The Liberty Box

by C. A. Gray

  I sighed in frustration. “I’m not trying to say I think I’m ‘better’ than other fishermen. It’s not that at all. I just feel like—well, all right, I don’t care if you do think I’m cocky, I’ll just say it. If Beethoven never composed music, wouldn’t you think it was a waste? If Da Vinci never painted, or that scientist you’re quoting all the time, what’s his name?”

  “Einstein,” Uncle Patrick told me mildly, smirking.

  “If Einstein never studied physics, if he’d spent his whole life in the patent office, wouldn’t you conclude that he’d wasted his potential?”

  “I will ask you a question in turn,” said Uncle Patrick. “If the world never recognized Beethoven’s or Da Vinci’s or Einstein’s work in their lifetimes, would you conclude that they had been failures?”

  I stared at him. “I don’t follow.”

  “Sure you do. What is it that you’re really valuing here, Jackson? So-called ‘great’ accomplishments… or getting the glory for them?”

  I sighed, rolling my eyes. He’d trapped me there, and we both knew it.

  “Sophus, your Grandfather, taught you to hone a great skill, undoubtedly,” Uncle Patrick went on. “It’s given you power over your own body greater than what I could ever imagine possessing. But even Sophus, I think, would caution you that power is never the point. Power is a byproduct of a peaceful and quiet mind… but the moment power becomes an end in itself, the peace evaporates.” He watched me for a long moment, his lips pursed under his thick salt-and-pepper mustache. “As a result of training with Sophus, I’d venture to say you’ve gained a great deal more wisdom than most young men your age. You have even saved a few lives that might otherwise have been lost. Yet you want more than that?” When I didn’t reply right away, he added, “You are a fisherman, Jackson. You help to feed the people of Frjósöm. You meet one of their most basic needs. That in itself is a purpose, and an important one.”

  “But anybody can fish,” I muttered. I knew I was playing right into his hands, but I just couldn’t help myself.

  “Anybody?” Uncle Patrick raised his eyebrows again. “Did you not apprentice for this job? Did it require no training? Are there no dangers involved?”

  I sighed, annoyed with his condescending response, and annoyed with myself for setting him up to give it. “Fine,” I told him, “You win.”

  “I know.” He winked at me.

  Eventually I’d stopped trying to explain my restlessness to Uncle Patrick because I knew he wouldn’t understand, but I’d really never been satisfied with his explanation. Life in Frjósöm was comfortable, but uneventful. On some level I knew that he was right—there was purpose in meeting simple needs. But I’d still dreamt of coming to the Republic and doing something “great”… whatever that meant. I’d had no definite plans to do so, though, until I’d gotten cousin Jennifer’s letter.

  Grandfather alone had known why I was really going.

  “You don’t think I’m coming back,” I had murmured to him on the docks.

  Grandfather had smiled, but the lines in his face made him look even more ancient than he was. He did not deny it. “Your destiny has never been here in Frjósöm,” he said, his voice heavy and sad. “You know this.”

  I did not deny it either. I’d known it for years.

  “When you were young, my intention was to train you to help protect our tribe from invaders,” he went on, “but for some time now I’ve been training you for something else entirely. You are restless, Jackson. You feel that you have no purpose here.”

  “I have my aunt and uncle,” I murmured. “I have you…”

  Grandfather shook his head, solemn. “We are not a purpose. We are a launching pad,” he said, his voice low and deep. “I do not say that with resentment, but as a simple fact. You are made for more. I do not know what manner of challenges you will find when you arrive in the Republic, Jackson. All I can tell you is that it will take everything you are.”

  Now here I was: not fishing in Frjósöm, but hunting in the Republic to feed the refugees. Not exactly what I’d envisioned. They’d fed themselves without me well enough up until this point; surely if I disappeared, they’d go on surviving just the same.

  But what if? What if my training for all these years mattered? What if there was something I could do here that no one else could?

  Some hundred yards away, I saw the hunters, crouched and silent. I counted nine of them.

  Slowing down to make sure I didn’t startle away whatever creature they had in sight, I approached Nick just as one of them let an arrow fly. The group erupted in a cheer.

  “Dinner for my tribe!” cried the man who had felled the deer.

  No longer bothering to approach with caution, I joined the circle. Nick looked up at me with a grin.

  “There he is!” Nick crowed at my approach. “This one will change our odds, boys, mark my words…”

  “Odds of what?” I asked.

  “Odds of winning our competition,” Alec told me. “Each tribe against the others every week. The one who kills the most wins.”

  “What do they win?”

  “Bragging rights,” Alec shrugged with a half-smile.

  “With you on our team, we’ll win every time!” Nick declared to me, winking.

  I deflated a little. Was that the only reason he’d said they needed me so much? Bragging rights?

  I fell into step behind Nick and Alec, representatives of what was now “my” tribe, as they split off from the rest of the group. Another hunter named Jacob walked beside me. After a moment he glanced over and said, “So you’re some kind of hunting prodigy, I hear.”

  I laughed. “Is that what they’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what else to call it. Every story I hear about you seems to be more exaggerated than the last.”

  “Perhaps you’d better lower your expectations then, or I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.”

  “Why don’t you show me?” Jacob challenged. “How about this. You teach me some of your buck-whispering skills, and I’ll show you the best spots to find them.”

  “‘Buck whispering skills?’” I raised my eyebrows.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I appraised Jacob. He was short, stout, and dense. He had hair so thick it might have been fur, and very large pores on his cheeks and nose. He looked like he might have been twenty or forty; I couldn’t tell. But he seemed genuine. Curious, yes, but he also really wanted to learn. At least so far he didn’t think I was a freak.

  “All right,” I conceded. “Long as you promise not to think I’m crazy. Or if you do think I’m crazy, keep it to yourself.”

  Jacob grinned at me. “No problem.” He didn’t seem to be disturbed by this preface at all. That was a good start.

  We split off from the others, and I led Jacob south. I’d caught a scent. I didn’t actually smell anything, but that’s how I thought of it; I guess it was more of a sense.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  I pointed. Fifty yards away was an enormous, glossy animal feeding on leaves.

  “Holy…” Jacob began, silently pulling his bow level and grabbing an arrow at the same time.

  “Nope, not yet,” I told him. “Close your eyes.”

  He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Excuse me? That buck can feed half the caves!”

  I laughed silently, remembering my own reaction when Grandfather had told me to do this. “Are we doing this my way or not? Close your eyes.” I told Jacob.

  Reluctantly he obeyed. “Feel that?” I asked him.

  He opened one of his eyes again and glanced over at me. “Feel what?”

  “The buck’s fear,” I whispered. “It knows we’re here.”

  “Are you being serious right now?”

  “You have to get in tune with it,” I explained, unperturbed. “That’s the only way you can know what it’s going to do before it does it.”

  I let the primal feeling run through me, a shiver of b
oth anticipation and empathy. We could see it in the half-light, between the leaves of the trees that stood between it and us. It felt us too, I knew it.

  “My Grandfather taught me that all living things are connected, like part of a great tapestry of the universe. One thing can’t move, can’t even exist, without having a ripple effect on everything else—most powerfully on those in its closest proximity. The buck can feel us even though he doesn’t see us yet. He senses us.”

  Jacob guided his arrow to his bow and nocked it, not even listening to me.

  “Close your eyes!” I commanded.

  “Why? He’s right there!”

  “Because your inner eye is strongest. When he moves, the air around him moves. The ground around him moves. When he’s still, his weight, his breath, his metabolism is palpable. But as long as you’re looking through your physical eyes, you’ll miss all of that.”

  “Fine,” Jacob muttered, closing his eyes, the arrow still poised to fly. In solidarity, I closed mine too.

  Then we heard the crunch of twigs, the crackle of fallen leaves, and the pounding of the earth as the buck took its chance and fled. It was now or never.

  I flashed back to the moment when I’d been in Jacob’s shoes as a child: I hadn’t known if I could truly feel the direction and momentum with which the buck had fled, or if I was just wildly guessing—but either way, my instincts zeroed in upon a single spot. Eyes still closed, I’d let the arrow fly.

  I heard the twang of Jacob’s bow too, and an instant later, heard it sink in to flesh. A heavy thud told us both that the prey had fallen.

  Jacob swore. “No freaking way.”

  The buck’s eyes were still open when we finally reached him. They were enormous, the color of chocolate, but vacant and glassy. He continued to breathe, but shallowly, each breath coming farther apart than the last. Finally they stopped altogether.

  “Feel it?” I asked Jacob again.

  “What am I supposed to feel now?” he asked me. He was making fun of me, I knew, but now there was also an edge of grudging respect in his tone.

  “The moment a living creature’s heart stops pumping is a sacred moment,” I told him, closing my eyes. I was channeling Grandfather now, saying almost verbatim exactly what he had said to me all those years ago. “It’s like the extinguishing of a flame. A given flame is never the same, constantly renewed, and yet it is one until the moment it goes out. That light has gone out of existence forever; others may come that are like it, but never precisely the same. He gave his life for us, so that we may gain sustenance from his body. We must be thankful.”

  “Okay, weirdo,” said Jacob. “You can be thankful while I cut up our dinner.”

  I grinned at him. “I know how it sounds. But I’ve learned over the years that respect for life is part of being able to sense and predict it. Without that, you can’t really understand what a creature is going to do before it does it. Same goes for people.”

  “I shot him, didn’t I?”

  “Only because you closed your eyes. There’s no way you’d have made that shot otherwise. He was mostly hidden, and much too fast.”

  Jacob looked like he considered this for a moment. “Well, true enough,” he said at last. Then he set to work with his knife, skinning and cleaning the animal. I helped him pull off the breastbone with a great sucking sound, revealing the entrails. He tossed the heart and liver aside, into the dirt.

  “You’re not keeping those?” I asked, horrified.

  Jacob made a face. “Ugh, are you serious? You eat internal organs?”

  “Of course! Dice them up and sauté them with fresh root vegetables and some fresh butter…”

  Jacob gagged. “You are a weirdo.”

  “I’m not wasteful,” I corrected. “And out here, I don’t think you have the luxury of being wasteful either.” I picked up the organs, brushed off the dirt, and placed them carefully in my satchel for meat.

  As we worked, Jacob murmured, “How did you know where the buck was before you saw him, anyway?”

  “I could sense him.”

  “But… what did you feel?” Jacob pressed. “I mean, what did it feel like?”

  I paused, my arms covered with gore up to my elbows. “I spent a lot of time with my eyes closed as a child,” I told him finally. “In general, humans rely almost entirely on what we see to interact with the world. But even the visual information we tune into is only a fraction of reality. We can’t focus on everything we perceive at once. Most of what we think we know is a skewed version of truth at best. But the rest of the information is still available; all you have to do is tap into it. For humans, closing our eyes is the first step. It forces us to sharpen other senses. It reminds us that what we see is not all there is.

  “Here, I’ll show you,” I added. “Close your eyes again.”

  He looked at me askance, but obeyed.

  “What do you feel?” I asked.

  “I… hear the wind in the leaves,” he murmured, “and the birds chirping…”

  “What do you feel?” I repeated.

  “Uhh… it’s cold if I don’t move. I… I can feel the wind…”

  “Yes, yes,” I prodded. “And what is wind?”

  “Moving air?” Jacob guessed.

  “It moves in patterns,” I agreed. “A gust moves uniformly until it is obstructed by something physical, like a tree, or a buck, or you and me. And it changes shape based on what it encounters, which means the way it interacts with us is different based on what happens to be around us.” He paused. “And what about inside of you?”

  Jacob opened one eye and squinted at me. “Oh, come on.”

  I grinned at him, nodded to show I meant it, and placed a hand on my chest. “What do you feel in here?”

  With a sigh of exasperation, Jacob closed his eyes again. “I feel my breath. I feel my heart beating.”

  “Your chest rising and falling, and your stomach expanding and contracting?” I prodded.

  “Yeah, sure. That too.”

  “And your weight pressing into the ground, on your knees and toes? Feel your eyelashes against your cheeks?” Then I added, “I usually have some tension in my upper shoulders and I can feel my eyebrows pulled together and my jaw clenched. You probably have something like that too.”

  I watched as Jacob relaxed his shoulders, like something fell away from him.

  “And maybe you might feel something more than that,” I added. “Something you can’t quite describe… but it keeps the whole apparatus of your body going.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Jacob muttered.

  “You’ll feel it eventually, if you tune in long enough. Grandfather calls that thing asu,” I told him. “Asu is a life force, or the vibration of a living creature. Everyone has a different name for it. The Chinese call it qi. The Hindus call it prana. In a sense it belongs to the creature, but is something more, too. Think of it like a spirit.” I sliced through another layer of entrails.

  Jacob, also covered in gore, watched me skeptically. “You do know how ‘woo-woo’ you sound, right?”

  I grinned at him. “And you sound like my Uncle Patrick.” I wiped the sweat off my brow. “My aunt and uncle were missionaries in Iceland. They didn’t want me to study with Grandfather at first because they thought what he could do was ‘of the devil.’” In the end, after many conversations with Grandfather, Uncle Patrick had grudgingly allowed me to study under Grandfather, because he’d concluded that ‘all truth was God’s truth.’ “If these gifts and manifestations do exist,” he’d said, “then God made them, and they are His. And I do believe God gave mankind far more power over our minds and bodies than most of us use or are even aware of.”

  “It’s not as mystical as you think, though,” I told Jacob. “Think of it like this. When you spend time with individual people you know really well, the experience is different than when you’re with those people all at the same time, you know? It’s like a new energy gets created depending on the combination of ind
ividuals present. Asu is kind of like that. Each part of you has its own asu, its own vibration. But the combined energy of your entire body working together creates a different asu altogether. It becomes a unit that keeps your body functioning properly, and keeps you alive.” I gestured at the buck. “This guy also had asu.”

  “What happens to it after he’s dead though?” Jacob raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Some of it dissipates into the asu of the atmosphere as heat.” I gestured to the air above and around us. “And some of it will blend with our own asu, when we use his body as food. Some of it will return to dust and fertilize the ground.”

  “So asu is physical energy then.”

  I nodded. “Einstein said energy and matter are the same thing.” Uncle Patrick loved Einstein. I think Einstein was largely what convinced him that what Grandfather taught was okay.

  “Heard of him,” Jacob smirked at me.

  “When you close your eyes, if you focus, you can feel not only your own asu, but the asu of everything around you. If you practice, you can learn to see more clearly with your inner eye than with your outer.” When Grandfather had first explained this idea to me, I’d envisioned some sort of interconnected shadow world in which everything influences everything else, like ripples on the surface of a pond.

  Jacob glanced up at me, ripping a strip of meat from the animal’s carcass and stuffing it into his satchel. “Well,” he muttered, “I guess you must be doing something right, because it’s working.”

  I laughed. “Thanks.”

  Chapter 18: Jackson

  Both Jacob and I washed off in the stream to rinse away the gore from the animal before meeting up with Alec and Nick again. Our two satchels weren’t big enough by far to hold all the buck’s meat, so we had to get them to help us. Jacob told the others how he’d shot the animal with his eyes closed. Neither Nick nor Alec even believed him, to his great annoyance. When it was clear that they refused to engage the subject any further, Jacob leaned over and asked me, “We’ll keep training though, won’t we?”

  I shrugged and smiled my assent. “Whenever you like.”