A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

by Ellen Oh

  The passenger window was down, so it was cool, but there was no cross-breeze. My hand was on the outside of the car, slapping the roof, and I was thinking. That’s all. Just thinking.

  People pay so little attention to thinking. I mean, I would come home and my mom would ask me what had happened during the day, and I’d say “nothing” and she’d ask who’d I eaten lunch with and I’d say “Nobody. Just some people.” And on and on and on, and she’d act like I was stonewalling her, but really she wasn’t asking the right question.

  Because, to me, real life wasn’t something your body did: it wasn’t food and sleep and sweat. And real life also wasn’t social. I didn’t care about the delicate tangle of relationships: the fights and resentments and jealousies that make up a group of friends. Real life didn’t even lie within the flicker of lust and desire and romance that everybody around me pretended were somehow equivalent to love.

  No, real life happened in your mind. Real life meant dissecting your sensory experience—the evidence of your eyes and ears—then analyzing the pieces, using knowledge you’d gained from books, and reassembling it all into some semblance of a self. Yes, that was exactly it. Real life was about deciding who you were.

  But that wasn’t a thing you could tell to someone. If I had come home and said to my mom, “Yeah, I thought for hours today about whether there was anything in life that was worth dying for, and decided, ultimately, that there wasn’t,” then what would she say?

  I thought a lot about that particular topic: heroism, and the nature thereof. Because it’d occurred to me that most of my intellectual and emotional life revolved around fictional depictions of heroism. In Fallout, I was the Vault Dweller who went out into the post-apocalyptic wastes in order to preserve life for my people. In Star Wars, I risked my life to defeat the Empire. Even in my doodles of gigantic space battles that sprawled across many pages of my notebooks, I understood exactly what each of my space soldiers was giving up. It was a very simple thing: Heroism = risk + altruism + victory.

  A hero risks something very important—often, but not always, their life—in order to help others.

  Everybody would agree with this, I think.

  But it’s the third element that I was obsessed with: victory. Heroes win.

  If the Vault Dweller died before bringing back the water chip or the Garden of Eden Creation Kit or whatever else . . . if Frodo hadn’t destroyed the ring . . . if Luke hadn’t blown up the Death Star: Would they still have been heroes?

  The instinct is to say, “Yes, of course.”

  It doesn’t feel good to mock a loser. But what does losing really get you? They say that oftentimes when you jump into the churning ocean to save a drowning person, you’re just creating two corpses instead of one. Because if you’re not a very strong and careful swimmer, the drowning person will only pull you under with desperate flailing. But doesn’t the would-be rescuer deserve to be praised? After all, you risked your life. And yet . . . and yet . . . now two mothers have shattered hearts. Now two lives—the lives of human people who might’ve lit up the world writing a killer pop song or making friends with that one lonely person or, I don’t know, doing some other great stuff—are gone forever, when otherwise the cost might’ve been just one.

  That was my problem. Every day, I read about heroes. And when I wasn’t reading about them, I was dreaming about them. I wanted so badly to be one. I looked up astronaut careers, so I could be like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride and John Glenn and Alan Shepard (but not like the astronauts who burned to death in Apollo 1 or in Challenger or Columbia . . . other than Christa McAuliffe, do you remember their names? I don’t). Or I looked up careers in the military or in spycraft. Again, what about the guy who’s so full of guts and honor—the guy who charges forward, determined to save his unit—and immediately gets mowed down by machine-gun fire? Is he a hero?

  I would be that guy. I knew it. I would be that fucking guy.

  So in my car that day, I was thinking, shit, if someone came up to me and gave me a magical sword and told me I was the chosen one and asked me to defeat some cosmic evil, I’d say, “No thanks,” because you know what? Death is real. And death is really the end of everything. And I know how insignificant I am, and I know any threat worth fighting is probably way more powerful than me.

  My head was still resting on the window. The air was damp, and a caterpillar dropped down suddenly from a tree and swung back and forth in front of me. I stared at the little ridges contracting and expanding along its damp body, and for once my mind was empty.

  This was the exact moment the other guy appeared in my passenger seat.

  His first words were: “Jump scare.”

  I screamed, and my hand went for the lock, but I couldn’t open it. He grabbed my chin and said, “One two three, no you’re not dreaming; four five six, I’m about to make you an offer; seven eight nine, shut up and listen.”

  His eyes were a deep, warm, molten brown, and his skin was very dark.

  “You’re ready,” he said. “Take my hand. We’ve gotta go.”

  “Who the—?” I said. “Are you—?” But I knew—maybe I shouldn’t have known, but because my mind was already there—I knew that this was the guy: He was Gandalf, he was Dumbledore, he was Merlin. . . . This was the fucking guy.

  “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “If you take my hand, you will die. But I swear it’ll mean something. So come on.”

  My hand jerked back. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ll die? You’re not gonna try to sell me harder than that?”

  His eyes bored into mine, and then his body went slightly out of focus. The man was very dark-skinned, but he didn’t quite have the features of a black or African person, so I can’t really say what race he was supposed to be. “Do you understand that I am a god?”

  And I knew we weren’t going to banter. He wasn’t going to answer my questions or lead me around. We were not friends or allies. I’d been chosen, but I was so small and so low that I wasn’t worth the ten seconds it’d take to answer my questions.

  He didn’t hold out his hand again, but I grabbed for it, and once I’d caught hold, he wrenched me sideways and threw me onto the dirt. When I stood up, he was gone, and I was in this valley, surrounded by millions of people.

  You know the rest: a many-armed demon grabbed me up, marched me off to get all my equipment, and showed me how to find my place. I went through a day of drill, and I ate the food they gave me, and then I went to my little hole and tried to sleep, and during that day and night, I had a lot of time to think.

  And, and, and . . . my life might not’ve had a lot of meaning. My parents maybe didn’t care much about me. I maybe wasn’t interested in much or good for very much, but I enjoyed life. Death was nothingness; it was a black mass at the edge of my mind.

  I mean, okay, the fact that I was here meant magic existed, and if magic existed, then maybe so did Heaven or Nirvana or the Elysian Fields or the Grey Haven or whatever, but . . . Death. I mean . . . that’d be it. My life as I knew it would be over. I guess. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know the meaning of death! All I know is that I was terrified of it. Shit, I wish I could explain this stuff. I wish I could tell you what it’s like to be alone and sleeping in muck and to not know what is happening or why. What it’s like to see a valley covered in monsters and to know that this is real. To test the point of a spear and then to feel this unasked-for pain right in the diaphragm as you imagine it sliding into you.

  Hadn’t even taken any convincing. I cried that night and berated myself for being so stupid. All my life I’d said I was too smart for this. I was the person who knew that heroism was just a story! And yet I’d come to this place anyway.

  Our sergeant motioned for us to march, but even if he hadn’t, we’d have gotten the message. Our whole army oozed toward the riverside and carried me with it. We left behind the camp, and we marched across the still-unmarked grass between the armies.

  The enemy came into vie
w. They were like us: a mass of tiny figures, interspersed with chariots and horses and elephants. They moved slowly out of a line of campfires. People ranged over the distance between us. And for the first time I saw real heroes.

  One of them rode on a chariot that floated above the ground. Another took a shot with his bow, and that one arrow multiplied in midair until the sky was dark with shafts. I was sure the enemy army would be completely destroyed by that one shot, but another flurry of arrows appeared, slicing our guy’s arrows into mulch that rained down harmlessly. And that wasn’t the end. Another of our guys was a fucking giant: hundreds of feet tall, he soaked up enemy arrows without noticing.

  The giant stepped into the enemy lines and began swinging his club. The first rank of our forces detached, striding forward. Arrows flew out in their hundreds of thousands. The fighting was too far away for me to hear the screams, but I am sure that I saw people fall and not get up.

  We waited, not talking among ourselves. The sun grew higher, but water was plentiful, passed out in paper satchels that dissolved when we were done drinking. My friend, the crab, rubbed the edge of his claw against my armor.

  I was numb. This was it. I would die on this battlefield.

  And that’s when I caught a glimpse of the dark-skinned man who’d brought me here: the god. He was just a few dozen feet away, driving a huge golden chariot and moving toward the rear lines. The god was bare chested and unarmed, but a man in golden armor stood next to him, holding a bow. The horses neighed, forcing their way forward through our army. I dropped my spear, and I tried to push through the ranks, but the press of people was too strong. All day I’d been looking ahead, but now for the first time I got a good look back, and I saw the millions—literally millions—of people behind me.

  Sure there were snakes and giants and rat-men, too, but they were all people. And they had every face you could imagine. Torn-up, weary, fearful, stern. I just—I—I—they were a sea of gold armor and black mud. And the whole valley rippled, like a breeze across a meadow, as they moved.

  They seemed so insubstantial from where I was standing, but when I pushed, the nearest guy got a harsh look and shoved me back. I fell, and then a huge bulk appeared above and saved me from being trampled.

  “What are you doing?” The tiny mouth was set in a fleshy belly. My crab-friend was standing over me.

  “We need answers,” I said. “We cannot—absolutely cannot—just rush forward into that shit.”

  The crab stood there for a long time. So long that I feared he’d given up, but then I heard the clangor above me. Somebody was beating a spear against my friend’s hard back.

  I scrambled from under him, and then I moved next to him, jabbing one guy in the side to make room. The crab scuttled into the space, and with that wedge drawn up, we managed to slowly make our way through the army.

  When I saw the chariot again, conscious thought didn’t even come into it: I immediately hopped up onto the sideboard. “Stop!” I yelled. Our sergeant grabbed the back of my armor and grunted at me in some foreign language. I fumbled for the clips holding together my breastplate, trying to detach it, but he yanked back, throwing me into the mud.

  The muddy trot of the horses was all I could hear. A foot lashed out, connecting with my stomach. I shouted, “Help! Help!”

  Suddenly, a groan. Weapons flashed. I got up, free of my armor, and ran through the crowd. Cries went up around me, and I heard a sharp scream, but I didn’t turn.

  The man in the golden armor—he was no taller than my sister—was holding a bow whose bottom edge was braced against the floor of the chariot. His torso and face were covered with colored powder; he wore golden earrings and golden necklaces, and I saw for the first time the thin crown of gold that held back his long hair.

  The chariot driver didn’t notice me, but this guy, the one with the bow, moved faster than I could see, and other arms appeared from behind his back—they were attached to him and yet somehow independent—so that he was in the center of a cyclone of limbs. And each of those arms held an arrow.

  That’s why my feet were stuck. A forest of arrows rose from the edges of my sandals. They’d pinned me to the wooden sideboard without piercing my feet.

  “Wait!” I said, pointing to the god who was driving the chariot. “You know me!”

  The charioteer made a motion to knock me to the ground with the butt of his whip, but the man with the bow said something, and the charioteer turned, responding.

  “Please,” I said. “We don’t want to d-die here.” I turned back, looked for the crab-guy, who was pinned down beneath the fist of a giant. The chariot had stopped. In fact, the entire army seemed to have gone still.

  The archer and charioteer engaged in a heated argument. The archer turned to me, sweeping out an arm, and he said something in his strange liquid-gold language.

  “Come on,” I said. “What’d he say?” My eyes pleaded with the chariot driver. “You know English. Come on!”

  The charioteer turned sharply. “He wants to know what your problem is and such; I’m explaining that you’re a coward.”

  “What?” I said. “Excuse me? That’s not true.”

  Thousands of people were looking at me. Spears rose up methodically, and I felt the sharp clack as they banged against one other.

  “I, uh.” I looked at the archer. “I just want to know what this is all for. I mean, why are we fighting? What’d we come here for?”

  The charioteer rolled his eyes and then focused them on me. They went dark, and the swirling of the cosmos was reflected inside him. His arms unfolded, multiplying, and heads spilled out sideways from his head. This nightmare vision—all swinging limbs and sneering mouths—stared at me from dozens of eyes, and I knew it saw everything I had ever done or thought or seen. Then I fell into them, and I saw, well, I saw the swirling of the cosmos. I saw that everything is fire. All of us, we are just a mass of fire that is moving so fast and so ecstatically that it’s come to believe it’s alive.

  The vision went on for a long time. The fire that was me—the little bit of fire I thought I owned—joined in with everything else in a gigantic conflagration that burned and burned and burned and burned until, I, er, blinked. I mean, I blinked my eyes. And then the vision faded.

  I looked around me. All was silent. Every face within visible distance was holding still. As I watched, a tick-tock motion began. Heads lolled as they snapped out of the trance. Behind me, the crab rose shakily to his legs.

  “Do you see now?” the charioteer said. “Can you finally see?”

  “Er . . . ,” I said. “Yes . . . in some sense.”

  “Good.”

  He bent over and began to pull the arrows from around my sandals. “Then let us be. We have a war to prosecute.”

  The archer laughed. He reached out a hand and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “But—” I said, “in a more direct and immediate sense, I’m still confused. What is happening? Who are those people over there?”

  The charioteer started to—

  “No,” I said. “Are you the one who’s in charge? That guy over there’s wearing the crown.”

  “I am quite literally a god,” the charioteer said.

  “But are you in charge?” I said. “Wait, can you translate this for your friend? What is happening? I get that the fate of the universe in some way hangs in the balance, but can anybody tell me who those other guys are!”

  I thought the charioteer was going to blow me to bits right there, but I’d gambled right. The archer had stopped him before; the archer wore the crown; the archer was clearly giving the orders here. So he spoke to the archer, and the archer chanted some words, sparkled briefly, and nodded at me.

  “You had questions?” he said.

  “And you speak English?”

  “In a sense.”

  “What is happening? Why are we fighting?”

  The archer looked to the charioteer. “I said to you this was not the right way to raise an army. They w
ill come willingly from throughout time and space to die for you: this is what you said. But this one does not seem willing.”

  “He is willing,” the charioteer said. “He prayed for this chance.”

  Then the archer looked at me. “This is . . . It is complicated. My brothers and I are the rightful heirs to the kingdom of Hastinapura. You are on the side of justice.”

  “Wait, so we’re fighting so you can be king?” I said.

  I wanted to make a joke about democracy, but I didn’t have quite enough chutzpah.

  He pointed across the field of battle at the other army. “My cousins, the Kauravas, stole my kingdom. They insulted my wife. They attempted to murder us in our beds. They aren’t worthy to rule.”

  I waited a bit longer, to see if anything more was gonna come out. I looked back at the crab. He raised his claws. Maybe he was confused as I was, or maybe this explanation was enough for him.

  “Is that it?” I said.

  “I very much understand these concerns,” the archer said. “I too had these same questions. Do you think I wish to kill my cousin-brothers? To kill my uncle Bhishma? To kill my teacher, Dronacharya? I would give my life to save his. Believe me, this is something I do only with the utmost reluctance. But believe me, it is necessary.” He looked at the charioteer. “Could you show him the vision? The vision is what truly cleared my head.”

  “I just did that!” the charioteer said. “We don’t have time for this!”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s just . . . Are we really supposed to just, like, trust you? This could all be a lie or a trick. . . . The vision was cool and all, but it was a little like you were hypnotizing us, and—”

  The charioteer broke in: “Americans.” He looked then at the crab. “Both of you. Americans. I knew we’d have trouble . . . Well, okay, fine. You can go back.” He snapped the head off an arrow. He tossed it at me, and after some fumbling I caught it. Then he did it again, throwing it to the crab, who was more graceful, cupping his gently between two claws. “Scratch your hand with these if you want to go home.”