sometimes it’s a hundred percent one or the other.”
“It may manifest in such a way, but you fail to see beyond.”
“I’m getting very tired of talking to you. Humanity does see beyond the
manifestations. I know that any great positive has to have an equally
great negative somewhere in the universe, or otherwise neither could
exist. Everyone figures that out–no light without knowing darkness. So here
we are–I’m the positive, you’re the negative. Let’s get on with it.”
They obliged me. The floor went out from under me and I began to fall.
It was still too dim to make out where I was, but in a matter of seconds I
knew I had already fallen quite a distance. I figured I was going to land on
rocks, perhaps, and couldn’t care less. I didn’t land after those few seconds,
or ten, or a hundred. The air was moving so fast over me that my face
burned and my eyes watered endless trickles. I kept trying to count
to keep at least a rough track of my time, but the stress of falling like this was
a big mental drain once the initial rush wore off. Eventually the count
of minutes probably added up to an hour, but the numbers became pointless.
The subjective motion of time morphed as if I was holding my hand over
a lit match. I speculated on the goal of this tactic, if it was to wear me
out, try to drive me insane, try to make me feel hopeless . . . But they weren’t
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succeeding because I felt nothing at all. I refused to. I was beyond feeling
empty and had become the emptiness. I was sure that would help
me survive; like a man thrown into long solitary confinement, I just had to
numb myself and robotically go through the processes to stay alive until
someone came to let me out.
What started to get to me was that no outside help was coming. In
that case, I resolved myself to a much longer wait than I had hoped for.
I didn’t know how else to handle it than to let the numbness deepen in ways
I never knew possible. It had a puzzling result, however, when I came to
have a sense of bad injury but without being able to register any pain as
before. That terrified me to think I was oblivious to something that needed
my attention. I couldn’t attend it without knowing what was wrong.
I had let the numbness overtake me to where I managed a kind of
escape by forgetting where I was, but at the price of having to forget
who I was.
My brain, like a foraging sloth with no memory, happened to perk
up a little at noticing a strip of grass off to the side. It angled at about
forty-five degrees; I was next to a grassy hillside, I supposed. I didn’t know
my own name, but I remembered how to crawl. As I went through the
grass I writhed from an oddity of pinches and prickles. I thought it was
just the grass causing it, but there was more to the story. On a look behind,
I saw that I was crawling out of a thin outer shedding of myself. On the slope
I started to roll a bit under the spell of a sky so engorged with blue that
it seemed it would burst. The grass was still a touch damp from the previous
night’s dew. At the turns onto my bare torso especially I loved the tickling
grass and didn’t really mind if I knew my name or not. I hugged the hillside,
hugged to this particular spot connected to every other spot of the planet that
had lent me life and into which I would be reabsorbed one day. Might as well
be today, I decided.
“You can’t escape that way,” the Illusionists said. “It’s the same door
you came through into this form. You’ll have no purge and new origination.
You may think you’ve found all the difference of night and day, but eventually
you will still have to know yourself.”
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Ignore that voice and go far away, I instructed myself.
I rolled onto my back with my limbs outstretched. My skin welled out
a strange but pleasing stickiness. I was plastered in tree sap, it had to be.
I felt myself extending to incredible lengths and could keep track of what
was happening to me by feel under the thousands of exploring fingertips
I had. They ran across swelling rivers, roots, soil, hooves, fur,
feathers. Huddled deer and flocks of birds sprang up out of me. The
bottoms of trees, hungry to grow, gripped like strong but playful hands into
me at points of interest–palm of my hand, top of my forehead, middle
of my chest. The acts brought soft laughter to me. What am I becoming?
I shouldn’t have needed to question that, but there was a reason. Something
was still denying the process to complete and kept me in suspension. The
hangup was no better, really, than when I’d been falling and falling
through nothingness.
The single star above today was a fierce fireball that stung to look at. The
human eyes I still partly endured could not stand to stare at it for more than
a few seconds. Maybe if I could push myself through enough exposure,
I could transition on to the eye a hemisphere wide that could stay
exposed permanently.
“You had it wrong,” the Illusionists said. “You are the one with delusions of
grandeur. All that you’re about to do is make yourself go blind. Let us show
you what’s really going on and the true nature of the universe as you know it.”
They cracked my skull open and took me as an impartial observer into
the brain at work inside. “You want an answer?” they proposed. “In cold logic
you will find it. It will not be the answer you want, but it will be the honest one.”
They intensified my observation right down to where I could watch the
actual sparks of neurotransmitters jumping between one of trillions of synapses
in the brain, bathed in its own endogenous chemicals. “Do you understand now?
This is all that determines what you’re seeing, hearing, feeling–your entire
perception and experience of outer stimuli; your entire concept of the universe.
Yes, there is great potential in these sparks, but one particular brain’s
understanding of the same atoms, the same energy, is not an absolution
for it but just a different expression of it. There’s nothing special about you. Let
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us help you. Let us take you down to something brutal but real.”
They relieved me of my observation and left me paused in the process of
which they had intervened. They had brought me to tears, but I wouldn’t
even consider their offer. “No, it‘s a wider door,” I affirmed. “I want to go
through.”
The Illusionists were quiet. Upon speaking to me again, the voice got
more monstrous and was out of patience. “Go ahead and try to stay sane
without our help. You will fail.”
The angle of the light strengthened from a morning glare to noon. Without
choice, my gaze embedded to it. Out of the white-hot center of the burn
emerged that single segment of a window through which a boy stood
looking around at countless segments from his perspective. He had to face
them all from there at once–where he lay with life-support strapped to him,
where he lay in his first lover’s arms, where he lay in a baby crib fascinated by
the song toy that dangled overhead, where he sat looking out on an orchard
at twilight, where he was staring into a star and unable to turn away. And
more and more like fans of playing cards raced on by him.
“You can be relieved,” the Illusionists said, “if you’ll only limit yourself.
Stop trying so hard. You can have simplicity and completion. It will break
you if you keep trying to bear this on your shoulders. You could spend
forever here believing you are learning, and you’ll only have gone too
insane to ever find a home again. To ever be still again.”
My hands dug at my face, on the verge of proceeding to just rake out
my eyes. I fought and resumed facing the sky. “No, I can take more. I want
to see more.”
“Then see you will, and blind you will go.”
From the glare hot as an open flame against me, I was powerless to turn
away. It burned my retinas to where I was sure I would have permanent
vision loss. I couldn’t quit, though. The burning warred down into me as
the minutes passed, eating me, digesting me. I couldn’t hear the Illusionists
anymore. It didn’t seem they were anywhere around. That meant success,
but in order to get away, it seemed I was about to destroy myself in
the process. The two choices still seemed to either be, live forever but as
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a slave to the end, or die today but with my free will intact to the end.
It started like a tapping on my shoulder. There was some new persuasion
coming into the picture and implored me to acknowledge. Next, grown intolerant
with my failure to take notice, it resorted to shoving and grabbing onto me.
The aggressiveness of it jostled me but didn’t break me loose. Then in forceful
proximity, a glowing sort of corkscrew insisted that I remember. Off
at the base of the reaching figure, Aurora shaped in like the answer at the
bottom of an equation. She was exhausting all her energies out to draw my
attention. The extensions from her were all around me now. The slightest
receptiveness of my body language was enough to let her Synth begin
pouring into me from all sides.
It hurt, but it was a therapeutic breed of pain because it also drew me out
of my perpetual sleepiness. Sometimes in the company of pain, a special
clearness can also arise. At age seven I fell out of the tree in my backyard
one winter evening. Sprawled on the ice near the branch that had broke
and fallen with me, I sampled a mystic hush in which I could hear every
snowflake alighting. I heard all the pin drops in the world. I could listen to
my own thoughts from the outside. Such lucidity had always been there, but
to shake me from my everyday distractions enough to understand, an
intervention like the blow I just took was necessary. Epiphanies speeded the
clock on the deathwatch for the least of pains and the least of joys.
I used the strength she had put into me to help pull myself toward her. I
was able to look around now and tell that her extensions went farther
than to saturate me. Her energy alone had raged into a surrounding
Synth as vast as that which had once required dozens of people to
form. Like a surprise wildcard, it was carrying me away and putting more
solid distance between me and the two choices I had determined to
be my only fate.
She was trying to come closer too, but she seemed to cover less than
one pace for every ten she took. My effort produced the same.
“They’re taking me,” she said. She sounded so drained that it made
even speaking a task. “I can’t stop them anymore, but at least I saved you.”
I shuddered at a sound like ripping steel inside her. Shockwaves
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steamrolled me just from standing in her vicinity. I couldn’t stop myself and
reached out for her hand. We were too far apart to ever connect, but she also
reached out. An exploding bubble like white napalm spread out from between
us. It destroyed the creation that had come from her solely to help me.
We were both thrown into the air from the impact as well. I was knocked
out temporarily except for a ringing in my ears.
I faded back into myself and saw that I was lying in a quite featureless
place. At first glance it might have been a solid white room, but I couldn’t
exactly make out any ceiling or walls nearby. If there were, it seemed that
they must be out of sight.
I was surprised to notice Aurora lying a ways off from me but well
within my bounds to get to her. While I dragged myself over, I kept expecting
some new attack to try to keep us apart, but it never came. I made it to
where I was right over her. She was on her back, knees bent, one arm
across her ribs, the other behind her head. She was deeply lacerated around
her arms, face and everywhere else. While in the midst of crossing the
borderline to flow out of her, the blood transformed into light, like rays that
toyed their way through the holes in a leaf canopy. She could no longer
budge any part of herself except for her eyes. They were facing me and
then seemed to look on past me, as if something of interest had arisen. I
looked behind us at the single segment of window. Inside the boy still
stood watching his swarms of windows by contrast spin deathlessly onward.
They spun with greater velocity than ever as if out of spite, or just indifference,
to the fact that she wouldn’t be moving even another inch.
“I’m going to die,” she more mouthed than spoke, “but I’m not afraid.”
I wasn’t so interested in what was happening out through that window.
I turned back around to focus on her. The window widened and contoured
itself around to either side of us until it surrounded us by 360 degrees.
It was certainly spectacular, but still neither of us cared to look. We
only wanted to look into the windows of each other’s own eyes.
“I wasn’t either,” I said, knowing that in a few moments she was going to
leave me feeling the most alone I’d ever been in my life. “And I understand
what you’ve been trying to teach me. We are the Illusionists, aren’t we?”
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“Yes.”
I shook my head, not to disagree but the only thing I could wring out from
my disenchantment. “It scares me that I know you’re about to leave me, but
it scares me even more that I’m not crying. I don’t think I could cry.”
“No reason to mourn.” She now sounded comfortable, as though taken
into a warm embrace.
I took her hand. Choice departed along with her; I had to do it. Nothing
happened at all, though, except one survivor clutching for companionship.
I was about to ask if she was as surprised as me. Then I saw the reason why
there had been no reaction to our touch: She was gone.
I wrapped her hand into both of mine and put my head down lightly against
hers. Where did you go? I wondered. It seems I should know, but I don’t.
I know less now than I ever have.
I picked her up and stood to leave. For all the multitude of windows, all
directions really just looked the same since they were all circling. I started
off the way she had been facing when she fell. The light had concluded
emptying from her, and now the rest began to silently undo itself in my arms.
A slow upside down rain left from her as the fluid part dispersed, which took
the majority of the weight I held. A tear finally parted from my eye and drifted up
to join the rain, too. As for the remaining matter I held, it crumbled into another
slow upward rain like dried flowers and dust sprinkled into the wind. My
arms were left empty.
I needn’t even lower my hands. I was close enough to connecting with
the wall of windows flying past that I might as well just reach right in
to see what happened. The intrusion of my hands had the effect of touching
running water. I sent ripples out universally over each scene that flashed
by. Their speed and the large numbers in a line dislocated and began
piling on top of one another in front of me. They unified into the most
inviting image I could ask for: a grand door face composed of an eye I knew
well from the combination of hers and mine. It made a wide blink as
if in astonishment by the fact of its own existence. While it remained open,
the entire eye opened again from slits of secret lids that were the eye itself.
Another enhanced pair beneath the first glistened even brighter. Those
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opened again, then again, while also deepening into a recess like many
layered doors opened to create an entire hall. After I stepped inside, I was
standing on and surrounded by the intricacies of the iris stretched to coat the
place. Their luminous streaks surpassed that of any precious stones.
The glory didn’t last long but got me started. The length of this hall was
too far to see the end and harder to keep going with each step. All that
sustained me was the belief that by having been with her for at least
a while, I was, in the best way one person could, with everyone who
searched hard for love and never found it. The design had to be for
separate lives to carve a path to where all could eventually meet–at
levels above this kind of form, a tiny, alienated piece of a pattern, to
become the nature of the pattern as a whole. She and I had been a brief
home for the other; our bodies were the other exile’s resurrection to
worship, to live for, to live in. Our flesh provided a scroll upon which our
fingers traced, writing without ink or letter, the lyrics of an aching healed
by its unmaking. We strived to know that the attainment that rewarded
the wanderer was the journey itself. We strived to exist as a mutual
being made of music. To have found even one such moment outshined an
entire lifetime of nights spent apart. I settled on my last thought about her,
at least for this fragment of place and time. Love and the acts of love are
the outreaching of the soul: the soul made visible.
I came to the first of the side doors leading off from the hall. At
this one, I looked in at myself perhaps three years older than now and
back at my house. My wheelchair was parked by the bed. I had gotten some
feeling back in my arms, but I was still mostly paralyzed from the chest to the
waist and completely from the waist down. I suddenly remembered three
years of experimental surgery and physical therapy. The drawn shades
somewhat dimmed the room, but the edges of the window hinted at the
brightness of the afternoon outside.
Asia walked in the open bedroom door. She had grown and matured
into a young lady. She had her arms crossed in the posture of hugging
herself. She looked to have been crying. That was understandable, since
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this was the anniversary of her mother’s passing away. She climbed onto
the bed and snuggled against my side. I didn’t know what to say, so I
just used the slight movement I had in my arm to hold her.
Her voice sounded whipped, near to a whisper. “I feel small.”
I found the strength to hold her closer. “Me, too.”
We stayed there a long time. We slept for periods. It almost seemed that a
night passed and another day came.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Could we make a garden in the backyard?”
As I looked at her, head lain on my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of myself
from when time was still a stranger, slowed so that the bleeding of one season
into another was hardly chronicled. Each quarter year could seem like
all that the world had ever been or would be. Time could last longer then
than all the later decades combined, just an afterthought to the real story.
She added, “Remember how we used to make a garden when we
were a family? We could again.”
I stroked her hair. “Sure we can.”
I left the two of them lying there and went into the living room. The
window there showed nothing new outside but the same cityscape,
changed none since I last stood here smoking one of my last cigarettes.
I could tell that the city had been freshly rained on. Then the clouds had
immediately broken to let the sun shine on the standing wetness everywhere.
I hadn’t really changed nor had this particular setting changed, but the way
I looked at it had changed in a way that held the key to a veiled magic. While
it was just business as usual out there, that was what suddenly made it
all so wonderful. I hoped I could keep my mind open to that and resist
cornering my outlook back into a tight, unvarying angle. The key had to
unlock true respect for the quietly shapeshifting power out there, to be
able to know it, run with it, drink from its waters and play in its fields.
To not just get a taste of that power but hold onto it is like growing
wings after having journeyed on foot for ages. But the longer you soar,
you may find an unexpected calm, in a place where you are sure you are still
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a newborn, being tickled and held by some loving maternal hands.
“Could you take these down to him before you leave, Melissa?” said a
strange voice from out in the main hall. I followed my curiosity out there again.
I spotted the back of someone in a nurse’s uniform walking away from
me, then they turned into another door. I went to it and looked inside. This
was another room I had visited before, I was sure about the total package,
but it had been so long that I’d forgotten most of the details . . . except for
an old dust-laden clock ticking on a shelf.
There was one more detail sitting by the window that I did recognize
but hated to admit to myself. I wanted to just turn and run from here,
but my legs wouldn’t do what I was telling them. A kind of achy wave
passed over me into which I seemed to settle and rest. I didn’t even
realize I had closed my eyes until someone laid their hand on my
shoulder and said, “Mr. Shaw, here’s your sleep aid.”
I took the cup of water and little blue pills the nurse had brought. “Thank
you, Melissa.”
“You’re welcome. Is there anything else I can do for you before I go home?”
“No, I’m fine. Have a good night.”
“You too.”
My mouth was dry so I took a sip of water first. I was about to take the
pills when my hand paused before my lips. I had an odd provocation
to look behind me. It took a fair amount of effort from my good arm to
swivel my chair enough that I could look back at the doorway. No one was
there. The nurse was long gone. Why had I gotten the feeling that someone
was watching me?
“Hmm,” I said under my breath. I worked on getting myself faced
back toward the pecan trees that went for hundreds of acres outside my
window. The pills were still in my lap, but for some reason I decided to
forgo them tonight. I set them and the cup aside. The night nurse would be
along in a few hours to see if I was in bed. I usually put her off as long
as I could, since most of the nursing home residents were usually
fast asleep while I was still wide awake, even with pills.
I had spent a lot of recent years in this room unable to do much of
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anything, just drifting along toward my eighty-fourth birthday next week.
But this evening, I suddenly felt unsettled and really didn’t know what to do
with myself.
I felt like talking to someone. That’s really what I wanted, but there was
no one around. The only two sounds I could even hear was the ticking
clock and the faint moan of wind outside.
I put my good arm to work again and inched myself over to my dresser.
I pulled out the big, squeaky drawer under the flat top. Inside was a single
photo album which I hadn’t looked at in so long, I’d almost forgotten it was
there. I took it out and flipped through initial pages filled with shots
from my childhood and the expected family and friends who should
have populated the photos with me. Something changed about the
tone of the photos starting from around the time I was in high school.
There were longer stretches of time in between shots, and I was either
solitary in the photo or among different people who rarely appeared more
than once with me. I kept expecting to see another woman and maybe a
little girl show up somewhere in the pictures, but they never did. By the
time I looked to be in about my mid thirties, the photos became very
infrequent. At the halfway mark of the album, they stopped altogether.
The remaining pages of the album were empty. I tilted my stiff neck
to where I could look into the back of the drawer, but there were no
more albums either. I placed the one in my lap back inside and shut
the drawer.
My good arm was usable enough that I could roll my own chair
in close quarters. It was rigged with a device on the other wheel so
that my other hand could apply pressure to help turn left or right. I got
myself over to the window again. Just to have rolled myself across the
room and back had taken a great deal of exertion.
My old heart was feeling it, too–beating harder than necessary, and
even though I had stopped, it had not slowed yet. Lately I had been
figuring that either a heart attack or stroke would probably be how I’d
go. Both were nice, natural causes and nothing to regret considering how
long I’d lived. Although, I had rather hoped that it would happen in my
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sleep sometime so I wouldn’t even know I was dying.
I got a reprieve for now. My delicate balance held up enough to the strain
that the panicky beats could recede. The heart rate ended up about in sync with
the clock again.
“So . . .” I said to no one. Outside the sun was soon to sink, but for now the
way its horizontal light fanned across the bottoms of clouds was the best
helping hand into self-hypnosis that I could ask for. “I think maybe
it is going to happen tonight. That’s okay. If I do see another sunrise, I’ll
appreciate it. If I don‘t, I can accept that too. I may look as old as the hills
to people, but on the inside I still feel young. Never stopped, in all these years.
I don’t know what it was all for. Just another extraordinary person leading
an ordinary life. Just another story that’s already been told a million times.”
A humming bird came zipping up to my window. It seemed to have
caught its own reflection in the glass and perhaps mistook itself for a
possible bloom to drink from. It quickly decided on the contrary and flew
away.
“I remember having dreams that could seem to last for months,
years even–yet dreams measured by the time we use may only last a few
seconds. If that possibility is in the cards, and if someone doesn’t know
they’re dreaming, I can imagine how much time could fold into the minutes
when the brain goes on after the rest of us has died. It could be a
whole other lifetime, and that sets off another, falling on like dominos.
And all that is just one possibility among an ocean of possibilities.”
I glanced over at the closed drawer. “Should I have to face the
chance that neither of them were ever really in my life? It could be
that, first you start to go crazy as you die and rewrite the whole story
of memory to try and puzzle out what went wrong. How someone
could spend their life with so much passion and put out so much effort,
but just never happen to meet that other individual who would complete
them. So you have to make-believe to where you can’t tell the difference
between what really happened. If the hard realities of life as a human
being here on planet Earth mattered to me, I would have to face
that in a few hours, despite all the love that I had to give, I’m going to
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die a lonely and broken man.”
I wasn’t sure of when I dozed off. I came awake about a half hour
later. One of my eyes opened partway, and what seized my attention
was very subtle but very intriguing: The loosely held together impression of
a boy crouched over in the dusky corner of my room. I lost him if I tried to
look straight over. I had to keep the image in the corner of my eye far enough
that some doubt remained about whether I was seeing it or imagining it.
Even with the faint bit that I had to go on, I could have sworn I knew him.
He wasn’t doing anything, just crouched there, watching me in return.
I never could get that straight-on perspective to be sure. I finally put
my attention back onto the window and let it remain a mystery about
whether he had been there or not.
“There is a question that’s been haunting me for as long as I can
tell,” I confessed. “What is an illusion? I have the clarity now to fill in
the blank. An illusion is one thing and one thing only. It is the side of
people that, wherever they happen to find themselves, tries to deny
their potential, gives up, loses compassion, and accepts that there
are limits to the power of the human spirit. That side of people will
try to conquer them no matter where they are, at the top of the
world or at the bottom. The stage where it plays out doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you fight back.
“The more important question is this: What is not an illusion? To find a way
to see beauty through the darkest of times. To give the fight everything you’ve
got with no guarantee of triumph, but go on fighting anyway. To believe
unconditionally that you’ll get back whatever you’ve given, in this
form or in another.
“There is a passion that rages and rages endlessly. Everyone has it or once
had it but lost it. It’s much easier to let it go numb than to hold onto it, because
it will likely remain unfulfilled. Letting it reign at full strength may almost feel
like self-destruction. You may think you’ll go insane or just explode from
letting it stay alive. But if it does ever slip away, an illusion takes its place.
“Events that happen through a collision of circumstances beyond our
control aren’t important. The intentions that we put forth among them are.
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I may have never really had a daughter, but the desire never diminished
and makes her as real as can be to me. I want the love that she taught me
to live by to reflect on anyone wherever they are, whoever they are.
The reflection will be there if they ever need to know that they don’t have
to stand alone.
“It remains strange, beautiful, and haunting. But in the most honest
way I can put it today, I would call human life one small part of a continuous
birth process, and the entirety of space is the cocoon through which we
are sliding. You may have a hard time understanding what I mean,
but there will come a moment when you, too, will get to turn the
telescope around.
“I remember something, from just shy of seventy-one years ago. I remember
going into this crowd of strangers with open arms welcoming me back to
Earth. I remember my answer of fearless love, without conditions. Fearless
love. That is a simple thing, but I can name nothing else of greater importance.
That can keep us warm and remind us not to turn into machines. That can
join any hands and help us all step forward together, closer to where no open
arms, no open heart, will be left unfilled. That, the intelligence of the soul,
knows such a time will come because it is already here hidden between
the lines. That is what matters the most on any day, in any world.
“That is truth.”
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