The Real

by James Cole

  “My own forecast didn’t give us a chance in hell either,” said Jeremy, “but look at us now.”

  Of the three snow-covered cars in the parking lot, one was Monika’s ’69 Mustang.

  “There’s our ride,” said Jeremy triumphantly.

  He escorted Jinni to the passenger side and unlocked the door.

  “Wanna go for a ride?” he asked.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, stepping in.

  As they drove off into the snow-muted dawn, they were tired but warm and their mood was ecstatic.

  “Where do we go from here?” asked Jinni.

  “That is an incredibly good question.” Jeremy was thinking of the huge ramifications of his becoming as much as any transient destination.

  Jeremy knew he was right about the Source, right about Monika being Claire, and right about her protracted youthfulness – and his own. But what would he tell Jinni about the change? Should he even mention it at all? He had promised to marry Jinni and to walk with her through all the days of their lives. But now, the path of his life must necessarily deviate from hers. She would grow old while he, in all likelihood, would not.

  Jinni interrupted the deliberations. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “You,” he replied, “and all the time we have ahead of us.”

  After a contemplative silence, Jeremy asked, “What if it’s true?” He waded in, not knowing how deeply he might delve into the subject. “What if Monika really is Claire and the Source is keeping her young?”

  “Oh brother,” sighed Jinni. “Are you saying you believe it now?”

  “Maybe. I thought of a couple more things on the ride in.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” she asked rhetorically. “What do you think you’ve figured out?”

  “For starters,” Jeremy began, “Monika went to a lot of trouble to track down that particular tree, and Grady gave up his life rather than reveal its location to her. Their actions, I think, prove they weren’t lying.”

  “Even if they believed it themselves, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” said Jinni. “I don’t pretend to understand why Monika does what she does and why Grady did what he did, but I would need more definite proof, something that doesn’t depend on the actions of those two.”

  “What about Grady’s home movie?” he asked. “You have to admit Monika and Claire do look alike.”

  “They could be related. You said so yourself.”

  “But what if it were true?” Jeremy asked, belaboring the point. “Can you imagine how awesome a thing it would be to stay young?”

  “It would be nice,” agreed Jinni, “but even if the Source could do all that, it’s gone now. It has no bearing on us at all.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he said.

  Without informing Jinni of the mitochondria connection, she would never accept what he suggested and he respected her for not giving in. Jeremy wasn’t even sure why he tried to convince Jinni if he didn’t intend on telling her everything, including how the changes in his mitochondria were the proof in the pudding.

  Appropriate or not, in this moment, Jeremy no longer worried about Monika, or the police, or, for that matter, anything at all. It was the first time in a long time he actually felt optimistic about the future. Jeremy opened his mouth to comment again on the sheer beauty of the snow and of their vastly improved state of affairs, but hushed up when he saw that Jinni had found her own measure of serenity. Her eyes were closed.

  *****

  “I never really had a chance to tell you but, I had this dream…”

  Jinni spoke without raising her head or opening her eyes, as if talking in her sleep.

  “Dream?” prodded Jeremy. “What dream?”

  “The gulch, the river, the white ball of light and the thunder snow,” Jinni replied. “I dreamed the whole thing.”

  Jeremy’s heart quickened. “What else can you tell me about it?”

  “There was this creepy old woman crouching like an animal on a rock, and there were angels playing your music.”

  “My music?”

  “It sounded a little like that band you like – Singe, right? – only a whole lot better.”

  When it seemed that Jinni might be drifting off again, Jeremy asked, “In this dream – did anyone speak to you?”

  “Yeah, there was this one angel up on top of the cliff. She said-”

  “Hold that thought.” Jeremy cut Jinni off before she could finish her sentence.

  Jeremy found a pen in the console. He was just able to squeeze the seven words onto the palm of his left hand.

  “Now tell me. What did the angel say?”

  “Open your mind and experience the real,” Jinni replied, reciting from heart.

  Jeremy held out his hand.

  Jinni had to strain to read the words in the pale glow of the dashboard lights.

  “Word for word!” she exclaimed with as much muster as her exhausted state would allow. “How did you know?”

  “I knew,” Jeremy replied, “because I had the exact same dream.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Something, but I’m not exactly sure what,” he replied. “I guess it means I don’t have a monopoly on prophetic dreams.”

  “Well,” she said with a gaping yawn, “when you get it figured out, you can tell me all about it. I just can’t stay awake any longer. Do you mind?”

  “No, be my guest,” replied Jeremy. “Sweet dreams.”

  For the next hour or so, Jinni scarcely moved a muscle. Jeremy, driving on autopilot, tried to consolidate all he knew about the shared visions, starting with the mysterious reappearing children. He had been initially introduced to them in his vision of the real, which began with children’s voices chanting – Red rover, red rover, send Jeremy right over – and then, most recently, there were the children he perceived in the road at the tail end of the police chase, reciting the same childhood rhyme. Their presence proved their good intentions, as he otherwise would never have slowed in time to turn at the three-pronged tree. Had they not shown up when they did, he would likely have been caught by the police.

  Monika herself had provided another indication of the good nature of a certain child she saw in Reefers Woods. Monika (a.k.a. Claire) chose to include the girl-child of her visions in her paintings. Monika had even explained to Jeremy how the melancholy child represented “Claire’s” prior state of innocence and pureness of heart that she let get away – her lost childhood.

  More children made appearances around the bonfire at the secret beach, each child, it seemed, associated with a different member of Monika’s group. Interestingly, Monika’s late-arriving companion there had not been a child but rather an old woman, the craggy character who also appeared in his wedding dream in the preacher’s role and in the vision of the real as a bystander on the cliff. In the wedding dream, Monika and the old woman had recited the final proclamation of the ceremony in unison: With this ring I thee wed, a clear indication of their shared identity.

  That she appeared as an elderly woman also made sense because Monika, despite her youthful façade, was old – at least 60 years old by Jeremy’s calculations. More importantly, if the children represented innocence and blamelessness, the appearance of the old woman laid bare Monika’s opposite condition: she was unclean and her heart was dark and sinister. That explained why it was the old woman who joined Monika around the bonfire while the other group members were attended by children. The innocence of the other group members had not yet been irreconcilably lost; it wasn’t until the recitation of Monika’s vow that that point in time – the point of no return – came and went.

  Based on all of this, Jeremy thought that maybe the children’s job was to plead for their grown counterparts to resist the dark side. The chant – red rover, red rover, send Jeremy right over – was an appeal by the children for Jeremy to resist Claire’s evil ways and to run to them where they might capture him on the side of purity and right
eousness.

  Having satisfactorily resolved the meaning of the children’s presence in the dreams and visions, Jeremy tackled the question of why it was that he, Jinni, and Monika all shared the same vision of the real. For Monika and him, it did not seem a complete surprise. Early on, Jeremy noticed the similarities between his dreams and the hallucinations he experienced in Reefers Woods, even going so far as to refer to the hallucinations as waking dreams. After Monika convinced him that she also saw the children and the old woman around the bonfire, it seemed fitting to learn that she also experienced the vision of the real.

  But what triggered the vision in the first place? What did he have in common with Monika? After learning that Jinni experienced the same vision, the more intriguing question was what could the three of them – Monika, Jeremy and Jinni – possibly have in common?

  *****

  For every thing that Jeremy thought he had figured out, a dozen questions remained. How, for instance, had Tavalin come to join forces with Monika? He didn’t seem to be part of her group, or if he was, Monika never invited him to the meetings. Jeremy’s first guess had been that she recruited Tavalin late in the game to take advantage of Tavalin’s association with him. However, since Tavalin apparently orchestrated that first meeting of Jeremy and Monika at the Halloween Singe show, his links to her must have preceded that time. After observing how they interacted, Jeremy’s strong feeling was that Monika and Tavalin had known one another for a long time.

  Another cloudy subject was what Monika meant to do next. It seemed obvious that she had nefarious plans for the future and that those plans were directly related to what she referred to as Claire’s Way. While she never really said what it was, one thing Jeremy did know: Claire’s Way led away from the grander realms alluded to in his vision of the real, and though he did not yet know the ultimate end of her wayward path, he knew that sooner or later their paths would cross. Despite having lost the Source, Jeremy knew that Monika would continue to implement her ruse of fools. He also realized that she would never stop looking for him, knowing what he knew. Likewise, because of his unique position of knowledge, the task to foil her plans – whatever they might be – fell to him. That was what Grady had meant when he said that, by knowing more, one had a responsibility to do more, and Jeremy – by his own choice – knew plenty.

  But, alas, that was tomorrow’s worry. For now, Jeremy would be satisfied to be alive and unhindered in this moment, riding along in Monika’s car in a freakishly beautiful snowstorm with Jinni sleeping at his side.

  Jinni, who had been stirring around for the last couple of minutes, sat up and raised her seat to a more upright position.

  “You’ll never guess what I was dreaming about just now,” she said.

  “Let’s see. Was it angels, white light and the sort?”

  “Nope, something else,” Jinni replied with a smile. “Where’s your jacket?”

  “I threw it in the back seat but I’m sure it’s still wet,” he replied, thinking she meant to use it as a blanket.

  “Which pocket?” she asked with gleaming eyes.

  “I should have known. Check the right side.”

  Jinni produced a small black box from within his coat pocket. She flipped open the lid and peered intently inside. “Will you do the honors?” she asked as she pressed the ring passionately into the palm of his hand.

  As Jeremy looked down to slip the ring onto Jinni’s outstretched finger, the car drifted over the center line, directly into the path of an oncoming pickup truck. Alerted to his blunder by a blaring horn, Jeremy jerked the steering wheel to the right, too abruptly for the slick conditions. The rear end fishtailed, first to the left and then back again as he struggled to keep the car in the right lane. It wasn’t until after the pickup truck had passed that Jeremy regained full control of the Mustang. He exhaled and glanced over at Jinni.

  Without acknowledging their close call, Jinni whispered, “I love it. It’s beautiful.”

  Jinni was about to toss Jeremy’s jacket into the back when she paused. “What’s this?” she asked as she poked at a lump concealed in the coat.

  “Oh yeah,” replied Jeremy. “I forgot all about that.”

  Jinni removed the ziplock bag from the large inner breast pocket of the coat and flipped on the overhead light.

  “I found that in the closet at Grady’s house but I never got a chance to look at it,” explained Jeremy.

  Jinni peeled apart the bag and pulled out the small notebook.

  Jeremy asked, “Is it wet?”

  Jinni held it up in the light. “No, it’s bone dry,” she replied, “in spite the rain and our plunge into the river. How do you think Grady happened to put this into a waterproof bag?”

  “Grady seemed to know about a lot of things before they happened.”

  Jinni flipped through the first few pages. “It seems to be a journal, or a diary of sorts. Listen to what Grady wrote on the first page,” she said. “To the Elect, strangers in the world, who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge... I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter hidden things, things from of old.”

  “More Grady-speak,” remarked Jeremy with a smile. “Just what we need.”

  Jinni said, “It goes on to say: Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.”

  “Dreams and visions?” asked Jeremy. “That sounds familiar.”

  She continued, “And finally: Behold, I make all things new.”

  Jeremy thought how his body, in a sense, had been made new, thanks to Grady’s special grape juice derived from the Source. On a grander scale, his outlook on life and his commitment to a more righteous and upstanding way of living had also been made new.

  “That last one sounds like a quote from the Bible,” he noted.

  “They all are,” replied Jinni.

  Jeremy hadn’t seen that one coming. “Did you realize Grady was a believer?” he asked.

  “I had a feeling, and I did run into him at church, you know.”

  Jeremy looked blankly at his copilot.

  “I told you, remember? I saw Grady outside my church on the Sunday before he died,” recounted Jinni. “He invited me to his house for brunch and, while I was there, he gave me the home movie to give to you.”

  “I don’t recall your saying anything about brunch,” mumbled Jeremy.

  A euphoric surge, better than ten hits of the Unreal, ripped into Jeremy as the words to his next question made the long journey from his mind to his mouth.

  “Jinni, when you ate brunch with Grady, what did he give you to drink?”

  All around them the snow fell, obscuring the car’s passage with torrents of white.

  Jinni returned a curious look. “Grape juice,” she replied, “only it didn’t really taste like grape juice. Grady said he made it himself.”

  Epilogue

  Wanderings of Claire, The Hippie Queen

  1969-2009

  Claire and Zach

  Claire had been the one to seek out and initiate the affair. It worked out nicely that Zach, the medical examiner, was married and was terrified that his wife, or someone else in town, would find out. That made him the perfect accomplice.

  Zach told her he loved her but Claire had no feelings for him, one way or the other – at least not in the beginning. Upon learning that it was he who paid for and placed the sculpture at the grave, her nonchalance turned into vitriol. The medical examiner, in his guilt, placed it as a memorial to the one whose body took the place of Claire’s. The last thing Claire needed was for any extra attention to be directed toward any of this. She meant for the fire and everything associated with it to die down, but the buzz generated by the mysterious appearance of such an exquisite sculpture at a pauper’s grave kept the fire stoked.

  Claire had coerced the medical examiner into declaring that hers was one of the burnt bodies recovered from the commune ruins and, while he had been true to his vow of silence, Zach knew too
much. She had promised to return to him when the smoke cleared to revive their affair. She arranged to meet him at Sticks River Landing, one year to the day after the burning.

  When he arrived at Sticks River Landing on the eve of December 22, 1970, Claire wasted no time. She got in his car, kissed him and shot him in the head. With the medical examiner out of the picture, she felt a lot better. She had gotten away with the murder of Zach, the medical examiner (made to look like a suicide), her hippie friends (made to look like an accident), and also her fellow graduate student, Maurice (presumed lost and given up for dead). Maurice, for his part, paid the ultimate price when he ventured too close to her beloved lotus swamps.

  Claire drove away in her new Mustang, humming that melody she so loved, the one she first heard in a dream.

  *****

  Claire and Nick

  With her looks and savvy Claire knew she could land just about any man she met. She trolled the New York City night clubs until she met an acceptable match. Nick was good-looking, he liked to party and he was smitten with her. Most importantly, Nick had a lot of money.

  After the fire, Claire dropped her old identity and created a new one. She provided the state of New York a forged birth certificate when she married Nick in the spring of 1979. Claire Wales, known now as Monika Cassel, was 32 years old. Nick’s friends became her friends as she settled into her upper-middle class, suburban-wife life. At 36, she quit taking her birth control pills and became pregnant. At 37, Monika gave birth to a baby boy.

  With each passing year, the difference between Monika and her peers became more pronounced. Where her friends developed fine wrinkles and crow’s feet and permanently creased foreheads, Monika’s skin remained supple and smooth. She never went to the gym yet somehow avoided the inevitable flabby bellies, sagging boobs, and legs dimpled by cellulite exhibited by her fellow middle-agers. Despite her devil-may-care attitude, she maintained the youthful body, hair, and overall glow typical of a woman in her twenties. Her friends could only assume that she had work done, thinking that no one her age could look that good without the lifts, implants, tucks and/or liposuction increasingly marketed by the cosmetic surgeons.