“Close your eyes.” His fingers flutter her eyelids down and he places his forehead to hers. Her breath whooshes out as they enter the vortex, one to one, head to toe, fused together. Sucked in, she hardly dares believe the images, the dreams, and the visions.
She saw his blonde hair, her laughter, their wild dance around the fire in the green forest. He had died in battle. And then she had married his brother.
In the lifetime after, she was his mistress, his secret desire at Hawa Mahal. He had lavished turquoise jewels and rose petal silks on her. The attraction between them was so strong that he could not stand it if any other person dares look at her. And so he had built her a special palace where he had kept her hidden from the eyes of the world. All of it ending when she hurled herself onto his funeral pyre.
And now in this lifetime they are finally together... or were they? The question echoes in her mind, the fear of losing him grips her and Tiina’s eyes snap open.
The place next to her is empty and she jumps out to find Egreog sitting just outside the door of the bedroom, on the floor, naked, his hands around his legs and his head bent over.
“Is it true?” she asks, not bearing to touch him just yet. “All that you showed me. Is it?”
“You saw it all. Didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why the doubts, then?”
She hangs her head a little in shame. “It all feels right. Yet … yet I now find it difficult to believe in everything that was the cornerstone of my thoughts through my growing years. In some corner of my mind, I had a realisation that it was all true. Yet I could never bring myself to believe in it. But it is all actually true, right?”
“You felt it. Didn’t it seem real enough?” he snaps at her losing patience.
“The pain,” says Tiina, looking at him, and her face screws up as she remembers that deeply wrenching, pathetically sinking, hollowed out blackness feeling; of losing him over and over again in all the different lifetimes which he had shown her.
Egreog looks up and holds his arms open, closing them around her. “I could fall in love with you again so easily.”
“Make love to me?” she pleads.
“I would be lost then. I could not return,” he replies seriously.
“Just once more?” She runs out of words. He kisses her slowly, absorbing her lips. “Give me this time at-least …” she pleads, swallowing her pride. Then for some reason, is compelled to ask, “Who are you?”
“You know who I am. Just believe it,” he says getting up to put on his clothes. He walks towards the door of her apartment.
Desperate, she casts about in her mind for something, anything that could make him stay longer. Then, “Wait,” she calls out.
He stops and turns to her.
“Almonds …” she blurts out, seeing the pack on the kitchen table.
“Uh …?” he asks, surprised.
“Almonds — you know those crunchy nuts, they are my favourite snack. Would you like one?”
He laughs then, throws his head back and laughs so she can see his chest move in ripples. “You’ll see me again, I promise.” He picks her up and walks into the tiny closet like bedroom.
Placing her on the bed, he covers her up. “Sleep,” he says and places his hands over her eyes, covering them and forcing her eyelids closed. “Sleep …”
“But …” She opens her eyes to find him wearing his clothes. He kisses her fully on the lips, taking her to the edge and back in just a few seconds. She is unable to protest as he walks out. She closes her eyes and much to her surprise falls asleep.
The craving for more of his touch warring with the more real feeling of fusing into him and flowing across dimensions, across their different lifetimes together.
Could she dare believe what he showed her?
All those years of searching, and then he enters and slips out of her life. Just like that. Who was he she wonders.
All of this takes place just a few months before her eighteenth birthday. She wonders if she dare believe what he had shown her. All those years of searching, and then he entered and slipped out of her life. She cannot understand why the series of coincidences had brought them together only for him to walk out of her life? “Who are you Egreog?” She wonders. It is a question which tears her apart, disturbing her, so that she searches in vain for an answer.
One day as she is walking down Pok Fu Lam – a strip of land which connects Java to the mother planets by a solar bridge and is so long, narrow and stark it can be seen from far outer space. She walks to the very edge and looks out into the black space stretching out in front of her. And just like that the visions appear. It is as if all the ghosts of those who died before her terrorised by Shaitan had come to haunt her.
“This is it then” she thinks. And steps off the edge of the universe.
When she opens her eyes it is to find that she is with Mimir in Arkana. It is still a mystery to her how he had found her. A question she is saving to ask Mimir at the appropriate time.
Yudi’s Journey
The lightning struck her down, charring her black, with the smoke ebbing out, and he awoke to the gut-wrenching pain.
Thump Kreeee. Thump eeeeeee …
Fresh and throbbing, the sound jolts him into consciousness.
Yudi throws off the covers and pads onto the small, terrace adjoining his bedroom. The noise carries through the still dawn air growing louder by the second, Thump Kree THUMP KREEEEE…
He swore, “Not again.”
Not far below, he sees again the aged female Plutonian going about her early morning ritual of dragging the large steel, electric pole, bumping down the sleeping escalator steps.
“One of life’s great mysteries” he thinks.
The urban chemistry swirling around him mocks him. He can see his face in the smog of the early dawn. Cigarette smoke hitting the sticky side of the one hundred and forty stories high apartment buildings on either side of the street, blowing between the gaps of the steps of the silent escalators, in and out through the other open window of the apartment diagonally opposite, where the young man often parades his women.
Carrying away the fading Thump Kreeee Thump Kreeee.
The DJ swings the record, slow now; then fast, stretching out the notes. He is trapped in a celestial circle.
“Here I am, Yudi. Charioteer to the Sun God who drives the twelve flaming celestial horses through the desert. I am safe ... No. I am scared, so scared.”
It seems unstoppable, growing within.
“Here I am, Yudi.” STOP! He screams to himself. His mind goes into overdrive and he forces himself to brake. Finally!
His heart thuds. He can feel every separate beat. Realise the full breadth of his life. Feel every separate moment intimately in that space.
“Do you know what it is, to feel completely helpless?”
His thoughts hang there suspended against the window, and then hurtle against the glass, crashing into a thousand pieces in his mind.
“Stop! Breathe!”
He clings on and tries to haul himself up, hanging suspended over the precipice. Then suddenly he is there. He opens his eyes.
“Tomorrow, opening night,” he thinks, “there I will be, up for display. Exposed.”
When he had last met Ayse, his girlfriend of the last few years, she had exclaimed, “You used to be so cocky. So full of yourself. Every time I saw you, I wondered how someone could be so supremely confident. So ...”
Yudi interrupts her tirade, “I would be shooting my mouth off, right?”
“You played the tortured artist very well,” she says.
“The movie was everything then,” he retorts.
“And now?” she asks.
“Now,” says Yudi, “now it’s all over. They used to say that I was the one with the original speak-what-you-are-thinking spirit.” He pauses. “Then it all went wrong. Am I making sense?” he asks her, the desperation ricocheting through the hollow corridors of his voice.
> “Yes,” she says, “ah…”
Yudi goes on dejectedly. “How can I have found out all this? All this ... stuff?”
She puts her arm around him “It gets easier.”
“Does it?” he asks.
She smiles. “It is no big deal.”
“And I had to meet you, here, of all places.”
“Yes, that’s the way it always is — isn’t it?” she laughs. “There are no coincidences, you know.”
“No,” he says, “I don’t know, but I am learning. So how do you see yourself, then?”
“Me? I’m hopeless.” She shrugs it off. “And you?”
“I am trapped. A victim of your charms.” he says in dramatic fashion, putting his hand on his heart in an extravagant gesture. He knows that this will afford him the pleasure of a smile from her. She does not disappoint.
“Ah! Yudi. You know exactly what to say!” she smiles.
Yudi chuckles, circling her face with his palms. Looking into her light blue eyes, he says in a more serious tone, “You recoiled the first time you saw me. That look on your face …” He shakes his head.
“Yes, because you had …” She corrects herself. “You still have, someone with you,” she says, looking to his left.
His forearm hair stands up, all at once. “You give me the creeps when you say stuff like that.”
“It is true,” she laughs.
“When I stand in art class, naked, holding still, looking over the heads of the people drawing, that’s the only time I feel really light,” he says.
“Maybe you just like being looked at?”
“Yeah,” he grins, “that too.”
“Just go with it, OK?” Then she says with vehemence. ”You are halfway there. But if you don’t choose, then you’re going to have to go back and start over.”
Yudi nods, listening intently.
“Where did that come from?” Ayse shakes her head, surprised by her articulation of her own feelings. “So, then, what is your movie about? Can you tell me?”
“Well, I should not.” Yudi pauses, pretending to light up his first virtual cigarette of the evening, “But you could say that it is homage to Spiderman.”
“Spiderman?”
He nods. “A Spiderman who spins his web between the tallest towers of Arkana and the highest mountain on the moon.”
“Ah! Arkana!” she exclaims. “The dream destination of most Half Lives.”
“Do you ever wonder why we came to be called Half Lives?” asks Yudi.
“Sometimes. But I assume it is because we are only half human.”
“Half mortal — half not.”
“Half celestial,” she offers.
“Half God — half demon!” he says.
“And we can go on and on!” She smiles at him. “Any which way you look at it we are only half human.”
“But the other half, the more exciting one, the physically beautiful, therein lie possibilities. No?” asks Yudi.
“All it is,” she says, “is that the other half is from some other planet, really.”
“The part of me that beats the most.”
“How long will you continue denying your human existence?”
“Half human,” he corrects her.
“Half Life,” she smiles.
“And you? What makes you so comfortable with that non-human part of yourself?”
“It brings me peace. It allows my mind to be free, to dream.”
“Ah! Here is the windfall; a mind that knows no boundaries?”
“And the reason you are able to turn out these amazing movies which have brought you much fame.”
“Speaking of which...”
“Oh, yeah! The big tomorrow.”
Ayse realises that once again he has brought the conversation back to himself. “Tell me more,” she says.
“It is” he says “about a Spiderman with no costume.”
“No costume? So he is naked?”
“No, it is because he is not really there.”
“Aha!”
“He is not real. However, his webs are real. And made of fibres that are silken and sticky. He weaves his web such that it can catch all Half Lives and Aliens; anyone who lusts after you beautiful human women.” He gestures impressively in her direction.
Ayse laughs. “Now, why do you think that I am human?”
“More human than me, at any rate,” says Yudi.
“It so happens that both my parents are more human than not. I admit that sometimes I am not clear what my mind wants. My heart always gets in the way.”
“That’s what I like about you.”
“I thought it was more than just my heart,” she grins.
Yudi laughs and grabs her. They tussle and fall to the ground, both laughing.
That is how Yudi remembers her as he stands there, looking at the charred remains of the building where they had spent the last few years of their life together. It was gone just like that. That and everything of the life he had built on Pluto.
He turns around and walks away, feeling numb. And keeps going, for many days, until he is not sure where he is anymore. He is in the middle of nowhere. Isolated on the island of his feelings. The moat of surreal separates him from the rest of the living. Marking him out as being on a different path. He gives in to his broken heart, sits down in the middle of a deserted square once teeming with life. Letting the sun’s rays reflect off his parched lips, he lets the last drops of emotion run down his hands, his legs, his feet.
That was almost a year ago. Yet the pain refuses to fade. Instead, like a gnawing hunger it ebbs and flows, with its own rhythms, never quite fading.
Of late, he finds that he can on occasion calm it for a few seconds... only to return stronger.
Standing there with the rest of his life spread out before him, the enormity of the before and the after slice through him. “I may never sleep again” he realises watching the breaking dawn.
How could he stay on in the aftermath of that terrible night, when it all came undone; The raging fire had torn a path through Pluto burning everything in its path, including his life. “The irony,” he thinks “leaving Ka Surya to escape Shaitan. Building a new life on another planet. Only for nature to get him. Fires from lighting storms were common on Pluto. He had just never thought it would consume him.
Taking a deep breath he attempts to clear his head. He can hear thunder grumble in the distance, lighting flash somewhere else. It echoes the turmoil in his heart. “Perhaps it is that simple?” he thinks. “Just make sure it is my turn next.... but how do I do that?” he wonders “when lightning never strikes twice in the same place.”
He realises how far gone in his own misery to think about his own death. He closes his eyes opens his heart, and asks the Universe ...if someone was out there for help.
And, looks up when a shadow falls across him. Yudi raises his eyes and there, shines the figure. There suspended in mid air his white robes fluttering in the light breeze his long flowing beard as white as the starlight in the background is Mimir. “You took your time.....I thought you’d never ask,” he says, opening his arms.
Yudi walks into his embrace. “Welcome to Arkana” smiles Mimir.
Reunion
Tiina is reeling from the sudden change in time and space. The journey to Arkana is a blur of images melding into each other. It is a definite sort of coming home for her.
It is a bright and sunny day, when she walks in through the front gates of the academy. The Arkana of Half Lives, the dull virtual letters next to the gates declare. She is about to step over the threshold when a young man who has been gazing at the scene inside hails her.
Tiina looks around at him. “Hello?” she says. There is something very familiar, yet she cannot quite put her finger on it. “Uh! Do I know you?” she asks,
“I am Yudi,” he says.
“Yudi,” she laughs, unsure. “You are ...Yudi?”
“Ah! That’s what I just said, didn’t I?”
Tiina hesitates. “You don’t really want to know my name …?”
“Try me!” he says.
She puts her hand forward. “Uh! Zara.” She bites her lips. It’s easy to lie. The sweetness of their final meeting is forever etched in her memory, married with the pain of having left her twin behind. She is just not yet ready to reveal her name to him, she realises.
“Where are you from, Z?” He takes her hand, enclosing her fingers within his palm, warming hers.
Raising her eyebrows at the casual way in which he has shortened her name, she says, “From a place far, far away from you.”
“Well, girl from far, far away, let me buy you a drink before we head in there,” he says. “God knows if they have alcohol in this place.”
“Why not?” asks Tiina. “A place filled with young people, surely they serve recreational drinks?”
“Recreational drinks, eh? That is cute,” he says, and then adds, “you are cute.”
“Uh!” Tiina swallows uncomfortably. “You are direct,” she says, trying to get by him. “I am in a hurry. I really do need to get on.”
“Oh. Surely not. Z, come on. If not alcohol then coffee. There’s nobody else here I’d rather be with than you!”
“You’ll do anything to avoid going into Arkana, is that it?” she asks.
“I came of my own free will,” he replies, “but school has never been my strong point.”
He holds on to her hand as he speaks, looking into her eyes, his lips curved into a half smile, while his brown eyes twinkle down at her, his hair ruffling just so in the slight breeze.
“Go on ...” he urges her, “just the one.”
I am over the “love at first sight” thing, she reminds herself. And it is not lust ... well, not lust, either, she thinks. However, there is an intense pull, an attraction and affinity and a strange sense of immediate trust, as if she has known him all her life. It does not seem to matter that it is almost eight years since they last met, he still has a strange hold on her. All he has to do is look at her with his brown eyes and just ask. And she could never refuse him anything.
The Destiny of Shaitan Page 8
