by J. Thorn
She blinked and removed her hands from the grip of the other two and climbed into a sitting position, her head between her knees and her body rocking back and forth. Samuel rolled onto his stomach and pushed both hands into the sand until he was on all fours. Saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth, and he could taste the sand in his teeth. Samuel felt his lungs open and begin to draw oxygen to their full capacity. A dull ache blossomed behind his eyes, much like the ones he experienced when he was drinking. Jack remained lying in the sand with his mouth open and his eyes closed.
The threat of death brought a vulnerability to the strangers as the instinctual power to survive took over.
“Something is wrong with Jack,” Lindsay said.
“Please, let me think,” Samuel said.
He pushed back, squatting and staring at the mountain. The peak glared down with a foreboding stare. Samuel noticed the angle was slightly different, but the mountain seemed as far away as it had been before. He turned to look over his shoulder, and he could see sparks on the horizon. Samuel held a hand up to his forehead and thought he could make out the cabin at the epicenter of the epic firestorm.
“It worked,” he croaked through parched lips.
“Damn it.”
Samuel and Lindsay spun their heads as Jack rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands.
“Who shit in my mouth?”
Lindsay giggled, which spawned a raucous laugh from Samuel. Jack looked back and forth with a smile before he became infected with the outburst. All three gave in and let their laughter shake the sand from their lungs.
“That was one hell of a ride, Samuel. How did you do it?”
“Can’t say I know exactly how the slip works. Trying a short-range, localized one was a risk. But,” Samuel said, pointing toward the fireworks show underneath the western sky, “not sure we had much choice. The fire had us pinned, and the cloud looks bigger than it did before.”
Lindsay and Jack looked into the sky. The reversion’s cloud extinguished the last remnants of frivolity the group shared, returning its cold, dark doom.
“Did anyone else have a flashback?” Jack asked.
“Not me,” Lindsay said.
“Nothing,” Samuel said.
“First Gran, now Joey.”
Lindsay scrunched her eyebrows and shook her head, but Samuel nodded and looked Jack directly in the eye.
“Tell us,” he said, sitting in the sand and waiting for the story to commence.
***
“Who is Deva?” Jack asked.
“What did you say?” Samuel asked. He sat up, then stood so that he was standing, towering over the young man.
“Deva.”
Samuel shook his head. He turned to look at the mountain and then back at Jack.
“I think we talked. Well, not exactly. I listened a lot, and he talked.”
Samuel sat back down and took a deep breath. “He talked to you during the slip.”
“Yes, before my flashback.”
“I didn’t get any of this excitement,” Lindsay said. “I passed out and woke up, like being wasted on vodka. Not fair.” She blew a wisp of hair from her mouth and gave Samuel a wicked smile.
He thought of her dolled up, holding a pint of vodka and wearing that smile. Before his imagination could completely hijack his brain, he turned to Jack. “Start there.”
Jack sighed and looked skyward. He marveled at how soon he had become accustomed to seeing the expansive darkness above. He was beginning to forget what the sun felt like.
“Commitment,” Jack said. “No, wait. More like duty. It sounded like a voiceover from one of those campy, sixties horror flicks. He never called himself Deva, but I knew that was his name. There was another word he used that was like ‘duty’ but more exotic sounding.”
“Ahimsa,” Samuel said.
“That’s it,” Jack said.
“Go ahead.”
“He was explaining what it meant, and I thought my job was to listen, so that’s exactly what I did.”
Lindsay’s eyes narrowed and Samuel forced himself to breathe, unsure why the name was the source of so much anxiety within the group.
Jack knew Samuel was seeing the recollection through his head, as if they were two friends watching a movie together.
“Do you know of the Jains?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“They were the first, in your originating locality, to come up with the idea of ahimsa. They called themselves ‘the defender of all beings.’ Do you know why?”
“No,”
“The Jains believed in conquering desire as a way of achieving enlightenment. Enlightenment, for them, meant escaping the cycle of rebirth. Reincarnation was a curse to avoid, not some type of immortality.’
“Sounds Buddhist,” I said.
“It is. Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries. But they are not the same.” He paused. “Because of their belief in the cycle of rebirth, Jains also believed every living thing had a soul. Not just intelligent creatures, but the trees, birds, plants. Everything. So the pain man inflicts on other living creatures is really the pain he inflicts on himself. ‘Many times I have been drawn and quartered, torn apart, and skinned. Helpless in snares and traps, a deer. An infinite number of times’.”
“That’s not possible. You can’t exist without destroying something else that is living,” I said.
“You can if you are not of the living.”
I thought about what he said, but could not find the words to reply.
“I hope you find your moksha and free yourself from the rebirth cycle. I hope you can find the peace I cannot.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Samuel shook his head, trying to dislodge the same words that entered his head before.
“Yes,” Jack said.
“Some call it the path of righteousness, but I find that misleading. It has nothing to do with right or wrong, only duty.”
“What can I call you?” I asked.
“Whatever suits you.”
I nodded in the ether somehow, waiting for Deva to continue.
“The Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jains, they all incorporated dharma into their belief systems, but it is much more ancient than that. Those in the West liked to call it fate, but even that is a misnomer. There is a natural order of things, a rta. Your dharma corresponds to this order. Of course, the Hindus used moksha to reinforce the caste system, which put thousands of people in the gutters of their cities, but the idea behind moksha was that you would be rewarded for pursuing your own dharma. In the Rig Veda, the teachings claim that dharma is not just law or harmony, but it is pure reality. Verily, that which is dharma is truth.”
“What does this have to do with me?” I asked. I felt Deva pause before answering.
“Your dharma includes the man and the woman, as well as the mountain you see rising in the east. Until you deal with these souls, your dharma will not be fulfilled.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Deva said.
“I don’t understand any of this. I just want out. I want to go home,” I said to the faceless Deva.
“When the moment arrives, you will fulfill your dharmic responsibility or you will be reborn in the cycle that is tied to your fate. It is how the universe will be. It is how it has always been.”
Samuel winced again. The pain that started behind his eyes now commanded his entire head. He felt his vision constrict and wanted nothing more than to collapse into a bed and sleep for days. Lindsay huffed and stood, brushing the sand from her shirt.
“That’s it? What the hell does that mean?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “I want the hell out of this place, and I couldn’t care less about any of your New Age bullshit.”
Samuel watched the blood surge to her face and overtake the playful expression she wore moments earlier. “Please,” Samuel said. The pain in his head began to steal his vision. “I need a moment to think a
bout what to do.”
“Like there’s a choice? Look, asshole. We jumped or skipped or—”
“Slipped. We slipped,” Jack said.
Lindsay threw a murderous look at the young man before turning her tirade back to Samuel. “We slipped,” she said. “And all we did was move from one dead spot with fire rain to another dead spot without it. I could’ve done that with a brisk walk.”
Samuel placed his hands over his head and collapsed into the sand.
“What the fuck kind of choice is that?” she asked, spitting her words at Samuel.
When he did not answer, Lindsay pivoted and stormed off toward the mountain, kicking sand in the dark silence of the dying locality.
“Leave her be,” Samuel said to Jack as he rose to chase her. “Let her cool down. Denial is a normal part of the process.”
“Women,” Jack said in the way men do when none are within earshot.
“The flashback?” Samuel asked. Each word felt like a stake driven through his head.
“Shouldn’t she hear, too?”
Samuel waved off the question, doing his best to avoid any unnecessary speaking.
“Another moment of death. Like Gran. I’m starting to wonder why I ended up around people at their moment of passing. Do you think I was a psychic?”
“Or a serial killer,” Samuel said, the blinding headache unable to stifle his wisecrack.
“Funny, asshole.”
Samuel circled a hand in the air, signaling his disdain for the tangent the conversation had taken. “Take me there, Jack.”
***
He drew the dry, desert air into his lungs and revisited the event for what felt like the third time. The scene materialized in his head, and although it had a dreamlike quality, the sensation was vivid and realistic, spanning space and time. Not feeling the necessity to speak, Jack let the memory play out again. The sequence skipped through segments of time not relevant to Samuel’s understanding of the events.
“Yeah, man,” Joey said, huddling around the rotary phone hanging from the kitchen wall. He glanced at his old man on the couch watching spaghetti westerns and his mother at the stove preparing the real spaghetti. “Seven. Should be empty by then.”
He hung up the phone and slithered down the narrow hallway toward his bedroom, at the back of the single-story ranch, built in a development with thousands of others just like it. Being the eldest, Joey gloated about having his own room, even though it was crammed with so much junk that he couldn’t remember what the carpet looked like. His sister had her own room, but she was the eldest and only girl. Joey’s three younger brothers shared the room next to his. It held a bunk bed and a futon, which left little space to maneuver. A battered, limp basketball hoop dangled from the back of their door, with holes punched in the drywall to prove how competitive those boys could be.
Joey felt the nervous twitch in his stomach, much like the one just before a big hockey game, the kind that would force him to visit the bathroom before he put on his skates. He had three hours to kill, and the street-hockey game down at the park had already finished. The kids who said they’d come back to play after lunch never returned. You had to get your street hockey in when you could, before a video-game marathon or a trip to the swim club depleted the rosters.
He flipped through a dog-eared magazine and skimmed over the interviews until he came across a two-page spread of Alanis Morissette, who looked like an alt-rock queen in her black leather pants. Joey felt the burn below. It was too bad most of the girls in his class were more into Mariah than Alanis. He tossed the magazine to the ground and stood in front of the full-length mirror on the back of his door. Joey flexed his taut, teenage muscles while admiring the length of his hair.
“Murder ball?”
The question broke Joey from his contemplative posing, and he turned to see brother number three holding a sponge ball in one hand and a Wiffle-ball bat in the other.
“Nah.”
“C’mon, Joey. I told Jeff that if he gets an out, we get to beat him three times. Each.”
Joey laughed and shrugged it off. “Got too much on my mind. Maybe next game?”
“Whatever. Go back to kissing yourself or whatever you do in your room alone.”
Joey grabbed the nearest item and launched it at his brother, but it was a second late. The CD case slammed into the closed door, spilling the liner notes for Nevermind onto the patch of carpet not covered in hamburger wrappers or dirty T-shirts.
He leapt onto his bed and stared at the Alicia Silverstone poster dangling from above. Something about that Aerosmith video bothered him. He remembered some friends saying how she would always be “the Aerosmith chick,” always be the dumb blonde from Clueless. There were a lot of things about the world Joey had yet to learn.
Time crawled. Joey watched the sliver of sunlight march down the far wall and closer to the foot of the bed. He listened to the hustle and flow of the rest of his family maneuvering through the house, which seemed to be three sizes too small to hold them. Jeff was on time out for not eating, and Johnny was wailing about some injustice leveled by Duke. He no longer thought of his father as “Dad” since he legally changed his name in honor of John Wayne. Calling him “Duke” instead was silly, and he thought it was the reason his mom acted so distant toward his father.
At some point, Joey awoke with a startled shake. He had slept through dinner and felt the protest in his stomach. The house sat still, with only the occasional bark coming through the open window. He stood and stretched and followed that with a yawn. Joey opened the door on an empty house. He saw remnants of the battle that had taken place at dinner, including Johnny’s untouched plate of sweet potatoes.
“That would explain the wailing,” he said to himself with a smile.
The John Wayne clock hanging above Duke’s favorite chair read quarter to seven. Todd would be there in fifteen minutes, and he hadn’t even gotten it out yet. As if on cue, the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Leaving right now,” Todd said.
“Okay,” Joey said, hanging up.
He felt his heartbeat quicken, and his mouth went dry. He shoved his head under the kitchen faucet and drank in the cool water, careful not to let his hair fall into the stack of dirty dishes inches from his nose. Joey took a final glance at the dinner battlefield and felt his hunger give way to adrenaline. He went into the living room and shoved a hand down the side of Duke’s favorite recliner until he felt the cool tingle of the key. He grasped it, lifted it up, and brushed the potato chip crumbs from the teeth.
Joey held the key like a sacred artifact as he walked back down the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom. Crossing the threshold made him feel like a violator, and he cringed, imagining his mom in this room wearing only her bra and panties. The key tingled in his palm, begging to be used. Joey dropped to his knees and slid the cedar box out onto the floor then sat cross-legged in front of it. The silver medallion on top gleamed even in the dimness of early evening. Joey drew his hand across the charging stallion forever frozen in sterling silver. He inhaled the familiar and forbidden scent of cedar before sliding the key inside the lock. It turned soundlessly, and Joey lifted the lid with his left hand.
Although the pistol was a small .22 caliber, Joey saw what it did to tin cans and cantaloupes. He knew Duke would not have kept it under the bed to protect his family if it didn’t carry enough punch to get the job done. He looked down at the ivory handle and traced a finger down the black steel barrel. Joey grabbed it from the case and brought both hands up, aiming the gun at the mirror on the wall like one of those detectives from TV. He set the gun down on the shag carpet and removed the box of shells tucked inside the cedar case. Joey flipped the chamber open and grabbed three shells from the case. As he slid the first one inside, the doorbell rang. Joey ran to the door and yanked it open to see Todd on the front step.
“Got it?”
“Of course. I know all of Duke’s hiding places. At least this time I d
idn’t have to fish the key out of the toilet tank.”
Todd smiled and stepped inside, pushing the door shut behind him. Joey turned the deadbolt and took a quick glance out of the living room window to make sure the driveway remained empty.
“What time are they coming home?” Todd asked.
“Later. I don’t know.”
Todd shrugged and gasped, stumped by such an answer. “Well, what the fuck? One hour, three hours?”
Joey shrugged and looked at Todd without a word.
“Okay. Guess we do this now and hope Duke doesn’t come home while we’re fondling his pistol.”
The boys laughed at the double entendre before heading down the hallway to Joey’s room. Joey held his hand out to Todd, the gun sitting in his palm like a glistening onyx monster.
“You got shells?”
“A box,” Joey said.
“We only need one. Unless of course you grew a set of balls today.”
“Let’s start with one,” Joey said.
Todd smiled and grabbed the grip. He flipped the gun sideways and spun the chamber while the metal clicked through, spilling the musky scent of oil into the air.
“Gotta give it to your old man. Duke really takes care of this thing.”
Joey smiled, unsure whether to feel pride or guilt at the fact he and Todd were handling his father’s most cherished, and most dangerous, possession.
“I need to wipe it down and clean it up before we put it back or he’ll kick my ass.”
Todd shook his head, holding the pistol up and aiming it at the women adorning Joey’s walls.
“So how’s it go?” Joey asked.
“Put one in, spin, pull it. Ain’t complicated. We go a few rounds and then I kick your ass at NFL Madden.”
Joey laughed at Todd, knowing he’d never lose at video game football. Joey could get those virtual players to obey his command with fingers that glided across the buttons.
“Who starts?” Joey asked. He felt a tingle in his stomach and his mouth went dry. “You or me?”
“Slow down, cowboy,” Todd said. “There are only two horses in this here rodeo.”
