Chronicles of Ara: Perdition

by Joel Eisenberg

  “Ten years of a commuted twenty-year sentence for extortion, conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter.”

  “I know. I read the papers back then, and my memory’s not so short I don’t remember from your last visit. And the yearly visits before that. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. I need a place until Tuesday.”

  “So that’s your comfort.”

  “Sure.”

  “And in the years since the sentence?”

  “Yeah. I slept with six of my former students.”

  “Did you use protection?”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “Yeah,” she says, mocking him. Billie Clance, looking a healthy sixtyish, head bishop of Brooklyn’s wealthiest disenfranchised Roman Catholic church, pulls the curtains. “Can you trust this punim?”

  Peter Levin smirked. He peeked at his junior high school friend and confidant. “You know, you never age. God really is treating you well.”

  “You, on the other hand, look like the Crypt Keeper.” She’s right. Peter has become an alarmingly drawn, sunken-eyed old man.

  “I feel worse.”

  “Was anyone behind you?”

  “No.”

  Billie rolls up her sleeves. “Five Hail Marys and a couple of bagels at the Heights. Your buy.”

  “My—”

  “Ten minutes.” She draws the curtains.

  PENN STATION, NEW YORK CITY,

  JANUARY 2015

  When Thomas left the Scarp building he looked for the woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. And right away he knew. He knew he would be unable to extract her presence from his memory.

  The rain has subsided; for how long it is impossible to tell. As he sits in Penn Station sipping a coffee, he feels safe in his anonymity. He still wears his hat and storm coverings. Now, he’s just another schmo.

  Nobody’s around anyway.

  Thomas’ writerly instincts take over, and his mind overflows with wild rumination. He recalls an ex-special education teacher friend of his whom he hasn’t spoken to in a decade.

  “I would love to write a book,” she told him upon leaving her job. “I just need to distance myself from the drama for a while.” It had been a fifteen-year tenure for her, and she was more than ready to escape both the kids and the politics. Thomas relates to the sudden recollection, the randomness of which he is convinced is not a coincidence. “Same here,” he mutters. He will one day write about his trip to London proper, and all that has transpired since; he believes it is inevitable.

  But like her then, he now needs his distance.

  When he realizes he may have lost an opportunity with the wanderer, whether for story fodder or something more nefarious, he’s single and oh-so-alone for a change. Switching up to a lower standard of class and respectability has crossed his mind lately, and more than once, for the first time since he disappeared, Thomas is purposeful, though he is unclear as to what precisely his new purpose is. He only suspects, without logical reason, that the appearance of this new woman, this Freak as she called herself, must be related to recent events in his crazy life.

  Has to be, he laments. It would be par for the course.

  And he thinks of Samantha and the letter from X to Denise. The letter he in turn printed and gave to his daughter back in London right after her wedding. All he wanted was for some honesty for a change.

  No answers were forthcoming, and they haven’t spoken—again—in a year. Before, he cared. This time, he cares less.

  There are other troubled women in the world, if he’s so inclined. Like Freak, a perfect example. As the strange lost woman again moves to the forefront of his thoughts, he figures it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if he’d take his drama and shake it up a little. Turn those thoughts into dice in a can, perhaps.

  And then he’ll cast the dice and see where they land from there.

  And upon that thought he immediately feels dirty for pondering anything remotely lascivious.

  SOHO ARTS DISTRICT, NEW YORK CITY

  Freak vaguely recalls being transported. Held. That’s all she remembers. Soaked, exhausted, and barely conscious, she lies where the strange man placed her, unaware of where she is. She cries in fearful, childlike response to sudden bursts of soft thunder that she hears whenever one of her ears turns closer to the window.

  Her eyes remain closed. She doesn’t dare intentionally open them. Not yet.

  The on-and-off sounds frighten and confuse her all the more, the loud, angry voices from the men not too far away and the patter of rain against glass that makes her want to be anywhere but here.

  She is in and out of consciousness, and she shudders as she dreams, which she comprehends that much less . . .

  Black.

  But with the black there is not only still, but insight. Somewhere, she has heard the word immortal. Maybe in the midst of the anger. She hears something, from the yelling, like “the equivalent of memory for an immortal is that the immortal can recollect anything anywhere at any time.” Hence the difference, and not for the better, and this is why the chaos is happening.

  Freak thinks she should have no clue. She thinks she should know nothing of these words, this immortality, nor of the gods and goddesses who look upon her.

  Nor of the muse, from whom she is about to birth her first story that will one day soon be transcribed from Freak’s memory.

  For now, once she is ready and not before, Freak opens her senses to a world that, curiously, is not entirely unknown.

  Freak understands that she has been transported. Though she has never experienced dreaming, she is aware of the concept and also that the vaguely familiar sounds and images in her present purview are sensed outside of her physical body’s time and place. She is aware of her reverie, aware that she is looking down on the rest of the universe as an observer, and yet too horrified to consider the reasons or to return to her current plane.

  There is comfort here, and here there is awareness, which is the major difference.

  Despite her lack of knowledge, Freak dreams of the faraway time and place of Mirkwood as though she is Ara. She has veritably inhabited Ara’s being, and she dreams of mourning, of observing Eron’s prone body upon leaving the mountain that Ara had claimed for the span of eleven sunsets (which will, ages hence, inspire the adaptation of a mortal custom—a seated position over seven days to grieve a familial death—as derived from the teachings of a creation of particular influence: an Old Testament involving the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). A fierce battle has concluded, and yet the lone warrior lies prone, yards away, felled not by the endless swarm of encroaching dragons, but by his own hand. Eleven nights thereafter, as she walks toward him and her hair turns scarlet, she hears the muse’s thoughts as if she is narrating the images that pass like pictures in a storybook:

  The blood of spirit.

  All things past and all things present and future hold no turn. There is no distinction. My perspective is not twisted by prejudice.

  The universe of all things, living and not, all events of consequence and inconsequence, will expire. And then the Infinity Pass will implode, and the end result will be a return to nothingness.

  What we all deserve, all of us, and I will do anything to speed that inevitability. Then there will neither be a difference between god and mortal nor any other entity, and Eron and I will be together.

  Mirkwood will be destroyed first. This will be justice, in part.

  He fought, and now Eron is dead. Eron . . . my beloved. The dragons could not slay him. He, like me, was punished at the will of the gods. My immortal family I cannot control, and Eron did not deserve his fate! My mortal love is now spirit, and he will be influenced in his passing by those who exiled me, those who cursed me with my own eventual transformation to mortal. Eons hence.

  Father . . .

  She stops in the body’s stead and looks down upon the fallen dragonslayer.

  Where is my father? He could have prevented this! He should have prevented this!r />
  He is damned! He is as dead to me as the mortal!

  I will have my revenge.

  She looks above and beyond. The dragons fly back to their caves following an Abeyance. The world’s first.

  Eron will become an Over-dweller, take heed. He was created to be a warrior. I was a distraction, and his turning his sweord upon himself was my fault. “Warriors must never love,” he once said to another. I had hoped he had expected me. How I wish I would have stayed out of his way.

  Her gaze returns to Eron.

  But if . . . if he did love me, the Over-dweller will neither rest in the heavens nor survive, even as spirit, if he does not escape to find me. Anything less, or more, will further incite the gods.

  I wonder if he will remember me? I wonder if he will try to find me? I wonder when—

  Lightning strikes in the distance.

  Her eyes do not wander, though she hears the resultant thunder.

  Father, stay away. It’s too late.

  Her rage builds.

  No! I will not ever return, and you will never find me. It is you who is in harm’s way. If Eron does not find me, I will find him. We will be together. As it should be. I will never return to your side, Father. I was exiled by your brothers, your sisters, and your children, and you stood by and did nothing. Nothing! I am not like them, and I was ridiculed. Damn the natural order of things.

  Damn you! I will stop at nothing to unleash the grief you had set upon me for standing by my sisters. I will introduce a new element. It’s the only way. Eron would want this.

  Storm clouds again approach.

  Through new storms and the threat of new kingdoms, my family closely watches. For naught. My beloved will return.

  She leans into his ear.

  We will be together again. She will no longer be contained. Her words are a promise.

  Without warning, the images are overtaken by a furiously erupting volcano. And then another, as lava and ash spew and overtake all remaining semblance of visibility.

  ~~~

  “It’s okay—”

  Sidra. She pulls back when her new boarder, lying on the couch, panics and her ensuing struggle threatens to become violent.

  “No! Where am I?” Freak strains to sit up.

  Sidra comforts the visitor, calmly placing her hands on Freak’s shoulder and gently pushing her back to the pillow.

  “Everything is fine. You couldn’t sleep outside. I wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Outside?” Freak is disoriented and very scared. “Where—”

  “Don’t you worry. I’m here now.”

  Freak considers her whereabouts. “You brought me here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How—”

  “How are you feeling?” Sidra reapplies Freak’s warm head compress, a wet dishrag. “I thought maybe you’d like to sleep a little longer.”

  Freak trembles, and this time jumps up at Sidra. “Where . . . ?” Freak grabs Sidra’s wrist. “Where am I?” she pleads. “How did you bring me here? Who’s with you? Where are the others?”

  Sidra, unnerved, tussles to release her hand. “I found you outside,” she says. “You . . . were left on the steps.”

  Freak lets go. “Steps?” Freak stands, but nearly falls in a haze of light-headedness.

  “Careful. You need to preserve your strength, trust me,” Sidra offers weakly. “I’m recovering myself. Really touch-and-go there for a minute.”

  Freak cautiously returns to supine. “Where am I?” she repeats.

  Sidra is equally cautious. “New York City,” she tests. Freak’s right eye flutters. She does not understand. “You’re safe,” Sidra adds.

  “Who—”

  “Sidra.”

  Freak contemplates the response. “Sidarah . . . ?”

  “Close enough.” They regard one another with equal fascination and fear. “And you? What is your name?”

  Freak shakes her head.

  “I’m sor—”

  “Freak.”

  Sidra is unsure if her guest understood the question.

  “Freak,” the stranger repeats.

  “We’ll work on—”

  “Where is S’n Te, Sidarah?” Again, Freak sits up. Sidra is unsure how to respond; for the moment she remains quiet and watches. Her visitor stands, off-balance, regaining her strength and consciously attempting to remain on her feet. Sidra casually backs off.

  “No.” Freak steps forward. “No. Where is S’n Te? The sweord . . . the sweord was his creation.”

  “I’ve been asking myself that same question.”

  “Eron . . .”

  Sidra hasn’t a clue. “Clearly I’m as strange as you are . . .”

  “Strange?”

  “Lonely?” Freak does not answer. She stumbles as she looks for an exit. “Look,” Sidra continues, “you leave, it’s not safe, and something happens to you, it’s traced back to me, and . . . I have enough going on. I don’t think this is a chance I can take. Seriously.” She watches helplessly as a determined Freak looks around for an escape. Finally, Sidra submits and opens the door for her. “Fine. Right here.” The visitor exits without another word. Sidra closes the door. “Or maybe we’re all just mad,” Sidra says to herself. “Sidarah . . . Jesus.”

  ~~~

  Freak has returned to the streets. The backed-up water, at times knee-deep, ripples and rings in her wake.

  Those few cars that follow and crash behind her never see her face.

  THE HEIGHTS COFFEEHOUSE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK,

  NOVEMBER 2014

  Tuesday. Over the past week, Peter has spoken to his old junior high school classmate, “Mother Billie Clance”—so-named back then before her adult reality due to her lifelong preoccupation with the Bible—over coffee, bagels, and schmear for four informal two-hour sessions. He has reiterated his life and the authentication of the Beowulf documents alongside Franklin McFee and his literary hero J.R.R. Tolkien.

  “I may have slipped there,” he says. “Swear to me, whatever I tell you about Tolkien and Beowulf remains confidential.”

  “I’m a priest now, remember? You can say anything to your priest.” Billie smirks as she crosses her heart.

  Peter goes on. He discusses his near-escape with the Beowulf documents, his incarceration and subsequent plea deal.

  “Damn it,” he says.

  “You should never say that to a priest.”

  “You just said I could say anything to you.”

  “Forgot,” Billie says coquettishly. She sips her coffee. “You may continue.”

  “I have to go.” Peter offers to pick her up at her home the next morning, testing the waters. She agrees, with a caveat:

  “We don’t say a word to each other before we get there.”

  He’s disappointed, but Peter quietly crosses his heart.

  ~~~

  The following day.

  Peter answers Billie’s inquiries as if being interviewed, responding to her probing questions that are phrased carefully and informally enough to elicit honest responses while also serving the friends’ long-term familiarity.

  Except, she didn’t ask the one he wanted to hear. He would have slept with her yesterday. He wanted to—he does now—and he’s convinced she would have allowed the one-time indiscretion, her holy robes be damned.

  She feels for him. She knows it’s been a long time since he’s been with a woman, and she sees right through his brave effort not to alienate her.

  Ten years of what had been a meaningful life till then, wasted on a commuted twenty-year sentence that he would serve half on plea and enter the witness protection program immediately upon release. He missed his first appointment and instead visited Clance straight away. He elected to miss his second and third appointments and move to the left coast in 1983, on his own, to start over and set things right. He honored his word and submitted names and identities to the authorities; despite their objections and warnings, he steadfastly refused to change his own.

 
He visits New York once yearly to stay connected to the city he loves more than any other. He also comes to visit Billie, though he would never admit as much.

  “You ever wonder—” he says, taking the chance.

  “No.”

  “Really? Never?”

  “You were married. I became a priest,” Billie answers.

  “You told me once you had a boyfriend.”

  “I did?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “When did I tell you that?”

  “The day before yesterday.”

  “Hmm,” she offers, none-too-convincingly. “Must have slipped my mind.”

  “Convenient,” he responds. “Vows of celibacy are as unnatural as monogamy. A deprived human being has urges. You didn’t get the memo?”

  “And to think I was giving you credit for self-control,” Billie says.

  “You’ve always had the class.”

  As the priest shrugs, the ex-con casually glances to the table three feet to his right in a hint of recognition.

  A table where Denise Watkins and Thomas McFee sit and a portal opens . . .

  “Donovan Bradley,” Denise explains, “is one of the preeminent book dealers in the world.”

  “That Donovan Bradley,” Thomas says.

  “Ever met?”

  “Not in pers—”

  “Know them?” Clance interjects.

  “Huh?” Levin snaps back to attention.

  “Know them?”

  Levin pauses before responding. “No.”

  “You’ve never been a good liar.”

  “Look, I appreciate the compliment, but—”

  “That was no compliment,” Clance replies. “Who doesn’t know Thomas McFee in New York?”

  “Didn’t know you read. Anything other than the Bible, that is.” When Clance ignores him, Peter’s eyes are awkwardly drawn to the wall clock above and then instinctively to his watch. “Isn’t that odd?” he asks.

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t wear a watch, do you?” Peter asks.

  “Not necessary.” Clance looks to the clock. “Needs some winding, I think.” Peter says nothing; he places his elbow on the table so Clance can take a good look at his timepiece. “Hmm.” Both pieces have stopped at 4:24 am. “You know what Jesus said about coincidences?”