Cathedral of Dreams

by Terry Persun

  Keith couldn't speak. His head was still swimming from the contact with the boy and girl. He wanted to be alone, to sit in a corner for a while. Crying might release the emotion he felt, but then again it might make it worse. He walked away from the group, entered one of the stalls and sat on the ground.

  “What's wrong?” one of them said to Sam.

  “Leave him alone for a while. This has got to be as strange to him as it is to us.”

  “I wanted to talk with you anyway,” Stacy said. “I didn't know there was a girl.”

  “An angel,” Sam told Stacy, as the two of them walked from Keith.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “We had to get him out of there,” was the last thing Keith heard from their conversation.

  He slid deeper into a corner of the stall. The dirt floor felt cool and the wood wall roughed his back. There was security in being closed in. The barn had a natural feel to it, one that Keith accepted easier than the mechanical feel of the van. He allowed emotions to rise and fall inside him, to swell to near bursting and to wane so far that he felt he would disappear. In the time that he remained in the stall he smelled the dampness of age, heard the creaking of wood moving, and tasted the earth he sat on, the essence of it rising into his mouth and sliding along his tongue. With his eyes closed, Keith traveled throughout the barn, using his senses in ways he had never imagined. He felt that he had explored more of the barn while sitting in the stall than he would if he had wandered around and seen everything with only his eyes. Inside the stall, alone but protected by the other six, was the first time everything changed for Keith.

  He became the barn.

  He knew the rats and felt the wings of insects vibrate along his back. The dust that floated in the air was made of particles of hay and decomposed grain, not dirt. He swam in the air over the lofts; he floated into the wood and into the metal roof, sensing, tasting, becoming each part. By the time he finished exploring, he opened his eyes and was not surprised to see his father sitting on the ground in front of him, cross-legged and alert.

  “Help me,” Keith said while shaking his head back and forth. Nausea choked his voice. His mouth filled with saliva.

  “Trust yourself,” his father said. “These people are as lost as those inside Newcity. You know that.”

  “Where are they taking me?” Keith whispered, hoping that the others weren't outside the stall listening to him talking with himself.

  “Where are you leading them?”

  “They want me to save the others,” Keith said.

  “That can't be done. You can only let them out.”

  “Will you help?”

  The man smiled. “I am helping.”

  Keith didn't understand any of the conversation. “You're not helping,” he said.

  His father shrugged his shoulders and said, “If that's what you think,” then faded in a ripple of air.

  “Who was that?” Sam stood in the stall doorway. His voice echoed along the walls.

  “Does it matter?”

  “The angel again?” Sam couldn't restrain a smile, as though he had won a prize.

  “What are you going to do with me?” Keith said.

  “We're following you,” Sam said. “We started toward Newcity. You're the one who led us here. Not for long, I hope.”

  “I can't lead you anywhere. The images come and go. They're unreliable.”

  Sam stepped into the stall. “They are completely reliable.” He swung his arm around and pointed toward the outside. He leaned toward Keith in earnest. “They would have caught us. Do you know what they would have done? Do you have any idea what Bradley is capable of?”

  “How could I?”

  “Hitting you was only a small part of his anger, Keith. You are the single biggest threat to his plans that has ever come along.”

  “Then why didn't he have me killed right away?”

  Sam slumped from the weight of his understanding, but Keith couldn't reach in and take hold of any of it. As Sam kneeled in front of Keith he let out a long slow breath to relax. “He thought that you might have information that could make his plan easier. If he knew how you were able to escape on your own, he felt that you could lead us into Newcity through a totally unprotected area. Destroy it from the inside.”

  “But I just followed the boy. No different than the others.”

  “You are the boy. You know the way. Expand that thought for a moment and it takes on new meaning. Bradley saw that more was going on than what he could fully understand. He planned to find out as much as he could from you first.” Sam reached toward Keith, but didn't actually touch him.

  “First,” Keith said the word and knew where it led.

  “The angel, the ghost of your father, well, that expanded the idea of ‘You know the way’ by a measure of ten times. I think there's a part of Bradley that fears you.”

  “What do you make of it all?”

  “I don't know. But I do know that you have been sent for a reason,” Sam said.

  “I wasn't sent. I followed. Out of curiosity, nothing more.”

  “You still don't understand fully, but you will. I'm sure everything will be revealed to you eventually. Until that time, we're going to follow you, or the boy, whoever is leading us.” He acted sure of himself, as though he knew something that Keith didn't.

  Stacy and the others crowded in behind Sam. The audience. “We all believe in you. You don't have to understand. It's the ineffable good that you bring to us.”

  “Ineffable?”

  “Beyond explanation, beyond understanding,” she explained.

  “I know what it means, I just don't know how any of this can be called good. Isn't it possible that there is an ineffable evil as well?” Keith said.

  The group of them fidgeted. They did believe in evil. He saw it in their eyes.

  “Maybe it's Bradley, or his fears,” Sam said.

  “We can overcome that,” Stacy added.

  Keith felt frustrated talking with them. As much as they were ready for integration, none of them, including Sam, appeared to be open to possibilities beyond their first thoughts. Similar to their need to place their love into another's hands, they needed a person to place the idea of good and evil on. He had become good, while Bradley had commissioned the slot for evil.

  Sam slapped his knee and pushed into a standing position. “You seem tired,” he said. “Maybe we should all rest, get something to eat, and get back on the road. I suspect that we could backtrack and be on our way without worries. Since the others passed us by we should be safe.” He turned around and asked if Will and Rebecca were still monitoring the road.

  “Yes,” came a reply.

  “Good. We'll stay for an hour. If Bradley's men haven't returned by then, we'll assume they kept going.”

  A few nods of approval and the stall doorway emptied. Keith again sat alone inside the security of the wooden walls. He didn't understand any of it, so how could they? Sam was probably right. If he could stay in contact with the images he'd been seeing, they would lead him, and in doing so lead them all. To where, or why, he had no idea.

  It wasn't long after they left that Stacy and Brent walked into the stall with bread and fruit for Keith.

  “You need to keep up your strength,” Brent said.

  The two of them sat near Keith, who took the food willingly. He tore off a piece of bread and began to eat. He waited for them to begin the questions and it didn't take long.

  “We're all pretty amazed about the angel and the ghost of your father,” Stacy said. “Sam didn't know a lot of the details – he only caught parts of the conversation while waiting outside – but he heard enough to make us all curious.”

  “I'm curious too,” Keith said. “Nothing has been explained to me. And trust me, I've asked.”

  Stacy broke out with the big question. “Why would all this be going on with you when you don't appear to be that much different than any of the rest of us?”

  “I wish I
knew.”

  “Do you think you'll find out? Will it be revealed to you, as Sam suggested?” Stacy said.

  “I hope so. In fact, I hope that it stops altogether, so that I can have a normal life.” He laughed and looked at the two people who sat with him. “I don't even know what normal is out here, but I'd like to find out.”

  “Don't wish for it to stop,” Brent said. “Not yet. You are our only hope.”

  “Hope for what?” Keith didn't understand. “Look, weren't things better for you inside Newcity?”

  “We had no freedom in there. You must see how the chips kept us passive, reduced us to sentient robots,” Stacy pleaded. “Out here, we can feel.” She balled her fists and raised them to her chest. Her mouth and cheeks tightened. Her eyes closed.

  Brent automatically reached over and held her. She leaned into his shoulder. Their actions appeared staged.

  Robert strolled into the stall behind where Brent and Stacy sat. “And then Bradley takes us and makes us work for him. He seems perfectly nice at the beginning.”

  Keith continued to eat while they talked. Then he looked at them. “So what's the difference between the two?” He wanted them to think, to explore the situation. “It doesn't matter if you're being controlled by Newcity or by Bradley, you're still not completely free.”

  “There is no freedom. No complete freedom. Fine,” Stacy said, “we know that. But what we also know is that we'd rather have the ability to choose for ourselves. And the others, the ones left behind, they deserve the same freedom.”

  “Even if they didn't ask for it?” Keith asked.

  “We'll liberate them,” Brent said.

  “It may not make it better for them. Especially those who never asked to be liberated. Not everyone believes what you believe,” Keith said. “Not everyone believes what Bradley believes.” He scanned the three of them, but their faces hardly changed. At that moment, they could have been chipped. The lack of reaction was disheartening. “Bradley is going to try to stop you.”

  “We're going to help them,” Stacy said. “Even if we have to kill Bradley and those who believe in what he's doing.”

  Chapter 14

  Stacy's words made Keith shiver. They considered killing Bradley, to stop him from killing those inside Newcity. It didn't make sense to Keith. And for some reason, none of it sounded wrong to either party. Bradley contained a boiling pot of anger that lashed out seldom, so far, but simmered under the surface at all times. His anger was so strong that Keith literally felt it when they were in the same space. Stacy, on the other hand, appeared calm, yet completely serious about what she said. Killing Bradley, or any of those who were with him, was just another thing to do, a way to stop him, a way that, from where Keith was sitting, appeared to be okay with her. In Newcity they'd all be taken away by the police, there'd be no killing, and the issue would be over.

  Stacy and Brent got up to leave. Brent reached for Keith's plate.

  “You coming?” Stacy said.

  “In a few minutes.” Keith didn't want to go with them. Why go back to the place he just escaped from?

  “We shouldn't have bothered you,” Brent said. “You need to be alone where you can focus on our next move.”

  Keith smiled as they left. He didn't have anything to say. There was no next move as far as he could tell. They already had their own idea for what was going on with him anyway. There wasn't much he could do to alter their thinking.

  He contemplated Stacy's last comment for a moment. There was no need to kill anyone. The Newcity residents wouldn't fight. They couldn't. Stopping Bradley could be much easier than any of them realized. If they blew up his weapons, it would take months for him to prepare again. A short term fix, for sure, but a non-violent one. He felt as though he understood the situation better than either party, as odd as that sounded even to him. Could it be due to the removal of the chip? To his unrestricted mind?

  He reveled in the clarity of thought he'd gained by having the chip removed. But the most recent clarity – intimacy with the essence that was the barn, personal sensations shared with the insects – bothered him. He held out his hands and stared at the wrinkles in his palms. Turning his hands over, the knuckles pushed against his skin; the nails, with their white moons, laughed at him. It would be an understatement to suggest that he was not the same, that everything had changed for him. Add to the strangeness of the shift in his perceptions the fact that he continued to see apparitions, people beyond who was already there, and Keith feared for his own sanity. Of course there was always the idea that Newcity still had a hold on him, and that as the seven of them approached the city the images would become stronger. So far, he had followed their lead. What if he didn't? What if he fought back?

  For now, the issue to worry about was the pending violence, and although the violence was surely kicked up a few notches, all the talk of killing didn't have much of an effect on him. Perhaps that's what Stacy exhibited, a lack of full understanding about what killing meant. He rubbed his jaw, still somewhat sore where Bradley had backhanded him. The anger in the tent had hurt more than the physical contact.

  He shifted his thoughts to the beauty of the sunrise that morning, to erase the deepening gloom settling into him from thoughts of killing. Closing his eyes, he shifted to images of the sunset from the night before, which he had watched intently as the colors folded from one into another throughout the sun's last moments. The process was slow, beautiful, and filled him with feelings he could not explain. Those feelings returned as he reviewed the memory.

  The spread of available emotions was extensive and widening further every day, but the ones he actually experienced were more real. They could be called up in memory and re-experienced almost as clearly as they were during the event that created them.

  So, again, when he turned his thoughts to killing, he had difficulty sensing what that entailed physically. He literally couldn't sense it. The closest thing he had to the idea of death was from the movies that he'd watched. Even as he recalled them, no large swing in emotion occurred. He had no point of reference.

  It was less than an hour later that the others were prepared to get back on the road. Their narrow escape had turned into a roadside rest, a break in the monotony of driving. Yet Sam had requested that Will and Rebecca continue to monitor the road even as the rest of them piled into the van.

  A breeze swept through the barn, the scent of morning slipping in to arouse everyone's spirits and hurry their movements. It appeared to Keith that only he noticed how nature was as much in charge of their activities as they were that morning. The natural need for nourishment, the cool breeze exciting them into action, and the heavy presence of the barn as it pressured them to move on, to go back into the world from where they came. The natural signs shifted and turned all around them without their knowledge. The escapees acted on those signs without knowing that they were doing so. Keith alone seemed to comprehend how it all came together like an orchestra of life. Regardless of their mission, the others appeared to be following a plan that the world had devised, except for a few nudges from the boy and angel.

  Keith went along with the escapees even though he was certain the world was involved in their decisions. Nature stood out as a coarse control. And if that were true, then the apparitions were the fine controls. Again, he thought of going counter to the boy's lead, to the angel's words, but why choose to go contrary to the world's motion when staying in its flow was so much easier? The question continually at the forefront was whether the boy and angel were part of the world's plan or part of Newcity's?

  Once Rebecca climbed into the van, Will slid the barn door open. He leaned into it and again the bearings squealed and the door jerked as he shoved. Once it was open, he jogged to the van and leaped into his seat. Sam backed out of the barn, swung the van around, and retraced their tracks.

  They were driving along a short while when Robert asked, “What if they parked someone at the crossroads?”

  “I only saw one
vehicle,” Brent said.

  “Doesn't mean there wasn't another one,” Robert said.

  Brent turned to Keith. “Well?”

  “I'm getting nothing. Keep going,” he said.

  “We'll go with that,” Brent said.

  It wasn't long and they came to the crossroads and turned left toward the city. “They probably thought we took another route in,” Sam said. “There are multiple ways to get into the city.” Nonetheless, Sam speeded along faster than Keith remembered him driving the first part of their trip. The tension of those inside the vehicle rose in the air, even though there was little talking. Keith felt an array of emotions, including uncomfortable, worried, and then fearful. He listened and watched for signs, for the boy and angel, but received nothing he could interpret into a change in what they were already doing. Stay the course was what the non-message said.