Enigma: The Rise of an Urban Legend

by Ryan Schow

  Weary to the point of sounding drugged, he says, “What happened to that boy?” He’s amazed that his jaw works, that he isn’t feeling the way he’d been feeling.

  “All three versions of him died. You killed one, I killed two.”

  He seems to think about this for awhile. He flexes his feet and toes, but I tell him to stop it for awhile.

  “Why do I feel better?” he asks.

  “You know why.”

  Switching subjects, he asks, “How did that boy come back in more than one body?”

  “It’s a longer discussion we can’t have right now.”

  He doesn’t agree, but he’s still too tired to argue. Instead of talking, we watch TV together, eating, saying nothing. He falls asleep on the couch. I pass out from sheer exhaustion on the easy chair. Sometime in the middle of the night I wake to the sounds of him sobbing. He’s in the bathroom with the door shut. I leave him alone.

  In the morning I apologize and tell him I never chose to be this way.

  “What are you?”

  “Will you ever stop asking me that?”

  “No.”

  “I am everything and nothing. An enigma. The great unknown.”

  “I’m not kidding,” he says, serious.

  “Neither am I.”

  “You healed my body.”

  “That’s why I came back.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Honestly, I didn’t know I had it in me. I mean, I brought the fake Abby back from the brink of death and I can communicate with the recently dead so it would stand to reason I might have other…talents.

  “I have this…power inside me. It’s a curse, or a blessing. I don’t know. It’s this thing I don’t want but can’t give back. I wouldn’t even know how to give it back or whom to give it to.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m not starved for power, but I do need control, and direction, and I feel karate can give me both. I want to continue my studies with you.”

  “I’m done with karate.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “I am.”

  “No,” I say, stern, “you’re not.”

  We sit here for a long time, watching something, watching nothing. The TV is just this box of flickering light that makes you stupid and I can’t stand it. I use my mind to shut it off.

  “They’re all gone,” he finally says. His eyes are wet. “All of them.”

  “Not all,” I say, gently.

  “What…you? I should feel better because you survived where the others didn’t?”

  “There’s Netty.”

  “Netty, the pregnant one. Your best friend who knows nothing of you. That Netty?”

  “She’s not pregnant anymore,” I say, starting to get choked up. “He took the baby from her. Killed it inside her while looking for me, for you. That gosh damn kid, he made her miscarry, telling her the pain in her stomach was him killing her baby.”

  Now this silences him.

  “You need each other,” I say, wiping my eyes. “And I need you both.”

  “Bullshit,” he says, but with less fervor this time.

  “It’s not bullshit. It’s true.”

  “You don’t need anything,” he says, sharply, “you only want.”

  “I need.”

  After what I went through, I’m not sure changing bodies is the same as changing fate. I hoped that would be the case, but there are no guarantees. Not if I don’t change. If all I ever want is to right every wrong, to change the course of history for the better, then I have to be someone different inside, too.

  “I’m not training you,” he says.

  “Yes, you are. I’m going to sit here until you say you will.”

  “You can control a lot of things, but you can’t control me.”

  “I wouldn’t place that bet in Vegas,” I say, looking him dead in the eyes for the first time.

  He won’t hold my eye, so I use my mind to turn his head back around. I make his eyes look at me, refuse to let him blink.

  “If your eyes dry out, will you go blind? Will your lids stick to your eyeballs when I finally let you blink?” His brain is screaming for me to knock it off. “You need to get back on this horse, and soon.”

  “I loved those students,” he says. I let go of his eyes. When he speaks next, his voice is high in his chest and his eyes are crunching down against a pain he can’t control. “They were…they were my life.”

  “I need it. Netty needs it. We’re all broken, Sensei, whether you want to admit that or not.”

  He starts sobbing, and nodding. I’ve never seen a man cry before, and certainly no one as powerful or as competent as Sensei, and this destroys something fundamental in me.

  “Will you help us?” I manage to ask. “Will you let us help you?”

  His brain says yes, even though his mouth can’t form the word.

  “Inside, you know karate is as much about strength, balance, and honor as it is about self-defense. I am defending against things I don’t understand. You are defending against all the things you’ve lost. Netty is defending against both because it’s the only way she can find strength in her life and she needs that now more than ever.”

  Wiping his eyes, he asks, “Where did the boy go?”

  “To understand what he was, you have to know he was not from here. Not from this time.”

  “Where was he from?”

  “It’s not a he and it wasn’t a where. That boy, that thing, was a soul who could choose bodies the way you choose a pair of shoes or a tie. He’s a boy, a killer, a saint. He’s a soul from nearly a thousand years into the future who came here to play, to murder, to occupy a body.”

  I refuse to tell him the “boy” came back for me because I became the terrorist that wouldn’t die and wouldn’t stop my reign of political terror long into the future.

  “Say I believe this outlandish tale, which I almost don’t, where is he now?”

  “I have his soul.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside me,” I say. “I swallowed him. Locked him away inside me. Which is why I need your training. There are now two of them in me.”

  “Two?”

  “Killers. The one you met was The Operator. That’s what he calls himself. And Delta, which is a facet of me, a trauma-induced alternate personality born to carry out kill orders without me knowing. He killed someone close to me. Someone I loved. He may be gone, or he may be inside me still, I’m not sure. That’s why I need your help.”

  “Jesus,” he mumbles.

  “Delta is a mind-controlled assassin born from an umbrella program called MK ULTRA out of the late 1950’s up into the ’70’s. I’m the latest version of that. To some degree or another. And don’t act like such a pussy. You’ve been asking what I am and now I tell you, so seriously, Sensei, with all the respect you deserve—”

  I can’t finish my sentence without further offending him. He levels me with a stare hot enough to score the side of a glacier. It’s a respect thing.

  “I’m sorry, Sensei. The way I said that…was out of line. What’s behind it, however, that’s what’s most important.”

  I can’t help thinking how scary it was watching Delta control me and kill Tavares. A great sadness wells inside of me. A mounting fear.

  “I don’t believe you,” he says, looking away. “You can’t eat a soul.”

  “On this topic, I could care less what you believe. You need only know I believe it.”

  “So you ate the boy’s soul?”

  “I did.”

  “And it’s inside you now?”

  “It’s contained inside me, but the Delta alter, he’s asleep, lying in wait, and I don’t exactly know where inside me he is buried, only that he can wake at any time and to some measure, I’m powerless to him. If the past is any indicator of the future, I could kill someone I love again if I can’t root him out and eliminate him. Or like I said, maybe he’s gone. If he was hardware inside me, he’s been rooted o
ut. I just don’t know if he was hardware and software. Does that make sense?”

  “Nothing about you makes sense,” he says.

  “Thanks for the breaking news.”

  After a long while, he says, “Okay. We’ll train. But not at the studio. And you need to know, I’m the key suspect in the disappearance of all those people.”

  “I took care of that,” I say.

  “You did?”

  I nod.

  “Is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I say, “I can’t get a boyfriend who wants to stick around.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I’m going to go to a funeral instead,” I say.

  “Suit yourself.” We sit there and stare at each other, and then he finally says, “Thank you for coming back for me. For…healing me, though I still don’t know how you did…what you did.”

  “It’s the least I could do.”

  Potter’s Field

  1

  The first light of morning is a warm glow behind my curtains. My eyes open slowly, heavily, and I wake up in the guest bed feeling emotionally hung over. People are dead. Cameron specifically. It takes an act of God for me to drag my butt out of bed, but I do. Because I have to.

  I shuffle into the bathroom where Maggie killed herself trying hard not to get swallowed up in the thoughts of this. The memories assault me, though. Perhaps it’s because I’m heading to Cameron’s funeral today and this has me thinking of Maggie. It has me thinking of the way she went.

  With the labored intensity of a creaky geriatric, I get out of my clothes, fold them, set them on the open counter space between the two sinks, then turn on the shower and spend a veritable eternity underneath the hot water. I shave my legs, wash my hair, get every last bit of skin on my body soaped and washed, then exit the shower feeling measurably better.

  That’s when I see it: the big history book sitting on my clothes.

  An old anger wells inside me. Whomever came in here, they set this book down on my clothes while I was showering in a mostly fogged in glass shower. How did I not notice anyone? My mind is racing with who could have done this, or why. I don’t have a history class.

  I’m not even in school!

  With my towel wrapped tightly around my body and this ten pound book in hand, I peek into the bedroom. My bedroom door, however, is shut.

  No, it’s locked.

  WTF?

  I open it up, look out into the living room. It’s a tomb out there. Not a soul stirring. I check Rebecca’s room; she’s fast asleep. My mother and father, too.

  Okay, this is weird…

  Back in my bathroom, I hurry up with my hair and makeup because I have a plane to catch and already this…whatever this is…it’s got me frazzled and off schedule. So I get ready, wolf down a thrown together breakfast, then jump in the Audi and race off to the airport. When I left the house, to my complete consternation, no one was even awake.

  I can’t stop thinking about this book. I brought it with me. Which means I’ll be carrying it with me all day. Ugh.

  Sitting in SF International airport, waiting to board the plane, I look at the book. A History of America. It’s not like any book I’ve seen, but then again, I live in a six foot bubble. There are dozens of History texts out there, right?

  Half out of boredom, half out of curiosity, I leaf through the book. From the overhead speaker a woman is saying my flight is boarding now. She calls out the first section of boarding passes and I respond, standing, then getting in line with a bunch of people whose minds I will work diligently not to roll.

  Standing amongst the normal folk with all their human eccentricities, I busy myself with the book, leafing through the pictures thinking not of this book but about the funeral I wasn’t invited to. How will I look at those people knowing I mauled their daughter? Shoved her into such a dark, hopeless place that she decided suicide was her only escape?

  Deep down, I’m still struggling.

  How many times did I wish that bitch was dead? How many times did I dream of her dying? We all prayed for that. Without a doubt, that’s the kind of response she inspired in others. I can’t deny my memories, though.

  My face drains of color thinking of how I found her. There was so much blood. Such dark, thick blood pooling under her head. My eyes shimmer. I blink away the tears, then come out of these memories and into the present moment. A woman is looking at me. She asks if I’m okay and I smile, nod my head and say, “I’m heading to a friend’s funeral.”

  “You poor thing,” she says, her eyes full of compassion. She puts her hand on my arm and I warm to her compassion.

  “Thank you.”

  My eyes are back on the history book, and just as I’m thinking, when the hell are we going to board the plane, I see it.

  “What the f*ck?” I mumble to myself.

  This history book is dog-eared and opened to a page half consumed by a vintage photo with me and several other people in it. My entire world turns inside out. Beneath the picture, which I’m now certain is me, is a caption I’m not reading because I can’t tear my eyes away from the black and white photo. In the picture, I’m not Savannah Van Duyn, Abby Swann or Raven de’ Medici. It’s me. Savannah Crawford-Swann.

  My eyes finally break from the photo and dip to the subtitle below which is highlighted. It reads: ONE OF A FEW UNNAMED SOLDIERS WHO TURNED THE TABLES ON ADOLF HITLER AND AT THE TIME STOPPED THE RISE OF WHAT MANY BELIEVE COULD HAVE BEEN THE FOURTH REICH. The photo was dated 1951.

  Didn’t Hitler die in the early forties?

  “Hey, that looks like you,” says a small voice behind me. I turn and see a little tow-headed boy. He’s cute with his blonde hair and his small teeth and all his clean, pressed clothes.

  I shut the book and say, “It’s not,” before facing forward again.

  Behind me, the boy says, “That girl’s picture is in that book, Momma.” She shushes him and says stuff like, “That’s nice,” and, “Are you ready to see grandma?” But my head is spinning hard right now, whipping up a syrupy run of vertigo that has me standing like a sapling in an off-and-on-again torrent.

  I widen my feet for balance, hold on to a man’s shoulder beside me.

  Then it passes.

  He’s looking at me funny and I say, “Sorry, got dizzy for a second.”

  “Not a big flyer?”

  “Something like that,” I tell him.

  My group boards the plane, almost single file, moving toward the gate like cattle. People cough and shuffle, they speak to each other in low tones as we hand our boarding pass to a lovely woman, get it checked, then bang our way down the metal plate floors leading to the actual plane. As I board I say hello to two really pretty flight attendants who stare at me in awe, then I find a window seat and try to still my rapid fire heart.

  This book in my hands feels like some kind of disease, or the nuclear codes to a war I’m about to start. Only the war isn’t an external thing. It’s going on inside me right now. The reality of my life is too much. Apparently there are entire wars I’m involved in along timelines I don’t understand and in alternate dimensions. My brain starts doing squats in my head. A low pain forms behind my eyes.

  I open the history book, to the front. Below the name of the publisher is the date the book was published. It’s a first run book. And the date?

  January, 2022.

  I slap the book shut. Now my world really turns inside out. So many questions hammer me at once, but hammering me even harder is this heart of mine. I start to sweat. There’s this business man standing in the aisle looking down at me, smiling and asking if the seat is taken and all I can do is look at him with startled eyes.

  “So it’s okay if I sit here then?” he says. My head just sort of bobs out an answer. I want to cry for what my life has become, but I can’t. My eyes are the Gobi desert. They’re the Mojavi in the belly of a scorching hot July.

  Didn’t I change all this? Am I in my own alternate timeline? Looking
at the book, I can’t help thinking, Oh God, what have I done?

  “You afraid of flying?” the man beside me asks. He’s a middle-aged guy with kind eyes and a soft demeanor.

  “Mind your own business,” I say.

  He frowns, then says, “Okie dokie,” like I’m the one being rude here. Which technically I am.

  Halfway through the flight, as I’m sipping a Sprite and eating pretzels and feeling much better, I open the book back up to the picture of me supposedly taken in 1951 and feel myself turning inside out. There’s a note written in red ink that wasn’t there before. I’ve had the book on me the entire time. It hasn’t left my hands and yet here it is!

  Vertigo snaps.

  The note says: YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR DNA, BUT YOU CAN’T AVOID YOUR FUTURE.

  My breath catches and I close the book, turn to the window and look outside as the shine of an exceptionally bright sun hits my eyes. Before I know it, I’m crying and I can’t stop. A hand comes on my shoulder and I turn with watery eyes to see it’s the businessman sitting next to me.

  “Are you okay?” he says. “I mean, I know you said to mind my own business, but…is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I’m going to a friend’s funeral,” is all I can say.

  I turn back to the window, grip the armrest upon take off, then later lose myself in the bed of fluffy clouds sitting far below our cruising altitude. For a few days I felt so good. Like not being Raven was somehow me not ending up as some crusader for peace and justice and all that. Now, inside this book from the future, there’s a picture of me turning the tables on Hitler, whatever that means.

  I force myself to open the book and read the story. Something most people don’t know is Adolf Hitler never died in World War II. History books say he died because it’s still socially acceptable to ignore the facts about him, even though our intelligence agencies had detailed notes on his escape to South America, specifically Argentina and Chile. These same notes from the FBI were used—as were current search engines created specifically from testimony from the Nuremberg Trials—for researchers today to follow the trail he left behind on the show Hunting Hitler, a favorite of my father’s and one I kind of enjoy watching.