by Bob Bannon
Jonah moved closer to the television.
“Hello, Jonah Havensby,” The man said, and waved animatedly at the camera. The man had some kind of European accent that Jonah couldn’t distinguish. He had never heard Albert Einstein speak, but he always thought Einstein would have this kind of accent.
“I am, well…” the man began, “Well, you haven’t named me, so I guess I should start at the beginning. I am you.”
Jonah felt the color run out of his face. He’d been through a lot today. Or a lot last night and today. To tell the truth, he’d lost track of time. He’d been through a lot.
“I know. I know,” the man said from the television. “This doesn’t make sense, now does it? How can you be two people at once? Well, I guess the question we should be answering is, how can you be more people than you are, yes?”
Jonah felt like he was going to be sick again.
“Now, here is what we know,” the man on the television said with a wave. He began to talk animatedly with his hands. “You are not a human being, we know that from Doctor Stapleton. You are an uncategorized life-form that we have no reference for.”
“But!” He said with both his index fingers pointed upwards and then brought them down as if he were pointing directly at Jonah. “You have taken on the characteristics of a human being. I would dare say that right now you are more human than alien at this very moment, and that, dear boy, is why you have stopped growing so rapidly. Physically, you are the fourteen year-old you believe yourself to be, and I believe that you will continue to grow at the normal rate of any human on this planet now. You are very tall for a five year-old, eh?”
The man chuckled to himself. Jonah did not.
“Now. Who am I?” The man continued. “I am a physical manifestation of your desire both to have your father back, and to have someone who was as smart as him in order to help you survive. This was both a conscious thought, and a subconscious desire. You created me exactly two months and three days ago from this very day as you slept your first night in the warehouse.”
The man continued. “I did not manifest physically for a while after that, but I did become aware that night. I was the one who fixed your computer tablet for you. That was the first time I manifested. I was also the one who sent the Creature out to get the electric blanket you saw in the hardware store on your second night in town, although you probably do not remember exactly seeing it in the window. But I did.”
Jonah felt like he might go crazy. This man was exactly what he would think smart people looked like. And this man was telling him that he was a ‘manifestation’ from his subconscious. Jonah had unknowingly created this man and he was the one who had been helping Jonah. How was any of this possible?
“Oh yes,” The man said, stopping himself and clapping his hands together. “The Creature. That is what I call it, you may call him something different. He is, after all, you.” The man laughed at his own little joke again. “When you are you, and I mean, when you are Jonah, we are only vaguely aware of what happens during that time. We register feelings, mostly. Emotions.”
The man had started saying ‘we’. Jonah didn’t fully understand, but he thought he must be talking about the others in his head.
“As the weather got worse, and you began to feel cold and frightened, the next thing you created in your head was a force of brute strength. A protector, if you will. What you came up with is more beast than man. He is a hairy, hulking monster. If I had to guess, I would say you created him to be more a mix of caveman and gorilla.”
Jonah did like cavemen and dinosaurs, and they always looked pretty brutal in pictures, and he’d seen a video a long time ago where an angry gorilla once ripped a whole tree branch off a tree and ripped a tire apart. He didn’t like this, but at least some of it was making sense. Things he had stored in his memory were coming to life to help him. And he suddenly remembered a dream he had about swinging from tree to tree. Was it him, swinging from these trees?
“The Creature was the one who I sent out to ‘borrow’ the things to make our new home here. Understand, now, that this was out of a necessity for security for us. I was unsure as to how long you could survive in the warehouse, and we needed something for a more permanent home, if you will. And having no other resources, we had to make some difficult decisions.”
Jonah had to wonder if his subconscious made that ‘difficult decision’ before or after he started stealing from the fountains in the mall, when he thought his father was a thief, and he became a petty criminal.
“Ah, which brings me to the other one,” the man continued. “You should know about the other one. The Red Devil, as the news has called him. He is a manifestation of your vision of a super hero. Once you had your protector, your brute force, you desired someone good. Someone who did not steal from fountains and would help others. I find it ironic that you chose the form of a devil, but a little devil he is indeed.”
“When he manifested, we found that all the traits you’d read about super heroes had manifested as well, he is brave and noble and you had given him some kind of super speed, but he is also callous, and sometimes rude.”
“He did not wish to steal anything, and so he dislikes the Creature. He also feels that the Creature is rather a lowly beast. He finally relented on the issue that night of the first snowfall. He knew we couldn’t last there in the warehouse.”
“The first time he physically manifested, he waited until you were asleep and then went out looking for the girl, Jenna, the waitress from the diner. He saw that you were attracted to her, and he acted on it. He, of course, could not have foreseen the robbery, but it gave him a splendid chance to show off for her. He subdued the robber, but then took a bag of popcorn as some sort of payment for services.” The man said the last part with a certain amount of disdain.
Jonah remembered seeing popcorn on the floor of the warehouse. He remembered Jenna, but he couldn’t admit that he’d been necessarily attracted to her. That was such an unusual word. He blushed.
“Now, of course, you have moved on to Miss Wong, but that is neither here nor there, Yes?” The man chuckled.
An odd sense came over him. He suddenly felt that these ‘manifestations’, these ‘others’, he had created, knew a little too much about him. His thoughts about Emma were private. Could he keep private thoughts from them if they were inside his head? Away from his subconscious where those thoughts sprang from anyway?
“The fourth, and last, to this point, is the Artist. He is the creative side of you. When you called Eric’s mother, you wished you were a better actor, when you spoke to Emma the second time, when she was shopping, you wished you could speak better. The Artist is aware, and you can thank him for how your new home looks. He is an expert in architecture, in poetry, in invention. It was he who shared his knowledge with the Creature, who put all of this together. I chose the location, of course. He has only manifested once, to finish the varnish on the wood and proclaim the tree-house ready. He is shy and over-dramatic”
Jonah looked around. An expert in architecture had built him a home in a tree. He looked closely at how well put together it was, and how his belongings were organized, even how the Christmas lights hung. He hadn’t even realized that next to each window was a heavy piece of red velvet fabric that could be pulled to cover the windows. His hand slid across the floor absentmindedly and he registered how smooth it was from the wood stain. It must have taken a month to build this place.
“You are exactly two miles outside of town and one and a half miles inside the tree-line. The nearest ranger station is three and a half miles to the west. To get to the road that leads back to town, you will head East. I have downloaded you a compass on your tablet so you will know where you are.”
“Now that you know the ‘who’,” he continued. “Let’s move on to the ‘how’. From what I have deduced, each time you manifest one of us, you revert to your original form. That is, as Doctor Stapleton described you, a wet ball of sand. Now that you’ve
substantially grown, it isn’t so little anymore.”
“I believe that these changes began to happen to you when you started puberty. That is, the human cycle of puberty. As your human side began to produce more hormones, I believe that your alien side began to explore what other forms you could take. I think you have manifested other forms before, but none that you could hold onto for very long, such as myself and the others you have now.”
“When you transform, you physically build us from the ground up, almost as you would build a snowman. When you become you again, and by that I mean Jonah, the process repeats itself. Each and every fiber is broken down and re-constituted for use by the other – even the clothes you wear. You believe I should look like this, and so I am created in these clothes with this appearance.”
The man straightened his lab coat and brushed back the bushy sides of his hair.
“I can also tell you this. The pain you experience when you take back your shape, the same pain is felt by all of us. The last thing to form is your optic nerve in your left eye. That was the last thing to form when you began to adopt human features, so I believe you have simply carried that over to the forms you are creating now. I believe, and this is just hypothesis, but I believe that if you concentrate, you can move this pain to anywhere you choose – your foot, your hand, your little pinky finger.” He said this as he waved his own pinky finger.
“It is something to think about,” The man said with a wave of his hand. “I can tell you that you have stopped the change before, which makes me wonder if you can re-form any of us if you want to. That is an interesting question. It was the Red Devil that tried to emerge at the mall during your confrontation with Logan Oswald. Somehow, you were able to hold him back. I still have not deduced how you did it unknowingly. I do know that, up to this point, we have only manifested when your subconscious allowed it. Now that you know the full story, you may be able to control it, or deny it entirely. I should have to think about this.”
The man was clearly fascinated by the idea.
“When you manifest into one of the others, that being becomes fully functional. It has its own mind, its own thoughts, its own feelings, but only by way of the parameters you have given it.”
“Do you remember the IQ test your father asked you to do last year?” The man asked. “I’m sure you do. Your IQ was ninety-three. Very good. You always were a smart young man. But the brain you have given me and the components of it, work at a much faster rate. My IQ is two-hundred and thirty. I am almost two geniuses.” He was clearly very impressed with himself.
“The Creature, on the other hand, is not so smart. He has his own thoughts and feelings, but would not be much of a communicator. Although it is clear he understands quite well.”
“You have given the Red Devil incredibly elastic muscles and an increased circulatory system. He uses these to create his great speed.”
“You see, each one is unique based on your design. And each one knows its purpose. We are well aware that we are only parts of you, and that is why I believe you can exhibit far greater control now that you know.”
“Ah, one last thing,” The man said, lifting up the notebook.
Just then, there was a crackle from inside Jonah’s backpack. Then there was another.
Jonah stopped the video from the camera and went over to the pack. He found the walkie-talkie and held down the button to talk.
“Eric? You there?” He asked into it.
What he got back was just above static. Every third or fourth word came through. He was too far away from Eric’s walkie-talkie to get a clear signal.
His need to tell Eric everything he had just learned overtook his need to hear whatever the man on the screen was going to say next. He was already feeling overwhelmed with information. He would go find Eric and bring him back here, have him sit and watch the recording and find out whatever the ‘one last thing’ was then.
He put the walkie-talkie back in the backpack. It was exceptionally light and deflated. He looked around for anything else he would put in it, but found that now that he had a place to leave his clothes and the other items, there really was nothing to pack.
He picked up the tablet from near the over-turned hammock. It had been plugged into the generator and was fully charged. He dropped that in the pack and then righted the hammock. Out of habit, he unplugged the electric blanket.
He looked around again and, finding nothing else to do, grabbed his coat and walked out the door.
He went to the bike and looked at the pulley system it was attached to. The pulley was attached to the roof of the tree-house and a long coil of black rope started at his feet and went through the pulley to the bike. It looked like he could lift the bike over the railing and lower it down.
It was impossible to hold onto both the bike and the rope at the same time, so he decided he was going to push the bike over and hope he could catch the rope before the bike crashed. He readied himself and pushed the bike over the railing.
He was surprised to find that the bike hovered there in midair, locked into the pulley system. He grabbed the rope and tried to maneuver it, but the bike stayed just where it was. When he pulled on the rope, the bike moved up, but then he finally felt the weight of it. The pulley system worked like the pulls on a vertical blind, you had to pull up to get the rope to release and if you pulled to either the left or the right, the rope would lock in place again.
He tested the theory over and over again as he lowered the bike to the leaf-covered dirt far below. Once it was down, he pulled the rope to his left and it locked into place. Then he began to look for a way to get himself down.
He saw a glint of metal just to the left of the door. When he looked closer, he found that it was a rope ladder, but this ladder was made of the same black rope he had lowered the biked down and it had metal rungs. It began at the roof-top and the rest of it seemed to be bunched up just at the patio floor next to another pulley system. When he pulled that rope and let it out, the rest of the rope ladder dropped all the way to the ground below.
He stepped on the first rung and it seemed to be secure. He went down the next one and it seemed secure. He didn’t start to lose his nerve until his eyes were parallel to the patio floor. He stopped, just for a moment, but then told himself that he was going to have to do this. He let out a deep breath and continued down through a hole cut through a thicket of branches.
Almost halfway down the ladder, he had a sudden flashback of being lowered from his second-floor bedroom window. He was filling in the blanks of that evening. Knowing the ‘dangerous men’ were military men who had come to reclaim the alien, and that they killed his father in the process, suddenly made Jonah freeze up tight on the ladder. He couldn’t move. His feet wouldn’t find the next rung, his hands wouldn’t slide down. He was suddenly so angry with his father it brought tears to his eyes.
Why hadn’t his father told him anything? Would it have been better knowing? Could he have been prepared for any of this? Would he have felt the same way he was feeling right now?
He had to fight to push it all away, but he did. He told himself there would be plenty of nights he could pace the floor of his new home until the wood ran all the way through while he asked himself question after question. Now was not the time.
He took two deep breathes and pushed it all away.
When he reached the ground, he looked up. He guessed that the tree-house was at least two-stories up. The floor of the tree-house was covered by a thick brush of branches and he wondered why he could hardly see underneath it. He circled the tree looking up. The tree had heavy vines hanging from all over it. He moved them out of the way as he looked up searching for the floorboards. Then he came across the reason. The floorboards had been painted black and green in a camouflage pattern. Even if you were walking through this part of the forest you’d really have to be looking for the tree-house to even spot it. If someone happened by on even a casual hike and looked up for a moment, there would be no spottin
g it. And he doubted hikers ever came this way. There was no clear path.
What he did find was a clear and bubbling stream not five feet away from the tree. This must be where his indoor plumbing came from. He walked over to the stream and looked along the inside of it. After a few minutes, his eyes narrowed on a black piece of tube inside it. Sure enough, there was a small mound of dirt leading all the way to the tree. When he knelt down and moved the dirt, he found that it was more of the tube. He replaced the dirt over it and tracked the mound to the tree. He had to move a few vines out of his way, but finally saw where it met the tree and went up all the way to the floor. It was black, so you couldn’t necessarily see it and if you didn’t look closely at it, you might mistake it for a vine anyway.
There was another crackle from the walkie-talkie inside his backpack. He would have to admire the construction later.
He went to the bike and unfastened the rope from it. He wasn’t sure what to do with the rope, until he remembered how well-camouflaged the tubing was. He moved through a couple of vines and tied the rope to a vine behind those.
Then he went to the rope ladder. He found another rope that hung just beside it. He tried to look up to see where it led to, but it was impossible to tell. When he pulled on it, the ladder began to ascend into the tree. He tested his theory again and found that the ladder worked on the same pulley system. If you pulled left or right, the rope locked into place.
Once the ladder seemed to be far out of sight, he had a rather long coil of rope to deal with. He thought about simply winding the entire thing around the tree trunk, but debated on what a pain that would be to deal with when he came back. What he settled on was to tie a portion of the rope to an interior vine and then cover the rest with leaves and twigs.
