by Legg, Brandt
“Kyle is fine. Time’s a funny thing and of no use to your soul. It is a human invention.”
“Like evil.”
“The only evil in the world is chocolate.” She laughed and Skyclimbed into another tree.
Wondering if nature could help me in my search for Rose, I sat down and got into a meditative state, disengaged my personality by feeling pure love, surrounded myself in white light. But instead of Rose, there I was in Dustin’s room.
“Nate, you’re here, aren’t you?” Dustin said quietly.
“I am. You’re looking better.”
“Are you allowed to lie when you’re on the astral?” he asked, knowing he looked bad.
“Apparently.”
He smiled. “When are you getting me out?”
“I’m working on it. Any day.”
“It can’t be sooner? I guess I’ll have to trust you on the timing. At least my head’s clearing, but going off these meds cold turkey is a new twist in the torture.”
Then I was in Rose’s empty house and quickly back on Lost Monarch.
“Hello,” I yelled. “Hello.” I didn’t know her name.
“Hello, hello, hello,” she sang, emerging from somewhere below.
“Could you please tell me your name?”
“This whole name business is an issue for you, isn’t it? Make one up.”
“You can’t just tell me your name?”
“A name only matters for now, and I don’t want to carry anything that heavy around. If you need one, give me one.”
“How old are you?”
“Now you’re pulling age into it. Is that another issue for you? Is that information necessary to pick out a name? Age, time, names, these are silly things.”
“No. I just wondered because you seem so wise but look so young.”
“Why, thank you. Am I blushing? I must be blushing. You’re such a charmer. I like you. Yes, I like you very much.”
“You’re so peculiar.”
“More compliments. Sweet, sweet you are.”
“Can I call you Gibi?”
“Of course, it’s a lovely name. But I’m curious why you picked it.”
“When I was little, I had an imaginary friend. It freaked my mom out, but one of the cooks at our restaurant, an old Turkish immigrant with about a hundred kids and grandchildren, told her it was just a ‘gibi’, a pretend friend. I haven’t thought about Gibi for years, but you remind me of her.
“I wasn’t imaginary, Nate.”
I studied her closely, “You were Gibi?”
“I am.”
“Where have you been for the last ten years?” It astonished me.
“I never left.”
“So, how come you stopped talking to me?”
“It was the other way around, Nate. But it’s not your fault. When babies are born, they’re more a part of the spiritual plane than the material world. As they grow up, society takes over, and around age five all is forgotten of what took place before this lifetime. Kids begin to think of the beauty in dreams and any connection to the powers of their souls as make-believe.”
“Why is that allowed to happen?”
“Allowed? Such a strong word, as if someone’s in charge.”
“Isn’t there someone in charge?”
“Everyone is.”
“How can that be?”
“How can it not be?”
I stared at her. She occupied my earliest memories, and the feelings washed over me.
“Why did it take you so long to come back and help me?”
“The day at the convenience store wasn’t the first time. I stopped in many times through the years . . . your dad’s funeral, the fourth-grade field trip when you were lost, whenever you were lost, as a matter of fact, or really scared.”
“Like now.”
She started giggling and grabbed my hand. “Come on, let’s play!”
“Shouldn’t you show me what you brought me here for?”
“Yes but . . . I mean it’s extraordinary. It’s just, you’ll never be the same again.”
She said it sweetly with a trace of nostalgia, like when Mom talks about me riding my tricycle. Did I really want to see something that was going to change me forever? Yes.
“Let’s go.”
She pointed up.
43
We made our way up to the crown of the tree; the sky came into view, deep blue with a strong bright sun. Balancing on the thin upper branches of Lost Monarch, thirty-two stories high, the breeze kept us bobbing back and forth.
She pointed out other trees. “Do you see how they make a sort of circle?”
“Yeah, Lost Monarch completes it.”
“Exactly. Now look down between them.”
There was a shimmering circle about fifty feet down. It was translucent and would have been invisible except for the subtle rainbow of colors radiating from it. I remembered Spencer’s description.
“A dimensional doorway?” I asked.
“Yes, but ‘portal’ is a much nicer way to say it, don’t you think?”
“Where does it go?”
“Don’t you want to see for yourself?”
“How do I get into it?”
“You jump.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Quite.” She nodded smiling.
“You want me to dive off this tree into thin air?”
“I don’t want you to jump, but if you want to see what’s inside, it’s the only way.”
“I can’t do it.”
“You can do anything.”
We stood there shifting in the breeze as I pondered my nerves.
“Isn’t there one of these on the ground somewhere I could try?”
She laughed. “Not like this one.”
“When will I see you again?”
“I’ll be here when you come out.”
“So I do come out?”
She nodded, smiling.
“Talk about a leap of faith . . . ” I gave her a glance that said you had better be right, then did my best imitation of a professional cliff diver I’d once seen on TV.
It would have been impossible to miss even if I tried. Some force pulled me into the center of the portal. The greenery, brown branches, and trunks of the trees were blurred streaks that became a light brighter than any known radiance, and yet it was not blinding. I soared into warmth. Landing isn’t exactly what happened--I was all at once walking in what I imagined a cloud would be like. My feet never really touched anything solid, but I seemed to be moving forward. It was difficult to really know. Gold light glowed all around. My mind unlocked, instantly recalling memories in vivid details--soul memories.
After no more than thirty steps, I could see an opening in the portal and before me was a green alpine meadow. I was on the slope of an 18,000-foot mountain, at the top of a black cliff more than a hundred feet above a rocky, moss-covered valley floor, encircled by snow-capped peaks. Melting ice plummeted over the cliff into a tiny stream.
Somehow, I knew it was the Andes Mountains of Peru, at the first few drops of the world’s largest river, the great Amazon. The headwaters begin an epic 4,000-mile voyage to the Atlantic Ocean, one-fifth of the world’s river flow. It’s no coincidence that this mighty river travels through the largest rainforest on earth, producing twenty percent of our oxygen and home to half of the planet’s species. The Amazon rainforest has existed for more than fifty million years, but in just five decades, man has brought unprecedented destruction and radically reduced its size.
Within the portal, I understood this to be a crime against humanity. It became clear to me that trees protect the human race, most often from ourselves. They guide and heal; without them we could not breathe. Trees do have souls, and we are connected to them, but unlike us they do not do bad things. The more trees we destroy the more difficulties we face, as there is less pure energy in the astral. Clear-cutting forests weakens our species and trouble follows because the balance is disturbed.<
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Rose had tried to explain about the souls in other living things, but I think even she would be surprised by the interdependency of all things. What would Rose think of this portal? It was a million times more than what she told me about the astral. Did she know? Could I use it to find her? I’d have to ask Gibi. Instead of learning about the trees, I should have been looking for ways to save Rose and Dustin.
Before I could fully digest my thoughts, I was on top of another mountain, this time in Nevada, where a grove of bristlecone pines huddled against the wind as they had for thousands of years. It was the site of the awful murder I’d told Linh and Kyle about. On August 6, 1964, the death of Prometheus, the world’s oldest living thing took place, by chainsaw. The portal opened above where the tree had lived for almost five thousand years; its void was vast and desperate. A mere few days after it was cut down, the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, officially entering the U.S. into a long and bloody war, resulting in more than 58,000 U.S. deaths and as many as a quarter of a million Vietnamese fatalities. The U.S. military also dumped millions of gallons of poisonous herbicide on the incredible forests of Vietnam, causing thousands more Americans to eventually die of cancer and an estimated four million Vietnamese civilians to become victims of dioxin poison.
What would Linh have thought if she could have seen the sacred trees around the former home of Prometheus? More startling would be Kyle and Bà’s reactions to the possibility that cutting down Prometheus had started the U.S. to slide into the horrendous Vietnam War. How different their lives would have been.
I’d been away for a long time, and Kyle would be searching. And I needed to get to Dustin. The portal was allowing me to physically go to places, so there must be a way to get to him. I needed to return to Gibi and find out how.
Back in the portal, another corridor, I stumbled out into a tragically filthy and primitive slum somewhere in Africa. I was standing on a sheet metal and tarp roof. The portal entrance was almost five feet above me. Raw sewage ran everywhere. I saw malnourished children with bloated bellies, vacant eyes, dying mothers, AIDS, malaria, contaminated water--a perfect collection of the world’s miseries. They came begging: a naked and exhausted child no more than six with a dirty orange plastic car in one hand and a stick in the other that he used to dig through trash piles, sought any crumb. I had nothing to give. Maybe two hundred more began climbing on the shanty. I Skyclimbed into the portal, escaping dozens of reaching arms just as the shack collapsed.
Would anyone believe how important trees were if they hadn’t seen what I had? Could they see a correlation between war, poverty, disease, despair, and the killing of trees? Not likely. They would think I was crazy and lock me up like Dustin. How many misunderstood people were wasting away in institutions? I needed Dustin. We had so much to do together. The profound depth of what I had witnessed in the portal was crushing and left me physically drained.
Coming out, the upper branches of Lost Monarch were within reach, and I quickly moved to the top of the tree. More stars than I’d ever seen were visible. I could easily tell differences in sizes and colors that were impossible to see before, jewels of pink, pale-blue, and gold. I realized it had been a suicide of sorts: the innocent earthly boy Nate ended with the leap from the tree and my soul had emerged.
44
Where was Gibi, I wondered, and then she was there. I took her into my arms, and we held each other floating on the trees, drenched in stars.
“What do I do?” my words choked out.
She held me.
“Gibi, what am I supposed to do?”
She stroked my hair.
“What have we done?” I clung to her, dazed and inconsolably grieved. Steadied in the branches of ancient treetops, high above the ground, having just traveled ten thousand miles in a handful of steps, I possessed the power of the universe in my mind, and yet I wept out of total frustration and inadequacy.
“The slum you were at used to be part of a great coastal African forest,” she whispered. “It was destroyed decades ago by logging, oil exploration, agriculture, industrialization, development . . . the usual reasons all belonging to greed.”
“Why did I see that? What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s too soon to understand, but don’t you feel the possibilities of what you can do?”
“All I feel is our whole planet heading for a future right out of a dystopian novel.”
“That process was started more than a hundred years ago.”
She went on to explain that this portal was not the one for getting to Dustin or Rose. I pressed her for any information on Rose, but she had none. Gibi told me of several other portals, but none was more famous among seekers and mystics than the Calyndra Portal.
“Many have been lost that we may never find again, but Calyndra is legendary. It’s somewhere along the Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail, which descends from the ridge of the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The thirty-mile trail winds through two California state parks, Castle Rock and Big Basin Redwoods, but it’s thought to be in Big Basin.”
“What’s special about it?”
“Supposedly, no one has been in Calyndra for more than a hundred years, but they say it can transport you to any specific time and place in the past.”
“Can you change things once you get there?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been but maybe. Time’s a funny thing.” We talked for the remainder of the night about things I’d seen in the portal and what they meant. The sun returned, clearing the possibility that it was just a dream.
“It’s time to go. You must continue your journey, but if you hide in towns they will find you. When you’re in trouble, the only place you can possibly escape is in nature. You must get into the trees where you can be concealed and protected.”
“I wish I could stay here.”
“Redwoods are truly mystical. Normally, it would be best to remain here, but you cannot. You still need to do many things out there.”
“Do you know what will happen? I mean will Lightyear succeed in killing me?”
“I can’t tell.”
I searched her eyes and saw both sadness and joy.
“In the meantime, you need to go back to Crater Lake.”
“Is that why I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind?”
“Yes, your soul knows. It’s a powerful spot, like a supernatural confluence.”
“What do I do when I get there?”
“What do you most want right now?”
“To free Dustin.”
“That answer is waiting for you at the lake. Before you go, I have something else to show you. Let’s get back on the ground.”
What I’d seen in the portal, although debilitating, put my personal problems into perspective. For the first time in my life, I understood just what wisdom was and the texture of it expanded my mind. Touching the forest floor again was an odd sensation, like the feeling of coming off an extreme amusement park ride. The emotional baggage of my young life returned with that first step, but it was muted and diminished. I was stronger.
“Do you see that bridge over there?”
“It’s extraordinary!”
“Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand.
The bridge was narrow, two skinny people could just walk side by side and we did. It was a beautiful arch carved out of a fallen redwood. A thin strip of copper oxidized long ago to a soft green, covered the outside of the railings. Midway, we stood above a swift shallow stream, filled with colorful soft round rocks, parted lush ferns. It was all so lovely, but none of it real. The bridge and the creek vanished, and we were once again standing among the trees.
I looked questioningly at Gibi.
“I sent the suggestion into your mind using an old power known as Solteer. Now it’s your turn.”
“Can you give me a little more instruction?”
She giggled. “Yes, if you’re going to be a baby about it. Imagine something you want me to
see. Picture it in as much detail as possible. And then see my eyes, feel the presence of me. Send it to my mind. Simple things are best, but eventually you can create very complex ones.”
I tried but nothing happened.
“You have to feel me. Our conscious minds may be separate, which is where we live as humans, but the subconscious is connected and that is where you must go; it’s the way to your soul. It’s how you Skyclimb and how you make Lusans. It’s the same with everything your soul does; it is just manifested through the mind.” She twirled around, her blue skirt spinning. “Now, make me something pretty.”
I wasn’t sure how to make something more beautiful than where we were but I tried again, and she squealed even before I saw it.
“It’s fantastic! I love it, thank you, thank you.” She clapped her hands.
The waterfall came down from between two redwoods, and we could not see the top. A misty pool not far from where we stood was surrounded by wildflowers of every shade of blue and purple. She hugged me and ran into the flowers and splashed in the water, even kicking some of it on me. A minute later it was gone.
“Is there a way to make it last longer?” I noticed we were both dry.
“Oh yes, with practice you can make them last as long as you want, but only if you’re near the person. They won’t remain after you’ve left a place.”
“I can’t believe everything that’s been happening.”
“Your journey is just beginning. It’s very important.”
“When do I get to understand it all?”
“When it’s over . . . if you’re lucky.”
I pondered what she said. “Why me?”
“This life is your time. It’s true that you’re young in human terms. Awakenings are much more common around age thirty. But, Nate, you’ve had so many varied lives, and that evolution has brought you very near to returning to your soul.”
I was quiet again. “I was a slave trader.”
“I know.”
I saw something in her eyes. “Oh no, were you there?”
She nodded. We looked at each other for a long time.
“I killed you? Please, tell me I didn’t kill you.”
