©2001, 2005, 2011 Jonathan Zap Please Note: The podcast is of the 2005 version, quite a number of improvements were made for the 2011 version. Eventually I’ll do another podcast of the updated version so up to you if you want to listent to an obsolete version.

ACTUALLY, I WOULD PUT OFF READING THIS OR LISTENING TO THE PODCAST BECAUSE AS OF APRIL 2012 THIS DOCUMENT IS GOING THROUGH A MAJOR REVISION, EXPECTED TO BE COMPLETE BY SUMMER 2012.

illustration—black and white copy of Parallel Journeys collage

I know I may be exceeding the limits of whatever credibility I have in your eyes, but I feel an intense inner compulsion to tell you about the anomalous experience that occurred to me just last night. As you learned from my earlier email I am now in Seattle where I am continuing my traveling fundraising canvass for the Pinion Mesa Animal Refuge.

I was out knocking on doors, “annoying people in the privacy of their own homes,” as Danny, my canvassing mentor used to describe it when we canvassed together for a well known environmental group. It was a rainy evening and Seattle was troubled by a thick fog, a fog that had the mind-numbing feeling of a bankrupt dot com executive lying etherized upon a table.

Canvassing for an animal refuge can be frustrating work in the best of circumstances, but when it is a rainy Friday night, and most everybody is out on the town except elderly, shut-ins, or people so exceptionally rude that there was no place else for them to be on a Friday night except home, waiting, waiting for days, or even weeks possibly, for some canvasser to knock on their door, some dutiful, innocent canvasser on whom they could vent the bitter poisons of a life of sleep and irritability, an incarnation spent in work places lit with florescent lights and a private life that consisted mainly of cable and heavily processed food. A life of that much misery and boredom had to be someone’s fault, and that someone very likely was this unwanted person standing on their door step with a clipboard. These were the kind of people that were laying in wait for me on this fog-obscured night.

And so, to protect whatever healthy tissues may remain within me, I retreated within myself, while I allowed my waking self to be somewhat cloaked and etherized, shrouding myself in that trance-like dissociative state that we canvassers call “auto pilot.”

Auto pilot allows the canvasser’s body to go through all the motions of canvassing, while his spirit body is off doing something else, such as thinking about a troubled romantic relationship, or wondering if there was anything to the cycle shift of the Mayan long count calendar—December 21, 2012. And it was actually this last item that I happened to be thinking of as I opened the chain link gate of a run down house with an infinitely bland early Seventies look to it. When I listened to inspiring guests on the Art Bell show, 2012 would sometimes light up in my mind like fireworks on a clear summer night. But now, after a couple of hours of walking around in the rain and getting dissed by the few people that were home, I was starting to have doubts about a lot of things, and I wondered if 2012 might not turn out to be a big, fat wet cardboard dud like Y2K.

But just as I had that doubting thought my eyes were dazzled by a striking synchronicity. Just above the door of this house in the dull gold of brass numerals was the address—2012! I stopped for a moment and felt shock reverberating through my body. No, it wasn’t a devastating shock like a lightening bolt, it was more like the static electric shock you might get walking across a thick carpet, but lasting a moment or two longer. And then a moment after the shock registered, a skeptical inner voice offered an entirely plausible prosaic explanation. Subliminally, or, as the President of the world’s supreme and only super power would say, subliminably, I had seen the large brass address numerals and that had acted as an unconscious catalyst to my scattered thoughts which had alighted on the Mayan end date only seconds before. But this was even more of a synchronicity in a way—only now the meaning had reversed itself, for this version of it deflated 2012 into a parlor trick played on me by my own unconscious to deliver a shock that would at first seem miraculous, but would moments later be revealed as a mundane case of unconscious influence.

Anyway, these were the dissonant, somewhat darkly toned thoughts cascading through my mind when I knocked on the door of the 2012 house. After I had already knocked on the door I noticed several visual clues that I probably shouldn’t haven’t knocked. My mind had been so caught up in the Mayan issue that I had failed to notice the most obvious and classic signs that a highly conservative, elderly person lived in this particular house. The stoop was covered in threadbare astro turf, and window sill shelves held dusty knick-knacks of the sort where a ceramic Eiffel Tower might stand next to a puffy, large-eyed plastic child whose outspread arms held a little placard that read “I love you this much Grandma!”

Sure enough, a gaunt, elderly woman in a shabby bathrobe opened the door the three inches allowed by the security chain and stared at me. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts and she stared at me with a look of uncomprehending irritability that teetered right at the edge of senile paranoia. There was a hearing aid in one ear, but something told me that the batteries had been dead for a long time.

Her appearance may sound unprepossessing, but her face was ground zero for a deja vu shockwave. My mind reeled as auto pilot delivered the opening line of my canvassing rap,

“Sorry to bother you, my name is Jonathan and I’m doing a fundraiser for the Pinion Mesa WildLife Refuge—”

“Mr. Johnson from the what?”

“From the Pinion Mesa Wild Life Refuge.”

“I don’t need any wild life. I’m on a fixed income.”

But I was no longer listening to what she was saying, because now I knew with absolute certainty where I had seen this old woman before.

It was in the Winn-Dixie supermarket in suburban Fairview, Maryland in 1965. It was the second day of a week long visit with my cousins when I saw her, an old woman who happened to be a perfect copy of an old woman I had seen in the Associated Supermarket on Kingsbridge Avenue in the Bronx just three or four days earlier. Even though I was a child I understood immediately the significance of what I had seen. It was that shattering, archetypal moment when you see the flaw in the matrix, when you see that you’ve been had, that things are not at all what they are trying to seem. Somehow I had always sensed that a lot of people, probably most people, and possibly even all people (I sometimes wondered in solipsistic paranoia) were, what I called “extras” or “walk-ons.” They were people somehow contrived to fill in crowd scenes, to take up most of the empty space on subway trains, to mutely walk down sidewalks holding lumpy plastic shopping bags in the hot sun. But if you looked at their eyes, if you looked close, there was no one there, they had those empty glass doll’s eyes and everything about them was mechanical.

I had always sensed this, but until that moment I had never had absolute proof of the deception. But what was I to do with that proof when I was still a small child? I continued down the supermarket aisle doing my best to hold up my end of the great facade, because I was afraid to confront the deception. If I were to call it out, if I were to have shouted at the top of my lungs in the supermarket that I knew it was all a great deception— I felt that I would bring down a great evil upon myself. I sensed, correctly I believe, that the powerful will behind the great deception would not allow me to expose it. If I were to step out of line there would be immediate and devastating vengeance visited upon me. In my mind’s eye I saw the supermarket lady emitting a piercing, high-pitched scream, and when she did so all the other extras would stop whatever they were doing and also emit the same high-pitched scream. I would be the only one not making this scream, and they would quickly circle around me, and engulf me.

And now here was this old supermarket lady again, but her physiognomy, her apparent age, was a perfect replica of how she appeared decades earlier. So much had changed in me since I had last confronted her, and the fearful accommodation of the deception that characterized my childhood had been replaced by the will to know, the will to see through the deception no matter what the cost. I stared into her eyes in a way that let her, and everyone, know that the game was up, that I had seen through the great deception, and was not going to accommodate the illusion for even a single second more. Instantly, the old woman, the walk-on, dropped her facade. The senile old woman’s scowl disappeared along with the cataracts and there was a high pitched ringing or humming in my ears. I couldn’t quite hear what was said to me, but I knew I had been invited into the house and stepped into a living room whose only illumination was a black-and-white television with a test pattern on it.

And then I had that acutely embarrassing sensation you get when you realize you have been way off in guessing someone’s age, or perhaps have even mistaken their gender, because I saw now that the old woman was not actually the supermarket lady, or even an old woman, but a pale school boy with large, sorrowful grey eyes. He wore a white button-down shirt, narrow dark tie and grey trousers and his neck was weirdly long and elastic. His style of dress seemed to be that of an English school boy from an earlier era. There was an uncanny intelligence, as well as sadness in his eyes. Automatically I asked,

“Are you interested in helping endangered wildlife?”

“Yes, we are.” He had a slightly British accent and spoke in a manner that was confident, formally polite, but also deeply sincere and humble. His tone and answer were so unexpected I wasn’t sure what to say next.

“You are?”

“Yes.” he replied with the identical tone—sincere, confident precision.

“You want to help endangered wildlife?” His manner unsettled me, and I was lapsing into redundancy.

“It’s the main reason I came here.” This last statement puzzled me into another silence. I replayed it slowly in my mind,

It’s-the- main-reason-we-came-here. He sounded so sure of himself, but I couldn’t quite get a handle on what he meant.

“Follow me please.” He turned and gracefully, almost elegantly, motioned for me to follow. I followed him out of the darkened living room and into a long narrow hallway. We turned a corner and now there was a long wide corridor of polished brown marble, magnificently decorated with Persian rugs of deep colors and intricate patterns. Crystal chandeliers glimmered in the high arched ceilings. There were beautiful cabinets of mahogany and beveled glass that were filled with what appeared to be antique nautical instruments—sextants, astrolabe, chronometer, ship’s compass, globes of various kinds, a complicated apparatus of gears and spheres of precious stone that was apparently a simulacrum of the solar system. I followed the boy down the long corridor, and into a room that looked like the private study of a Nineteenth Century English gentleman. There were floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes of fine, old, hand-bound books of the sort with marbleized end papers, and gilt titles. There were draperies of wine-dark velvet, and a chandelier of fine, old crystal. The boy motioned me toward a comfortable chair, while he sat behind a large desk with an elaborately carved oriental dragon motif. On the desk was a single object, an exquisite mechanical clock, a “grand complication,” I believe they are called with numerous hands and dials that showed phases of the sun and moon, and God only knew what else, for this clock had alchemical symbols or glyphs where one expected to see Roman numerals. The clock was housed in a crystal bell that revealed a whirring galaxy of gears, jeweled bearings, and other tiny parts in complicated movement.

“Would you care for something to drink?” The boy motioned to a small marble-topped serving cabinet on which there were glasses and a prismatic decanter of amber liquid. I assumed it contained some costly brandy, and wasn’t sure about the legality of accepting alcohol from a minor.

“It’s non alcoholic.” the boy seemed able to read my mind.

“Well, in that case…” He carefully poured me a drink, and handed me a glass tumbler of the amber liquid. It tasted golden, fragrantly herbal, like a mixture of sparkling cider, currants, maple syrup and cinnamon. It’s effect was warming, relaxing, enlivening in a way that was more like an elixir than a stimulant. This seemed magical and uncanny, until I remembered that nowadays, exotic, herbal concoctions could be found in every corner store. I took another sip of the drink, and put my clipboard filled with animal photographs on the desk.

“So, how long have you been interested in helping endangered wildlife?” I asked.

“Oh, a very long time,” he replied. “It’s only in recent years that we’ve allowed ourselves to intervene.” This seemed an odd, even weirdly grandiose thing for a school boy to say. But his manner did not seem to suggest pretentiousness, so much as a world weary, poignant sadness.

“What kind of endangered wildlife are you interested in?” He looked puzzled by my question, and his eyebrows arched quizzically.

“Your kind of course, and all the other kinds of wildlife in this realm, because it’s all endangered isn’t it?” This was an odd way of putting it, but I knew what he meant. I had often been struck by the irony of talking about certain endangered species, when really the whole planet was in an ecological crisis, and almost every species, besides cockroaches and bacteria, were somewhat endangered.

“Are you interested in volunteering to work with the animals?” There was a long moment of silent eye contact, he had a boy’s face but his large grey eyes seemed so old, the moment of eye contact seemed to stretch on and…. then there is a complete lapse in my memory, I guess this is what some people call “missing time,” because I found myself opening the chain link gate of the 2012 house… I knew I should leave, I remembered what had happened until that moment of eye contact with the boy, but there was just a blankness inside about any transition. I closed the gate and walked down the street feeling a bit stunned. It felt like I had been in a hall of mirrors, and there was a sense that I had been hypnotized, or put into some kind of trance and made to see a series of visions. And my questions to the boy, when I reviewed them in my mind, did not quite make sense, it was as if I was not getting what was happening to me. Had I been in shock or somehow put into shock? I also had the feeling that the supermarket lady was pulled out of my own memory. There was a feeling that I had been tested, or evaluated, and that the test had all been various forms of simulation and illusion.

I looked in my clipboard for my map so I could make a mark where the house was, and I discovered, that in the clear plastic envelope where I put donations, there were now seven very new-looking hundred dollar bills that I had never seen before. Whatever illusions or manipulations I had been exposed to, it had at least been a very successful night of fundraising.

II.

Several months had passed, summer had turned into fall and I had returned to Colorado, but was still canvassing for the Pinion Mesa Wildlife Refuge. It was a dark and windy evening, autumn leaves swirling around my feet, gusts of wind almost throwing me off balance as I came around a secluded cul de sac. I noticed that lights—pink and blue lights, were reflecting off the white vinyl siding of a house I approached. They could have been Christmas lights, but Halloween was only a week away, and Halloween lights are usually orange. The lights shimmered and moved. I drew closer, till I stood beside the house….But where are the lights coming from?

There was a field behind the house and I saw glimmers of light out there, but the wind blowing in my face seemed to blur my vision and what I saw looked like a ring of sparklers seen through fog or colored, glowing smoke whipping around in the wind. I walked between the houses toward the field fighting a fierce head wind. And then I saw it, and seeing it caused my mind to shatter. I know that “mind shattering” is something of a cliché of expression, but I actually felt it shattering, shattering like a bone china tea cup falling ten stories onto a floor of polished, black marble. My mind shattered into blankness for a moment or two, and then it staggered to its mental feet and made a crazed and wobbly attempt to explain to itself what it was seeing. I thought for a moment or two that I was witnessing the birth of a tornado, a tornado that was pulsing with ball lightening, or luminescent plasma or aurora borealis, or… But, no, no, this was outside any known category, this was a shockingly anomalous vortex, a vortex spinning with furious speed, but its spinning was more than spinning, it was like looking up through the eye of a tornado, but it was a tornado not of wind, but of luminous, scintillating filaments, and each of the filaments, which seemed to have no beginning and no end, twisted and spun each along its own axis, like glowing strands of double helix DNA hooked up like plumbing rooter snakes to invisible turbines spinning and whipping them around the tornado. Twisting, spinning, spiraling filaments of light forming a pulsing funnel, a funnel that folded back and in on itself again and again as if God, the father, were pulling back his foreskin again and again during a cosmic multiple orgasm.

Air rushed away from this singularity, and the resulting winds blasted me nearly off my feet, but I could not retreat from it, it had a furious, ecstatic energy that drew me with an inexorable certainty like a moth hurtling itself toward a thousand watt bulb. In my whole body, the awareness dawned that I beheld a portal, a wormhole vortex of spinning, vibrating, hyper-dimensional super strings. No, it was not an hallucination, not a flashback, not something that Stephen Hawking could hallucinate while having a wet dream on sixty-four hits of blue Sandoz acid.

The Universe, the Matrix, was having a kundalini crisis, and I knew that this crisis was, for me, an opportunity. I knew that my finger trembled above the reset button, that I trembled at the threshold, the event horizon of a hole torn open in the Babylon Matrix, in the fabric of space-time itself. This was a hole that I had to enter or my whole life would forever be bound in shallows and in miseries.

I can remember the wind blasting me, color and light exploding before me, into me, and then…blankness, silence, a slight wind fading off into the night, and I stood in a field, a field of sage brush and high desert grasses, and it was the same field I had been in, I knew this somehow as a certainty, I was in the same place, but there were no houses, no street lights, nothing man-made. It was still Colorado, but it did not have the name Colorado, it was just a high desert land that was and had always been, untouched by man—-white man, red man, not any kind of man….

Above were clouds drifting in silvery moonlight, and far above the clouds what looked like a distant aurora borealis of pink and blue lights receding into the darkness of space. The field was a mesa of sagebrush, grasses, here and there were boulders and pinion trees, and everywhere silence, stillness, vastness, the night air empty of human sound, empty of a single human thought besides my own.

I knew in my whole body that I was still on the earth, but this earth lived and breathed and dreamed untroubled by the nightmare spawn, the human species, of which I was a part now set apart, an alien presence standing there in my blue nylon parka. My metal clipboard was gone, but my camera/utility bag of black, weathered nylon was still buckled to my waist, and I felt it as an alien artifact, a thing of weird polymers, lenses, plastic, chemicals, electronics, extruded into a world of organic virginity. (others seem to have had experiences of this “green world” see A Splinter in Your Mind)

I scanned the moonlit mesa, turning slowly to see the whole horizon, and when I came back to my starting point I saw that a figure now stood a few paces from me, a boy with large gray eyes. He stepped forward and I saw that he was the boy, or what had seemed like a boy, when I had met him several months ago in Seattle at that house—the 2012 house.

(Disclaimer: I’m trying here to convey my encounter with an actual interdimensional being. To do so, to be able to language it to you, I inevitably have to alter things, but I am trying to do so in a way that captures the truth of the encounter.)

“Did you send that portal to me?” I asked. Instinctively, I felt that in this encounter I needed to be proactive, to engage this strange being and not merely react to him.

“Yes, I did.” Graciously, the boy paused and maintained an alert silence for many moments, sensing that I needed time to absorb this. I needed time to absorb a great many things, but I didn’t need very much time, because time had slowed down as it can in the presence of great danger or great power. But maybe I need to slow down this narrative, and be more forthcoming about what encountering this boy, entity, or whatever, was like.

I knew that I stood before great power. This boy was not a boy, not necessarily anything I could fully name, but whatever else he might be, he was certainly a highly intelligent and potent being, endowed with an array of magical powers. Although I couldn’t fully name what he was, the word “elf” flashed into my intuition, and I knew that word applied to him, but he was not, this is so hard to language, he was not an “elf” in some fairytale sort of way, no, he was the biological type—elf—shockingly revealed to my direct bodily perception. When you see a spider, or a banana, you don’t have to think a whole lot about it, your body is able to register such easily recognizable biological forms on a cellular level. Similarly, when I encountered this being, I registered him, or, let me be more exact, my body registered him on a cellular level as a potent being, shimmering at the edges of his cloaked fields with concealed magical powers of shocking intensity. Encountering a being that is potentially higher than you on the food chain is something that you will register on a cellular level. Your body knows what sort of power you are facing long before your mind does. I got such a feeling last Saturday when I was out at the refuge making eye contact with Kristopher, a Siberian tiger I met as a tiny cub, who is now 650 pounds of full grown healthy young Siberian male tiger who, when he rears up on his hind legs, towers several feet over my head. That’s a force to be reckoned with, and I can feel that on a cellular level when I draw close. The air around Kristopher crackles with nuclear potent tiger energy. Being inside the new tiger enclosure with Jack and Jill, who are brother and sister adolescent, but very potent, young tigers, blindingly fast, powerful, deadly if they want to be, and it’s a feeling of there, but for the grace of God, go I in one piece. And especially the grace and good will of these two particular tigers, or, in this case, there but for the grace of this particular being, who, fortunately for me, seemed to be benign—no, that’s not quite right, registered on a cellular level as benign. With Indigo and Violet I felt somewhat vulnerable, but with him I actually felt energized, empowered, my own energy field expanded in his presence, and the reason should be obvious, he “vibrated” (that’s starting to sound New Agey, but what else can I say) with such high energy, was so potently conscious, that he shocked and expanded my awareness and my energy field. Time slowed down around him, and perceiving him, my cells registered the physical presence of a higher biological, and perceiving that shifted my assemblage point, shifted the core of my being. And we should all be both aware and wary about the fact that encountering a very high energy being, a physical or nonphysical entity that has real power, is a very precarious, often highly dangerous moment which will, at the very least, alter us forever.

It would be very reasonable for you to ask why I didn’t register such a profound shock when I had first encountered this being in Seattle, when he was dressed like a British school boy. One answer is that I wasn’t as shocked then because he had heavily, heavily cloaked himself during that encounter. He did not cloak himself as a deception, but rather out of consideration of my frailty. He had a benign, prime directive sort of sensibility, an inborn gentleness, that guided him to use the least amount of power that would still accomplish the intervention. Also, I realized after my encounter in Seattle, though I didn’t make this quite explicit in my earlier account, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have, that from the moment I had encountered what seemed to be an old woman, I was very gently, but very potently, put under the influence of a spell, a benign spell, that had the effect of putting me into a kind of trance, a trance that was like a general anesthetic, but which allowed me, in a slightly disembodied way, to be aware of what was happening. This spell was done purely for my protection to prepare me, I now realize, for this new encounter in which he was still cloaked, but revealed far more than earlier, and he had manifested a portal, a highly energetic portal that had shifted me to a green world, an earth that was completely organic, and the shock of encountering the portal, the shock of finding my body, my incarnation, shifted to another realm, still the earth but another realm, was a double preparation for the third shock wave, the revelation of his energy, and without the anesthetic spell. What also helped greatly to prepare me for this encounter was the fact that it was not my first encounter with a highly energetic, powerful being in possession of magical powers. It was also not my first encounter with an interdimensional traveler. But that would have to be the subject of another story, and I’m sure you are growing impatient for me to return to my narrative.

The few moments he gave me were long enough, for they were a few moments of slow time, time in which my awareness expanded, and I understood that I could not be so passive this time, that I had to engage him as an equal, just like I engaged the tigers as equals, though at the same time staying very awake to the inequalities of our capabilities. It was time for the most direct questions possible.

“Who are you?” I asked, and he responded formally,

“I am an adept of the Vehrillion.” When I write that out, it sounds like an almost obnoxiously cryptic answer, but what is hard to convey is that although he responded to my questions verbally, there was also a level of telepathic communication going on, and somehow I knew that the Vehrillion was an inner circle or order of alchemists, or occult initiates, who had advanced to the highest levels of what we would consider magic.

“For now, call me Jeremiah.”

“Jeremiah, why did you bring me here?”

“I brought you here to see life forms that coinhabit your realm, that feed in your realm, yet they are hidden, and unknown to most of your kind.” I knew what he was referring to, again there was this telepathic overlay to what was spoken, but I had to ask, had to have it spelled out.

“Do you mean the mind parasites?” (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites, Vampires )

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. You have done well compared to most of your kind in becoming aware of them, and seeking to be vigilant about them. Your will to be vigilant about them is part of what brings us together here at this moment. You and your kind need to see what feeds upon you, you need to behold the feeders, to bring that which manipulates you, and harvests you, out of the shadows, and into the light of awareness.” The implications of his words were chilling, but not unknown to me. Still, he was silent for a few moments, giving me time to absorb the impact of his words which were a powerful confirmation of a dark possibility I had long been aware of. Jeremiah’s grey eyes were focused on me, they were highly alert, but not intrusive, and he was calm and perfectly patient, even gracious, in every look and gesture. A light wind moved across the mesa, stirring sage brush around us.

Jeremiah lifted his left hand, palm facing the night sky, and there was a cobalt blue sphere hovering about ten centimeters above the center of his palm. It looked like a sphere of the highest grade of blue sapphire, about four centimeters in diameter, except that it had an internal luminosity—it was an energy source, and it was alive, the way a cell or a star is alive, and the feeling of its aliveness was calm, clear, and aware. This is hard to language, but the optical precision, clarity and beautiful midnight blue color of this orb were also its energetic properties, which were also the qualities of its aliveness and awareness.

Jeremiah held his hand steadily, allowing me to look into the deep blue depths of the orb. “Think of this as medicine.” Jeremiah explained, “An, orb of blue sapphire elemental, manifested through the Vehrillion. To behold it is to have it with you. Behold it in your imagination, see it in your mind’s eye and you also partake of this medicine, for its manifestation is what you call nonlocal. Here you behold it at a point of origin, and that has a particular power.” I felt its power, a power of clarity and vision. “I see that you are wearing four items of silver jewelry. Keep looking at the orb, and at same time look at these four silver objects in your mind’s eye.” This request seemed to come from left field, but I did as he said, and saw these objects which I had worn for many years. One of the four was a ring with a faceted dome of cobalt-blue sapphire, and I also wore an amulet that had a large purplish black star sapphire.

And then I knew why he had called my attention to these objects. I had chosen them for a purpose I didn’t fully comprehend until that moment. They were designed, like tuning forks, to resonate with, to pick up like accurately tuned antennae, certain energies that were connected to the energy of this orb. And these were energies that I needed to protect me from the mind parasites, or feeders, as Jeremiah called them.

Jeremiah took a step closer to me and gently brought the orb near my body and I felt parts of me light up and vibrate energetically, these effects are too hard to language, but had everything to do with chakras and energy meridians. Jeremiah brought the orb near the silver objects and they hummed in sympathetic response. “You, and your silver objects, will now resonate more strongly with this medicine, even after you cross out of this realm. The silver objects will offer you some protection, but keep them within your energy field, do not put them aside or let others handle them. You live in a predatory realm, but if others try to take these objects, or this medicine from you by force or deception, by direct or subtle means, it will work against them, for it is medicine that cannot be stolen, it can only be received as a gift, and only the worthy can receive the gift…. You are going to need this protective medicine because when you see the feeders they may know that you are seeing them, and they will not like that, they will most likely try to swarm you at some vulnerable moment. I am marking you as under a special protection they have learned to respect. When you sense the feeders, see the blue orb in your mind’s eye. And tell others of your kind to do this if they find the feeders trying to overwhelm them. They may also summon and manifest the orb of Vehrillion sapphire elemental which is hidden, but available in your realm.

Jeremiah fell silent for many long moments while the orb floated above his palm, the stillness of the mesa all around us. The blue of the orb was so deep and I was drawn into clear depths of sapphire. It was a gift of energy and awareness to behold this elemental orb and Jeremiah seemed to be encouraging me to draw as much energy from it as I could.

I’m not sure how much time elapsed, for a time there was just the blue orb and in the background Jeremiah and the mesa. And then Jeremiah asked very gently—-the telepathic overlay very expressive of the seriousness of the choice,

“Are you willing to look at the feeders? ” And suddenly I wasn’t so sure if I was willing. I sensed the edge of the abyss, but I knew my life only allowed for one possible answer and I willed myself to say,

”Yes.”

”Then look down.”

I looked down and saw that which unraveled me for several long heartbeats before I was willing to let what my eyes scanned enter my mind. Attached to my body, coming from my body, through my body, was a broken lattice of dark filaments, undulating filaments like a broken spider web spun of black silk, moving chaotically like the tentacles of a sea anemone. (All of this is so hard to language because such a density of weirdness was presented all at once, and there were telepathic and intuitive overlays that made what I perceived all too apparent, while word-based descriptions can only present fragmented slivers.) And I knew that each of the filaments was a kind of nerve cell, shadowy black neurons with infinitely complex dendrites and interconnections with other threads of tissue. I must call it tissue because it was alive and intelligent and . . . parasitic, virulently parasitic: a vampiric web or neural net or brain, only the neural web was the vampire, and it was highly aware of me for I was its food source, its host, and it continually reconfigured itself to create networks, new interconnections to draw off more vital energy, and I felt the blackness of this shadow web, dendrites and axons of black spider silk moving and undulating, and also pulsating, but it was a weirdly horrifying inverse arterial pulsing, and suddenly I comprehended the horror of its pulsing rhythm, it was the anti-heartbeat of my heartbeat. This pulsating lattice of tissue was a capillary suction pump, it beat in perfect counter rhythm to my heartbeat because when my heart pumped blood out it sucked in, not blood, but vital energy, and for a moment it was not clear if I was merely tissue, an organ inside of its body, or if it was a parasitic tissue that surrounded my body. Something about the light absorbing blackness of the filaments made them tendrils of energy suction and also rendered them invisible to ordinary human eyesight. At certain nodes of the web, a nexus of dendrites formed a densely entangled concavity, a bulbous thicket of black nerve tissue, and inside these were pale worm-like parasites, and these worms had the pale, silvery luminosity of a hungry moon, a sterile moon whose only light was reflected from a host energy source on which it drew. These moon worms were part of a complex and delicately counterbalanced parasitic ecosystem, an ecosystem for which I was now the sole food source.

The equilibrium of this ecosystem had been shocked, even shattered by my displacement to this green realm and the web of parasitic life undulated in a highly agitated, chaotic state. It was a broken lattice, its outer edges were loose filaments, spindly neurons whose outer dendrites had been yanked off so that only loose dismembered axons, waved in amputated torment seeking to be reconnected, reconnected to the larger web, the planetary matrix of tissue which they had been so densely interconnected to before I entered the portal. I had displaced to a green realm, a realm not infected with this vast network of parasitic tissue, so all that I saw was the broken remnant of the web that had closely surrounded my body and somehow survived crossing over. This was but the smallest part of the mind parasite matrix that had always harvested my energy, its perpetual suction a hidden, insidious taxation of my every pulse of life energy. But now it lay before me shocked and vulnerable and I almost felt (weird as this sounds) pity for it. It was torn asunder from its planetary matrix and unsure of itself, chaotically trying to reconfigure so as to cocoon around me perhaps, tightening its embrace of the host to conserve its one remaining energy source.

My mind almost unraveled as I gazed at this alien life form, for I was seeing that which it is not permitted to see, and it was a singularity, like the time when I was ten and mauled by a dog and I saw muscle tissue, purple and pink-veined, the inside of my body on the outside, and perception came in time-slowing shock waves.

Then my visual perception blurred for a moment as color erupted and it took a moment to realize these were Jeremiah’s hands moving with blurred speed, and his hands projected flames or jets of multi-colored energy. So fast they moved and with surgical precision, and I knew exactly what they were doing, they were freeing me, filament-by-filament, from the matrix and the feeling was ecstatic, euphoric, as a billion hungry little mouths were removed from my skin, a billion points of constriction and fear that I had no idea even existed, because I had never before been freed from their insidious suction.

I felt my energy field blossoming, my awareness, my being was spinning outward, dancing and singing into the mesa, a glorious emergence as parasitic cobwebs vanished into the high desert night. My spirit celebrated, rejoiced, but I felt I could not go fully into the celebration, I had to seek the forbidden knowledge because the hungry web still thrived on my earth, the predatory, parasite-riddled realm that I inhabited with six billion of my brothers and sisters. I saw so many of them there going about their day gazing downward, many with spirits broken, for above them was a dark, coagulated sky, a planetary vampiric matrix above their heads, above them on the food chain, and their suffering spirits were like nodes of nourishing energy inside this dark brain, a network of parasitic intelligence inserting its mind into all of us, harvesting from us a rich diet of fear, pain, hatred, jealousy, addictive passions, and lethargic indulgences. And I realized at that moment that we have been the deceived host of this metaparasite since at least the dawn of history. We need to break loose from this devouring cocoon, but to do so, we need the clarity of the Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental to cast light on the vast, shadowy mind, the planetary matrix of hungry black tissue. And this was why Jeremiah had sent the portal. He had removed me to a pure, uninfected realm so that I could see the vastness of the infection and be a witness to my kind.

As I stood there on the mesa a terrible vision flickered into my mind. I saw the gleaming Twin Towers and I knew this was early on the morning of September 11. The Twin Towers were still perfectly intact, but surrounding them, massing and swarming around them, were pulsating masses of dendrites, entangled concavities of hungry nerve tissue and I knew that the matrix had sent great masses of suctioning tissue to this particular place and time because it knew what was coming, a great, exploding feast of dark energy, a feast of terror about to erupt and I saw dendrites, insidious tendrils of its will perfectly interfaced into the puppet brains of the terrorists so that the matrix actually looked out at the gleaming towers through the their eyes of their puppet brains, but with its will and ravenous hunger, and it craved with sexual frenzy to rupture those towers, to pop them, to tear into them like a starving, rabid dog tearing into hives full of golden honey, only here the honey was fear, and blood, blood vaporizing in the fiery combustion of exploding jet fuel, and as the towers collapsed there was a frenzy of feeding, an imploding vampiric orgasm suctioning blood and terror that pulsated the whole planetary matrix in waves of dark orgasm.

My whole being trembled as I beheld the godhead of evil, the face of the archparasitie, the Medusa whose hair of snakes was some early vision of these neurons and dendrites of pulsating evil. What was merciful, however, was that I was also seeing this event through Jeremiah’s mind. With the assistance of his vision I saw that the matrix was actually being caught in its ravenous greed, in its need for vampiric orgasm, and was revealing itself, revealing the web of evil so that the host was being awakened to its peril, an awakening immunological adaptation was gaining power and the dark matrix itself was imperiled.

A deadly battle was ensuing, the hungry mind of the matrix asserting its dominance over the host, its right to draw blood, its right to feasting explosions, vampiric orgasms of mass terror. But the host was awakening, individual nodes of consciousness were achieving glimpses of the shadowy network. And when I had these realizations, a matter of heartbeats, Jeremiah sealed the breach he had torn in the veil, the terrible visions dissolved and it was just us standing in the silent mesa.

I took in some deep breaths, feeling the stillness, the peace of the mesa, so removed from the boiling strife, the virulent, predatory infection of my home world.

“I have given you this vision and the orb of Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental so that you may share these gifts with your kind, share them through the web of thinking machines you have so recently manifested. The sleepers must awaken and see the feeding web, they must find the mind within themselves the love and will to freedom that is stronger than the web mind that still envelopes them.”

Jeremiah raised his hands, it seemed a gesture of blessing, but also a gift of energy, a bestowal of awareness, and I felt myself intensely, powerfully alive, felt myself and Jeremiah as very alike, magically empowered beings gazing out at boundaryless horizon shimmering with interdimensional portals. I knew somehow that we shared some common ancestor, and I wondered if some ancestor of Jeremiah, some early proto-elf might have been born into constricted, parasited mortal, human form, a human mutant who had somehow developed enough energy to break free of the matrix and become the first elf. Was Jeremiah a messenger from the evolutionary future of my species? Could the elves, this race of changelings and interdimensional travelers, immortal and magically endowed, be the higher form, the new species that Homo sapiens, bleeding and bedraggled, was struggling toward, struggling through webs of clinging, infected tissue suctioning us greedily, striving with all its dark will to hold back the day when we too become like the elves and join those who await us in a greener realm.

As I stood and looked at Jeremiah under the moonlight, his form shimmered for a moment and then altered. He appeared differently now, but I knew it was still him, it was the same essence, only now I sensed that he was more fully revealed, he was allowing me to see him in his physical body without cloaks or guises, and I knew that, for Jeremiah, this was a gesture of ultimate trust.

He was somewhat taller, his hair was longer, the color of dark gold, and his eyes were gray-green and intensely alive and aware. His eyes had the depth of one who has survived many sorrows, and the far-seeing quality of one who sees through many veils. Overlooking his slightly pointed ears, Jeremiah, as a human type was comparable to an exceptionally graceful, androgynous adolescent, but there was none of the temporary look of human adolescence. His body had a completely finished quality, a radiant vitality that seemed beyond mere youth, and a kind of charisma that was uncanny, a magical glamour. He was clothed in what seemed like dark velvets, mostly green and purple and he wore a cloak of similar material that seemed to blend with the night. His clothing was loose and comfortable and left his hands, neck and face exposed. And here there was a shocking incongruity in his appearance—-his skin was slashed with fresh scars, they seemed pink and in a healing phase, but there were so many of them, long twisting lines as if he had been slashed from head to foot with knives. I felt a shuddering certainty that his whole body was scarred in this way, and sensed these wounds as a glowing lattice of pain. Somehow, the perfection of Jeremiah’s elf body had been slashed with mortal scars, and the incongruity of these wounds cast a shadow of vulnerability on the preternatural beauty of his kind.

Jeremiah gave me a few moments to adjust to seeing him before he spoke,

“Since you have had the courage to see the feeders, it is only right that I lay aside all disguise and appear before you as I really am. The wounds you see are a small part of the price I had to pay to earn my passage, to make the crossing to your realm…” Jeremiah was silent for some moments. “I have also had to encounter the feeders, but in a different form, a form that preys upon the elves. What you have seen are like the strands of a web or like the drones that serve a hive. But at the center of the web is a spider, deep in the hive is a queen… We may need to talk more of these dark matters tonight, but perhaps in more comfortable surroundings. I have prepared a small camp not far from here where we can make a fire and have something to drink.”

Jeremiah gestured for me to follow him. It was a gracious gesture which came mostly through the eyes. He had a way of speaking through his eyes that was both eloquent and highly effective. As we walked through the mesa I wondered if Jeremiah needed things said aloud. I had the feeling that speech was for him a primitive custom which he kept up for my sake, a gesture of polite respect toward the accustomed ways of another kind. We walked silently, but I could feel that cessation of talk was no break in our communication. Jeremiah was aware of what I was thinking and feeling. It did not feel intrusive, it felt natural, more natural than what I had ever felt before, so that now, when I walk down the street with a friend and don’t know what he’s thinking, that seems so strange, a shocking omission and blankness that seems weird, artificial, almost like a punishment. I was aware of Jeremiah just as he was aware of me. Once he had appeared in his true form something opened up, a portal in the form of a shared space with another entity.

Sharing awareness with Jeremiah altered me, for one thing it profoundly shifted my experience of time. Time slowed around him, and eye contact with him made permanent alterations in my sense of time and reality. Mostly I became aware of how much more we could be, how much more we will be one day. But I also sensed from Jeremiah an awareness of how much we are something intense right now. He saw human beings as survivors in a realm of amazing trial and hardship. He viewed our kind with respect and a kind of horrified fascination, like we might view Siberian tigers, eyes glowing amber in the night as they fed on a half frozen wolf carcass in a desolate expanse of frigid tundra.

You see, when Jeremiah dropped his guise I became aware of many things at once. The nature of our relationship became completely transparent. I knew that Jeremiah was alone, the “we” he had referred to in Seattle was a guise, and in actuality he had traveled on some terrible, solitary journey, a great crossing, to get to this realm, and his separation from his kind and his world was probably irreversible. I knew that we were allies, and I felt his need of me, for his destiny required of him that he build a bridge between his kind and mine, and he needed me to help build that bridge. And I knew these things in this completely transparent way, no thoughts needed to lead up to realizations, it was simply and naturally apparent that we were allies, that each of us had pursued a difficult quest, but these quests had intersected and had now become parallel journeys.

The walk was longer than I expected, the mesa seemed to go on forever, walking across it in the moonlight, night winds sweeping by us, time unfolded in a way I had never experienced before. As we walked my understanding of Jeremiah, and my understanding of myself grew. The mesa felt so empty of human chatter, this whole realm did, and Jeremiah’s essence was the clearest of signals in the open night air.

We approached a rock formation, giant sand blasted boulders of red stone surrounded by desert plants. The curvilinear contours of the red stone emerged, grew out of the high desert expanse and through Jeremiah’s awareness I felt the deep indigo light around them. This was a power spot, a place of great medicine, and in the center of this crown of red stone was a fire ring created with ritualistic perfection, a circle of precisely fitted rocks with a teepee of dry sticks at

You see, when Jeremiah dropped his guise I became aware of many things at once. The nature of our relationship became completely transparent. I knew that Jeremiah had traveled on some terrible solitary journey, a great crossing, to get to this realm, and his separation from his kind and his world might be irreversible. I knew that we were allies, and I felt his need of me. His destiny required of him that he build a bridge between his kind and mine and he needed me to build that bridge. And I knew these things in this completely transparent way, no thoughts needed to lead up to realizations, it was simply and naturally apparent that we were allies, that each of us had pursued a difficult quest, but these quests had intersected and were now become parallel journeys.

Jeremiah lit the fire, an arc of energy from eyes and fingertips, and we sat beside it, its orange glow pulsated with warmth, and sparks flew up and disappeared into the high desert night. Jeremiah reached into his cloth bag and produced a beautiful flask which he handed to me. This flask was an artifact of another realm and of an unknown material that looked like polished bronze but was apparently some sort of light weight ceramic with the adamantine quality of some very hard gemstone. The cap of the flask was inset with what appeared to be a beautiful cabochon emerald. Jeremiah gestured with his hand in a drinking motion.

Carefully, I unscrewed the emerald cap and brought the flask to my lips. The liquid that flowed into my body was…. it would almost be an understatement to call it a magical elixir, it filled my body, every cell with elemental colors of light, radiant nourishment, a chorus of voices of colored light, the harmonizing energies of elements, gemstones, stars coursing through me, transforming me as pure vitality and color energizing my core. One sip of this elixir was more than sufficient, and I carefully screwed the cap back on, feeling the deep green medicine of the emerald, and passed it back to Jeremiah.

Jeremiah looked into the fire but I could tell that he was looking inward, looking into memory, and this recollection was an act of great courage.

III

“There are some crossings that can be made only by remembering what is hidden. And there are others that can be made only by drinking deeply from the waters of forgetfulness.” began Jeremiah.

“And so it was in a state of deep forgetfulness that I awakened on the darkest of nights. For a while I stared at the shadowed forest all around me, as if making sure that I had truly left the dream time. The folk of your world, and many of mine too, seem to have an inborn certainty that when they awaken from sleep they will recall their identity and life experience after a groggy moment or two. Most never stop to think how precarious this process is, that there is no guarantee that they will awaken, and if they do, that they will recall the same identity and life experience.

“Sleep and dreaming are quite different for those of my kind, but for all of us it is a journey, a journey that alike our waking journey is uncertain of outcome. When I awoke I recalled fragments of my dream journey. A darkness had haunted my dreams and I knew that I had battled a dreadful adversary, a fell creature of hideous power and form which I could not recall except in dissolving glimpses of pale yellow hating eyes and insectile tissues—-slick membranes, claws, antennas, and jointed stingers. It should have puzzled me that my recall was so fragmented, since for those of our kind dream journeys are as real as any other, but for some reason it didn’t.

“I had slept beneath a large willow tree of great age and its long leaves surrounded me like a protective canopy. The flashes of twisted battle I recalled from the dream time were calmed somewhat by the willow and the fragrant darkness of the forest. It was a clear summer night and a warm breeze whispered in the dried leaves upon which I had made my bed. In the distance were the rounded peaks of the Green Mountains.

“These sights and sounds and smells were so familiar and reassuring, but I felt disturbed, felt a wrongness in things that I could not quite define. I knelt beneath the safety of the willow tree. Beside me was a familiar cloth bag and resting on top of it a beautiful silvery dagger engraved with intricate symbols and runes. Its handle ended in a large round cabochon gem, a sapphire that reflected moonlight from midnight blue depths within the stone.

“I picked up the dagger and felt how familiar its heft and balance point was to my hand. I knew this object, and yet I could recall nothing about how I acquired it. I knew the cloth bag, and yet was not sure what it contained. My head swam as I realized that I existed as an island of awareness in a vast sea of forgetfulness. It was as if a dark, heavy curtain had been drawn across all the lifetimes I had experienced before I had fallen asleep beneath the old willow tree. But although I could recall nothing of my personal lifeline, I was able to draw upon a recollection of general knowledge. I knew all the principles of the alchemical art we call the Vehrillion, and I knew all the history of my kind and our world, Emeral.

“A potent spell of forgetfulness had been cast upon me, I realized, and I endeavored to discover its origin and undo its power. I took several deep breaths, stilled my mind, focused my awareness within and summoned a portal, a gateway that I could pass through and travel to the place of memory. This portal is part of an inner alchemy similar to what you call Theater of Memory. It is a practice from the third level of the Vehrillion that allows us to experience our memory as a landscape through which we can journey and explore the remotest reaches of any of our lifetimes. When I passed through the portal I found myself on a familiar stone pathway. This pathway leads up to the great walls that surround my Theater of Memory. A hidden doorway in the great wall, that only I knew how to access, would lead me into the interior depths of memory.

“As I traveled down the pathway I came upon an unexpected sight. A dense forest of grey trees with entangled, thorny branches blocked the way. There was a sinister, uncanny look to this obstructing forest. The trees and branches were all as grey and porous as old bones, and as I stared at them they seemed to feed off the energy of my gaze and become thicker and more densely entangled. I was profoundly shocked. This forest was the manifestation of a spell of terrifying power, and could only have been wrought by someone who had advanced to the highest levels of the Vehrillion. And even someone who had such a degree of ability would need a personal knowledge of me, for I am an adept of the Vehrillion and there are many counter measures and levels of defense in the mind of an adept that should have prevented a spell of such penetration.

“I needed to find some trace of the maker in the spell. If I knew the origin of the spell I would have a powerful lever to displace it from my mind. I took a deep breath and summoned a form of optical alchemy that allowed my visual awareness to draw to a fine point of observation, like a looking glass resolving the energy of the sun into a slender beam of intense light. I focused in on one tiny point of the trunk of an individual tree. The porous bark resolved into a network of ridges and valleys and craters. My awareness focused still finer until it beheld the chambers of dried grey cellulose within the sponge like interior of the tree. The walls of cellulose resolved into long, thin filaments, weirdly undulating silvery grey ribbons floating in the darkness of space. I focused still deeper and beheld a single filament and saw that it was actually a long flowing sentence composed of spidery runes with intricate silver lines. The sentence was obviously a spell, a spell of great potency that had an odd familiarity. I focused deeper to study the glyphs and symbols hidden in the lines of each rune and the subtle syntax of their arrangement. And then, with a shudder that almost broke my concentration, I realized that this spell was of my own creation, a spell of self-forgetting woven at the seventh level of the Vehrillion. A spell of self-forgetting at such a level was forbidden magic, considered an act of self-immolation to be avoided except in a situation of ultimate peril, a situation in which self-disclosure threatened the lives of others.

“I withdrew the intense focus of my gaze, but remained in Theater of Memory, standing before the densely entangled grey forest which I now realized was a defensive boundary of my own creation. What terrible danger would cause me to cast such a potent spell of self-forgetting upon myself?

“I walked along the edge of the forest looking for some tiny clue that I might have hidden for myself. Soon I came upon a tree that felt differently than the others. It looked barren and porous grey as all the trees did, but I sensed that it was charged with greater power. I felt a hidden depth, and studied the tree closely. Near the center of the trunk was a carved rune, weathered and scarcely visible, but still discernible as a Rune of Inner Vision. Surrounding the rune, a roughly circular area of the dry, grey bark had the faintest iridescence. Slowly, tentatively, I raised my hand to touch this iridescent part and instead of dry wood my fingers encountered a soft, very fine dust. The dust scintillated and dissolved revealing a dark hole in the center of the trunk.

“The tree hole was dark and very deep and I drew forth my awareness to travel into the dark space and see what was there. I traveled down what seemed a featureless dark corridor until I beheld a faint light which fell upon an old wall of grey stones with an arched door at its center. The door was made of thick, dense wood with iron hinges and lock. Above the arch of the door there were runes carved in the grey stone. The runes composed a spell of vigilance and awareness. Within the spell, the rune of inner vision had been tilted at the angle of activity so that it meant, ‘Look within.’

“I decided to act on this suggestion in a literal way and resolved my gaze toward the lock and key hole. My awareness passed through the key hole and there I beheld, suspended in a dark space, an old parchment scroll tied with a ribbon of dark, green silk. On the outside of the scroll was a single beautiful rune, an illuminated rune drawn in red, green, black, gold and violet ink with spiraling designs of great complexity. It was the Rune of the Sacred Quest.

“Recognition shivered through me. Although I had not consciously thought of it since awakening, and still could not recall any detail of it, I felt the quest implicitly in every particle of my being and knew that it had been my guiding star for a journey that spanned many long lifetimes. I felt the great joys and terrible sorrows of the quest and my whole being stirred and trembled at the sight of the rune that represented it. Within the complexity of its design were the dark, curling lines of powerful opposition and the glyphs of dreadful adversity and fell adversaries…”

Jeremiah paused for a moment in his narrative and looked searchingly at me. “I know that you also have experienced the darkness that rises up to resist those who undertake the Quest. I have heard it said that among your folk the dark force is so potent that black magicians among you would actually use the sacred word, Quest, to name the most mundane and trivial items, the most inferior mass objects of the factories of Old Terra. They degraded and obscured this sacred word of power so that people could not even name it in their minds. And it is said that the shadows in their minds were so thick that they performed such dark magic without the slightest notion of what drove them to it.

“But you are a living witness to this realm. Is it true that their sickness is so great that they dared to use the sacred word Quest in this way?”

Jeremiah’s words jarred me into painful recollection of a lifetime that seemed so far away. But it was true, I did remember a time when suddenly the word “quest” began to appear on the most weirdly inappropriate objects—minivans, bank cards, plastic shopping bags. A revelation dawned in me and I glimpsed dark magic working and hiding itself within the vast banalities of my world. For the dark force, banality was the most corrosive acid, the heaviest bludgeon and the most perfect camouflage.

“Yes, it is true.” I replied to Jeremiah’s question, and he looked at me with compassion. We stared silently into the fire for a few long moments before Jeremiah returned to his narrative.

“For a time I gazed through the key hole at the Rune of the Sacred Quest, allowing myself to feel its power and import in my whole being. When I felt ready I performed the spell of opening that I knew would unroll the old parchment scroll that bore the rune. The green ribbon slipped off and the scroll began to unravel with an ominous slowness. Waves of fear ran through me as I realized the reason for the slowness. The Quest required of me something so terrible that I was being given time to prepare myself so that the shock would not unravel my mind.

“I beheld a finely drawn map. There were spatial runes indicating directions of travel, and time runes that indicated movement backward in the stream of time. The scroll unrolled some more to reveal my destination and I beheld the rune of the place we call ‘Old Terra’ and that you know as ‘Earth.’ My whole being shuddered as images and words descriptive of Old Terra and the ancient primate ancestors of the elves replayed themselves from the lesson books of my childhood. I saw pyramids in the desert, great sailing ships in a green ocean, cows being killed with a bolt gun in an animal slaughtering factory, geese flying in formation in a stormy sky, a human cybernetic organism, a thermonuclear bomb bursting over a large city.

“Old Terra. My mind reeled as I considered what it would mean to journey backward to this ancient world of darkness and mortality. Horrible images of primate madness flickered into my mind from the histories of Old Terra. I saw moving pictures of a crowd of many thousands of humans standing before a single very distorted looking male individual. He had the eyes of complete possession and wore a harshly evil black rune in a field of white and red. Flags and banners bearing the same marking of dark power rippled behind him. I could see that this male human was a type of alchemical lens, a lens that focused the crowd’s energy toward hate and evil hallucinations. The faces of all the humans were the faces of flesh-colored marionettes and their eyes burned with possession.

“I saw more faces, images of a later time, a crowd of humans in a banquet hall. They wore costly fabrics and perfumes and their pockets were filled with slender machines of plastic and silicon. They had cunning eyes, and faces adorned with subtle cosmetics. Spells of deception and power were woven into their every glance and spoken word. Amidst an array of glass and metal implements they sat at tables of white linen and dined on the cooked tissues of their fellow mammals

“My heart wavered as I felt the immense shadow of Old Terra conjuncting my path. While my resolve trembled, the quest scroll continued to unravel and I beheld runes that indicated that there was a single portal of crossing into Old Terra. In all of Emeral there existed only one aperture that permitted one to fall backward through the stream of time and descend to the shadowed lands of Old Terra. The scroll unraveled further and I beheld a rune of such dark significance and fell power that for a time a dreadful blankness over took me.

“I overcame the blankness only to feel stabbed by cold terror. It was the Rune of the Demiwraith.

“Demiwraith. All of its fell names cascaded through my mind like falling knives— Demiwraith, Viealetta, Flesh Spirit, Enemy of Infinite Form, Archparasite of the Elves.

“Demiwraith. The shadow of the evergreen world of Emeral. Bringer of death, hate, madness and despair. Long had we known that when the ancient primate ancestors had passed away, their darkness and disease had not passed away with them, but the dark web had remanifested itself as a singular entity of indomitable power—Demiwraith. No one could know its form, for its form was legion, and no one could know the extent of its powers. Six of our kind had been brave or foolhardy enough to venture into the Valley of Shadows and enter the Cave of No Escape beneath the mountain. But none had ever returned to tell their tale. Each of the six had thought to rid our world of an entity that fed off our vitality and curtailed the bright hope of our species. Some believed that these six champions had been deceived from the beginning, that it was the Demiwraith who all along had been the secret source of their heroic aspirations. Ambition, it was said, was the nectar that lured them into a deep web where they would be parasited and consumed body and soul.

“We did know of the Demiwraith that it had devastating powers of mind pressure and manipulation that could act on one from any distance of space or time. It is also named Viealetta because it is the supreme master of the black art of Viealitation the ability to derange the mind of a victim to the degree that love and truth could be perfectly reversed. The history of Old Terra was riddled with evidence of horrific Viealitation attacks. Ancient primates would take on the name of a great prophet of love and then devise and execute the most monstrous deeds—inquisition, war, genocide. They would create intricate systems of belief and law that would twist and repress the human spirit from every angle, and yet convince their victims that they held their only promise of salvation. And these vast systems of Viealitation could reign for hundreds, even thousands of years, for the Demiwraith spun webs that encompassed all of history.

“The Demiwraith would even reveal itself to its victims, but so intoxicated were they by the mind-warping ethers of Viealitation that they would think themselves mighty champions fighting a supreme devil they called ‘Satan.’ In the blind insanity of their fury they would burn other primates alive, and repress and torment them in a thousand thousand ways, until they too were possessed with the madness of Viealitation and did the same to others.

“When some would glimpse this insanity, the Demiwraith would spin new webs of Viealitation and convince these primates that prophets of love and beings of evil were merely insane hallucinations. It led them to believe that soul, spirit, will and love were all just superstition and sentimentality. It would mind-pressure them to believe that only objects and death were real, and that consciousness itself was an accident, or an automated illusion. And this new Viealitation was so powerful that its victims would be possessed with a ravishing death hunger and would devise great engines of war and killing weapons.

“These and other terrible realizations raced through my mind when I beheld the fell Rune of the Demiwraith. The Quest Scroll unraveled no further and I knew that my journey of many lifetimes could only continue by facing the Demiwraith, and passing through the portal that it guarded into Old Terra.

“I had seen enough. Slowly, I withdrew my gaze from the key hole, withdrew from the darkness within the tree so that I stood once again before the dense entangled mass of the Forest of Self-Forgetting. I turned back on the stone path and walked to the shimmering portal of my Theater of Memory and passed though it, returning to my body that still knelt beneath the protective branches and trailing leaves of the old willow tree.”

“My body shivered and trembled as I knelt beneath the willow tree. Rather than engage inner practices, I felt it was best to struggle to my feet and take the first step, the first step toward the Valley of the Shadows. Only by taking action could I address my fears. If I allowed them a voice within my mind they would ask a thousand questions and express a thousand doubts for which I had no answers. There was no answer except to follow through with the quest.

“I focused my attention on my body and my immediate environment and prepared to break camp. My fear was still present and I felt it wanting me to turn inward. But I had looked within as far as my gaze could travel and seen the resolution I had made from my True Will. The resolution had been made when I remembered things, knew things, that were now protectively hidden. Reconsideration would be meaningless, and perhaps that had been part of my design when I had locked away my Theater of Memory.

“I took up my cloth bag and dagger of silvery metal, and before leaving the protective shadow of the willow tree I cloaked myself, engaging spells that would allow me to travel with great stealth. The forest where I had slept overlooked the Valley of Shadows and after a short walk I found the long and winding path leading down to its misted depths. There was a reluctance in my muscles so that even though I descended, it felt as if gravity resisted my every step.

“When I reached the damp floor of the valley I felt something deep underground waking up and becoming aware of me. I didn’t want to name what I knew that something to be, but I felt it, felt it as a hot nucleus of evil beneath my feet, a throbbing appetite so powerful that I could feel its pulse beneath hundreds of feet of insulating soil and stone. I felt it in the cells of my body, a primordial feeling that animals, even insects, can recognize. It was the feeling of being prey. My body, my blood, my life energy, was food approaching a vast and insatiable hunger. And I was not just any food, but the juiciest morsel to come this way in many long, and thirsty ages.

“The sense of the Demiwraith’s pulsing hunger beneath the soil was too horrifying to contemplate. To still my fears I focused all my attention on my body and the immediate environment. I engaged my awareness with my muscles, breathing and movement so that I walked in a way that flowed with the rhythms of the night and the valley. My stance was fluid, but alert, and in this way I walked along the Valley of the Shadows until I stood at the foot of the Dark Mountain.

“The Dark Mountain glowered over me ominously, a massive and desolate presence that made me feel the smallness of my body. I approached and saw that about forty feet above the base of the mountain was a huge funnel-shaped indentation that terminated in a dark orifice. An icy dread crept over my heart as I recognized this as the entrance to the Cave of No Escape. I knew the danger of hesitating at the brink of a dangerous crossing, so I immediately began climbing up to the funnel. It was all dark rock and crags with harsh angles, and moisture from an unseen source left the rocks wet and slippery. They had an almost oily sheen beneath the cold light of the moon. Long years of training in the various arts of balance and movement contained in the Vehrillion made the climb an easy task for my muscles, but cold fingers of paralyzing dread grasped at my quavering heart.

“As I drew near the dark orifice I heard distant wailing sounds, but could not discern if they were made by anything within the cave or were a trick of the wind that flowed through funnel and aperture. I paused for a moment, remembering something. From beneath my shirt I brought forth the alchemical amulet that I wear on a chain of Elvin metal. We call an amulet of this kind a Navigator, and for an adept of the Vehrillion it is both a talisman of many virtues and a tool of many functions. Here I used it to illuminate the entrance and I adjusted the color and focus of the light to suit a subterranean environment. The luminosity of the Navigator is not merely practical, it also lightens the heart and heartens the spirit.

“With renewed purpose, I crossed the threshold and entered the Cave of No Escape. There was no floor beneath me, but a jagged vertical shaft. Water dripped and the rock was slippery but the shaft was so narrow that extending my limbs was enough to control my descent. Footholds and handholds abounded, though many secure positions had to be gained by allowing jagged points of rock to press against my back and other parts of my body. As chilling water dripped beneath my clothing, the bruising pressure of these rock points was like being chewed by teeth of dull stone.

“I descended a considerable distance and the shaft began to swell outward so that my limbs could no longer extend across it. One foolish move now would mean plummeting. And when a foothold I tested loosened a chunk of rock, I waited many long moments before I heard the sound of its impact echoing back up the shaft. I increased my vigilance, jamming my fingers into cracks and using all my senses to feel the underlying structures, the fissures and weaknesses in the rock before I trusted it with my weight. And in this way I descended, like a fly walking backwards down a steep wall.

“When at last I reached the bottom of the shaft my hands burned and were covered with abrasions and bloody marks. But those of our kind heal very quickly and minor injuries of this sort did not dismay me at all. At the bottom of the shaft was rock and gravel over which flowed a thin surface of icy water. The temperature had dropped considerably with the descent and the moment I stopped moving I felt the chill steal over me. A couple of feet above the floor of the shaft was a tiny opening that was the only possible exit. I had to remove my bag and push it ahead of me to squeeze through the opening and into the roughly horizontal tube. Cold water flowed along the bottom of the tube soaking me and I had to engage an ancient practice called fire breathing to heighten my life energy and keep the core of my body from becoming chilled. Slowly, I pushed my bag and crawled on my belly over jagged rock and gravel. The tube descended, spiraling like a giant corkscrew, and I had no choice but to keep crawling forward, allowing it to take me where ever it would.

“The corkscrew became narrower, and getting through it was certainly no task for those who fear closed in spaces. After a time I came to long for another vertical shaft, that no matter how treacherous, allowed me to stand and expand my limbs. There was no way that even the most well-trained body could back out of this tube, so I kept squirming forward relentlessly. My mind became blank and I became a crawling thing of meat and bone caught in the deep bowels of the earth.

I lost my sense of the passage of time and could no longer guess how long it had been since I had begun my descent. But then I detected a change in the sound of the water and in the flow of cold air about me. The tube curved around some more, and I saw there was an opening where the flowing water fell vertically. For a moment I wondered if my distressed mind had summoned a mirage to comfort itself, but soon I had crawled forward and come to the opening. There was a sheer vertical drop and I took out my Navigator and adjusted the focus and intensity of its beam and surveyed what was bellow me. I beheld a high domed space of rock and glittering stalactite, and far below was a dark lake of inky blackness. There was no way to climb down, and no way back, which left only one possibility—-to allow myself to fall through the opening and into the lake. I probed it with my senses and the beams of my Navigator, and felt reassured that it was quite deep. If I were deceived and shallow water covered jagged rock I would certainly be crushed, but desperate choices are made somewhat easier when there is absolutely no alternative. With some contortions, I managed to tie my bag to an ankle. I crawled forward and performed a practice that allows an adept of the Vehrillion to slow the perception of time, and heighten all the senses so that as I plummeted I would be able to finely adjust my diving form.

“I pushed myself out of the opening and plunged through the cold air. Moments later I shattered the still plane of the dark lake and submerged a score of feet into the icy water. Rising to the surface, I swam toward the nearest shore. I was shivering and soaking wet, but all of my clothing was made of a sturdy survival cloth that shed moisture very quickly. I maintained slow time so that I could respond in a splintered second to any attack.

“The lake still rippled from the shock of my impact, and water continued to fall from the opening far above, but otherwise there was perfect stillness, and silence. While I waited for my clothing to dry I performed powerful defensive spells that manifested as shimmering fields of energy. These energy fields shielded body and mind from penetration by foreign objects, energies or thoughts. I sensed that the Demiwraith was well aware of my exact location, but no longer did it feel like a hot nucleus of evil pulsating with appetite. Instead, I detected the shadowy coolness of powerful cloaking fields, and sensed about me an attitude of highly observant waiting.

“I did not engage any cloaking at all since I was here to summon the Demiwraith. At the outer boundaries of my shields I detected the most subtle and devious telepathic probing. Such probes could only be devised by one who had a deep understanding of the energy fields of our kind, and I wondered, once again, about the six who had come here before me, and if they had employed the very same strategies that I was playing out. I adjusted the outer boundaries of my shields so that any thing, energy or thought projected at them would find its energy converted to the corona of reflective energy surrounding me.

“I focused the beam of my Navigator and surveyed the large domed space. There were a number of openings into antechambers, alcoves and corridors of hidden depth. As I surveyed, I felt the available area of my memory summon details of the life stories of the six who had come before me. The resonance of their despair and suffering permeated the air, and I wondered if this emanation was a remnant of their spirit energy, or a subtle device of the Demiwraith. It is true that none of the six had reached the levels that I had in the Vehrillion, but I also knew that if I attached an iota of pride to that fact I would quickly join their fates. Deepest intuition told me that the Demiwraith was an indomitable foe. What the quest scroll revealed was an absolute resolution to encounter the Demiwraith, and somehow to pass through the portal that it guarded. But I did not intend to defeat or slay it, and I sensed in my whole being that defeating it in its own realm was not within my powers.

“Completing my survey, I decided to move to one of the larger antechambers. I preferred to wait out the Demiwraith in a space that had fewer entrances. I walked along the shore and climbed the gently sloping bank that surrounded this part of the lake like an amphitheater. I entered the antechamber. It had a high arched ceiling like a cathedral and icicles of crystal glittered in the beam of my Navigator as I examined the interior. Besides the opening on the lake side, there was an interior opening that was smaller, but still large enough to admit a creature of even gigantic size. I felt that it was most probable that the Demiwraith would appear through this entrance rather than expose itself on the shore of the lake.

“I stood in the antechamber in the Artemia Stance, which is a posture that is relaxed but also very alert. My first perception of the approach of the Demiwraith was a strong odor of ammonia, and this olfactory perception was followed by the sound of a billion scurrying creatures. Like heralds or courtiers at the head of a royal procession, a wave of albino insects entered the antechamber. They scurried forward with military-like precision and quickly covered every surface of the antechamber, as well as the arched ceiling, though they stayed well clear of my energy shields. The tiny creatures seemed to be of numerous species, some resembling minute crabs, others seemed like arachnids, and there were great boiling masses of centipedes and millipedes. The anteroom had become a living white cathedral, when a massive form moving with the springy, stealthy grace of a tarantula appeared through the inner entrance. My mind reeled at the asymmetric complexity of its form. Pale insects moved all over it, so that at first I thought its body composed of myriad tiny creatures. Its head was enormous and tear drop-shaped, with the swollen end terminating in a kind of face with two glittering black orbs for eyes. It was a face, and yet not a face. It was immobile, expressionless and translucent like a large blister in the shape of a face. The whole enormous head was translucent, covered with blue veins, and seemed almost liquid, like an egg yolk, while its body was an armored hybrid of insect, arachnid and crustacean components. Everywhere it bristled with asymmetric arrays of claws, coiled scorpion-like stingers and moving ventricles. But its most hideous and disturbing feature was the corona of chaotically moving hair thin red antennae which surrounded its face. Besides the dense corona of antennae around the face, a sparse distribution of the hair-like red antennae covered its almost liquid skull.

“I remained in the Artemia Stance and kept my breathing slow and regular, my muscles poised, but relaxed. I sensed that the Demiwraith was examining me, searching for betrayals of nervous tension, the little edges of fear it could pry open to invade my mind. Insistent telepathic signaling pinged at the surface of my energy shields, but I refused to let it enter. A telepathic link to the Demiwraith was far too dangerous. If it wanted to communicate with me it would have to be through the ancient device of audible speech. The Demiwraith’s glittering black orbs tried to pierce my shields with bursts of intense mind pressure, but the projected energy only made them shimmer more brilliantly as the energy was reflected. There was a hissing sound as of steam escaping a valve, as voice passages, unused for decades perhaps, were cleared and readied. A voice, cold and cutting like a razor emerged not from the mouth of the sort of face, but from apertures on the flank of the body.

“‘Who is it that comes here to disturb the rest of Viealetta?’

“‘One who seeks only to pass through the portal that leads to Old Terra.’ I replied in an even, neutral tone.

“‘Only?’ replied the Demiwraith with a hissing sneer. ‘How dare you use such a term to describe a privilege which is denied to you and your kind.’

“‘Who denies it?’ I responded. The answer was obvious, but I decided to adopt the mocking, arrogant tone of an over-confident warrior. I wanted the Demiwraith to underestimate me, and make inaccurate assessments of my strengths and weaknesses.

“‘I deny it.’ responded the Demiwraith, ‘And I punish unto death and beyond any who question my authority. Would you like to see your six little friends? They too thought to defy me and I still squeeze sweet drops of nectar from the suffering of what little remains of them.’ The Demiwraith turned and raised a flap of its pale hide. Within the translucent tissues of its body was a sight, the horror of which nearly shattered my resolve. The mutated, shrunken, degraded forms of the six were inside it, artery like tubes attached to every orifice including eyes, ears, mouth. They had become fetus-like organs within the body of the Demiwraith. ‘I keep them around for old time’s sake, but I’ve sucked on them so often they’ve gone rather stale and sour, while you seem so fresh and savory. Would you like to join with me now? I’m hoping you’ll say no, I’m hoping you’ll resist to the last, there is nothing so sweet to me as that kind of sport.’

“‘Nothing seems so sweet as what we can never have.’ I responded mockingly. ‘But if you need someone to play with you, I will try to be as entertaining as possible. All I ask is that we move in the direction of the portal that leads to Old Terra. Keep moving in that direction and I will be delighted to let you chatter on and on. Just please don’t be a bore and attempt to travel in the wrong direction. That sort of falsehood is immediately apparent to me.’ This last was not a bluff, for we have a truth-saying alchemy called the Rune of Truth that allows us to detect blatant falsehood.

“‘Ah, now that would be an amusing journey.’ replied the Demiwraith. ‘What I will enjoy most is the denouement where you beg to join with me like your six little friends. So, yes, I do pledge solemnly to always lead you toward the portal you desire. It will be a most succulent diversion. Prepare yourself, however, for it is a long and difficult journey, and I must rest now, refresh myself, before we set forth. I suggest you do the same.’

“Immediately following this suggestion a thin milky film covered the glittering black orbs and with mind-numbing speed armies of albino creatures raced over the surface of its body and into and out of numerous apertures and ventricles. At the same time strands of spider silk appeared to blow out of a thousand points of its body and before long the scurrying armies of creatures were invisible beneath a white cocoon that covered it like a royal canopy of white silk.

“I stayed in the Artemia Stance, aware that thousands of tiny eyes were tracking, and somehow recording, my every breath. While my face and eyes remained impassive, my mind raced through many vital considerations. My life, I understood, depended on my being as opaque as possible. A single careless word or gesture could reveal quirks or qualities which would allow the Demiwraith to register my personality. It was clear to me that it favored the psychological attack, it had as much as said so, and if there were any telepathic leakage points in my shields, or revealing nuances in my words or movements, it would immediately uncover vulnerabilities. It was obvious that I had sealed off all my personal memories, even from myself, to deflect this sort of attack.

“And what was happening beneath its canopy of spidery white silk? I didn’t believe for a moment that it needed rest. Probing with all my senses, I detected a furious metabolism that had raised the temperature within the cocoon to an atmosphere of high fever. Myriad tiny creatures served as an army of robotic surgeons under precise telepathic control. Extensive surgeries were being performed, whole areas of tissue excised or reconfigured.

“I shuddered to think of the possible reasons for this metamorphosis. No doubt it was reconfiguring itself to attack me more potently, but it had plenty of time to perform such an operation while I was struggling through the cave and waiting in the anteroom. Did this mean that it had registered me, and was reconfiguring itself based on what it had perceived of my vulnerabilities? Or would it periodically transform itself just to keep me off balance? Possibly this was the standard strategy of a creature long known to be a changeling.

“I replayed every word we exchanged, but gained little insight. It was a masterfully opaque manipulator, and what it did reveal it do so blatantly, as a measured thrust in its attack. It had agreed to lead me toward the portal, and when I tested this statement with truth-saying alchemy I found no falsehood, the Rune of Truth did not flicker or change hue. But trickery of all sorts was involved, or perhaps it didn’t need trickery, possibly it wanted me to pass through the portal. I could only assume that there must be some chance for me to succeed or I would never have resolved to undergo such a descent into the underworld lair of the Archparasite.

“I allowed the speculation and analysis to go on for only so long. I knew that I could not allow restless thoughts to tumble through my mind continuously, for that would only exhaust my spirit. In times of great trial, those of my kind, especially those trained in the secret arts, are able go without sleep, food or drink for very long periods. Even so it was to my advantage to obtain a certain type of rest. I quieted my mind, kept my senses alert and my shields up. My eyes were open and I could respond to a sudden threat with lightening speed, but core parts of my being were allowed to sleep and recuperate.

“Partly awake, partly asleep, I remained in the Artemia Stance for some time before I heard the sound of a billion insect mouths devouring the cocoon. Gaping holes opened in the silken canopy, and soon all trace of it had dissolved. Armies of tiny albino robots scurried away with quantities of removed tissue which seemed to still be alive. Before me stood the reconfigured Demiwraith. It had greatly reduced its size and complexity and had become far more primate-like in form. Its body had two main segments. The one that faced me was fashioned in the form of a naked female primate, pale and hairless. Its face still had the large glittering black orbs, and hideous corona of red antennae, but was now an expressive, personal face with puffy cheeks and a mousy look of fear, confusion and anxiety. It was short and shaped a bit like an ancient primate fertility doll with pendulous breasts and greatly exaggerated reproductive organs. One hand had ordinary stubby fingers, and the other was not a hand but something that closely resembled the coiled tail of a scorpion. This was the mostly primate-looking segment of its body. The other, larger segment closely resembled a headless albino spider. It was attached via a thick flexible stalk at the base of the first segment’s spine so that it suspended the primate form a few inches from the floor almost like a puppet. The spider legs could move it swiftly backward or forward while the primate portion always faced me, its soft flesh jiggling as its arachnid locomotive platform moved it about.

“‘Sire, what is it that you require of me? I want only to serve you.’ Spoke the new Demiwraith. Its tone was mousy and obsequious, as if it feared some dreadful punishment for any slight transgression.

“‘ I hope you are amusing yourself with this puppetry, Demiwraith. You know very well what I require of you, take me to the portal.’

“‘Oh sire, why do you call your poor servant, Lianna, by this terrible name, Demiwraith?’

“The tone and facial expressions were the perfect semblances of a nervously servile creature. I also found that I had begun to automatically register this new form of the Demiwraith as female, even as my mind recognized that this was pure subterfuge. I wanted to minimize communication until I had more time to analyze the psychological warfare that was behind this new form and manner.

“‘Since I am your Sire I command you to take me toward the portal that leads to Old Terra without further discussion.’

“‘As you wish, Sire.’ With the help of the flexible stalk, the primate form made a submissive curtsey, and still facing me, the spider legs carried it rapidly backward and through the entrance at the back of the anteroom. It moved swiftly with its multiple legs, and I had to struggle to keep up with it as we moved quickly through a winding stone corridor.

“As we traveled, I studied the transformation and speculated about the effect it was supposed to have on me. The puppetry was very effective in many ways. Although my mind saw through the deception, my body still registered this new form as female and as different from the Demiwraith I remembered before it vanished into the cocoon. I still had ancestral primate instincts that stereotyped various body types and tones of speech. The Demiwraith was side-stepping my mind and convincing parts of my body that it was female and submissive. But then there were was the jarring incongruity of the scorpion tail hand and the spider segment of the body. These elements seemed designed to awaken archetypal primate fears of devouring genitalia and the even deeper instinctual mammalian fears of biting and stinging creatures that crawled on the ground. The only consistent theme was that it exploited and revealed my animal ancestry and the degree that this ancestry still conditioned me. But the paradoxical incongruity of its soft, female, passive elements and the frightening invertebrate elements showed its mastery of the black art of Viealitation. By mixing powerfully dissonant biological forms it threw my bodily intelligence off balance. Part of my body interpreted this form sympathetically as a submissive primate, while another part interpreted it as a dangerous invertebrate.

“As I studied the subtle power of this manipulation, I recognized a shocking flaw in my own strategy. I had attempted to hide any trace of my personality by adopting the consistent tone and manner of an arrogant, over-confident warrior. But the Demiwraith could surely see through such a simple subterfuge, and since I had adopted a perfectly consistent persona, I had given it a stable frame of reference. The slightest deviation in tone or gesture from this contrived persona would reveal volumes about the underlying personality. These betrayals would be apparent only to a discerning and attuned observer, but I could have little hope that the Demiwraith was anything less than that. It seemed more probable that the Demiwraith was a great deal more, that it carried within its cells the entire history of primate fears and frailties and through its hideous absorption of the six it had intimate knowledge of the vulnerabilities of elf body and spirit.

“I considered whether I could better camouflage myself by adopting a random assortment of persona when I communicated with the Demiwraith. But since this was an obvious abandonment of my previous strategy in favor of its mode of Viealitation, it would mean that I would be crediting it as master, and diminishing myself to the role of imitative disciple.

“I decided to forgo a conscious strategy for the present. Instead, I would respond spontaneously as the need to communicate arose, trusting that intuition would serve me better then a conscious plan. I did not have long to wait before the Demiwraith tested me with maddening Viealitation dialogue.

“‘Oh Sire, I hope it is not disrespectful to ask you this, but do you really want me to lead you to the portal or have you just tricked me into this dark space so you can have your way with me once again.’ I wanted to show that I felt under no pressure to respond to such nonsense, so I ignored its question for a few moments. I considered making no response at all, but I suspected that it might not continue to lead me toward the portal if I refused to engage its favorite game.

“‘I’m disappointed in you Demiwraith.’ I said shaking my head in mock sadness. ‘I had heard that you were a creature capable of lightening change, and here you are right from the start doing exactly what I expected, the old Viealitation trickery. Is there no way you can at least rework this ancient routine to make it more interesting?’ The Demiwraith stopped moving.

“‘Oh Sire, it confuses and frightens me so to have you call me that terrible name and say such strange things I cannot understand. It makes my poor head too dizzy to be able to lead you. Please Sire, have mercy on poor Lianna.’ The Demiwraith was adamantly refusing to break character and showed me plainly that if I did not play along that it would refuse to take me to the portal. I decided to play the part it indicated for me, but with a sarcastic exaggeration.

“‘Oh poor, dear, Lianna, please excuse my frivolous jokes. I know you only wish to serve me, dear, so I won’t torment you with further discussion. I’ll leave your poor, little head free to concentrate on guiding us to the portal.’

“‘Oh Sire, you know if you want to have your way with me you need only ask. There is no need to mock me with such a joking tone.’ The Demiwraith still refused to move, forcing me to recognize another demand—I must not only play the part, but do so convincingly, even a facetious tone was enough to create an impasse. I didn’t like this last demand much, and for a time I made no reply. How far could I let this play acting go? If it demanded that I play a part more and more convincingly I would be giving it a potentially powerful lever to twist my mind with. But each moment that I kept silence might also reveal weakness, showed hesitation, indecisiveness. To cover this I resolved to extend the silence and see if I could force it to make the next response. Silent moments stretched long and uneasily as I studied the glittering black orbs and the chaotic, rippling of the corona of red antenna. The Demiwraith broke the silence,

“‘Oh Sire, these strange stares and silences make me feel so vulnerable. It feels as though you are undressing me with your eyes, though you can see that I have shed all my garments as you desired. If you want to enter me you know that you have only to say so Sire, you know that Lianna can deny you nothing that is in her poor power to give.’

“‘Yes Lianna, there is one thing you can do for me. It is simply to continue leading me toward the portal. And please indulge Sire in one more kind service and refrain from conversation as far as possible, as my thoughts are elsewhere today.’ I kept my tone carefully sincere-sounding. The Demiwraith, apparently satisfied with this victory, curtsied and began moving again.

Its spider platform allowed it to walk so nimbly over the jagged rock floor that I could scarcely keep up. After a long time moving rapidly through a maze of stone corridors I was forced to ask it to slow down. I was loath to reveal a physical limitation, but I knew I would exhaust myself if I tried to match its furious speed. Keeping my shields at such a high level of defense was too taxing for me to keep up a racing pace.

“‘Lianna, Sire would like you to go at a slower pace.’

“‘As you wish, Sire.’ Said the Demiwraith, and now she began to crawl at an agonizingly slow pace.

“‘Thank you for slowing, Lianna, but this pace is too slow. Could we try a moderate pace?’

“‘Oh Sire,’ she replied with the most convincing exasperation, ‘I so much want to obey you, but your orders are terribly confusing.’ Now she raced ahead and then abruptly slowed, raced, slowed at random intervals. Once more I was being successfully conditioned. If I tried to use my role as ‘Sire’ to control her actions, I would be made to regret it. It was better for me to go along with whatever she wanted me to do.

“We went on in this way for quite some time. With each twist and turn of our dialogue, Lianna took on the role of a poor, abused slave and to get any sort of cooperation I had to play the role of a cruel tyrant. After long and weary travel through huge stone tunnels, we entered a long, dusty passage not quite high enough for me to stand erect and I had to walk in an uncomfortable, crouched position.

“A couple of seemingly contradictory intuitions battled in my mind. Although truth-saying alchemy revealed that the Demiwraith was leading me toward the portal, I was sure that it was using a needlessly roundabout way and taking a sadistic delight in drawing out our journey. But I also had a strong intuition that the Demiwraith, unpleasant as it was to deal with, was not showing me its fierce side, and that it had no resistance to my passing through the portal, but actually desired it for some reason.

“After traveling some distance down the low, dusty corridor, I realized that I had to insist that the Demiwraith give me some time and distance estimates on our journey. Mostly I had been avoiding any sort of questioning, but there was an important tactical consideration here. By forcing me to follow down a corridor where I had to walk bent over, the Demiwraith had intensified the war of attrition on my body by several notches. I knew that energy could not flow through my body properly with my spine so contorted for a long period of time. Eventually I would start to project leaky shields and become vulnerable to telepathic attack.

“‘Lianna, tell Sire how long this corridor is, and estimate the time it will take us to cover that distance.’

“‘Oh Sire, poor Lianna has trouble understanding you when you talk in such a weirdly calm way, I’ve grown accustomed to your usual angry manner.’ This statement instantly decided me that I was done cooperating, and I sat down in a comfortable position on the dust. I knew exactly where the Demiwraith was trying to take me with its Viealitation. It would demand an ever angrier tone from me, and I would have to accept the potent Viealitation of play-acting an ever more sadistic Sire. That was completely unacceptable. The Demiwraith had successfully discovered a lever that ultimately would twist and distort my mind.

“‘Sorry Demiwraith, but game’s over. I will not play Sire any longer, and I will not follow you another step unless you draw a map of our exact route here in the dust with correctly scaled distances. Show me where the portal is.’ Lianna stared at me for a moment and abruptly her mousy expression dissolved and a new face of the Demiwraith appeared.

“‘How boring of you to take so long to ask this simple question.’ The Demiwraith spoke in a voice so altered that waves of shock coursed through my body, forcing me to realize how deeply it had conditioned me to expect the Lianna puppet. Although closed memory rendered no details, I had studied a great many primate artifacts including the moving picture films of the end times, and this background allowed me to register this new voice as the husky, hoarse accent of an older primate woman who had endured decades of that strange primate addiction known as ‘cigarette smoking’. She had the feeling tone of one who had led a life of base pleasures and dissipations, but whose body had soured to a state where excitements were beyond her grasp, and even greedy lechery had faded into a vast and bitter boredom. Her face scowled at me with disappointment and disgust. ‘Who knew that little Elf boys have become so dull that such a simple game would have to be drawn out to such tedious, fatiguing lengths before you would see through it.’ She switched voices to grotesquely mimic my last statement in the high pitched falsetto of an annoying child, ‘Show me where the portal is.—Did it never occur to you how I could be leading you toward the portal no matter which way we went? Turn that stupid light off little boy and I’ll show you the portal.’

“Warily, I dimmed my Navigator and allowed the corridor to go dark. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I beheld a faint glow coming from the albino spider portion of the Demiwraith’s body. Within its translucent tissues there was a tubular cross section of living light, a pale ring of fiery sheets in undulating folds like a tiny aurora borealis. Its luminosity was pale and lunar like the shimmer of a hungry moon.

“‘Behold the portal to Old Terra that lives only within me.’ said the Demiwraith. To be sure I engaged truth saying alchemy, but I already knew there was no deception. The Demiwraith lived off the negative energies of Old Terra and to continue to feed in this new time and place it needed a portal that flowed backward through the stream of time. The portal functioned like an organ of digestion with hungry mouths on both sides. And what better place for such an intestine-like aperture than within its own body where it could be directly energized by the fermenting hates, fears and desires of a whole primate-covered planet. And what hidden place could be better protected than within the hideous tissues of its own body? For a moment I wondered, as it wanted me to, if I were not dull-witted to have failed to consider this possibility. But then I glimpsed something I wasn’t supposed to see. It was as if I had seen through an open crack in a door that was quickly pulled shut. I saw that I was surrounded by an intricate lattice of potent spells. Some spells were long and woven together like an encircling web. Other spells hung just outside the web like powerful magnets capable of misdirecting attention with great precision. Wary as I was, the Demiwraith had tricked me into underestimating its powers.

“‘You see the portal you desire.’ The Demiwraith’s husky voice slowed and became sultry, and darkly seductive. ‘Now little boy relinquish your shields and remove your garments for the only way to Old Terra is to pass through me, and I allow that privilege only to the most beautiful and succulent young flesh.’

“I felt the black orbs glittering at me, and the Demiwraith’s excited metabolism heating to a feverish intensity. I lit my Navigator and saw that a long pink slit was opening along the length of its rapidly transforming puppet torso. My mind and heart quavered with terror. Is this how I would join the fates of the six? But the sacred quest demanded I pass through the portal into Old Terra and there was only one way to do so. I could not hesitate at the brink of this terrible crossing.

“I dimmed the Navigator and with shields still up I removed my clothing, stowing it in my cloth bag which I tied to my ankle as I had done before diving into the lake. I hoped that the Demiwraith, in its state of great excitement, would either not notice or care about such a detail. Then I performed a time alchemy to slow my perception of time so that with hyperawareness I could sense every nuance of change that occurred between heartbeats. Finally, with an involuntary shiver I relinquished my shields and trembled to feel that only the air on my naked skin separated me from physical contact with the Demiwraith. No longer did it bother to hide its voracious appetite which I felt as throbbing waves of heat on my naked skin. My Navigator was hidden in my bag and I had no light source, but those of my kind can still sense the shadowy outline of things and sudden movements even in complete darkness. Struggling to overcome a fear too dreadful to name, I stepped toward the Demiwraith. As I did so its head loomed up and the corona of hair-like red antenna shot outward and lashed my naked body. Blinding flames of white-hot agony tore through me as flesh-dissolving acids in the antenna cut through my skin and allowed the antenna to suck greedily at my blood. I dove through the slit-like opening and into the body of the Demiwraith.

“There was a shocking reversal of sensation. The Demiwraith had so tuned its body chemistry that the flaming agony of acid-cut wounds was neutralized and replaced by fluids streaming through my wounds that produced sensations of blinding, shivering pleasure that nearly extinguished my mind. I knew that if I didn’t act instantly my will would dissolve and in one more heartbeat I would be enslaved forever by this parasitic womb. I swam forward and into the portal.

“Immediately I fell into a non place, an ether-like limbo of horrible suffering within the portal that was removed from physical time or space. My identity merged with the culminating death moments of countless primate lives that were being extinguished in states of absolute Viealitation to be food for the Demiwraith. I lived for a moment in the body of a primate female who watched impassively, paralyzed with despair, as uniformed primates put her on a metal plank to be slid into a gas-fired oven. I lived through the final moments of countless suicides and withered on numerous steel beds penetrated by plastic tubes and machinery.

“And then there was a sensation of plummeting, I fell backward into space and time, tumbled through a dark sky and landed in a high desert of red soil. I was near the entrance to a canyon, great buttes were in the distance and there was a scattering of dusty green desert plants and reddish boulders. My body and mind were shattered and bleeding, but I had passed through the portal and now lay somewhere on the surface of Old Terra.

“My body wanted to writhe in pain, and my mind reeled in shock, but I knew that all my available energy and will had to focus on one thing—coagulation, for I was bleeding from a hundred different wounds. I gave all of my attention to my wounds until I was able to stem the flow of blood. This took precious moments longer than it should have, and much of my life energy spilled onto the red soil. From a thousand planes of intuition I knew that many of my powers had been diminished or lost as I fell so terribly wounded to this ancient world. The Demiwraith had drawn my blood from a hundred deep lacerations and my body was feverish from poison and infection.

“But however fragile my state, I had survived the crossing, the sacred quest continued, and I knew that this was a blessing. Although I had no time to dwell on it, I also perceived that my memory had been restored, the spell of self-forgetting I had imposed on myself had unlocked as I had crossed over and survived my encounter with the Demiwraith. My mind was capable of solving problems of immediate survival, and my ravaged body was still able to take actions. As soon as the bleeding stopped I untied my bag which had survived the crossing attached to my ankle. Here was another great blessing. My Navigator illuminated and I felt it stabilizing my energy and heart rhythm. Removing a flask from my bag I took a small drink of the medicine you just sampled, which we call the ‘Vehrillion Elixir.’ In the whole history of this medicine it had probably never found an elf body so in need of its restorative effects. Gratefully, I discovered that it had retained much of its potency. Healing energies rippled through my body, fever and infection vanished, wounds closed but did not altogether heal. My mind became clear and still.

“I looked about me and saw that I had landed in a place of great power. Canyons and buttes of red stone stretched out in desolate moonlit vistas. All about me were medicine plants, the potent desert plants of the high desert—-sage, agave, yarrow—to my eyes they were fringed in blue electricity. Towering buttes rose out of the desert like giant lode stones charged with planetary energy. The desert was intensely alive, and its heart beat with a rhythm as long, slow, and powerful as the rhythm of the most ancient mountains. I had arrived on Old Terra, but in a place of power, a high desert that generated its own dimension like a red planet. It lived utterly apart from the primate collective, a place of the dreamtime shrouded in primal mysteries.

“ I allowed myself a long moment to behold the beauty of this world before returning to survival tasks. The bleeding had stopped, and wounds had closed, but my naked body was covered with blood and I shivered from shock and the cold night air. From my bag I removed a loosely woven cloth and put a few drops of the Vehrillion Elixir on it. I wiped blood from my skin. Every movement had to be paid for in pain— the lacerations were like strings of fire whipping around my whole body.

“I put my clothes on and the soft fabric comforted my skin and protected me from the cold, desert night. I put the hood of my cloak up and drew it around me. The cloak reflected back the warmth of my body and I sat down, covering myself with it as if it were a small tent. Once I stopped moving, I was able to detach from some of the pain. I took a number of deep, slow breaths, closed my eyes and focused my mind inward. I summoned a navigational alchemy, a type of far seeing that stripped away all the surface detail of where I was, and revealed points of power that glowed from various parts of this world.

“I saw that when I had fallen to Old Terra my spirit had been drawn to a land displaced, a vast high desert inhabiting its own time stream. Looking beyond the high desert, faces came out of the night, the faces of spirits who were linked to me in this world through strange patterns of destiny connected to the sacred quest. They were faces of metamorphic primates, primates who were part way on the path to becoming elves. One of these had almost become an elf, a boy who lived in a green, wooded place some hundreds of leagues away. He was on his own journey that was not for me to disturb, but he was deeply connected to my lifeline, a root soul. And I sensed you, sensed your will to connect to my kind.

“And that is perhaps all I should tell of my story for now,” said Jeremiah, his eyes glimmering in the firelight. He put some more wood on the campfire and seemed to be giving me some space to ask questions or say anything I cared to say. But I had been so affected by his story that I wasn’t sure if I had a thousand questions or none at all.

“I think you should ask as many questions as you need to.” said Jeremiah. His face glowed in the light of the campfire and I was startled once again to see how young he looked, while his eyes had a depth of awareness that transcended any age. But despite this strangeness I felt perfectly comfortable with him, and felt that I could ask him anything.

“This terrible creature, the Demiwraith, why do you think it let you through the portal?”

“I don’t know, I keep wondering about that myself.” replied Jeremiah. “Possibly it didn’t expect me to be able to resist the pleasure creating chemicals it had secreted within its body, an ultimate, metabolic Vielitation that I only narrowly escaped. But I have a feeling there is something more to it. Even the passage through its body seemed designed as a test, with an opening provided if I were capable of passing the test. For a few moments, after I first landed on Old Terra, I realized that I shouldn’t assume that I had passed the test, what if I were still in the Demiwraith’s body and it were capable of simulating my whole perception of reality? It was a horrifying thought, but I had to consider it, and I performed a number of tests, the details aren’t important, but I was able to know that I was not experiencing a simulacrum, I really was on Old Terra.

Since then I have had a vision of the Demiwraith as a harvester of primate energies. In the vision it was manipulating its crop to achieve a precise type of decay, a delicate fermentation, but the process was destablizing and in the scales of its calculations I was a medicine, a new ingredient to stir up the chemistry of fermentation. In the vision I saw that there was a slight and precarious chance that the Demiwraith had overstepped, that if I could connect with some of the proto-elf spirits in this world, that I might act as an unexpected medicine. Once I saw that I began to think differently about the Demiwraith. Everything, even the darkest things, are part of the way, the great design, what some of the ancient primates named ‘Tao.’ We cannot expect to comprehend all the paradoxes and strange relationships, we can only assume that the Cosmos is unfolding as it should, even though this be in ways fantastically different than what we want, or think we want. The Demiwraith is the Archparasite, and seems the adversary of both primate and elf life, but it also seems that evolution requires adversity and suffering. If a parasite forces its host to become more conscious to deal with the threat, than from a greater point of view it is more a symbiont than a parasite. Certainly the Demiwraith is a highly intelligent, creative, metamorphic creature. So perhaps it evolves as we do, or we evolve as it does, and that suggests a hidden symbiosis.

In my case, at least, I intended to encounter the Demiwraith, and the quest required that I pass through its body to make the crossing to Old Terra, so for me the Demiwraith fulfilled a purpose. I am also wiser for my encounter with the Demiwraith, though it cost me in many ways too, cost me more than the scars that you can see. But for the six, and for the primate lives I witnessed in the portal whose suffering seemed only to serve as food for the Demiwraith, this is a deeper mystery, one I don’t want to explain away just to put my mind at ease. Still, things are not always what they seem, and the cutting edge of the black art of Viealitation is to make parts of the great design seem utterly black and pointless. But we can never be sure enough of what we think we see to know that it is all black and pointless. Did those lives I witnessed in the portal all dissipate into ethers of suffering to feed the Demiwraith, or did they pass through the portal and become something else? I do not know. Did the six really become part of the Demiwraith’s body to be slowly sucked dry and assimilated? I don’t know that either. The Demiwraith wanted me to think so, but the Demiwraith is a puppet master, a genius at the deceptions and misdirections of Viealitation. It is a metamorphic changeling and more than capable of contriving its bodily tissues to create a horrifying illusion. Perhaps the six also passed through the portal and arrived at earlier points in the history of Old Terra. Certainly there have been reports from the distant past of Old Terra that others of my kind had been seen by primates, but would quickly vanish once observed. We always assumed that these reports were visions of an evolutionary possibility, distant echoes of the future. But these are just more possibilities I can’t be sure about.

I also cannot assume that all seemingly dark things are ultimately helpful illusions, and that underneath everything is all pretty and wonderful. I simply cannot see enough of the grand design to judge the Cosmos and say that there should be daisies and amethysts, but that there should not be spiders and cancers. There are some that say, among both your kind and mine, that things are exactly as they should be and that one need do nothing but contemplate, meditate and accept. Perhaps they are right, but when I contemplate I become aware that I have a True Will to follow the quest, and that will seems to be as much a part of the great design as anything else. So, for me, acceptance means following my True Will even though there is so much I cannot understand like the Demiwraith, and maybe nothing that I can fully understand.” Jeremiah looked at me and smiled, his face lighting up in a way that lightened my spirits. “Well, I’ll be surprised if that wasn’t the most round about answer you’ve ever gotten to a question about the Demiwraith.” I felt heartened by Jeremiah’s attitude toward things. He had a way of putting things and a manner that was both reassuring and unpretentious. My usual anxious disposition was calmed by his presence, and I felt confident enough to ask the most troubling and difficult questions.

“Jeremiah, you called the realm that I come from ‘Old Terra’ and you’ve referred to human beings as primates, and have described them as the ancient ancestors of the elves. But I know nothing about this phase of evolution. What happened and how did the elves come to be on this different world, that you called Emeral?” Jeremiah smiled.

“I am glad that you are getting to the heart of the matter, but perhaps I owe you an apology. Intuition told me to present things to you in a certain way, but I’m not entirely sure why. Hopefully this approach wasn’t needlessly clumsy and unsettling. What I told you was true, as far as I understand these things, but I certainly owe you much more in the way of explanation.

“Old Terra, the world of your time that you know as ‘Earth’ was in a state of great instability and change at the time in its history that I fell backward through the stream of time to meet. This is hard to know how to communicate, because what for me is ancient history, for you is the near future. What obscures things even further is that there are infinite arrays of parallel time streams and the one that I came from may match up with yours in some ways, and not in others. Most of your kind stay within the collective time stream all their lives. Alphabet-using primates came to call the collective time stream, ‘history’ and by powerfully Viealitated habits of mind they considered divergences from that stream as ‘not real.’”

“What I can tell you of Old Terra and the elves is only what I can see looking back over my shoulder, backward into the time stream that I flowed with before I crossed over. The story of the exodus from Old Terra and the origin of the elves is not a tale that could be given justice at an evening campfire, or at the nightly campfires of many moons. Perhaps some day I will try to set it down properly, but for now a very simple version will have to suffice.

“On Old Terra there lived a very unusual boy, what in your mind you call a ‘mutant‘ and what I might think of as a metamorphic primate, a proto-elf. But this is not the boy that I mentioned earlier, that I saw in the high desert. This boy, whose name is Allan, I have not yet seen in this world, and I suspect that he may be from the past of my timeline but I feel no trace of him in yours.

“From the earliest age, Allan heard voices and saw images that communicated secret things to him. Many of the secret things had to do with the technological magic so predominant in your world. When he was grown, Allan was able to create new machines and devices. This technological magic was so celebrated and copied that Allan became one of the wealthiest individuals of his day. Allan used his great wealth to build many secret projects, projects that involved magic that he believed his world was not ready for. And it is not so hard to see why he would feel this way as his world was being poisoned, and vast realms of life were being destroyed by technological magic already. Allan began to get visions that his world would not last too much longer. Visions and voices insisted that he make an Ark and they gave him all sorts of information on how he could do this. The Ark was a type of starship, a ship that would be able to carry life samples from the flora and fauna of Old Terra. It also had thinking machines that allowed it to carry extensive records of all the culture and history of Old Terra. The voices told Allan that genetic sampling of his world had revealed that many valuable species would become too genetically damaged to be of use elsewhere if he did not complete his Ark quickly. He was also told to build sufficient accommodations for one hundred and forty-three primate passengers besides himself, plus extra space if a number of them were to bear children during the great crossing.

“Allan set to work with all possible speed. The workers who built the Ark thought they were constructing a building of great technological magic that would demonstrate how primates could live in sealed, self contained environments. Allan was also told that he should not seek out or attempt to choose any of the primate passengers, that they would be chosen for him and would seek him out. Sure enough, one hundred and forty three primates, all of them proto-elves in some way, had visions, heard voices, or in other uncanny ways came to seek out Allan.

“And then there was the day of departure, a day that nearly proved tragic. Primates of the sort that are fully possessed and energized by Viealitation got wind of his plans and felt a burning passion to destroy the Ark. They would have succeeded, but Allan had been given information on how to use technological magic to create defensive shields, and these defenses proved to be just barely adequate to survive a terrible onslaught of technological weaponry. But the Ark held together, and was able to leave the gravitational field of the planet. The Ark traveled at great speeds so that it soon diverged from the time frame of Old Terra. And it was the gravitational coherence of the primate time stream known as history which they needed to depart as much as the physical planet.

“Then followed the time of exodus, the ‘Great Crossing’ as it came to be known while the Ark traveled through the lonely reaches of space. The Ark had sensors that probed the galaxy seeking a planet that could support the life that it bore. But there were flaws in the design of the sensor instruments, and for many, many years they wandered blind, though they did not know it. Members of the original group of one hundred and forty-four began dying of old age. Allan was a very old man when he discovered the flaws in the ship’s instruments and corrected them. It seemed to him as if the voices had intentionally misled him. For some reason they must have wanted the crossing to take far longer than practical necessity required. Allan also discovered that there were relatively simple reconfigurations that would allow the Ark to travel at greater speeds than were at first thought possible. Soon after these discoveries, he also died, and in a very few more years all the original passengers were gone and remaining on the Ark were a group of one hundred and forty-four children all of whom had been born on the ship—the first generation born off-planet.

“The off-planet generation were an even more unusual group than their parents. Their parents, as I mentioned before, were all proto-elves in some way. They all had unusual talents, what they called ‘psychic abilities,’ and many of them were very youthful and androgynous in appearance. They were all of them primates, but of a sort that saw and experienced their world differently from the primate collective. Each of them had a powerful True Will to rebel and diverge from the destructive time stream of their species, and had suffered greatly resisting the dark undertow of Viealitation. Their suffering deepened their commitment to alter the time stream and allowed them to develop profound empathy for their fellow creatures. Yet they lived in a time that was so lacking in that natural empathy, and so charged with Viealitation delusions, that they had to live secretly, and as outsiders, in their own world. In the stark emptiness of outer space they discovered that although most of them had never met, that they were somehow a family and that many in the group had contact with each other through dreams long before they had encountered the Ark.

“And all of this strange family of proto-elves shared a heavy burden of sorrow for all the life on the planet that they had left behind. Many felt a profound guilt for abandoning the Earth, their species, and particular loved ones that had been left behind. Technological communications with Earth had been lost early on, and no one knew how things turned out, though the worst was presumed. And so they lived as a true family, with deep wounds in common, and empathy for each other and those they had left behind.

“Once they had been surrounded by history and the primate collective, and now all around them was the vacuum, the silence and darkness of space. Their lives were utterly confined to the ship as they traveled through the vast sterile emptiness of deep space. Many unusual things happened during this crossing, but that tale is more than can be told this night. For now I will only say that communication among the group on the ship reached a level that few if any other primate groups had ever reached. But for their children, the first generation born off-planet, who never knew a world besides the Ark, things were stranger still. They learned to experience each others’ dreams and to communicate in visions instead of words. For them the Ark was also a chrysalis, a chrysalis in which primate evolution gave birth to something else.

“I was one of those children.” Said Jeremiah, and his eyes filled with tears. “And there is much that I must pass over for now, like the terrible grief we felt at the passing of the Old Ones, our parents. They were the last of their kind and in some ways the first of our kind, but the mortality of their bodies could not be altered. And there were deep feelings of sadness and guilt as we discovered that we were not subject to aging while one by one the Old Ones passed away from us.” Jeremiah became silent and stared into the fire for a while before continuing.

“Not very long after the passing of the last old one, the Ark’s sensors detected our new world, a beautiful evergreen planet that we named ‘Emeral.’ There came the day of the landing and the one hundred and forty-four of my kind left the only world we had ever known, the Ark, and found ourselves on a planet of spectacular, pristine beauty. No primates inhabited this world, but somehow it had been seeded with many familiar life forms, and we found others that were new and wonderful.

“On Emeral we had room to grow and evolve, and we adopted new ways, and rediscovered many ancient ones. Especially we created new magic which we blended with rediscovered ancient magic. We called this hybrid magic the Vehrillion, and it allowed us to grow far beyond where the old technological magic of our parents and primate ancestors had taken us.

“But the tale that I have told is merely a glimpse of the tale that could be told, and one day perhaps I will attempt to set it down. But of all the many parts I have omitted, there are one or two things that still need to be told.

“For some of the Old Ones the crossing was like one long and endless night. There was no sun to divide days into light and dark. Artificial lights were dimmed and brightened to simulate day and night, but this was no substitute for sunlight. For my brothers and sisters born off planet this was not a problem because the Ark was all we had ever known, and children have a gift of adaptability. But many of the Old Ones became despondent and felt a longing to at least know what had happened to Old Terra, the planet they had left behind. They felt like exiles, and for them the great crossing was a dark and interminable exodus into the sterile, cold vacuum of space. Deep in their bodies they knew that they would never live long enough to see it through.

“They longed for Old Terra. They had not forgotten how the forces of Viealitation had tried to destroy them and made so much of their lives on planet miserable, but still they had yearnings to reconnect. When they were on planet they had only felt their desire to diverge, to be separate from the primate collective, but now that they were so irretrievably separated they were forced to realize that part of them still lived, or wanted to live, on a world that was so many light years away. As some told it, they felt that world like the phantom pain of a missing limb.

Some tried to use what they called ‘psychic powers’ to view Old Terra remotely. But what little they were able to perceive was shadowy and vague, and they could follow the time stream of the planet only to a certain point, and then they couldn’t see Old Terra anymore, but only strange colors and lights that would then vanish altogether. They called this horizon line of their vision ‘the Great Mystery.’ Some felt that viewing remotely was impossible because of the dilation and displacement of the time streams. At the speeds that we had traveled for decades, thousands and thousands of years would have passed on Old Terra. They felt we were too remote from the old time stream to be able to view it anymore. Others disagreed and said that anything could be viewed remotely if you resonated with it. It was their belief that the time stream was obscured by what they called ‘novelty.’ There had been so much change on the planet that their minds simply could not resonate with it coherently. But for all the Old Ones the loss of communication and knowing was a deep sadness.

“As the Old Ones aged and began to pass on, some of them shared visions with us, visions that haunted them for years, but which they had withheld. They told us that they felt sure there had been cataclysmic change on Old Terra, but they could perceive it only as the Great Mystery. They believed that suffering may have intensified on the planet, perhaps horribly, but somehow it had led to an explosion of evolutionary change. What they called a ‘quantum shift’ occurred, which apparently meant displacement into other dimensions of possibility. And some felt a deep disappointment and regret that they had removed themselves, and not been there to participate in the Great Mystery. For them it seemed that they had not so much escaped the fate of Old Terra, as been left behind by it.

“After most of the Old Ones had passed on, I became very close to one of the few remaining elders, a proto-elf of great wisdom whose name was Arthur. Shortly before he died Arthur told me something, something that would come to haunt me. His words have a direct connection with my being here and with the Sacred Quest. I can still hear him speaking them in my mind,

“‘Jeremiah, I can feel the end of my time is near, and I feel at peace with that. But one doubt still gnaws at me. I have tried to view the Great Mystery and the few glimpses I have been given cause me to feel that it was somehow diminished, that some quality my mind cannot name was lacking in it. I wonder sometimes if our departure was not a misdeed, if we did not take something away from the mother planet that she needed. For we took life, sacred medicine, away in our ark. In the one hundred and forty-four of us who left was also the spirit energy of you and your brothers and sisters. It lived in us only as unborn potential, the elf spirit you might say, and I wonder if we did not take something from the Great Mystery by sending that life off into the sterile darkness of space.’

“For a time, after we completed the crossing, I put those words out of my mind. There was so much to do to explore and settle our new world, Emeral. We had grown up in a confining crucible of technological magic, the Ark, and now for the first time had set foot on a planet, and not just any planet but one filled with life and untrammeled beauty. Ages passed as we settled this world and developed a new culture. I became part of a hermetic circle, a small group of elves, some male, some female, who found that we were connected by especially deep inner ties. We discovered that we had been brought together to develop a new system of magic—the Vehrillion—and with our vital, ageless bodies and eager minds we had all the space we needed for that development to occur.

“But even on our beautiful world there were shadows. Some few of us chose dark paths, and slowly we all became aware of the Demiwraith. As yet it was still wraith-like and disembodied, but we felt its presence, a malign spirit deep underground near the Valley of Shadows. I attempted farseeing alchemy to probe its mind and view the time stream of its origin. And that was when I rediscovered the problem of the Great Mystery. I used farseeing alchemy to view the solar system of Old Terra, but the earth and its moon were no longer present, nor did any trace of them remain. The Demiwraith, like ourselves, was a castaway of the old world. Somehow the Great Mystery had removed the life of the mother planet to a place, a realm that neither we, nor the Demiwraith could follow. The Demiwraith, this potent being fed by the madness and suffering of many billions, had found that its food source, its host, had disappeared forever across an impenetrable event horizon. It was a hungry wraith, a parasite without host, abandoned in the cold of space. But the Demiwraith knew the secrets of inner navigation and sensed Emeral as its nexus of power, a place of resonance where a species lived that was the direct descendant of its host species. As a flesh-spirit, it desired the living food that would allow it to manifest organically. But it had the ability to persist as a wraith, disembodied, and as a wraith it needed no star ship to follow us across space.

“We felt this flesh-spirit throbbing with hunger in the deep stone cavities of our world. But we were not so easy to feed on as the primates of Old Terra. Our bodies and spirits burned at a temperature of color not suited to its metabolic fires. The Demiwraith required of its host a certain fermentation—it loved bodies that aged and died in fear, for these exuded a sweet ether that made it strong and lusty. For the Demiwraith, our energy was strange and mutagenic, medicine that it both feared and desired. But in the living presence of its original host descendants it was able to perform a powerful alchemy, an alchemy of time and energy and feeding that opened a portal that flowed backward in the stream of time to Old Terra. The portal it created through time was a digestive organ that allowed it to still feed from the fermenting madness and fear of many billions of dying primates.

“In this way the Demiwraith came to coexist with us on Emeral and for a long time it sipped cautiously, almost invisibly, at the edges of our collective energy. This continued until the six decided secretly that they would seek out the Demiwraith and slay it.

“It seems very likely that the Demiwraith discovered weaknesses in their personalities, that it employed mind pressures and deceptive spells that fanned the flames of naïve ambition within them. But we cannot say for certain.

“All we really know is that the six never returned to us. They may have been parasited and slowly consumed, or perhaps they were allowed to pass through the portal as I was. But we did feel, deep in our bodies, one dreadful result of the outcome of the six. For the first time the Demiwraith had fed on the living blood of elf bodies, and this blood made it a far more potent parasite. The careful, almost undetectable sipping at the edge of our collective energy had become a greedy suction that we could now discern clearly in the dark moments and gloomy moods that came to pervade our world like encircling mists.

“Our world had become overcast and out of joint. Wispy tendrils of fear sought openings in our minds and a vague miasma of discontent overshadowed spirits once bright and glowing.

“Arthur’s last words to me returned unbidden to my mind. I journeyed back to the Ark which had lain dark and closed up for ages. I found it covered, almost hidden, by thick ivy. Within its darkened interior I felt the lingering of the ancestor spirits. I also began to feel, almost against my will, a deep urging to return to Old Terra no matter what the cost. I fired up the old thinking machines and viewed images and words that were the stored artifacts of the old time stream. I fasted, prayed, and came to know in the depths of my being that the sacred quest required me to cross over to Old Terra.”

Jeremiah paused and looked at me searchingly with his grey-green eyes. Somehow his eyes communicated to me that he knew things about me, and about my journey, things that I needed to know but that were hidden around corners in my mind and just out of sight. I felt that Jeremiah was waiting for me to ask the right questions, that there was a respectful gentleness in him that held him back from telling me what he knew. I considered a few moments before asking a question.

“Now that you have crossed over and are so much closer in time and space to the Great Mystery, do you have any clearer sense of what it is? Can you probe it with your vision and intuition?”

“In some ways I am closer to it, but in others I am further away, because from your timeline the Great Mystery is in the future, and although it is a necessary part of the future it is not yet fully formed. What I sense is a time of great change, and perhaps great suffering, a time when enough proto-elves will experience such a profound need to escape the collective time line that there will occur a sudden evolutionary metamorphosis, the collective time line will fracture, and there will be an explosion of what the Old Ones called ‘novelty’ as a multitude of spirits find they are free to radiate their own time streams and follow pathways that are unbound from matter and mortal bodies. Some of these unbound spirits will coalesce and have a knowing of each other unimaginable now, since most of your kind are so fractured and communicate mostly with verbal speech. When these spirits, who have so long endureBridge Realmsd separateness, begin to coalesce there will be new realities created, and new dramas of light and dark will occur.

“When I viewed the Great Mystery from my time line, I saw, as Arthur had, that those of my kind had in some way been left behind, for as much as we have been able to evolve, we did not have the power of so much suffering and discontent, so much life potential wanting to explode a confining crucible. I believe that the suffering of that confinement to the proto-elf spirit was the alchemical fire that created the Great Mystery…” Jeremiah put more wood on the fire, and the resinous branches crackled and exploded releasing clouds of fiery sparks that disappeared into the night air.

Jeremiah looked at me, seeming to study me for a moment. I could feel his concern for my well being and it was both tender and capable of the subtlest discernments. Jeremiah had the ability of a great martial arts master to locate precisely the moments when, in the alchemical flow of energies and events around him, there were subtle shifts. Relating to another he could see those tiny windows of opportunity that blink open and closed, and with a remarkable grace he was always able to be in the right place at the right time. And if that weren’t enough, he also had the sensitivity of a great Chinese accupuncturist who could tell the condition of all your organs from the feeling of your pulse. Except that Jeremiah could feel the pulse of your life energy through eye contact, and I could sense that he was as aware of fluctuations in my bodily organs as he was aware of psychological and spiritual shifts in me. Once again, so much of what passed between us was nonverbal, so the record that I am able to provide is merely the shadow and outline of what I experienced.

“It may not be wise for you to stay too much longer in this realm. Conditions here are so different from your realm that staying here much longer will make your departure more difficult. We must part fairly soon, but you will see me again sooner than you think, and it will probably be in your realm. Within you now is a tiny orb of the Vehrillion Sapphire Elemental which will help you find your way.”

Jeremiah looked at me for a moment, again that feeling of subtle discernment, and then he seemed to make a decision. “There are two available portals that may take you back to Old Terra. One is quite safe and direct. It is a portal very similar to the one I sent to summon you here. There is another portal that is not safe at all, passage through this portal is labyrinthine and perilous, but not impossible. Through this portal there is almost certain to be great hardships and trials, but there is also the potential for great benefit. In the first case I summon a highly energetic portal that will provide a clean entrance to your world, but in the second case you will summon the portal, you will manifest your own bridge between the realms, and if you are able to do this it will make you stronger, you will be better able to travel and adapt to novel circumstances. Your ability to manifest change, especially in your self, will be greatly enhanced. The most likely case is that when you summon this portal, summon it within yourself, you will generate Bridge Realms, something like what the Old Ones called ‘bardos‘, only they are not necessarily generated just by you, because you may be visited by other travelers and you may also tap into Bridge Realms that already exist. Both the Bridge Realms you create, and the ones you tap into, may be quite dangerous, indeed they are most likely to be dangerous, and the dangers are likely to be of every sort, dangers to body and spirit. If you are steadfast you should be able to deal with all the dangers of the inner sort, and this will make you stronger. The possibility of tapping into existing Bridge Realms is the most dangerous part of this portal, some of these are quite potent and capable of pulling you in, they can influence even very strong spirits to forget themselves and make irreversible choices that may tie them to the Bridge Realm for an almost indefinite time. But I will be working from my end to do everything I can to help you keep away from such realms, or if you do enter them, to be able to travel through them rather than get sucked ever more deeply into them.”

“Does the Demiwraith occupy one of those existing Bridge Realms?” I asked, feeling a dread certainty that it did.

“It would be closer to the truth,” Jeremiah responded thoughtfully, “to say that the Demiwraith is a potent influence on almost all of the Bridge Realms, including the ones you are likely to generate yourself. This makes all the Bridge Realms dangerous, but this danger is also a completely necessary part of their medicine. The Bridge Realms that you generate will tend to be reflections of your deepest fears, and they will very likely be grotesque. Most of them are not absolutely hellish, they are mixtures of light and dark just as your native realm is a mixture of light and dark, but they will likely have dangerous and difficult elements. This is much like journeying in the dreamtime, but here consequences may be irreversible. it is easy, even likely, to get lost in a Bridge Realm that you generate, to forget that you are a traveler passing through, and to forget that you are more than what you appear to be in a single realm. Most of your kind are in that state of deep forgetting, they have made choices that bind them ever deeper to their native realm until they have forgotten that there was ever any other realm, and they push away even memory of their daily dreamtime travels. They have no idea what realm they were in before birth, but this vast area of forgetting doesn’t even attract their attention because their attention has been completely captivated by their native realm. And this state of being completely entranced is a classic danger with Bridge Realms—they may captivate your attention utterly, and when you travel through them they will shift your identity so that although you will still be yourself you may find yourself being twisted by strange identities.

“In saying so much about the second portal it may seem that my counsel leans toward accepting such a challenge. But the truth is that I truly do not know which portal is wiser for you to pass through. There are too many possibilities for anyone to anticipate, too many unformed outcomes. You must be guided exclusively by your intuition. Ask your deepest self which portal you need. It may very well be the first. I realize that I am asking you to make a very difficult choice, but this fork in your path could not be hidden.” Jeremiah fell silent, giving me space to consider. I closed my eyes as thoughts, intuitions and feelings piled into each other. My mind had been conditioned by so many stories and myths to believe that the more challenging path was always the one to choose, but I also felt the truth of Jeremiah’s not knowing, that there was a genuinely open question here and I could make no assumption about this choice. Part of me said, Quit while you are ahead, there is a time to advance and a time to retreat. I sensed great suffering and danger from the Bridge Realms. But another part of me said, This is the call to adventure, you could never live with yourself knowing you had avoided a challenge that could have made you stronger. I realized that my mind was cutting both ways and that I needed to shift to a deeper and more intuitive plane of awareness. I took several deep breaths and felt a trembling dread of the second portal, but also an awareness of its inevitability in my timeline. Where the second portal would take me was completely unknown, but an inner certainty demanded that I do it. Nevertheless, it was an uncomfortable certainty, there was that edge of the abyss and there was a powerful desire in me to choose the first portal. I had to will myself to say the words,

“The second portal.”

“Very well.” said Jeremiah standing up. I stood up also. Jeremiah did something to extinguish the fire and the moonlit mesa became more visible around us. I felt the magnetic energy of the red crown of stone. I followed Jeremiah a few feet toward some of the largest red boulders. In clear and succinct terms Jeremiah instructed me in summoning this inner portal. Although Jeremiah encouraged me, since I had first encountered him in Seattle, to share my account of our encounters, he suggested that it would not be helpful if I shared the method, because, for one thing, it was particularly adapted for traveling from this green realm back to my native realm, but it would be ineffective for traveling from the native realm.

While I’m providing disclaimers, I should also explain a few things before I narrate my travels in the Bridge Realms. When I passed into the Bridge Realms there was not so much as a fade to black, there was no break in consciousness, or if there were it was so complete I have no memory of it. I have no memory of any transition. I simply entered the portal and became a different identity in a different realm. I didn’t wake up as this new identity, or form into it, it was more like a channel had been switched, this other life was already in progress and now I was the other life. There was a certain blankness for the first few seconds of that new identity, and then the interface was completed and now I was the new identity with no memory of ever having been anything else. To be perfectly honest, this new identity is not one I would have chosen if I had the license of a fiction writer to choose the way I would like to appear.

Narcissism and self-consciousness are major themes in my personality, and there is much about this new identity that is rather embarrassing to relate, and I also have to admit that my whole performance in the Bridge Realms is not very flattering. I forgot myself and got caught again and again and it is not clear at all if I would ever have escaped on my own power. Also, to tell you what I experienced in the Bridge Realms I have to switch point of view to my new identity, an identity that has a different voice, a rather neurotic voice that is sometimes in your face and defensive, at other times collapsed in self-pity and complaining. This other identity exists inside of me in this realm as a subpersonality, and the only effective way to narrate its experience is to allow it to tell its own story in its own way. And if that’s not bad enough, some of the Bridge Realms had grotesque elements that retold may sound like a flimsy dream or cartoon, and if it seems that way to you, count it a blessing because, for me, it was no cartoon at all, it was as real as a Monday morning heart attack. My implicit understanding with Jeremiah is that I would share the entire encounter, but you are under no such obligation, and if you don’t care to view the many humiliations of my experience in the Bridge Realms then don’t let me stop you from skipping this part of the account.

OK, so that’s probably enough disclaiming. It’s dangerous to hesitate before crossing the abyss, so whether I like it or not, this is what happened. After Jeremiah instructed me, I closed my eyes and followed his portal summoning instructions until I beheld what looked like a mirrored soap bubble, or a curved, but asymmetrical drop of liquid mercury about three feet in diameter. Its form was always moving, changing, flowing and reflected in its mirrored contours I saw myself, only the contours distorted all the reflections of me stretching them, compressing them, twisting them into unexpected forms, and I began to see different people or beings in these different reflected faces of myself. They were all me—but there were so many of them. Jeremiah had told me that I had to enter this mirrored bubble, that it was the opening of the portal. But now that it was before me I felt a powerful reluctance to enter it, a reluctance that was rapidly escalating into a paralysis of will. I feared to be obliterated, to be twisted into something unrecognizable, like the weird and ever-shifting reflections I saw in the shiny mercurial bubble. I had to act immediately before hesitation could gain hold and I willed myself toward the bubble, and the will had to come from deep within, and when it did I felt my feet leave the ground as I dove into the silver bubble.

VII

It was a Winter morning and I stood in a mostly empty parking lot, the pale winter sun cast my shadow before me and I saw the gross roundness of my body and how big and round my head was. I wore a big old black overcoat, a coat so familiar it was almost part of my body and its pockets bulged with a messy collection of important items—candy bars, coupons, plastic pens, dog-eared envelopes and folded up pieces of paperwork. These bulging pockets reassured me and I felt my old, fat wallet in an inside pocket built in the satin lining of the overcoat. The presence of such familiar things was comforting, but I also felt a strange blankness in my head, a blankness you can get on those groggy winter mornings when you’ve just woken up and you’re not sure yet of where you are and maybe even who you are.

Nervously, I pulled out the old wallet and opened it up and saw my picture ID and there was my big round head, my eyes were big and shiny and black as coal, worried puppy dog eyes, and there was my name, Morris Schnauman, and that person in a wheel chair icon, that official disability certification that entitled me to discounts and to handicapped parking spots if I had a car, which I didn’t, not to mention that they’d never let me drive a car if I did have one, and next to the wheel chair icon was the all too familiar code: “RCDMG# 089-54-7895. In case you’re lucky enough not to know, RCDMG# means Reality Challenged Disabled-Mutant Registration Number. They use a “G” to stand for “registration” for some stupid reason. My nine digit registration number I knew backwards and forwards, could recite it in my sleep, probably did recite it in my sleep sometimes, because of all the endless paperwork I had to fill out twice a week when I had to go downtown to the Office of Disabled Mutant Services, ODMS, which everyone pronounced “Odd-ems,” as if we needed reminding of our oddness. Every week I had to go down there and fill out the same papers over and over again to get my disability payments.

Now I realized why my head felt so blank. I was trying to forget that I had to spend my morning and afternoon at Odd-ems sitting on uncomfortable plastic chairs filling out papers under florescent lights waiting for my number to get called by snotty clerks who treat you like mutation is synonymous with retardation. Except that they treat like not only you’re retarded, but as if it’s your fault you’re retarded, that you’re not only retarded but doing it just to irritate them. My case worker, Mrs. Sternberger, always tells me I shouldn’t call myself a mutant, but a “Reality Challenged Survivor,” (or “RCS” as she always stamps my paperwork), but then she always treats me like I’m a retard if I forget to get some paper stamped, especially if its my DSM-4 voucher, because she can’t get paid on time if my DSM-4 isn’t notarized, and she’s still giving me this huge snotty attitude because I forgot to get my stupid DSM-4 notarized like seven months ago. I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about having to talk to Mrs. Sternberger and her attitude.

Descending the iron steps into the subway station, I felt the sprightly enthusiasm of an elderly, rheumatic coal miner about to begin a 100 hour shift after a breakfast of cold gruel. I stood on the subway platform feeling hungry and nervous. My pockets bulged with cellophane packaged snacks and I started tearing into them, eating salty snack foods, square orange crackers that were sandwiched with a layer of dry, industrial peanut butter. I didn’t even notice what I was doing until I was sitting in the screeching subway car and there was a huge lump in my stomach. The lump felt like it was composed of greasy sawdust, salt and chemicals, and I let out a belch that reeked of artificial cheese flavoring and rancid peanut butter.

Great, now I had school cafeteria breath and nothing to drink. I searched my pockets in vain for a mint or any sort of hard candy that might take away the cheesy taste out of my mouth. I felt a terrible dryness that started in my throat and then seemed to steal moisture from every ice crystal of my body so that I felt dizzy and weak. I had been suffering for years from hypoglycemia, candida, and Epstien-Barr, and I knew I was supposed to be drinking lots of fluids to replenish my ice crystals, but here I had gone ahead and eaten all these dry and salty snack foods without bothering to bring even a single, warm drink box of Hawaiian Punch with me. And then that voice started to speak in my head, you know the one I’m talking about, it sounds like a cross between a hyper-critical AM radio talk show psychologist and my caseworker, Mrs. Sternberger. The voice started saying stuff like, “Hey Mutie Boy, Hey Mr. Softballs, can’t you remember about avoiding dehydration—DUH—-is somebody else supposed to take responsibility for your health?—DUH—Is it gonna be our fault if you get metastisizing snow cancer, Mr. Duh-head? How many times do we have to send you the message before somebody inside your big duh-head picks up the phone?” The voice went on and on seeming to merge with the sound of the subway car. It was the sort of subway car where the lights always flickered and there was the continual screech of metal parts brought into unhappy contact with other, equally unfulfilled metal parts. Lost in a malaise of screeching metal and chaotic thoughts, I stared down into the world of subway car linoleum.

The subway screeched around a curve and something slid into my field of view. It was a magazine of a sort I had never seen before. The magazine was called Healing Nexus and there was a picture of a man with smiling eyes and sunlight all around him. Underneath it said, “Your Guide to Healing and Wholeness.” I felt goose bumps forming on the surface of my snow crystals when I opened the magazine. I knew this was no coincidence, the magazine had slid right toward me, and flipping through it I saw an article about astrology headlined: “There Are NO Accidents!” The people in this magazine were all backlit and smiling at me with such beautiful smiles and clear eyes. Mrs Sternberg couldn’t smile that way if a sexy movie star showed up in her office to tell her that the lottery ticket in her purse was worth thirty million dollars. It felt like these smiling faces were all my friends, that they knew all about my troubles and were here to feel me, touch me, heal me. The lonely boredom of my subway ride disappeared and I blinked back tears of joy and gratitude. I flipped through the pages and came to a picture of a man in white robes with arms outstretched and the dawning light of morning streaming all around him. I felt intuitively that he was the leader, that he was the highest of all the beautiful angelic healers in the entire magazine. His name was “Ra, Light Bringer.” Since I have a photographic memory, I can tell you exactly what I read:

“A Special Invitation to Freedom From Ra, Light Bringer

“Know then that after vanquishing his ego and shedding the last vestiges of his human identity, Ra, Light Bringer became one with divine essence at the moment of interplanetary harmonic convergence. Freed from human bondage, the being once known as Matt Weinstein, recalled his former lives and recovered his true identity as Ra, Light Bringer, Master of Osiris and Jah, Secret Origin of the Goddess, Bearer of the Seven Seals of Solomon, Writer of the Akashic Record upon the Emerald Tablets of Eternity, Rider of the White Buffalo as foretold in Hopi Prophecy, Supreme Certified Reiki Master, Tantric Initiator of all Younger Sisters of the New Age, Conqueror of the Serpent Ego in all its Many Guises, Blameless One, Wearer of the Many Colored Cloak of Great Radiance, Soul Guide, Grandfather Leader, Past Life Regressor and Sacred Prophet of all Peoples.

“Having come back to the mortal plane only to serve as the single true source of all divine light, Ra, Light Bringer challenges you to cast aside the rag of your human identity and follow him with absolute submission onto the only true path of freedom. Do not be waylaid on the path to freedom by others in Healing Nexus who are merely the myriad Maya-tongued deceivers filled with hollow promises of wisdom, power and spiritual attainment. These false teachers and prophets seek only to submerge you in the ten thousand things of Maya and to keep you from the only true teacher and prophet who is the bringer of the one true light that illuminates all the universes of creation.

“Brothers and sisters, render unto Babylon what is Babylon’s! Allow the Living Light Foundation Trust to take from you the unclean and heavy burden of Babylon money and worldly possession and fill you up with the Living Light of Ra, Light Bringer’s audio cassette series, Stepping onto the Path of Living Light and Freedom. This three tape series is all you will ever need to cast aside the rag of human identity and enter the Realm of Divine Living Light that Ra, Light Bringer has brought forth for your eternal freedom dance.

“Do not be deceived by the serpent-tongued enslavements of the so called ‘friends’ and ‘family’ that want to cling and ensnare you, to bind you to their fears and shackle you to the realm of outer darkness where all things dwindle and perish. Ra, Light Bringer, as Divine Prophet, foresees this danger for you! Be steadfast or you will never regain your one and only opportunity to find the living light path to freedom that opens to you only through the divine illumination of the one and only true tape series, Stepping Onto the Path of Living Light and Freedom.

“Many other books, tapes and teachers abound in Healing Nexus that promise you wisdom and illuminations. These are fine and useful tools if you intend to follow the thorny, descending path of samsaras where you limp weakly through false incarnation after incarnation into the endless sterile ether worlds of torturous bardos and phantom-haunted wastelands where your dwindling spirit cries out for freedom and has none.

“But if you prefer the short and easy true path, then become a freedom dancer in Ra, Light Bringer’s way of divine, living light by obtaining the one true tape series that opens the door to eternal freedom. The three tape series, Stepping Onto the Path of Living Light and Freedom, is better than free, it is available to you only in exchange for our freeing you of the heavy, unclean burden of your Babylon attachments. Please complete attached “Power of Attorney” form and have it signed and witnessed by a notary. Render unto Babylon what is Babylon’s! The door opens and light is streaming through waiting for you to begin your eternal freedom dance! Act before midnight tonight and receive Ra, Light Bringer’s Medallion of Freedom Pendant wrought of genuine Polymer Crystal and set on a scintillating chain of authentic Gold Tone from the Crystal Workshop and Forge of the Living Light Foundation Trust which has been authorized and blessed by Ra, Light Bringer himself. Send notarized documents to the Living Light Foundation Trust” An address, which I won’t record here, was given.

I know what you’re thinking. What a snowy fool I must be to fall for such an invitation! Like dark ripples flowing backward in time I can feel your negative judgments of me trashing my self-esteem. Don’t forget that judgments make an ass out of you and out of me because things are not always what they appear to be. So, if you will kindly have the patience to suspend judgments and just allow my narrative to unfold, I think you will find that such an attitude will be by far the most helpful for your understanding as well as for my self-esteem. For example, it may surprise you to learn along with me, as my story continues, that Ra, Light Bringer is exactly who he says he is, if not more so, and that the absurd nature of the ad was an intentional, highly conscious alchemical blind, a ruse to deceive the uninitiated who could be expected to make premature judgments that it was all a typical New Age rip off.

Being misjudged is exactly what I expect from people who think they know what’s going on, but have never been labeled a deformed mutant by society or suffered for years with chronic incarnation seizures (what they now refer to generically as Multiple Incarnation Disorder Syndrome or MIDS) or any of a number of heath challenges I’ve had to face. Let me be up front with you right from the start. The life of a mutant suffering from MIDS (among numerous other health challenges) is not always a pretty picture and I’ve never claimed to be the perfect poster child, so if you can’t deal with that, if you’re the type that can only view a mutant’s life through rose-tinted glasses, if you’re the sort that needs the harsh edges of an actual mutant case history sugar-coated with the glib, inspirational tone of an after-school special, then maybe you ought to back out now before things get a little too real for you. And if you are going to keep looking over my shoulder like I know you’re doing, the least you can do is hit the mute button on your negative judgments and stop trashing my self-esteem.

Anyway, when I finished reading Ra, Light Bringer’s ad in Healing Nexus I was filled with a deep calm, an inner sense of knowing. I might have been deceived by any number of the false teachers in that magazine but, intuitively, I had turned to an invitation from the one true teacher, the one true path, and, obviously, the one true tape series. In a moment I was shifted from my usual indecisive, passive disposition into a warrior, a man of action. Instantly I decided to blow off the FODMS appointment, get off the subway at the next stop and find a notary.

Well you can probably guess many of the events that followed. Since you think you can guess them, I’ll skip over the next few weeks and give you a brief summary. Yes, I was evicted from my apartment, no, I never did receive the tape series or polymer crystal freedom pendant I was promised, and, yes, my tiny checking account, and all the practical side of my life became the proverbial black hole at the center of the cosmic doughnut. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a homeless mutant, a Reality Challenged Survivor thrown out, penniless, luckless, hungry, thirsty, poorly rested, without health insurance or a friend in the world on the cold, hard streets of urban poverty.

No, I’m not going to try to glamorize homelessness for you. It might be the “cool thing” to make it sound like it was a descent into the inner labyrinth, an archetypal descent into the belly of the beast and all that. I could give it the old mythic spin and make it sound like I was a mutant on a classic hero’s journey with a modern, gritty, urban, slummin’-it flair. But that just wouldn’t be the truth. The truth is I didn’t like any part of homelessness, there was no heartfelt bonding with other street people, and when I could rouse myself from almost inanimate depression I would feed off of self-pity like a starving subway rat on three-day-old extra cheese pizza. The truth is that when I got tired of selfpity I had no spiritual epiphanies or transcendent experiences, but after three or four cups of Salvation Army coffee (with extra sugar and non-dairy creamers) I would spend hours cursing Ra, Light Bringer, this so called being formerly known as Matt Weinstein—-or “Sucker Boy” as I called him. I had endless Kung Fu fantasies where Sucker Boy would just happen to walk down the street and I’d just saunter up to him real casual like and say stuff like, “Go ahead, make my freedom dance.” Then I would proceed to head butt Sucker Boy like twelve times a second. Also, I would do these flying scissors kicks that would send Sucker Boy somersaulting upward only I would spin around so fast that I would be in position to do another flying scissors kick to Sucker Boy’s jaw before he could land and just keep him somersaulting back and forth like that thirty or forty times in a row. I walked down streets making intense facial gesticulations and saying things like, “Oh yeah, Sucker Boy, enlighten this…” And people would get out of my way. Then my blood sugar would collapse again and my Kung Fu self would fall from its high, caffeinated precipice of rage and fall through the weak, watery trampoline of self-pity to land in the dark gutter of absolute depression once again. Now, of course, I can see that there were many immature aspects to how I reacted to things at that time. But this is what my life was like for about six weeks of abject homelessness.

Then one particularly cold and windy night I walked aimlessly. Street after street I walked. The Kung Fu rage part of the day had long since dissipated and I found myself to be a kind of homeless snow zombie, my mind nearly blank. That was the moment when I first heard the telepathic voice, the first moment that the true Ra, Light Bringer revealed himself to me.

“Snow Child, hear me, it is I, Ra, Light Bringer.” His voice resonated into my deepest psyche. The whole, demeaning “Sucker Boy” ego concept I had formed of Ra, Light Bringer vanished at the first moment of telepathic contact. I felt such an absolute love, such an absolute strength and clarity from this being. It was his presence, even more than what he said, that could not be rationalized away. And with an intense, deja vu-tinged inner knowing I realized that Ra, Light Bringer was the one who had always guided me, but that somehow vast realms of Maya had caused me to forget him. Unconsciously, I had been waiting all of my life to rediscover Ra, Light Bringer, to take him into my heart, to allow him to fill my self esteem, and deepest self, with light and peace. “Snow Child, listen to me, for I have not forsaken you to the miserable existence that has befallen you. I see what you have suffered. The suffering I created with my deceptive ad in Healing Nexus was not an act of cruelty, but one of love, and as you grow toward the light you will see that it is the only way that you could have learned. Many other worlds await you, and if your eyes are open you may behold a key, a key that will unlock the vast deception of your existence.”

The reverberating voice of Ra, Light Bringer grew silent and his presence withdrew. I looked around me, and everything seemed perfectly ordinary and as usual. But I did not return to my ordinary, depressed state of mind. I was still filled with the living light of Ra, Light Bringer’s presence, and I had become hyper alert, my senses heightened to a dazzling acuity. I knew that I had waited a life time for this moment, and I knew that the true Ra, Light Bringer could speak no falsehood, that I would soon behold the sign, the key, as he had put it, that would unlock the vast deception of my existence. I was able to accept all of that in a single moment. Recognition was easy for me because somehow I had always sensed that there was something more, that there were other worlds than these, and that my whole existence as a mutant was caught up in those other worlds.

I walked down the street and my mutant awareness scanned out panoramically, aware of every shard of broken glass, every rusty bottle top and pigeon dropping. I scanned surface texture variations on the galvanized steel of street lamps, and perceived even the most faded and obscured graffiti marks on peeling walls of ancient, over painted cement. I was searching for that off detail, the clue, no matter how minute and hidden, that would unlock the great deception.

And then I saw her, saw her walk out of the dingy, florescent gloom of the small, inner city sized supermarket. She was an old, heavy woman in a shabby overcoat carrying two lumpy plastic shopping bags. She was the human singularity that ever since I have referred to as “The Supermarket Lady.”

You may recall that I had earlier mentioned in passing that I have a photographic memory. It has always been my fate in this incarnation to remember in painstaking detail everything that I have experienced on this plane of existence, while having no recall whatever of what happened before or beyond it. One glance was enough to tell me that I had seen The Supermarket Lady before. The style of clothing she wore now had been updated slightly, had a darker, more urban look than the flowered print dress she had worn then, but her apparent age and every detail of her face and physiognomy had been repeated and was identical to how she appeared decades earlier when I had first seen her.

This was what Ra, Light Bringer had told me to look for, a single, but shocking flaw in the deception, a careless moment of recycling an “extra,” a pseudo person that was meant to be a background detail that would be forgotten as soon as it was perceived. Someone had forgotten about my mutant memory, a tiny slip, but I had caught it, and now I understood. Every particle of my seeming world was a simulation, and I had been caught in that simulation for a lifetime like an insect caught in amber. My mind reeled and I started to hear ringing tones in my ears. Adrenaline pumped through the veins of ice water deep in my body. Ra, Light Bringer’s voice broke through telepathically.

“Snow Child, now you understand what I could only have shown you in this way. You have seen through the great veil of deception and now if you look about you once more, you will behold a portal into other worlds than these.”

Staggered, I walked down the street, the ringing tones in my ears heightening in intensity. I passed into the dark shadows under a highway overpass and saw a large, perfectly clean and empty refrigerator box lying before me. It lay with open ended side toward me and its interior was shadowy and vague. The box glowed with the uncanny aura of anomaly. This was the homeless part of town and an unoccupied box that perfect, in such a convenient place, was as unlikely and uncannily fortuitous as an uncrumpled hundred dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. I walked around the box examining from every angle its unblemished walls of cardboard and the four reinforcing bands of white plastic that gave it extra structural integrity. In small print I read, “This Energy Efficient CFC Free Refrigerator Manufactured by Inter Spatial Home Appliances, a fully owned subsidiary of Portal Technologies Unlimited.” Here was the portal that Ra, Light Bringer had told me I would find. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the shadowed opening of the box.

VIII

It would be conventional to say I “fell into” dark, empty space. But to say that would imply gravity and spatial direction. It would be a shade closer to the truth to say that I crawled for several feet until I “swam out” into space. But it would be most accurate to say that I just found myself in dark, empty space. There was a sense of movement, but there was no up or down, or any frame of reference to define it.

I floated in this undefined, dark space for many long eternities while my mind, having no context to think in any more, regressed and curled in on itself like a fetus gone asleep for long eons of self forgetting. Eons and eons and eons passed by, but there was no one there to be aware of them. Without an observer the eons themselves began to get sluggish and sleepy. They began to pass slower and slower and slower. Time itself began to curl in on itself and go to sleep and I had still not even completed the first eternity. But because of that weird thing about time and eternity, all of this incredibly long amount of time passed in an infinitesimal moment, like the twinkling of a star, and I hardly noticed it at all.

Mostly I didn’t notice it because after about thirty hours worth of sensory deprivation at the start of the first eternity, my ego collapsed and there ceased to be an observer. My awareness slumbered deep within me and gradually, imperceptibly, my perfect photographic memory dissolved, and with it my sense of self-identity, not to mention my self-esteem, vanished into complete nothingness.

After all these eternities had passed, I fell out of featureless, dark space and into the most distant outskirts of a universe of some sort. Slowly, the dormant kernel of my mind reanimated itself, awareness dawned and there was once more an observer, me, and I noticed that I was slowly tumbling through outer space. I couldn’t tell whether I was tumbling up or whether I was tumbling down, and that concerned me a great deal. It occurred to me that if I was tumbling downwards then it was inevitable that I would eventually fall bellow the universe, but if I were tumbling upward it was inevitable that I would eventually rise above the universe. Then where would I be?

You may imagine that tumbling through outer space there would be stars and comets and so forth lighting up the darkness everywhere. But, as I’ve already mentioned, this was the distant outskirts of a spotty, threadbare universe, a spatial backwater where stars were few and far between. In fact, I could see exactly five distant stars. There were two yellowish stars in binary orbit and a triangular constellation of two yellow-white and one blue-white star. As I tumbled, the binary yellow stars would be ahead of me and then they would rotate out of view and the triangular constellation would be ahead of me and this process repeated itself over and over and over and over again. I can’t deny to you that I had negative judgments about this universe. Also, the monotony of the weightless tumbling was making me nauseous, disoriented and anxious.

As time slowly passed I became more and more irritated at the lack of celestial bodies. Self-pity and depressiveness overtook me. What chance did I have of a meaningful relationship or a worthwhile existence of any sort in the distant outskirts of such a thin, disappointing universe? Then a sudden realization brought me up short and shocked me out of my depression, What a fool I am to wish for more stars! What if I should come too close to one and be pulled into its gravitational field? I would be burnt to a tiny cinder. Stars may be nice to look at, but in reality they are my enemies. And now I observed something that made my whole being pulsate with anxiety. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, it seemed that the triangular constellation of stars was getting larger. I must be falling toward them! I thought alarmingly. Frantically, I tried to twist and contort my snow body to change the direction of my flight away from the triangle. But my trajectory had a slow, but inevitable momentum, and I could do nothing to change it. Try as hard as I might I would keep going in exactly the same direction. That triangle’s evil gravity is controlling me. Despairingly I realized: I’ve completely lost my free will. And I ground my teeth in frustration.

Gradually, I came to realize that the triangular constellation was not actually getting closer, that it had only been my anxiety that had made it seem that way. As far as I could tell, my only movement was tumbling. I had a rotational inertia, but there was no trajectory, no forward, backward, up or down movement. This became decisively apparent when an object came into my field of view that really did have a trajectory. A smallish, grey, pitted asteroid came speeding by at a distance of what I estimated to be a few thousand meters. Without even considering the unlikelihood that there would be any sentient being on the asteroid that would be both able and willing to help me, I waved my arms and tried to shout as the asteroid hurtled past me. I attempted to shout but absolutely no sound came out. My memory having dissolved, including whatever little I had once known about astronomy, I had no concept that sound was impossible in the vacuum of space. Falsely, I concluded that the problem was with me. I’m a mute. I thought. And as I contemplated what life would be like with what I assumed to be a permanent handicap, there was a drastic drop in my self-esteem. At that point I began to question the value of my whole existence.

Who was I anyway? I couldn’t even remember. I stared at my skinny tentacle like fingers of pale snowy tissue. Suddenly I realized that this body structure was not normal, that it was, in fact, a horrifying deformity, a mutation. I’m a mutant. I realized, and this realization stirred formless, somnambulant memories. A lifetime of vague, recollections crowded around me darkly, refusing to take on specific form. I experienced them as an obscure cloud of painful feelings and shame. The cloud enveloped me and my personality began to spiral downward into the utterly black event horizon of absolutely no self-esteem at all.

I know what you’re thinking. This mutie boy just doesn’t have the “right stuff.” He just doesn’t have what it takes to make it through the demands of space travel. He just doesn’t have that square-jawed guy thing that would allow him to tough it out. Poor snowy little whimp whose self-esteem is ready to collapse the moment things get a little rough. You probably think that if you were there you’d teach me a lesson or two on how someone who’s really cut out for it would handle space travel.

Well, I hate to be the one to pop your little fantasy bubble, but unless you are also a mutant I can almost guarantee you that you would have gone stark raving mad long before I even had my first worried thought about space travel. When you think space travel you’re probably thinking astronaut specials you’ve seen on TV, or maybe even Star Trek. You’re probably thinking there would be a “Ground Control” to talk you through everything and plastic squeeze tubes of all your favorite foods. Maybe you’re even thinking Star Trek where you’ve got your own carpeted dorm room and a replicator that can make you all your favorite foods and drinks any time of the day or night. I’d like to remind you that what I experienced was solitary space travel, without any refreshments, in the thin outskirts of a low-quality alternate universe while in a state of complete amnesia. Try that on for size, big guy or gal, and then come back to me with your negative judgments about my supposed mutant whimpishness.

Having said that, I shouldn’t feel the least bit ashamed to admit that I probably did go stark, raving mad after a certain point. My self-esteem had fallen so far bellow absolute zero that if my self-esteem had fingers liquid nitrogen would have felt like white-hot metal. So for a time I was tormented by dark hallucinations. After the hallucinations spent themselves my mind cleared and I noticed an old, black duck, with a heavy abdomen and big rubbery webbed feet standing before me. The duck was late middle-aged, had a protuberant gut covered with thick, dull black feathers and an enormous flesh-colored beak that looked like worn, grimy plastic. Its wide, staring eyes seemed fearful and enraged and its breathing was rapid and agitated. Suddenly it quacked something at me that sounded like,

“Nhagwheel, Nhagwheel, Nhagwheel,” I couldn’t understand what it was saying and every time it quacked it sprayed saliva that crystallized in the cold, vacuum of space and floated away like smoke signals. Impatiently, it began stamping a heavy, webbed, rubbery foot in time with the quacking.“Nhagwheel, Nhagwheel, Nhagwheel.” It quacked, quacked sixteen, seventeen times in a row and then suddenly I comprehended what it was saying in the garbled speech impediment voice of duck-speak, “Not real. Not real. Not real.” I stared into the dark black pools of the duck’s staring eyes. “Not real. Not real. Not real. Not real. Not real.” It quacked and stamped its webbed foot furiously. It seemed to be saying that I wasn’t real and that it was furious with me for pretending that I was. It seemed that from the duck’s point of view I was a disturbing hallucination that it was angrily refusing to accept.

Then in a sudden nervous gesture the duck jerked its wings up and covered its eyes and somehow I felt compelled to cover my eyes. But as I felt my hands move through space to where I thought my head was I discovered that I had no eyes and there was no darkness behind them to go to, no other real besides this one.

The duck brought its dusty black wings down and stared at me with furious irritation. The dark, enraged pools of the duck’s staring eyes seemed to grow larger and larger. Or perhaps it was that they were getting nearer and nearer. There was some sort of uncanny suction involved in the duck’s stare and I found myself being sucked into the dark spinning pools of its eyes. Horrified, I tried to resist this suction, but found I had nothing to resist with. My God, I’m paralyzed! I thought with rising panic. As my will tried to flail about with nonexistent limbs, and to scream with a nonexistent mouth, my horror expanded into a new realization, Oh my God, I have no body at all! In my mind I screamed and screamed helplessly as I was sucked closer to the dark twin vortices of the duck’s eyes. Though I had no physical snowbody anymore, apparently I had a spirit snowbody that the eyes attracted with an irresistible gravitational force. As I grew closer the eyes became immense and filled my field of view. Each eye was like its own wormy black hole, and as I crossed their stereoscopic event horizons I felt their attractive power pulling my spirit body in two directions. In a moment I was pulled into two parts and then sucked into the centers of the two eyes. I blacked out momentarily and found myself spiraling around in a featureless dark space. Everywhere this dark space was permeated by the presence of the duck’s quirky personality. Especially, I felt the intense fear, bordering on hysterical panic, occurring in the duck’s psyche because it interpreted what was happening as possession by an alien spirit. I felt a deep empathy for its fear, but there was nothing I could do to comfort it. I knew that I could communicate with it telepathically, but it would only interpret such a telepathic communication as further evidence that it was possessed.

My profound, but impotent, empathy for the duck was suddenly interrupted by a shocking telepathic communication. I felt another me calling out to me from another hemisphere of the duck’s mind. The reason for this was both obvious and highly disturbing. Although I had been torn in two when I crossed the twin event horizons of the two eyes I was no longer conscious of myself as split. The reason was that I was now become a split off half out of contact with my other half. There was a fork in the path of reality and my soul had been sundered and taken onto each of the new paths. My other self was calling out to me, warning me of our separated plight. Each of the duck’s eyes was a portal into a different reality and while we remained in different sides of its mind we could still communicate, our telepathy like the corpus callosum, the dense bundle of nerves that allows the two hemispheres of a brain to communicate, but once we left the duck’s mind our paths would sunder irretrievably into two different universes where communication would be impossible. Our experiences would inevitably diverge as we spent time in these separate realities, and therefore we would become increasingly different and the possibility of our reuniting as the same being would become more and more remote.

I felt an aching sense of loneliness and abandonment in these last moments of communication with my other self. We were like identical twin fetuses being separated not at birth, but before birth, pulled into different birth canals to be born into different realities where no reunion was possible. Then there was a heart rending telepathic cry of desolation from my other self just before it was ejected into the birth canal of its new reality. Already our experiences were diverging as I still spiraled in my side of the duck’s mind and lingered still in the realm of the unborn.

Slowly, I spiraled downward in the quirky darkness of the duck’s mind, and as I descended the speed of my rotations accelerated, like water spinning down a drain. When I reached the epicenter of the duck’s mind I plummeted downward, like a snowball tossed into an elevator shaft. Instead of hitting the bottom of anything, I crossed the threshold of the new reality and found myself shooting upward like a rocket in the star-dappled heavens of a new world. Unlike the skimpy universe I had tumbled in previously, this seemed to be a proper universe with a rich array of stars and nebulae. And I was not just tumbling either, I had a powerful upward trajectory and in the vacuum of outer space there was nothing to slow it down. Up ahead of me I could see a distant planetary body that was pale and luminous. It glowed softly like a giant pearl set amidst a vast jewelry of stars. I could see that my trajectory was aimed directly for it and, intuitively, I knew that this was a world I was destined to encounter. A feeling of deja vu inevitability intensified as the separating kilometers dwindled rapidly.

In this new reality I had also regained my corporeal snowbody, and was clothed in the dark over coat and other shabby garments I had been wearing when I had crawled into the refrigerator box portal so long ago. My overcoat billowed around me when I encountered the thin atmosphere of this planet and acted as a wind break or parachute. Fortunately, gravity was weaker than usual on this smallish planet, though it still seemed that I was heading toward it at a potentially injurious, if not flattening, speed. A silvery, grey landscape rushed into view and I impacted a surface far softer that I could have dreamed possible.

I submerged in an almost liquid layer of grayish dust several feet thick. I swam easily to the surface, but found that I had to keep swimming to keep above it. There was too little density to support my weight on the surface, but because gravity was so weak I could, if I balanced myself just right, lie on the surface, supported by some sort of surface tension. Any unbalanced movement, however, broke the surface tension and I was forced to make doggy-paddling like gestures to climb back onto the surface. Panting, I lay carefully on my back turning my head slightly and using the wide angle of my mutant-enhanced peripheral vision to scan the landscape all around me.

Great dunes and starlit desert plains of the silvery, grey dust stretched out to the vanishing point of the horizon. Everywhere was a vast monochromatic desert of dust with pale shadows and windswept topography. Dust that had gotten into my nostrils during impact caused me to sneeze violently and, of course, that broke the surface tension and I had to doggy-paddle myself back to the surface. A small amount of dust that I had dry swallowed made me feel nauseous and left the faintly radioactive aftertaste of very old nuclear fallout dust. I was seized now by a fit of sneezing and the sneezing not only broke my hold on the surface but sprayed clouds of dust into my eyes and ice crystals. My eyes were irritated and the whole surface of my snow skin felt itchy and uncomfortable. I was becoming painfully aware that I was highly allergic to the principle ingredient of this new world—-dust.

Once again I struggled against the dark undertow of despair. I knew it was only a matter of time before my allergy would become fatal in such a disastrously inhospitable environment. I wondered about my other half and whether it faired better or worse in its new universe. Telepathically, I tried to call out to it, but there was no response, only a reverberating silence.

In attempting telepathic contact, however, I made a serendipitous discovery that undoubtedly saved my life. Exerting my mutant psionic powers during this unsuccessful attempt at telepathic contact I observed a strange pulsing of colored light coming from deep inside my snow body. The light was strong enough to be visible through my shabby clothing. Pulses of different colors came from different parts of my body and thanks to my photographic memory I noticed that these corresponded perfectly to the placement of the chakra system in the human body. If in this reality my subtle energy was actually visible it might mean that my mutant psionic powers were increased generally. I tested this by focusing my will telekinetically and found that it was strong enough to resist the weak gravitational field of the planet so that I could hover a meter or so above the surface. With more practice I found that I could hover and glide forward at a modest pace. In this way, my chakras pulsing with color, I was able to glide over the undulating desert. By not touching the surface I also stirred up very little dust and my allergic symptoms began to abate.

I traveled long, long distances in this almost featureless landscape. The life force that glowed within the icy crystalline structure of my body reflected off the silvery dust beneath me as a living corona of psionic energy, an aura of concentric bandwidths of flickering, spectral color. In this way it partly illuminated some of the near shadows of the undulating dunes and on one occasion this proved to be life saving.

There was no dawn, no daylight, in this twilight world, and therefore no conventional way to measure the passage of time. The cheap digital watch with a busted wristband that I kept in my overcoat pocket was still there but it seemed to tell time counting backwards—- and even that it did inconsistently—-it would stay at the same time for a long while and then it would start hurriedly losing about a minute a second as if trying to catch up with backwards time. I was unable to eat, drink or sleep and the landscape was so colorless and unchanging that after a while I just tranced out, scarcely paying attention. A strong ammonia smell, brought me out of trance for a moment and I noticed my flickering psionic aura reflecting off something moving in a dune shadow. I intensified the light I was projecting and saw the first living organism I had noticed in this lifeless desert world. It was a pale, faintly luminous scorpion like creature about a meter in length with a densely coiled tail like a giant watch spring. I glided back evasively just in time. The scorpion flicked out its tail at me so fast it made a sound like a ricocheting bullet. When it missed it came scurrying toward me with terrifying speed. Fear intensified my psionic power and I glided out of range with great speed. The scorpion’s gleaming bulb like eyes stared at me with furious hatred, and when it saw that it could not overtake me it hissed with a horrifying intensity as bubbles of ammonia came out of its mouth. Before I had time to recover from my shock I caught another whiff of ammonia and there was another scorpion almost in lethal range. I evaded it and it also hissed and bubbled ammonia.

I soon discovered that I was in an area of desert that was heavily infected with these evil scorpions and that they were even more dangerous than they looked. It was obvious that they had some sort of telepathic, collective mind as after the first attack they all seemed to be waiting for me. They also seemed aware of my evasive abilities and adopted counter strategies. Occasional groups of three or more worked cooperatively, trying various ambush tactics. Fortunately, their ammonia scent always gave me warning and I was able to stay out of range. Their hatred for me seem to intensify and everywhere across the desert I heard hissing and the bullet ricochet sound of tails being snapped. On one occasion, when a group of three tried an unsuccessful ambush technique ( each of them rushing at me from a different direction) I simply hovered about ten meters above them. They were so enraged and frustrated by this simple, but effective, evasion that in their fury they attacked each other, tails whipping out and slicing off body parts until they were all in pieces and bellow me was a twitching mass of infuriated scorpion parts. A couple of amputated scorpion tails ricocheted about wildly and the ammonia vapors from their dismembered bodies nearly blinded me.

Finally I crossed out of their part of the desert and after not smelling ammonia for a substantial distance I stopped gliding and hovered for a few moments. I was exhausted. Every ice crystal burned with hunger and feverish dehydration. I was rapidly losing the psionic energy I needed to keep moving and it was impossible for me to rest on the loose dust. I forced down a rising panic and focused all my will on gliding. Somewhere there had to be something to eat and drink.

I psi-glided across the desert until I was at the limit of my endurance. Then I saw a strange object up ahead of me. It was roughly cylindrical and shaped like a giant hook about thirty meters high. It threw an enormous hook-shaped shadow across the desert. I drew near it cautiously and saw that it had a faded stripe of red that twined around it from top to bottom. Its surface was pitted and abraded by thousands of dust storms, but here and there were patches of its original glazed surface. It appeared to be a gigantic candy cane of some sort, and there was a feeling of almost geological antiquity about it. I was so desperate for nourishment that I tried biting into it and found that under the brittle surface patches of glaze it was mostly air like dried out Styrofoam. I ate a couple of big mouthfuls. It tasted like a mixture of peppermint flavored saccharine pills, Styrofoam and dust. It left my ice crystals with a chemotherapy aftertaste and seemed to suck precious moisture out of my body.

Health issues plagued my mind. Anxiously, I realized that the dryness of the desert was causing profound dehydration. As I dehydrated my ice crystals shrunk in size and my old overcoat hung loosely on my diminishing snowbody.

As a natural defense mechanism my snow tissues dehydrate in a special way. No crystals are lost, each of them diminishes in size, but proportionally, so that none of the complex, crystalline structure is lost. But once dehydration passes what’s called ‘the Beckstein Limit,’ there begins structural deterioration, and as this happens my bodily tissues become coarsened and reduced to the most rudimentary level of functioning. Since this tissue deterioration obviously includes the brain, there is permanent brain damage and impairment of cognitive function. As dehydration continues beyond the Beckstein Limit the permanent deterioration continues and results, ultimately, in death.

When the last trace of my deteriorated ice crystals vaporized in the desert air I would be gone. There would not even be a skeleton left behind since my bones are not mineral, but cryptocrystalline ice. I would become absolutely nothing at all. An empty overcoat lying on a desolate dune of gray dust.

Such anxieties about my health, and the possibilities of disability and even death, stung at my mind like a thousand pale scorpions. Every ice crystal was individually aflame with thirst. My psi-gliding took on a slumped aspect. Inside my overcoat my body had shrunken and my appearance took on the anxious, bedraggled sallowness often associated with the ghosts of the anorexic. In short, I looked like a very tired version of Edward Munch’s The Scream. I continued across the endless dunes of dust for what seemed like forty days and nights of eternal gloom.

And then, some time late on the fortieth night, I encountered two beings that I first beheld from the distance gliding toward me with shocking speed. They were as fast as fighter jets and the energy of their psionic auras were like two flames—one of deep indigo, and one of yellowish green. A heartbeat after beholding them from a distance, bobbing and whipping over dunes, they hovered right before me, their auras hissed with power and their eyes stabbed me with telepathic probes. One entity glowed violet, and it was shaped like a giant skull that hovered over the desert floor throwing a purplish shadow onto the gray dust below. It had the porous surface texture of a real skull, and yet it seemed more like a horrible puppet of some kind, there was an energy behind it, a fierce will, and that will was using the skull as its form. Occasionally there were flickers of movement visible in its dark skull-shadowed eyes. The other entity glowed yellowish-green and seemed to be a giant, highly evolved grasshopper. Its expression was as unreadable as that of an android card hustler, but I formed an impression that it was benign and more of a neutral observer. There was not a trace of ill will from the grasshopper entity, but I also knew that it would not intervene on my behalf.

They hovered in front of me, bobbing up and down slowly as though they were suspended unsteadily by hover jets. Slowly, almost too late, I realized that their bobbing movements were intended to be hypnotic. It took a great effort of will for me to keep my eyes from automatically following their movements. Mercilessly they probed me telepathically, and the weak psionic shields I was able to put up were like thin films of oleomargarine against the surgical steel of their telepathic probing.

Suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, the skull’s jovial and bitingly sadistic voice began speaking in my head. His telepathic voice had been somehow contrived to have the staticky distorted sound of an old phonograph record.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! And how’de do!” Said the giant skull-shaped entity. “My name is Captain Skull and this is my good friend, and sycophant, Mr. Grasshopper.”

“ My named is Snowman.” I replied telepathically with as much defiance as I could muster.

“Yes, and a fine figure of a Snowman.” Said Captain Skull laughing spitefully. “Quite a fine figure, indeed, eh, Mr. Grasshopper?” The grasshopper laughed with a horrible, thin, high- pitched insectile laugh, but there was no malice in it, somehow you could tell that it was just playing out a role.”Yes, quite a fine figure of a Snowman, indeedy, though perhaps a bit dried up, perhaps a bit on the deteriorated and catatonic side, but one can certainly see that here was once the potential to be a perfectly ordinary Snowman, yes indeedy, Ho! Ho! Ho!” The cruel intention and content of Captain Skull’s words tore into me, and my self-esteem became a bloody rag caught on a television antenna during a raging, winter storm.

“So just what on Pluntith do you think you’re doing here?” asked Captain Skull.

“I guess I’m on a quest.” I replied weakly.

   “Ho! Ho! Ho! On a quest! The Snowman on a quest! That’s rich, that’s truly fabulous, really a most entertaining delusion! Imagine, a Snowman on a quest! Imagine that Dr. Beckstein, I mean, Mr. Grasshopper. Why you are quite the amusing jokester Mr. Snowman!”

      “What’s so freakin’ funny?” I asked, some deeply defiant aspect of me awakened by the challenge. “What’s wrong with my being on a quest?”

     “Ho! Ho! Ho! I say. Ho! Ho! Ho! You do have me absolutely in stitches, in sutures, positively in sutures, in long rows of black sutures, you really do! What a marvelous misconception, really quite a creative, neurotic delusion.”

Whenever Captain Skull spoke I was disoriented by the phonograph record staticky timber of his voice, his statements were unpredictable yet they sounded as if they had been replayed so many times they had become scratchy.

“I still don’t get it. What’s the delusion?” I asked in a challenging tone.

“Ho! Ho! Ho! He doesn’t get it! My but this Snowman can really play off the straight Man to a P, to an absolute P. What a magnificent jest! The way you pull that off with such a straight face!” Captain Skull imitated me speaking with a squeaky, falsetto voice,

‘I’m a Snowman. I’m going on quest.‘

“ —Why you do it with such a dead pan one can almost believe for a moment that you yourself believe it. As if you didn’t know that you are a mere ornamental entity of the most limited sort with crude features wrought by careless children on a whim. And as for your life span! Ho! Ho! Ho! Seasonal at best, n’est pas? And your body! Ho! Ho! Ho! Your body! Ho! Ho! Ho! Why sir, to say that your body is weak, to say that it is flaccid and sallow, to say that it is soft and mushy to an extent that bullets and knives pass through it with pleasurable ease, to say that it is utterly lacking in the cardio-vascular capacity and muscular definition needed for the rigorous exertions of the quest, why sir, to say that your body is absurdly lacking in physical charisma and both laughingly comical and sickeningly repulsive in appearance, why to say all this would only be to flatter you and protect you from seeing the real and actual horrors of your bodily existence. Why to butter you up with such fake compliments would only be a cruel encouragement of the delusion that you might be adequate for anything. Surely you must have noticed that most of the serious players on quests have abdominal six packs, high muscle definition, suntans, long flowing hair and noble foreheads. And, Ho! Ho! Ho! I can’t say that I remember anyone on a quest with a warty, cone-shaped nose, spindly stick-shaped arms, pale tentacle hands and flabby snow belly! Ho! Ho! Ho! Why even if there were handicapped parking spaces on quests with refrigeration, can you imagine what would happen if you butted in? Why my goodness, everyone would be so hysterically laughing at your looks, not to mention your weakness and incompetence, that there would be such nonstop hysterics at your expense that nothing would ever get done. And Ho! Ho! Ho! How could there be a quest if nothing got done?”

Captain Skull’s words shocked me into silence. It seemed that everything he said was true. Impotent despair paralyzed me and I found that I was compelled to stare into the dark skull shadows of Captain Skull’s eyes. I felt my self-esteem as a tiny cinder washed down the sewer of a city abandoned to eternal nuclear winter.

Deep inside the enfolding skull shadows of its eyes glowed a gyrating indigo spiral and I found my awareness tumbling through that spiral, tumbling into a blackout.

When I came out of the blackout I found myself leaning heavily on a bathroom sink. There were razor blades on the white porcelain and bottles of pills, sleeping pills. The water in the sink was a dull, scummy white like heavily used bathwater. The water was slowly turning, turning in a vortex centered on a steel drain that made a loud slurping sound as the water was sucked into it. The spiral, twisting of the water was strangely fascinating, and my mind became immersed in the counter-clockwise rotation of the vortex. The thought occurred that the universe must have flipped over and begun turning backwards. As the last of the spiraling water began to disappear into the center of the drain a little rubbery thing, a rubbery little ill-formed doll with a tiny, squeaky voice said,

“Sorry folks, no after life.” And it disappeared down the long, dark drain.

A wave of intense nausea passed through me and I found myself clutching both sides of the sink for support. I was sick. I lifted the cover of the toilet and threw up. There were pink, rubbery flakes and shards in my vomit. I stood up and looked at myself in the cracked mirror, the florescent light in the bathroom mercilessly revealing the flabby white features and misshapen nose of a body that seemed both flesh and snow. I looked down at the twisted veins of my pale, skinny arms and the complex tangle of track marks, each mark a tiny little needle-hole mouth, each mouth hole puckering with rabid hunger for more stuff, more of the dreamy white powder. My head felt heavy, and I could barely keep my balance. I opened the medicine cabinet and found works and a glassine envelope of beautiful, snowy powder. Reverently, I poured the powder into my steel tablespoon, added measured drops of tap water and caressed the bowl of the spoon with the flickering orange tongue of a plastic lighter. The sound of the bubbles roiling on the spoon was like a chorus of tiny angels heralding the approach of paradise. I picked up the hypodermic. It was greasy with perspiration from many weeks of use. It felt plastic and hollow and hungry. But as I drew back the plunger and sucked up the precious fluid it began to glow with a warm power in my fingers. And then the gruesome part of the ritual, trying to find a live tube in all the tangled snowmeat that could suck up all that warm liquid paradise. My needle had to make many new hungry red mouths before it found home and was able to come inside me.

My hands felt numb and swollen. I let the works fall clanking into the sink and walked heavily out to the old sofa bed that had once been tan but was now mostly gray with dust and grime. Living in mother’s basement wasn’t so bad anymore, now that mother had stopped coming out of her room. My weight felt heavy and warm on the sofa bed. I felt comforted by the smells of stale cigarette and pot smoke, spilt beer and old urine. It was like I was floating on a heated water bed in a beautiful, dark motel room. I closed my eyes and floated in the velvet darkness for a long, long while. But then the lovely darkness was interrupted by an annoying sound, the wailing sirens of alley cats surrounding the house.

Those evil, little pygmy heads of fear and paranoia popped into my mind. Alley cats again in the backyard, wailing alley cats all around the house. They must smell my mother upstairs. They’ll let everyone know, they’re trying to get me in some kind of trouble!

I struggled with my lethargic, rubbery limbs until I was standing. I wobbled, stabilized and then grabbed the taped hockey stick handle by the sofa-bed and walked out of the house. But the backyard was empty, and there was no sign of a cat any where. I looked around carefully. All the backyards were dark and empty. Low, howling winds shook the old aluminum wheels of the laundry-lines and rattled rusting TV antennas. How long had it been that all the yards were empty? There was that unmistakable feeling of ancient abandonment. Alley cats were nowhere to be found. The thought form, alley cat, had not whispered its sinuous, feline phrases for centuries. There was not even the dark stain of an alley cat crumbled to dust in the old cement driveway. Slowly, I remembered that the world had ended such a long, long time ago…

It wasn’t so bad being the only one left so long as I had the dreamy white powder. The white powder had all the answers. The white powder was a winner. And the reason the white powder was a winner was because it always made all the right moves.

The wind howled through the empty yards. Underneath the howling wind I heard that strange wailing again, but this time I could tell that the wailing was happening inside my head. Weird sirens were speaking to me inside my head. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they tormented me, like kids whispering about me in the school yard. I couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but I knew it was about me. Out of my peripheral vision I saw a white bulbous thing, blurred with speed, whip around the back of the garage. I wasn’t supposed to see that. I thought nervously, it’s that Skull again.

The wailing sirens vanished and a melodious, deeply aware voice spoke softly inside of me,

“Please don’t be alarmed. It’s only another incarnation seizure and we’re here to guide you.” To help me calm down the voice sung me a little lullaby,

“We’re the ones with the great big eyes.

We’re the ones who help you when you dies.

We’re the ones that watch and wait.

We’re the ones that guide the Snowman’s fate.”

And now I saw that things were changing. The winds had quieted to nothing and there was a benevolent presence in the yard. They were behind me and all around me, but for some reason I was unable to see them, I could only feel their great dark eyes at the edges of my vision. The guide floated toward me and into visibility. He was wearing old blue jean coveralls and a sun-faded red and white checkered shirt. His head was long gray and elastic, and the enormous black almond-shaped eyes probed me with impersonal curiosity. Above, in the deep darkness of the sky a luminous disk hovered, waiting. “What do you need?” The guide spoke gently, lovingly, in my head. I looked down at myself, looked at my bloated gut and the network of track marks that covered snow tissues soured by endless years of alcohol, cigarettes and needles. I saw the emptiness of the back yard, the cement stained and broken, and thought of the dark, porous husk of a mother in the upstairs bedroom.

I need a new body. A new incarnation. My request lingered in my mind as the guide gently willed my eyes to close. It’s long, tapering fingers projected rapid pulses of energy into my body. Alien finger energy vibrated through me electrically, generating a cascading chain reaction in my snow crystals. The vibration intensified until it seemed like my very snow molecules were being split apart. I’m having another incarnation seizure! I realized, and hot electrical wires of fear burned into my snow. I was destabilizing. Waves of entropy shattered me, and as I was shattered, the surrounding reality of empty cement yards and abandoned apartment buildings deteriorated with horrible rapidity. It warped and thinned and then suddenly popped like an old blister. The flimsiness revealed made me feel intensely nauseous. Moments later I blacked out.

The next thing I knew there was an old woman tugging on my arm, trying to get my attention. She wore a white lab jacket, her face was haggard and there were enormous bags under her eyes. She was obviously in a state of extreme nervous exhaustion. She wanted me to follow her, so I did, and while we hurried along she spoke in a voice that was edged with barely suppressed hysteria

“We’ve tried everything. I haven’t slept in eleven days. No one will do anything…Look.” The woman gestured with a pale, blue-veined hand. There were scientific and medical-looking equipment everywhere, but she seemed to be directing my attention to the binocular eyepiece of an enormous black microscope. It looked like it was probably the most advanced optical microscope in the world, but of an earlier era, probably the Nineteen-Forties. It was composed of massive black enameled components labeled “Zeiss Ikon.” There was an illuminated circular stage on which was mounted a single glass slide with a drop of yellow oil in the center. The blue-veined hands of the woman began to tremble violently. She tied an old piece of surgical tubing around one arm , took a glass and steel syringe from her lab coat pocket and injected herself with a yellowish liquid. She looked up at me with dark, terrified eyes and I saw that her eyes were yellowed, and her hair ravished by chemotherapy with only a few thinning tufts on her barren scalp. “I’ve lost all my natural beauty.” said the woman with a terrible sadness.

I turned and looked through the binocular eyepieces of the microscope. There was a blurry yellowness with something at the center. I removed my gaze from the eyepiece and examined the illuminated stage of the microscope. A large oil immersion objective rested in a pool of yellow oil above the glass slide. I looked back into the eyepieces and adjusted the fine focus knob. There was a strangely shaped dark object, a cell or a tiny organ or organelle, suspended out of focus in a field of yellow oil. Knobs on the stage of the microscope allowed me to alter the position of the slide. I readjusted the fine focus knob and the object came imperfectly into focus. It was a tiny Snowman with dark, empty eye sockets.

I looked away from the microscope. The old woman was gone. The hospital room was dark and dusty, it was filled with equipment, but there were no people around. I wondered for a moment if all this meant that I was dead, and that was why she wanted me to look in the microscope. Sometimes people don’t know if they’re dead. I realized and it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of movies had come out recently about someone who had died, but didn’t know it. What if they were all trying to tell me something? I decided to look back in the microscope to be sure of what I had seen.

I adjusted the fine focus knob but suddenly I heard a crack followed by a loud beeping sound. I had a terrible twinge of fear. I believed that the beeping came from the microscope and that it meant that I had shattered the glass slide with the oil immersion objective and permanently damaged the valuable optics.

I looked up anxiously to see if anyone had observed my costly blunder. But when I looked up I saw that the beeping was actually the obnoxiously loud beeping of a garbage truck backing up.

XII

The sound of the garbage truck was amplified by the narrowness of the alley and I had a pounding headache that seemed to throb in time with that stupid beeping which continued even as sanitation workers banged metal garbage cans full of glass bottles into the back of the truck. My blood-stained eyes struggled to focus on the cement surface of the world. My head was pounding, and there was the severe nausea typical of the aftermath of an incarnation seizure. A yellow Taco Supremo wrapper smeared with the grease of fried cow meat had become stuck to my face and I peeled it off. The smell of rancid cholesterol and artificial cheese flavoring was sickening. Once again my memory was nearly blank, and I felt exhausted. In the cold light of an overcast morning I brought reality slowly, and reluctantly, into focus. There were deep, black tarry stains on the gray concrete. On the other side of the alley were the rust colored stains of fossilized dog shit. I must have had night sweats because pieces of debris were stuck to all my exposed snowskin. I pulled a newspaper advertisement off the back of my hand. Parts of the newspaper did not peel off and bits of newspaper fuzz stuck to my skin. The headline of the newspaper ad read, “Physician Recommends Suffering as a Treatment for Chronic Pain.”

Sluggishly I tousled with that old tyrant, gravity, and brought myself to a sitting position. Back and neck pain felt like a series of white hot knitting needles stuck in my snow. By my side I noticed a worn plastic shopping bag that looked vaguely familiar. The most complex and fully formed thought of the morning arose in my mind: This is my shopping bag. I felt heartened, momentarily, by the realization that I still had possessions. My shopping bag. I repeated the thought with satisfaction. In the center of the worn folds of plastic was a little pool of amber liquid. When I picked up the bag the amber fluid streamed down the bag and dripped onto the bone dry cement. I opened the bag and found a large flask made of colorless glass that contained a dark amber liquid. I sensed the bottle as highly significant, its contours were familiar to my hand and it resonated with vague memories. It was more than half-filled with an oily, reddish brown liquid that had almost exactly the color and viscosity of boiled cockroach juices. Identifying the flask was a white paper label sloppily adhering with glue wrinkles convoluting the paper. On the label was a crude black ink drawing of a skull and cross bones, and a snowman with black Xs for eyes lying unconscious in a puddle. The words “Snow Comfort” in large black letters were stenciled on the top of the label.

A painful feeling in my chest distracted me from consideration of the bottle of Snow Comfort. I looked down at my body. It felt as if the pain were coming from my clothing, perhaps some sharp object sticking out of one of my pockets. Underneath my dark over coat I wore a rayon shirt that had an upholstery-like pattern of brown and orange flowers. There were dark perspiration stains under my arm pits that went right through the shirt and the overcoat. The pain seemed to originate from the shirt pocket where I wore a large, white plastic pocket pen protector. On the flap of the protector was a decorative seal—a red and gold heraldic crest design with a white knight wielding a golden spear and a white eagle clutching a vanquished black serpent. In Gothic lettering bellow was an ominous looking Latin motto. The protector contained a single, splintered plastic ball point pen jammed into it diagonally. The pen had punctured the plastic of the protector and leaked a greasy black ink that had penetrated my thin rayon shirt and seeped into the naked ice crystals within. Carefully, I unbuttoned the shirt. There was a black nucleus of ink stain at the ice crystal surface. Deep into the translucent snow tissues the nucleus reached long wavy fingers of black ink that moved toward invisibility at their dendrite-like extremities. The creeping rivulets of stain felt like the insidious tendrils of a rapidly metastasizing snowcancer. I tried to wipe off the main nucleus of stain with sheets of newspaper, but most of it seemed to have penetrated beneath the surface.

I knew I was dangerously dehydrated and decided to drink the Snow Comfort. The dark, oily liquid tasted deliciously of coffee, cola, cocoa powder, rum and non-dairy creamer. It immediately soothed my nausea and glowed deliciously inside of me. I drank the rest of it down in one long swallow, and as the rich, creamy fluid went down into me my mood went up and up and up. I reached into the shopping bag and found a battered transistor radio. I turned it on and by another improbable coincidence found that my favorite song was playing—-“My ExGirlfriend’s New Boyfriend” by the Depressives. I felt perky enough to sing along with it for a minute, but the station cut off the last few seconds of the song (I hate it when they do that) and an annoying commercial jingle came on. A chorus of toddlers with irritating falsetto voices sang endlessly repetitive lyrics, “Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks. Buy and eat. Buy and eat. Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks. Buy and Eat. Buy and Eat….” The jingle went on for several minutes. I tried changing the station but the jingle was playing on all of the stations. The only difference was that each time I changed to another station the children seemed to sing with greater speed and urgency. Then a loud beeping sound came out of the radio and a red LED display blinked, “Commercial Evasion: Fine: 35.73 Credit Units.” The display kept blinking and now the radio wouldn’t play anything.

I searched further into the shopping bag and found a big white rectangular box that was incredibly narrow. It seemed to have been chewed through on one end and the thin white card board was gummy with saliva. On the box were alternately pink neon and yellow-green letters that read, “Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks Buy and Eat Buy and Eat.” Beneath the lettering was a glossy picture that showed blond-haired, blue-eyed teenagers with golden sun tans playing volley ball on the beach. They wore skintight nylon bathing suits that revealed the Olympian muscular definition of their supple bodies. Their faces were frozen in orgiastic grimaces of youthful summery euphoria. In the foreground of the scene was a powerfully built boy wearing a white and red foot ball jersey. The boy was openly copulating with a prepubescent girl who was handcuffed and blind folded. The boy’s jersey had a big number “twenty-three” on it and red letters that read,

“Joey Consumer
Studback
Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacker”

There were open boxes of Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks lying on the beach all around him.

Following an irresistible impulse I put the chewed through part of the box to my mouth and poured the contents into me. Industrial-strength flavorings of turbo-charged pink lemonade and sour green apple exploded into my mouth and set off a massive sugar quake in my brain. My mouth was so full of gummy sugar and chemical flavoring that I could scarcely breath. Artificially colored sugar bubbles began to shoot out of my nose and pop loudly. Inadvertently, I opened my mouth too wide and a gooey satellite of the main wad of mouth candy fell to the concrete followed by a long, thin comet of sugary spittle. Without even thinking, I tongued the chewy mash of pink, yellow and green sugar right off the cement. I chewed and sucked avariciously until all the sugary chew, the satellite and the main wad, were completely gone. When they were gone I tried to inhale all the sweet candy vapors still hanging moistly in the air about me. The sugar vapors dissipated and I felt nervous and shaky. Nausea returned and my stomach felt like an over-heated drying machine tumbling ruptured bleach bottles of old bacon grease and the charred carcasses of scorpions and insect antennas burned in a chemical waste fire.

Suddenly a policeman of some sort in a yellow uniform appeared at the end of the alley. He barked into a gigantic black rubber bull horn, “Attention, you are an unauthorized consumer! Your presence in this private retail corridor is illegal. You need to step to the sidewalk so we can scan your identity code.” At that moment an enormous tabby alley cat with brilliant yellow-green eyes ran into the alley.

“C’mon Snowman! We’ve got to blow this alley.” Electric shockwaves of deja vu jolted me as I realized that I knew this alley cat, that I was somehow familiar with its beautiful eyes and glossy, stripped coat. Its sleek elegance in form and moving was highlighted by the oppressive ugliness of the alley. “Snap out of it Snowman!” the cat said. “Don’t you, remember me, Eddie Cat?” He gave me a penetrating stare. Eddie Cat, of course, my old friend Eddie Cat, how could I have forgotten Eddie Cat? While I puzzled about this there was a loud stapling sound and a painful impact on my shoulder. Some type of metal dart was stapled into my arm and attached was a yellow photocopied form of some sort.

“Quickly!” said Eddie Cat. “They’re serving papers on you.” I looked up and saw that the police man in the yellow uniform was holding a big horn shaped gun. Another stapling sound and I ducked just quickly enough to avoid a paper dart that nearly caught me in my left eye. “C’mon!” shouted Eddie Cat. I exerted every ounce of my strength to follow behind Eddie Cat who ran with blinding speed. His speed seemed to pull me along in a wake of feline acceleration as the alley rushed away from us and we skirted between stores and garbage cans. We raced over rooftops, down fire escapes and through mazes of narrow alleys. One alley opened into a garbage-filled vacant lot behind a row of abandoned stores.

“Ah, we can slow down now matey.” said Eddie Cat. I was wheezing horribly trying to catch my breath. Gently, Eddie Cat removed the paper dart from my shoulder. A little clump of ice crystals came off with it and I had to clench my teeth to keep from crying out.

“Where are we?” I asked breathlessly.

“Why, Upright City of course, the land of the flesh-covered masters.” replied Eddie Cat, surprised by my question.

“I’m getting too old for this, Eddie Cat.” I gasped, still trying to get my breath.

“You’re only as old as you feel.” said Eddie Cat giving me a huge encouraging smile.

“But I feel old.” I replied.

“Oh.” Eddie Cat paused and thought about this for a moment, “Then I guess that means you are old, Snowman. Do you think that you’ll be getting put to sleep soon?” I felt a dark inevitability about Eddie Cat’s question.

“I don’t know. It might be for the best.”

“Hmmm, I’m not so sure about that Snowman.” said Eddie Cat. “Did I ever tell you about what happened to my cousin Debbie Cat?” I shook my head. “She was put to sleep too soon,” Eddie Cat’s voice lowered to an ominous whisper, “and we’ve heard that there were problems in the afterlife because of it.”

“What kind of problems?” I asked nervously.

“Y’know. Problems. Papers to fill out. Remediation courses. Arbitration. Surgery. Complications. Audits. Chemotherapy… In fact,” Eddie Cat motioned for me to bend down so he could whisper in my ear. “There’s a rumor that Debbie Cat might get sent back down to Annoying World and have to do the whole nine lives all over again!”

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry to hear that.” I replied in a shocked whisper.

“Best to go the distance kiddo.” said Eddie Cat with a friendly wink. But after he winked at me I got the distinct impression that he had made up the whole Debbie Cat episode, and I began to have suspicions about Eddie Cat’s credibility in general. I sensed that he had an unexpressed agenda of some sort, but I wasn’t sure what it was. We walked across the cracked asphalt of the vacant lot toward an area thickly grown with weeds.

We traversed vast mazes of weeds that seemed to only become more vast and densely entangled as we traveled inwards. Many of the weeds were over my head and they grew in curved, twisty, narrow rows. These rows would intersect each other, and at each intersection Eddie Cat would stop and sniff and then decisively turn his head in a particular direction. At first I thought we had entered an overgrown lot and kept expecting that we would get to the end of it. But we kept walking, and never seemed to get to a place where there was anything but rows of weeds in every direction. I began to wonder where Eddie Cat was taking us.

“These weeds are such a twisty maze,” I remarked to Eddie Cat “ how can you find your way?” Eddie Cat turned and looked back at me as if I had asked the stupidest question imaginable.

“By instinct of course.” said Eddie Cat smiling at me with the sort of smile a friendly social worker might have when handing a balloon to a retarded child. By instinct of course. replayed in my mind as we resumed walking. What is this instinct that makes Eddie Cat so powerful and confident? I wondered. It’s obviously a magic power of the highest order. I certainly don’t seem to have any of this instinct at all. Yet how can I live in this world with out this power? I would perish before I could find my way out of these weeds without instinct.

We walked for quite some distance. The morning wore thin and the white hot sun rose in the sky. I could feel the heat of the sun beating down on me, making my body sag. Sweat began to bead on my forehead and with a nervous start I remembered about the Beckstein Limit and what could happen to me if dehydration went on for too long. Eddie Cat, on the other hand, seemed to thrive in the heat, and I felt deeply ashamed of my bodily disadvantages. I dabbed my forehead with an old pocket handkerchief and decided, after some anxious consideration, that I would not tell Eddie Cat about my condition.

As we walked, the weeds seemed to change. At first the weeds were all very similar. They seemed heavy and dusty, with branches thick as cables and leaves that were wiry or covered with a dull fuzzing of white fungus. After we walked for a long way I noticed the ground sloping downward. We seemed to be walking toward the center of a giant crater and as we gradually descended the weeds became weirder looking and more various. One had waxy translucent skin and strange bulbous growths all over its spindly structure.

“Where are we going, by the way?” I asked, privately disturbed by the increasing deformity of the weeds.

“Cat City, of course.” replied Eddie Cat “Don’t you want to hang out with us?” My face flushed with embarrassment. Eddie Cat had a way of always throwing me off balance socially.

“Oh of course I want to hang out with you.” I replied with considerable embarrassment. “I’m honored that you were nice enough to invite me. I only meant that I’m having this slight memory problem, but I’m sure it’s only temporary. It’s just that I keep blanking on certain things like people, places and animals, that I just can’t find in my head.”

“Oh. OK. I’m glad you shared that with me, Snowman. It’s important that we communicate openly.” replied Eddie Cat.

“It’s very nice of you to be so considerate to me.” I said with awkward sincerity. “I really appreciate your help.” I had traveled such a long way without companionship and was genuinely touched by Eddie Cat’s close attention.

“Don’t mention it.” said Eddie Cat. “I’ve always enjoyed being your social worker. And even if I didn’t, I’m well paid for it.”

“You are?” I was shocked.

“What, paid?” said Eddie Cat looking extremely insulted. I was in an agony of embarrassment.

“Oh, no, no I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean about being paid, of course you’re being paid, why shouldn’t you be paid for being with me, see it’s all just a misunderstanding. I just said the words, ‘You are–’ because I was trying to say, You are my social worker.’ But when I said, ‘Are.’ my voice broke and it sounded like a question. And of course you were perfectly right to misinterpret it as a question because it was my voice that cracked and made it sound like a question. I…”

“It’s OK.” interrupted Eddie Cat. “It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. What’s done is done. It’s over. Let’s just forget about it.”

“OK.” I replied quickly. We walked together for some distance in a nervous silence. By the side of one very long row of weeds we passed two large lava rocks in a tiny clearing under the hot sun.

“We’ll rest here.” said Eddie Cat. We each sat on a grayish rock that felt like hot, scratchy Styrofoam. The heat was intense and the air was thick with greenish weed scent. I felt bone-tired and thirsty, but Eddie Cat began to lick himself and purr loudly with perfect contentment. How can Eddie Cat so totally go into licking himself like that? I wondered. He seems to be able to enjoy it with unreflecting pleasure as if he hasn’t got a care or worry in the world. I would be so embarrassed to lick myself in front of someone else. After a while, Eddie Cat finished licking himself and turned toward me and it seemed as if he were noticing me for the first time. Then he did something utterly disarming and unexpected. He lightly brushed his furry cheek by the side of my head in a gesture of feline affection.

“Don’t worry about any little thing, Snowman.” said Eddie Cat in a purringly sing-song voice. He was still purring even as he was speaking. “Don’t forget I’m not just your social worker, I’m also your good friend.” I was touched by Eddie Cat’s obvious sincerity and warmth. It encouraged me to ask a question that had been bothering me.

“Eddie Cat, I know that you are taking me to Cat City but for some reason I am not thinking of the place where we are right now.”

“This is Weedland.” said Eddie Cat. “And a more wild and desolate place is not to be found outside of Annoying World.”

“You mean we’re outside of Annoying World?”

“Of course. That’s why you don’t see any Uprights. Annoying World is wherever the Uprights live. And since this is still the age of the Uprights we also refer to this whole plane of existence as Annoying World.”

“How did Weedland get this way?”

“Because of the Uprights.”

“Who are the Uprights?” Eddie Cat looked at me with astonishment.

“You know who Uprights are— Skinjobs, the pale furless ones, they call themselves Humans.”

“Oh. But how did the Uprights create Weedland?”

“By dropping the N Bomb on it of course” The phrase N Bomb made my blood run even colder than usual.

“What’s the N Bomb?” I asked in a hushed, shaky whisper.

“You never heard of the N Bomb?” asked Eddie Cat, obviously amazed at my ignorance. “It’s only the most advanced bomb ever made. It’s really amazing to think what it can do. Why, it’s over fifty times more powerful than the M Bomb! I mean, we’re talking about a little piece of hardware, a little firecracker here, that can MIRV into ten thousand separate almost microscopic war heads each one of which is thirty times more powerful than the early L Bombs.”

“L Bombs?”

“You never heard of the L Bomb?” Eddie Cat was astonished by my stupidity. “Just what sorts of bombs have you heard of?”

“Well, I think I remember hearing something about the ‘A Bomb’ and the ‘H Bomb.” I replied defensively.

“What? You mean those ancient mushroom bombs? Why kittens throw them off of rooftops on Parade day. Next you’ll be telling me you’re from the Atomic Age. Time to wake up and smell the mutations, Snowman! Haven’t you noticed something abnormal about eight foot weeds and talking cats? We’re heavily into mutations here. How do you suppose you became a conscious Snowman? It’s obviously a mutation. The species are always evolving and mutating, but especially after all the irreversible damage the J Bombs did to the reality waves. I wonder what sort of Upright mind came up with the idea of a bomb that actually damages things on the Quantum Mechanical level, a bomb that ultimately burned cancerous pinholes into the black fibers of space-time? And now they say that damage to space-time is spreading. Reality wave distortion is beginning to diffuse back to the past so that it’s starting to make all the earlier times more weird too.”

“Are you sure about all this?” I asked in state of shock and confusion. I sensed that there was both truth and misinformation in everything Eddie Cat said, but it was hard to discern which was which. Eddie Cat gave me a shrewd and penetrating look.

“Haven’t you ever noticed something odd about being a conscious Snowman?” asked Eddie Cat.

“Well, now that you mention it…” Eddie Cat’s train of thought was disturbing

“Look, haven’t you been experiencing weird blackouts and sort of out of body experiences where you feel like you are flashing through different lifetimes, different incarnations or universes?”

“You mean I’m not the only one having that problem?” I asked, feeling suddenly elated. That I suffered incarnation seizures had always been my deepest, darkest secret, a burden that I assumed I, alone, had to bear. Through many long lifetimes I had borne this shame alone and in private. Never before had I been able to talk to another sentient being about my condition. Relief washed over me in warm waves. I looked up at Eddie Cat with a new found love and gratitude.

“Nothing personal against you,” said Eddie Cat compassionately, “but in an earlier, more virginal reality, before the J Bombs caused irreversible distortion of the reality waves, something like you would never have happened.” Shocked, I responded with reflexive denial.

“It’s not true!”

“Well, just Look about you Snowman. What sort of mutations do you see? Do you see how everything is a relatively slight variation of normal reality?. In the ancient days, cat’s couldn’t talk and they didn’t have as much structured thought as we do. They couldn’t hold objects in their paws very well and were only a fifth our present size. Our ancient ancestors were known at the time as ‘Alley Cats.’ They lived in the margins of Upright society and were treated as second class citizens. But despite these differences we are still very much like earlier feline species. Similarly, these weeds here are variations of ordinary weeds. But,” Eddie Cat lowered his voice to an ominous whisper, “you are something that cannot even be named…. You are the forbidden mutation. You are the Inanimate become Animate one. A Snowman was never before a living thing. There is no other like you. In a sense, you are the J Bomb’s only son.” I looked into Eddie Cat’s yellowish green eyes.

“I feel the truth of it. I am a mutation. I am a highly mutated mutation.”

“Yes you are. Everybody knows that you are the most reality-deteriorated mutant in all of Annoying World.”

“I am?” There was a sudden spike in self-esteem, almost like a sugar rush. Nobody had ever told me that I was the most at anything.

“Isn’t it obvious? Everybody else’s body has a definite structure, but you are amorphously composed of ice crystals. I’ve read your entire medical evaluation.” said Eddie Cat.

“What medical evaluation?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh my God, don’t you even remember anything of the early days when we first found you? Your medical evaluation was recorded on a tiny laser disc that you wore around your neck. The Uprights ran a whole series of phased reality scans on you. They say that you are formed from an extremely unstable field of nuclear magnetic resonance which has generated a unique mutation-hybrid of organic and representational reality waves.” Eddie Cat sounded like he was reading from papers and I wondered if he really knew what he was talking about. I had a distinct feeling that I was being fed misinformation.

“Well, does this medical evaluation say how I got so mutated?” I asked in a challenging tone.

“Why, yes it does, Snowman. The evaluation says that your biological mother abused—-or, shall we say, challenged herself, with an army surplus reality wave distortion field generator.”

“Why would she do that?”

“According to the evaluation your mother was part of an underground cult that felt they could use reality wave distortion fields to expand their awareness. They weren’t aware, or didn’t care, how much it mutated their DNA. They were probably just doing it for a quick buzz.” I put my twig like hands over my ears.

“It’s not true! I don’t believe it! Not a word of it.“

“I’m sorry, Snowman.” said Eddie Cat. He brushed against my leg in a friendly, reparative gesture that immediately calmed me. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Let’s forget about the evaluation. Everything will be just fine once we get to Cat City.” I felt calmed, but I could also feel that Eddie Cat was schmoozing me. It seemed quite possible that everything he said was a lie, but another part of me wanted to go along with it, wanted to believe I was getting definite answers even if they weren’t the answers I wanted. Also, I would do anything to avoid the terrible loneliness I had felt tumbling alone through space and through so many lifetimes. I clung dependently to Eddie Cat, and wanted, desperately, to believe him. My reverie was interrupted by a question.

“Can you remember where you’ve been these many suns that we haven’t seen you?” asked Eddie Cat.

“No.” I replied truthfully. I could recall falling through space and that there had been many incarnations, but a deep amnesia still covered all the specifics.

“You must have had more of those incarnation seizures. Can you remember being in any other lifetimes or dimensions?”

“I can’t seem to remember much about other lifetimes. The truth is I can’t remember much of this lifetime either. All I can remember is that I had this dreadful headache. It was like a Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snack hangover headache only a thousand times worse.”

“You mean all you can remember of all your incarnations, including this one, is a headache?” Eddie Cat was incredulous. I suddenly felt nervous and defensive.

“Oh no, I can remember some stuff of course,” I replied evasively, “It’s just that…I mean what causes these incarnation seizures I’ve been getting? Can’t anything be done for this sickness? Aren’t there any sort of antibiotics or pills of some sort I could be taking for it?”

“Whoa, one question at a time Snowman,” said Eddie Cat, “let’s talk about the cause first. The cause of the seizures is pretty obvious. Remember I told you that you are formed of some highly unstable fields of distorted nuclear magnetic resonance? Well, every so often, more and more often it seems, those unstable fields get a little too unstable. When that happens, your reality waves can shift to a parallel universe. When the system restabilizes you return to Annoying World. It used to be called Missing Time Syndrome.”

“What about treatment?” I asked gloomily.

“Treatment? Well, you have to realize that the underlying cause of your distortion and instability problems is the over all deterioration of space-time. When there is a seasonal flare up of reality wave distortion most of us ordinary mutants get a little nauseous or a slight headache. You get massive incarnation seizures. Remember, treatment is only one aspect of the healing process. The first step is to think of this as more of a challenge than a handicap.” Eddie Cat’s words sounded sweet and well meaning but they sure didn’t keep me from feeling depressed about my condition. We walked down another long weed row in silence. I felt tired and soggy. There was a white-hot sun over us now and I felt the Beckstein Limit hovering darkly on my bodily event horizon. There was a weird smell of heat baking on dusty soil and green weed sap boiling in wilted stems and leaves.

“We must continue the healing process.” said Eddie Cat after a while. His voice had taken on an hypnotic cadence. “Tell me what you remember of your unhappy childhood.” I shook my head.

“I don’t remember.”

“You mean you don’t remember your foster mother Betty Cat?” I shook my head silently, as a feeling of deep, undefinable shame came over me.

“It’s a pity you’ve lost the memory.” said Eddie Cat sadly. “Your blessed foster mother, Betty Cat, may she rest in peace, was a wonderful guardian for you—-it was she who found you when you floated down the Western River in an old plastic laundry basket.” Slowly, like a developing Polaroid, a memory began to form in my mind, but then it faded away again.

“Ah,” said Eddie Cat, his eyes lighting up suddenly. “I see what your problem is! You’re suffering from Repressed Memory Syndrome!” Eddie Cat’s tail trembled electrically with excitement and delight. Sheepishly, I nodded my head in agreement. I wasn’t sure what Eddie Cat was talking about, but I desperately wanted to please him and gain his approval.

Eddie Cat danced an ecstatic little feline gig and began singing and rhyming with horrible excitement, making up the words as he went along:

“Repressed memory syndrome. Repressed memory syndrome. Candy and catnip spice and everything nice. Repressed memory syndrome. Repressed memory syndrome. Makes me famous, makes you well, health and happiness, everything will be swell. Repressed memory syndrome. Repressed memory syndrome. Pots of treasure beyond the shrouded veil! Repressed Memory Syndrome reveals the hidden tale! Makes your past a many splendoured meal, like thick slices of luscious veal we can eat with great zeal! Repressed Memory Syndrome is the best. Makes you heal, gets me a lucrative book deal!” I shuddered nervously. Eddie Cat seemed crazy, perhaps dangerously crazy, and his yellow eyes glowed greedily. His tale vibrated electrically as if he had stuck his paw in a high voltage outlet. And yet there was something intensely charismatic about him, and his excitement, that made me want to follow him. “Quick, kneel down on the ground.”said Eddie Cat. Obediently, I knelt on the ground. My hands were sweaty and I felt moisture from my kneecaps seeping into the dusty ground beneath me. From a hidden pocket Eddie cat pulled out a big gold pocket watch hanging from a golden chain. Under its domed crystal was a black spiral on a white background. Eddie Cat began swinging the watch in a slow pendulum arc. My eyes moved back and forth rhythmically as I stared at the watch. Eddie chanted in an ever so soft, hypnotic voice, “Getting sleepy, nice and sleepy, nothing creepy, isn’t it nice to get nice and sleepy, nice and sleepy, nice and sleepy, nothing creepy, isn’t it nice to get nice and sleepy, nice and sleepy, nice and sleepy…” My eyelids grew heavy and closed. My breathing slowed to a sonambulatory rhythm. Somewhere inside, down a long dark, corridor a door opened and memory flooded in. As memory returned I blurted out what I was experiencing to Eddie Cat.

“I remember mother now, I remember the laundry basket. I remember the way she used to lick my face when I was little. But the other chill-dren...” As I said, “chill-dren.” I found that I was clenching my teeth and my hands had became shaky and my voice began stammering. “I never got along with the chill-chill-chilldren, they were always so cruel to me. And they had a name for me. A name I didn’t like.”

“What was the name?” asked Eddie Cat very interested.

“I’d rather not say.” I replied.

“Remember what I said before about Open Communication?” said Eddie Cat in a soft, but very insistent voice. “I’ve read every Upright book written on social working, and one thing they all agree on is that you can only help those that open themselves to help. And open communication is the key to opening yourself to being open to help. As part of that openness I want you to tell me that name they called you.” I felt a powerful reluctance, but my desire to please Eddie Cat gradually overcame it.

“Well, OK, what they used to call me, if you really have to know, what they called me was, was…Deteriorated Reality Boy.” I nearly choked on these words that I had hoped were forever in my past. Eddie Cat covered his mouth with his paw and seemed to be coughing suddenly.

“What’s so funny?” I felt a humiliated resentment of Eddie Cat’s probing.

“Well you do have to admit there’s an element of truth to the name. But of course it is a rather needlessly blunt and literal way to put it. I can see why it bothered you that they called you such a name.”

“It did bother me, it still bothers me.”

“Well, go on, what else did the Children do to you?”

“I’m not sure…I…”

“Do you remember that night in the school yard?” asked Eddie Cat. Eddie Cat’s words seemed to cut right into my snowbody.

“The night in the school yard?” I knew what he was talking about, but couldn’t bear for it to be brought up.

“Yes, what happened that night in the schoolyard? Can you remember what happened to you that night when those children abused you?” A wave of nausea went through me, I felt feverish and vomited. I spat vomit out of my mouth and onto the dusty soil. I clenched my fists and banged them against my forehead. I had to make the words. I had to get it out.

“I snuck into the school yard one night of my fourteenth summer to shoot some baskets. I had this idea that if I could teach myself to play a sport really well that the others might accept me. It was the summer and I hadn’t seen most of the other kids in the seventh grade for weeks. And then suddenly Kevin Cat and all his friends appeared all around me. It scared me and I gasped. You know how felines can creep up real stealthy and all when they’re after you? It is the scariest thing in the world. And then the way they stare at you with that predatory stare. I was so terrified. I was only fourteen years old and there was no way I could fight all ten of them, they were only a year older than me but they were full-sized Toms. Then Kevin cat’s cousin Jerry Cat started saying stuff. He started saying I was soft and that I made their school look retarded when I sat in the bleachers at football team pep rallies. Kevin Cat started in, calling me ‘Deteriorated Reality Girlie-Boy’ and ‘Soft Balls’ and the like. Then with sudden feline speed they grabbed me and pinned my skinny arms against the wall of the school.

“Let’s show him how soft he is.” said Kevin Cat. And then…” I found I was having trouble breathing. I gasped for air, but I had to get the words out, “They started putting things…They started putting things in my snow. Pens and combs and pieces of sharp glass. They said they wanted to show me how soft I was.” I began to sob almost uncontrollably as the remembered pain pierced my body. Eddie Cat’s glittering yellowish green eyes peered into me.

“Stop that crying!” said Eddie Cat. “You’re losing moisture.”

“You mean you know about my condition?”

“Of course we know about your condition, it’s pretty obvious isn’t it? Now tell me what came after, what happened after they put the things in your snow?”

“I can’t say.” I replied nearly screaming. “I promised never to say.”

“You must say it or you will never learn to live with the wound. It is essential to the whole healing process.” said Eddie Cat vehemently, looking at me with weirdly fascinated eyes. I was hyperventilating with anxiety , but I knew I had to say it. I gasped for air and blurted out,

“I made them go away. Something happened inside my head and then I just looked at them and their reality deteriorated and then they just went away. They were gone.” There was a long, tense silence before Eddie Cat spoke.

“Those young Toms should never have done what they did to you.” His voice was smoothly professional and had a soothing, consoling tone.

“No, they shouldn’t have.” I replied bitterly. “But what I did was so much worse. But I couldn’t help it, it just happened.”

“You must learn to let go of it.” said Eddie Cat. “That’s step number one in the healing process.” I took a shuddering breath, and felt the peace of a profound catharsis. “Come on.” said Eddie Cat. “We’ve stayed here long enough. Let’s make it to Cat City before night fall. Weed Land is no place to be when the sun sets.”

As I walked beside Eddie Cat I felt that we had crossed some major barriers and that heavy burdens had been lifted from my shoulders. But I also felt exhausted by the emotional stress of the process and the worsening dehydration. The dry, cottony taste in my mouth was changing to the vinegary acetic acid smell associated with snow tissues that have begun to metabolize themselves. I knew I had to say something.

“I must say I am getting very tired and thirsty, Eddie Cat.”

“Me too, but we’re only a few turns away from Puddle Town. I’ll treat you to some food and drink when we get there. We may even run into my cousin, Jamie Cat.” said Eddie Cat, giving me a curious sidelong glance.

The name, “Jamie Cat” reverberated strangely in my mind. That’s sounds strangely familiar, I wonder who he or she is? “What kind of town is Puddle Town?” I asked, unable to remember anything about it.

“Hmmm…” said Eddie Cat. “You usually beg me to take you to Puddle Town and yet you still can’t remember it. Well, if you really can’t remember I should tell you that it’s more of a port than a town. It’s a pleasant alternative to the bustling crowds of Cat City. And the food, spirits and lodging are all better and more reasonable than anywhere in the city. In fact, I was going to suggest that if you’re feeling pretty walked out we might want to call it a day and put up at my cousin Stanley Cat’s Admiral Black Paw Inn. It’s their slow season so we might be able to get rooms with a view of the water.”

“That sounds very inviting.” I said feeling quite attracted to the offer. “It also sounds very nautical. Is the Admiral Black Paw Inn frequented by sea going folk?”‘ “Why, yes it is,” said Eddie Cat. “You know how their advertising rhyme goes, ‘The Admiral Black Paw Inn, A valued harbor to those who travel far. A relaxing refuge to those who drink from our well-stocked bar. The Admiral Black Paw Inn is the place to get your rest. Drink and slumber here before you resume your quest!’ Seagoing folk? Why, The Admiral Black Paw Inn has it’s own dock and slips for up to seven boats. And there are always three or four weather -stained schooners docked there. But look about yourself if you choose to linger in the common room. Some felines hold their spirits better than others. Never arouse the ire of a pirate cat once he has taken to his cups I always say.”

“There are pirate cats there?”

“Aye, but don’t tell me you can’t remember pirate cats!” said Eddie Cat. I felt it was better not to press the issue and walked silently, trying unsuccessfully to recollect something about Puddle Town or pirate cats. Soon, however, we passed by the pools of stagnant water that gave Puddle Town its name. A faded wooden hanging sign creaked in the dry breeze, “Welcome to Puddle Town” The row of weeds became much wider and there was gravel on the ground now instead of dust. Distantly, I could smell the salty wetness of an ocean breeze. The path twisted and turned, but the weeds were so tall that I could still get no glimpse of Puddle Town. The path led up a hill and as we came over the top I could see below an especially large puddle that had a crude dock of old, weathered boards on the far side. On the dock slept a magnificent cat with glossy black fur and orange stripes.

“Ah, Jamie Cat,” said Eddie Cat. “But she’s sleeping.”

I stared at Jamie Cat and as I stared I felt the heat of the sun burning through the pores of my ice crystals. Time slowed as I beheld Jamie Cat with paralyzing fascination. Things deep inside my snow body tried to reach out to the musk scented black and orange of her sleek, smooth fur, to feel the infinite fineness of that taut and supple feline body. Jamie Cat. I had always known and desired Jamie Cat, though I could remember nothing about her. The gentle rising and falling of her breathing was the rhythm of the dark ocean of my eternal voyage. Jamie Cat. Now was the long winter of my discontent made glorious summer by this sudden apparition. Now I knew why I had walked the long and tortuous path, suffered the blinding fury of the sun’s glare and returned from every displacement of the incarnation seizures. I had run down alleys and across roof tops, over deserts, tumbled through universes and lifetimes to find Jamie Cat. And now was she revealed as the source and core of the life force that stirred in me, animated my existence and propelled my every movement. Jamie Cat. Every ice crystal urged me toward her. Here was the magic that Eddie Cat called instinct that allowed me to know exactly where fate called to me through all the twists and turns. Somehow I had forgotten my destiny, and now it lay for me at the bottom of a hill, waiting for me, sleeping in the sun, at the end of the long journey.

Many heart beats of eternity passed before I realized that Eddie Cat was staring at me, his shrewd eyes two all-knowing yellow slits.

“I see some things never change.” said Eddie Cat. I found his tone annoying and superficial. And how could Eddie Cat stand to look at me when beauty incarnate reposed before us? “It would be a little rude to disturb her rest, but I can see that you are keen to visit with her.”

“Oh no, don’t disturb her.” I replied quickly. I suddenly felt terrified of going down the hill. “Can’t we just stay a few more moments and gaze upon her? Please, as my social worker, I beg of you, cross to the other side of these weeds with me and let us hide ourselves amidst their dusty foliage so I can look upon my beloved.” With a patronizing shrug Eddie Cat followed me into the weeds, and once again I gazed upon Jamie Cat, feeling the pulse beating in my thin stick like arms as I inhaled the hot ocean-scented air, the same air that Jamie Cat breathed. In the ocean of atmosphere our breaths commingled. Now was the dusty, weedy world turned into a lush jungle of rich colors and radiant life. Now was the white glare of the sun made beautiful that it had this living jewel, Jamie Cat, on which to reflect its rays. And to what dark, dreary, empty night would the whole universe fall were it not for Jamie Cat, the focal point of all beauty, color and delight?

And then there was a sudden change in Jamie Cat’s breathing. The life force stirred in her, her head arose and Jamie Cat opened her green eyes upon the world.

“Oh beauty of all beauties!” I gasped “Was there ever green before her eyes? The finest emeralds are like gray dust compared to the green magic of her wondrous eyes.”

“Hmmm.” said Eddie Cat. “That sounds like a very codependent remark. All the social working books talk about this sort of thing, and it’s not very healthy. Step one in the healing process…” But I was only dimly aware that Eddie Cat was speaking, and could not follow his words long enough to derive any meaning from them. How could I before the green magic of Jamie Cat’s Eyes? And then Jamie Cat yawned and I beheld her beautiful pink gums, the polished white feline ivory of fangs and teeth and the inviting rasping wetness of her long tongue. Jamie Cat arose and stretched her spine magnificently—first convex and then concave as the gloss of her fur glimmered in the sunlight. Then she sat and scanned about her with those alert orbs of green. She was luxuriantly calm, but also aware of something, and the delicate moistness of her pink nostrils pulsed as they sniffed the air and interpreted the subtle variations of scent about her. It seemed as if she sensed a presence, a presence the sensing of which, made her animated, even (dare I think it?) excited. Could it be that my snowscent had wafted down to her and was evoking her alert attention?

But suddenly there was an intruder. A large, shiny black Tom sauntered onto the dock without the slightest hesitation or introduction. Jamie Cat regarded him with turned head and steadfast green eyes. And then the large Tom went over and licked Jamie Cat’s forehead. Instantly, my body stiffened in pain and outrage.

“Who is this vile beast that dares lay his slimy tongue on my Jamie Cat’s noble forehead? I’ll gut him with my bare hands.”

“Not so fast.” said Eddie Cat. “It’s only Tony Cat. Jamie Cat’s new boyfriend.”

“Her new boyfriend!” I nearly choked on the poisonous words.

“I guess you don’t remember anything do you?” sighed Eddie Cat a little impatiently. “Jamie Cat’s been going out with Tony Cat ever since Joey Cat, her ex, found her fooling around with that young pirate Tom, Sinbad Cat.”

“What?!! This is madness and lies, I don’t believe a word of it!” I cried with great agitation. But at that moment Jamie Cat and Tony Cat circled each other in a peculiar way and Tony Cat somehow got his nose near Jamie Cat’s hind quarters and sniffed her there.

“I will kill that vile beast instantly!” My icy blood was up and pain galled every crystal of my being. With smooth feline speed Eddie Cat locked powerful cat arms around me, restraining me with great efficiency.

And then Jamie Cat turned to look at Tony Cat as if only now aware of what he was doing. “She’ll shred his evil eyes in a moment!” I gasped, struggling to breath under Eddie Cat’s powerful grip. But the moment passed and Jamie Cat didn’t shred Tony Cat’s eyes. Instead she turned and sniffed Tony Cat’s hindquarters and then licked him there and…. kept licking him there.

I turned away in horror and threw up onto the weedy dust. My mind reeled and I collapsed into my own vomit, sobbing inconsolably. When I was capable of speech I cried out,

“Oh, I am fortune’s fool! Why, why, why was I born into this cruel world to be so stabbed and mocked by fate? Let me die that I may be free of this torture!” I writhed on the dusty, vomitous ground in agony, there was snow foam around my mouth and my writhing became almost electrical, and seemed on the verge of turning into a grand mal incarnation seizure. Eddie Cat’s eyes dilated with alarm as steam ruptured the trunks of weeds that popped and hissed all around us. My rage was creating dangerous mutant psionic effects, and Eddie Cat knew this must be stopped before God only knew what happened.

“Snowman, get a grip on yourself. This is the codependency speaking inside of you. It is not you. You are complete in yourself. You have to start feeling good about yourself. Let go of the voices of low self-esteem that make you choose such dysfunctional attractions! What is Jamie Cat to you, or you to Jamie Cat? It is all an overblown adolescent infatuation! Letting go of this is the first step in the healing process!”

“You don’t understand.” I sobbed inconsolably. “There is only Jamie Cat.”

“But didn’t you say the same thing about my little cousin Debra Cat? And remember how you went through that thing with Stacey Cat? Don’t you see how you keep repeating the same pattern?”

My head swam in agony and I felt like my whole snowmass was about to go critical and implode in a reality warping suction that could take down whole universes. I didn’t remember any of the she-cats Eddie Cat referred to and my mind spun in a white hot vortex of rage and confusion. I looked toward the dock. Tony Cat had pulled a weed cigarette from a small leather pouch and he and Jamie Cat were smoking it together, casually walking off the dock.

“They’re gone.” said Eddie Cat, reaching a paw down to help me up. “Let’s get out of here. We can talk more about this when we get to the Admiral Black Paw Inn.”

I picked myself up slowly. My gut felt like it had been stabbed with the ten thousand hot knives of a spiteful universe. How could Jamie Cat degrade herself in that way? Why does Jamie Cat forsake me? Why, Jamie Cat, why, why?

I staggered down the path in agony. Desperately I decided to appeal to Eddie Cat for help.

“Eddie Cat, you are my social worker and my good friend, is there nothing I can do to win Jamie Cat’s love?” My voice was pleading, whining, I trembled right on the brink of another huge crying jag.

“It would be an unkindness to you if I gave you false hope, Snowman.” Said Eddie Cat with great gentleness. “I don’t believe there is anything you can do. You’ve tried everything already. She does like you and think you are a very interesting and unique mutation, but that’s as far as it’s going to go.”

“But why is there no hope, Eddie Cat?.”

“Well, you know these things are always a mystery, but, in your case….I wish there was a more delicate way to put this, but the truth is you are a snowman and Jamie Cat is, well, a Cat. That’s a tough barrier to cross. This has always been a problem for you. You always seem to be attracted to young she-cats and they’re mostly attracted to young tom cats. It’s their instinct. Have you ever thought that one day you might find a snowwoman?”

“No.” I replied with enraged vehemence. I was sickened by the thought. All that bulging white snow. It was a nauseating image. “I don’t like the way snow people look at all, if there were any besides me, which there aren’t! You know very well that cats have always been the best looking animals around. You yourself wouldn’t settle for anything other than a she-cat, why do you think I should?”

“But there are other things in relationships besides all that mad passion stuff.” Replied Eddie cat in an exasperating tone of patient reasonableness. “What about companionship and spiritual love and all that? Don’t you want someone nice you can grow old with?”

“No. I want cats and you know that very well!” I shot back with vehement passion. “In my body, my heart, my soul, I know I was meant to be with cats. You yourself said I was found in a plastic laundry basket as a snowbaby by a cat, my foster mother Betty Cat, who always wanted another kitten. I was meant to be a cat!”

“But,” said Eddie Cat gently, “You know it is a common practice among the Uprights to abandon mutant babies. Don’t you think you probably had an Upright ancestry?”

“No! I can’t believe you could even think that. I’m a Snowman. I am not born of Upright flesh!” I cried passionately. “And no, I may not be fully a cat either. But I am myself, and I am the one who can make the weeds hiss and pop when the rage rises within me. I will conquer this handicap. I will transform myself so that Jamie Cat can love me. Why should Jamie Cat be with a snowman when I myself cannot bear the sight of my own deformity? Why should she want me when I myself sicken to glance at my snowy self in the looking glass and even my shadow throws a dark blemish on the dust? Oh, why am I so cheated of feature by dissembling nature? Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that mutant dogs bark at me as I halt by them! If I cannot fully make myself a cat then I will use artifice and make myself appear to be a cat so that none can tell the difference! I will dye my crystals black, I will exercise to tighten my muscles, I will eat cat food and drink, inject myself with cat hormones and I will have the fur of cats who have died in accidents transplanted onto the whole surface of my snow skin!” I stood suddenly tall and almost shouted with triumphant fervor. ” I’ll just do it. I’ll go for it, and it will be done!” A psionic aura—golden, with a flaring corona of violet appeared around my ecstatic snow body.

“Snowman, don’t you see this is just the manic side of you talking? You are fine the way you are. It is low self-esteem that makes you think you have to be a cat or look like one. And you know that transforming yourself doesn’t work. Don’t you remember all those things the Gypsy Cats sold you, the herbs, the potions, the special foods? None of it worked. Remember when you gave that Gypsy cat six hundred and eighty-five credit units for that Upright machine? They told you it was called the “Snow Flex” and was specially made for snowmen who wanted to look more feline and impress she-cats. But it was just an old Upright exercise machine, and those Gypsy Cats were laughing and laughing at you behind your back. The Gypsy Cats told you it would turn you into something they called “a Nordic Super Cat.” and you believed them. It did make you healthier, but you only looked like a healthier Snowman. Those Gypsy Cats are nothing but a bunch of cheap conjurers and greedy tricksters. They will only take your money again to sell you on a false hope. You must learn to accept yourself as you are.”

“No, no, never.” I cried adamantly, feeling the will rise up inside of me. “It’s easy for you to tell me to accept myself because you are a cat.” I leveled an accusing stare at Eddie cat and the aura of energy around me burned fiercely. ” If I were a cat I could accept myself too. But if there are cats, how can I stand it to be no cat?” I glared at Eddie Cat. “And who are you to give me advice? You are cat; you can do things by instinct. Things are different for me. My instinct tells me to go over a cliff. And if that is where the universe fates me to go then I will go there! And all your advice, all your middle-of-the-road, sensible advice, is no more use to me than the white hot sun that withers my ice crystals. I want to be a cat, I need to be a cat, I will be a cat, and Jamie cat will be mine! And Tony Cat will pay, yes he will, he will pay dearly, you hear me!”

“Good, good.” said Eddie Cat. “Let the anger out. It’s the first step of the healing process.” I turned on Eddie Cat savagely,

“What healing process?” my voice dripped venomously with sarcasm and contempt. “What healing process do you have for me, an entity of Ice Crystals that withers before the sun? Can your words heal me of that? Can they tell me where I will go when my last ice crystal has turned to vapor! Can you make a she-cat love me or make life make sense to me without that love? Can you save my eternal soul? You have no healing process! Your words are a sham and you social working cats are nothing but gypsy cat tricksters wearing soft lamb cat clothing.” The raw power of my mutant, psionic rage had Eddie Cat cowering and backing away.

“Well you needn’t be so husky with a fellow.” said Eddie Cat who seemed much smaller and now walked with his tail between his legs. “I told you it’s all just stuff written by Upright experts in social working books. Social worker is a good job for a feline these days. I never said the books were true or anything. How is a Cat supposed to know how to do a job if he doesn’t follow instructions in a book? We’re not born knowing how to do these jobs!”

“What about your instincts?” I asked sarcastically.

“Oh, well instincts can’t do everything you know. Try operating heavy machinery by instinct. That’s a good way to lose a paw in a hurry. Besides, we mutant cats have been trying to get away from instinct. Instinct is what drives the lower animals. A scorpion is all instinct—do you want to be a scorpion or a pair of ragged claws scuttling along the slimy floors of silent seas? How are we to rise above instinct if we don’t follow the instructions the experts write in books? Remember, this is the N190s. It’s almost two centuries since the N bomb was dropped. We social working cats believe that this is the New Age that all the Upright books talk about. We believe that this is a time when all the spirits of everybody and everything, Uprights, felines, weeds, dung, and even snow people, will all harmonize and converge into a new era of healing and safety. This is a great secret,” Eddie Cat’s voice lowered to an ominous whisper, “Don’t let anyone else know, but in a cave near the old sea we found an ancient magazine from the olden times of the ancient mushroom bomb era. This magazine says that it is a Journal of this New Age. Experts have restored the gloss of its aged pages and interpreted its strange words. It talks of an ‘Harmonic Convergence’ that will happen in our lifetime and begin to change everything. At that time all the reality wave deterioration will start a cosmic healing process. In the New Age, everyone will have a sacred place and a sacred value so long as they agree to respect everyone else’s sacred place and sacred values.”

“Oh?” I replied sneeringly. “And what of the mutant spider wasp with its fangs that inject its prey with fluoride-based radioactive neurotoxins? Will you respect its sacred values? Your New Age is only another reworking of the stories Betty Cat used to tell me about Sugar Candy Mountain where all the good creatures went when they died and where Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks grew on trees. Tell these tales to your grandkittens to ease their little kitty minds, but forsake to bebother my ears with these childish things and delusory trifles. Save your book instructions and New Age clichés for some other gullible sap, for I will seek my own answers and search for healing in my own way. If reality’s rules say that Jamie Cat is not for me, and I not for Jamie Cat, then I will seek out the rulemaker and challenge him with my woe. My body is different than this reality and ultimately withdraws from it. I will follow its direction and my quest will be to see if there isn’t some other dimension, some other world than Annoying World where I can find my path.”

Eddie cat seemed fearful of my violent passion and there was a tense, charged silence.

“Well,” mumbled Eddie Cat, “If that’s how you feel, then let’s away to the Admiral Black Paw Inn where many a great quest has been known to begin.”

We walked down a long row of weeds until we reached another puddle. This puddle was extremely small compared to the lake-sized puddle where Jamie Cat had appeared, but it was every bit as deep, and its water seemed clearer. The large puddle was dark green with algae, but this puddle was more like a well in the desert with smooth pebbles at the bottom that you could see from the top.

“I want to wash myself here.” I told Eddie Cat. I was feeling ashamed of my disheveled appearance and had an anxiety that we might suddenly come upon a whole group of cats and that they would be able to tell that I had been crying. This was not the sort of thing that I wanted to get back to Jamie Cat. Intuitively, I knew that to have any chance with Jamie Cat I had to radically transform the image I projected.

“You’ve picked a good spot for washing, Snowman.” said Eddie Cat. “

“And that’s another thing—-” I turned to face Eddie Cat and focused an intense, dark stare on him. “I’m sick and tired of you calling me ‘the Snowman.‘ How would like it if I called you ‘the Feline’ all the time?” I did a mocking imitation of the often sing-song cadence of Eddie Cat’s voice, “Good morning the Feline. You’ve picked a good spot for it, the Feline. ‘You’ve got to feel good about yourself, the Feline! Not having a name is the first step of the healing process, The Feline! The Feline! The Feline! Twenty-four hours a day— the Feline! I’d like to know who decided that I should be referred to in this cold, generic way when everyone else seems to have an actual name as if they all had individual personalities and I didn’t!” I took a deep breath and spoke with impressive resolve, “Hereafter, I am no longer to be referred to, by you, or by anyone else as “the Snowman”. Hereafter, I am to be referred to by my new name…” I paused to think for a couple of a seconds. “By my new name….Jake. I am now Jake.”

“Well, you’ve picked a good spot for washing up, Jake.” remarked Eddie Cat with a sarcastic emphasis on the new name.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, and by the way, Jake, I hereafter no longer wish to be referred to as Eddie Cat. My new name is….The Grand Imperial Dragon Slayer and Wizard King of Upper Elthamador and the Northern Lands. And please, don’t even think about abbreviating any part of my new name because that will be taken as a great insult to my personal dignity.” I regarded Eddie Cat with a highly unamused glare.

“What the fuck are you taking about? What has all that bullshit you just said got to do with my desire to have a simple, common place, one syllable name? And what has it got to do with you, that you feel you can mock it? I— oh, just forget it, I don’t have to .justify myself to you. Why am I even bothering with this conversation when Jamie Cat is out somewhere doing God knows what with Tony Cat!.”

Dismissively, I shooed Eddie Cat away with my twig like hands and Eddie Cat moved. I knelt down at the edge of the puddle and was about to put my hands in the water to wash off the dust and grime. But for some reason I paused before my hands actually went into the water. For a long moment I held my hands above the rippling surface of the puddle and beheld them. And as I beheld them time slowed, and my hands hovered over the silvery shimmer of white sunlight reflecting on the cool, dark well. I gazed at the weird asymmetries of my long, twig-like fingers. I had always considered my pale, elongated hands the most freakish and hideous feature of my body. Hands weren’t something you could hide under a long, dark overcoat. Hands were always out there. Hands always had to be used, whether you liked them or not. I had come to hate and abhor my hands, but I also knew that I was dependent on them for performing manual tasks. If it was not for this utility factor, however, I would probably have had my hands surgically removed a long time ago. The velvety, supple paws of healthy young cats were always a source of fetishistic obsession and envy. And if there was one part of my life that I really dreaded it was the little repressed gasps of horror and surprise when stranger cats saw my hands for the first time. Forever embedded painfully in my mind was the little she-kitten on the Cat City Trolley that remarked to her mother,

“Look mommy, that man has insect hands!”

It was because of my hands that I had always dreaded any event that involved public eating. Often I would just sit there with my hands at my sides neither eating nor drinking.

I moved my fingers slowly above the shimmering ripples of the deep puddle, and they felt heavy and swollen with the painful and portentous weight of my whole existence as a snowman. A memory arose, as if from the watery depths of the puddle, and began replaying itself in my mind. It was something that happened when I was very young snowboy.

For the first seven years of my life, my foster mother, Betty Cat, had insisted that I eat with her whole family during holiday gatherings. Betty Cat insisted on this out of love for her adopted snowboy, but it ruined the meal for everyone else. The practice finally ended one day when I was seven and Betty Cat was invited to spend Bird Feast Day with her family. The invitation pointedly did not include my name, but that only redoubled Betty Cat’s righteous determination to bring me along any way. As a very young snow boy I’m not sure how conscious I was of the controversy in the family about my being included in these events, but I did feel the general atmosphere of uneasiness, and dreaded these family occasions as sessions of torturous embarrassment for everyone.

On that particular day I had been crying alone in my room all that afternoon because I didn’t want to go to the Bird Feast Day gathering. I moped under the covers all morning crying and speaking in whispers to Joey, the large fuzzy, stuffed red mouse that was the constant companion of my early years.

“They don’t like us over there, Joey. We’re going to run away together.” I hugged Joey tighter and large tears of melted snow dripped onto Joey’s fuzzy red fur. Betty Cat yelled from the kitchen of our small house by the river.

”What you be doing in there all day, Snowboy?” Betty Cat had the heavy accent of the Black River Cat family she was descended from. It had been said that her great grandfather was descended from a full-blooded black alley cat. “Now you can go sulk yourself all day in there, Snowboy, but you will be going to Bird Feast Day just like any normal chi’l. And you best not be cryin’ in there Snowboy. I done told you about that too many times. You know you gonna dry yourself up with all that girlie-cat cryin’ till there ain’t be nothin’ left of you ‘cept one little snowflake dryin’ itself up in the dust under dhat radiator. You hear me Snowboy?’

“Yes, mama.”

“Now you put that Joey thing away and get yourself in your Sunday best. I wanna be proud of my Snowboy when we go to Aunt Bertha Cat’s house.” Betty Cat opened the door to my room and walked in with a steaming wash cloth. She rubbed my face so vigorously that it always felt like she was going to rub my snowskin off and turn me into a living snowskull boy. It was so different when I was still young enough to get my face licked.

Slowly and sulkily I got out of bed and slugged around my room. Betty Cat yelled at me some more and with glacier-like slowness I dressed myself in the brown corduroy Junior Fat Boy trousers, starchy white button-down shirt and narrow red and yellow tie that Betty Cat had spent half a pension check on at The Bulging Boy—a shop that sold garments for obese Upright children. I hated the outfit, especially since it was made for Uprights. Every time I buttoned the starchy, white shirt I felt like I was putting on a straitjacket. And then there was the way those ugly black rubber suspenders hiked my pants up practically to my armpits that made me feel like I must be the ugliest mutation in all of Annoying World.

Finally, I had to put on the most humiliating part of my outfit, the special deformity shoes that Betty Cat had gotten for me at Henry Cat and Sons surgical Supply Store where her cousin Sugar Cat worked. They had been specially made for a kitten with splayed-paw syndrome. But the kitten had died of complications before he could grow into the deformity shoes, and Henry Cat and Sons had to take a loss on them. Eventually they heavily discounted the deformity shoes and put them on the dusty black velvet display case behind the large plate glass window of their River Avenue storefront next to the cervical collars and aluminum walkers. Cat children from my elementary school would sometimes go to Henry Cat and Sons to stare at the shoes and laugh at them. The large brown deformity shoes looked like a frightening hybrid of orthopedic shoes and clown feet. They flared out at the front and had all sorts of weird curves and protuberances meant to accommodate the specific deformities of the deceased kitten they had been custom made for. Along the sides of the deformity shoes were a whole grid of air holes, each reinforced by a tiny brass grommet, that were necessary to provide the proper ventilation crucial to the treatment of splayed paw syndrome. In addition to laughing at the shoes, the cat children would sometimes join hands in a circle and dance around singing,

“Monster shoes! Monster shoes! Ten times uglier than a pair of doggy-do-dos!” Henry Cat or one of his sons would eventually have to go out and chase them away. Eventually they got tired of it, and decided to discount the shoes to almost nothing. When that happened Sugar Cat called Betty Cat on the phone and said,

“Betty Cat honey, you better get on down here in a lickety-split hurry, cause old Mr. Henry, done just put a pair of Cat City made shoes on sale for half the price of a bottle of flea pills. And I know they’re gonna fit your snowboy as if they was made for him special.” Sugar Cat always had a particular dislike for me and was never remiss when it came to stirring up trouble. She knew very well that Betty Cat was very poor and could never miss anything she took to be a bargain.

Later that day Betty Cat brought home the deformity shoes in a large brown box, but didn’t tell me any thing about their origin, afraid that I wouldn’t want to wear them if she did. And I hadn’t walked by Henry Cat and Sons Surgical Supply Store in months because it was in a shopping area where cat children from my school hung out. I knew I would be mercilessly teased and scratched by their sharp young claws if I so much as showed my snowy face there.

Betty Cat took the shoes out of the box and started to put them on my feet. She pressed and pinched my feet real hard from the outside of the shoes before pronouncing, “These shoes be near a perfect fit for you, son. And look at how expensive Cat City made they are too!”

“But they look kind of strange, ma. And what are all these little holes for?”

“Oh now hush up with all your worry-talk. You worry more than any old scaredy cat I ever met. You’ll be worrying us both to death one of these days. Here you got yourself a brand new pair of Cat City made shoes you can be proud to wear to the first day of school tomorrow, and all you gonna do is worry yourself sick about them.”

Tearfully, I remembered that first day of school as I put on the deformity shoes. I knew that Betty Cat did things because she loved me, and sometimes all I could do is go along with her well-meaning plans, even when I knew that no good would come of them. She was, after all, an old woman cat, and it wasn’t her fault that I was a freak. One day I hoped to do something great and become rich and famous. Then I would buy Betty Cat a beautiful big house with a big garden and all her favorite things.

Finally, I was dressed and Betty Cat took my hand and we walked on the path beside the long, dark river. There was a sharp crescent moon hanging just above the bare branches of the trees. I carried an old wicker basket that held the freshly baked sardine pie that Betty Cat had made for the feast. We walked in silence for a while, and I had one of those strange déjà vu moments that would come upon me at odd times and in lonely places. Time slowed and I heard the flowing of the river and the wind breathing through the tree branches. From inner depths I could feel that I was on a path, a path that was long, and dark and deep.

When we got to Aunt Bertha’s house, I tried to hide myself amidst the noise and confusion and cat chatter. Kittens were racing up and down the stairs and through the hallways, all the women cats were coming in and out of the kitchen carrying tons of food, and all the men cats were sitting around the living room smoking smelly catnip cigars and talking about sports and money. I stood in a shadowy corner by myself trying not to be noticed. But then they were ready to serve the feast and I had to sit at the table between Ellie Cat, a young she-kitten around my age, and Sammy Cat, a tom-kitten a year or two older.

The table looked like it was going to collapse with food. There was a large turkey, several quail, pigeon and sardine pies, a roast duck stuffed with mouse meat, and Aunt Bertha’s speciality—young sparrow breasts tartar, sautéed in a catnip-vinaigrette dressing. I was highly allergic to all animal foods and was sickened by the sight of all the holiday foods everyone else was making such a fuss about. To me, the feast looked, and smelt, like platters of dead birds. And even if I wasn’t allergic, I hated the thought of eating dead animals—it had always seemed savage and gross to me. Betty Cat always complained that my vegetarian diet would stunt my growth, but I told her I didn’t care. Better to be stunted than have a body made of dead animal parts. I thought. The only thing at the whole feast I could eat was the one platter of summer grasses. This was an out-of-season vegetable and was either frozen or from a can so that it was soggy and looked like seaweed once it was heated. It was one of those traditional dishes that was expected to be there, but in practice no one but me actually ate it. Betty Cat passed me a big plate of summer grasses that looked like it was frozen and canned. You couldn’t even make out the individual blades of grass, it was all just a big soggy mess. Greenish steam rose from the plate and smelled like old seaweed. Sammy Cat made a face and I just sat there with my hands at my sides, feeling hungry, but totally unmotivated to eat the greens. Everyone else was scarfing down tons of bird flesh, the men cats drank big mugs of sardine wine which made their breath stink of dead fish and catnip smoke. And most disgusting was the fact that they all talked with food in their mouths, chewed with their mouths wide open and ate with such noisy gusto that I felt like I was eating with a pack of starving hyenas wolfing down an especially tough carcass of raw zebra meat. The entire spectacle nauseated me, but I knew I had to sit there until the torture was over. I cast my dark eyes down at the tangled clumps of boiled grass on my plate imagining that it was a steamy, swampy jungle on another world. And that’s when the incident happened.

“Snowboy, Snowboy!” —It took a couple of repetitions of my name for Betty Cat to get my attention. “Be a good Snowboy and pass Ellie Cat that chicken liver pot pie.” I looked up and saw there was a platter of small, livery smelling pies in front of me next to a big bowl of tarry looking mouse pudding. I reached out to the platter of liver pies like Betty Cat told me to, and as I did so, Ellie Cat, who was quite a nervous, little she-kitten anyway, got a close look at my hands, and to her they looked like long, white worms. Ellie Cat emitted a piercing shriek and then threw up on her new, pink chiffon dress. Suddenly all the chewing stopped and every eye slit of every feline was focused on me.

“What’d you do to her Snowboy?” demanded Buck Cat, Ellie Cat’s father. I looked around and saw the hateful, accusing eyes glaring at me, and suddenly the whole family looked to me like a pack of predatory animals, savage and alien, and I let out a scream of pure terror, a scream of shattering psionic intensity that broke glass in houses half a block away. Bird Feast Day was ruined and Betty Cat ended up blamed and ostracized for bringing me.

Something died in Betty Cat that night. She would always love her Snowboy and think of me as the kitten God gave her when she was too old to have a litter, but her hopes that I would be accepted by the family were put to rest. There were many hysterical phone calls in the ensuing weeks when Ellie Cat stopped eating anything and eventually had to be hospitalized. Buck Cat and Missy Cat blamed it all on me, and, by implication, on Betty Cat for bringing me. For a time it seemed like no one in the family was going to speak to Betty Cat.

Ellie Cat eventually got better, but I was never taken to another family gathering. I began to feel nervous even eating in front of Betty Cat and would take my meals alone in my room. I would push my school papers aside and use my desk as a dining table. Sometimes I would put Joey on a chair next to me and talk to him during meals. Later in life, as an adult, I would always eat alone in my room at the boarding house. Mostly I heated up canned goods on a hot plate and ate out of the battered tin sauce pan that had belonged to Betty Cat before she passed away.

The memories ebbed away and I still stared at my hands hovering over the silvery ripples of the deep puddle. Somehow I had survived all that painful past and was still here. And now I saw my hands as if for the first time. The weird asymmetries looked purposefully complex, like the elegant brush strokes of oriental characters, or the intricate wards of a pair of uncanny, living skeleton keys. I saw now that there was something strangely powerful and intelligent about my hands. These hands were designed for some great and unknown purpose. I thought. And if these hands are not meant to caress the lustrous black and orange of Jamie cat’s fur then I will find the key hole that they are meant to unlock, whether it be flesh or some unformed destiny on some other plane.

I dipped my hands into the cool, dark water. Deep within I heard the luscious inner tinkling of the dry ice crystals as their capillary osmosis sent streams of replenishing moisture through out my whole body. I scooped up double handfuls of water and doused my head, cooling liquid passing through my brain and bloodshot eyes leaving them clear and refreshed. My body felt new made as the water flowed to my extremities, filling out my muscles and renewing every living crystal. I knelt beside the pool for a while feeling the life giving moisture coursing through all my snow tissues. When at last I stood up I seemed to tower over Eddie Cat, and my rehydrated body almost welcomed the heat of the white sun.

We walked a little ways further down the road before noticing a side path. “Ah, here’s the cut off to the Admiral Black Paw Inn.” said Eddie Cat, pointing toward a dirt path that cut through the weed field. It was a dirt path, but the sides were bordered with cobblestones. We walked down the path and soon came upon the Inn, a two story structure of weathered stone and wood. The windows were of an old fashioned sort with thick diamond shaped pieces of colored glass connected with lead solder. Surrounding the inn were well-tended vegetable gardens where many fine varieties of catnip and grasses were growing as well a number of tall sunflowers. The air was filled with the intoxicating minty smell of thriving catnip plants. The rear of the inn overlooked the dark waters of Voyage Bay, and a stone path led down to a wooden dock where a single schooner was tied in.

Eddie Cat knocked on the door and we were greeted by Jimmy Cat, a handsome young boy cat with alert and respectful green eyes and neat, tabby-stripped fur.

“Good evening, Sir Snowman and Sir Eddie Cat, welcome to the Admiral Black Paw Inn.” Jimmy Cat had perfect manners and had been brought up to speak formally and with the greatest respect to all the guests. We stepped into the common room which had dark mahogany paneling and heavy wooden tables.

“Actually, the Snowman is now to be referred to as the Jake.” said Eddie Cat.

“That’s Jake, not the Jake.” I corrected. Jimmy Cat looked a little confused. “Oh forget it,” I said. “I’ll keep my original name. You can call me the Snowman.”

“Yes, Sir Snowman.” said Jimmy Cat. “Would you gentlemen care for any refreshment after your long journey?”

“Yes we would.” said Eddie Cat. Jimmy Cat showed us to a table beside a window with a view of the garden. He told us about the daily specials and gave us menus printed on old parchment paper. Jimmy Cat brought us a large pitcher of iced catnip tea while we considered which of the Inn specialties would please us most. When we had decided, Jimmy Cat took our order and disappeared into the kitchen. In a short time he returned with another large pitcher of iced catnip tea, followed by chilled cream soup and fresh red snapper for Eddie Cat, and for me a plate of steamed, seasoned summer grasses, squash and potatoes—all fresh from the garden.

After we finished this excellent meal, Jimmy Cat offered us handmade catnip cigars from a polished wooden box, and pastel colored after dinner mints shaped like anchors on a red glass dish. Eddie Cat took a catnip cigar, and Jimmy Cat immediately lighted it for him. I politely refused the cigar but eventually ate all of the after dinner mints. It was against a Puddle Town ordinance to offer guests intoxicating spirits, but it was permissible to have written advertisements, and to serve anything that guests asked for. The Admiral Black Paw Inn was especially well known for its fine variety of homemade sardine and catnip wines and their special Quest Rum. Eddie Cat ordered a flagon of catnip wine for himself and a large mug of Quest Rum for me. We sipped our drinks as the setting sun cast roseate rays through the diamond shaped panes of glass. Jimmy Cat lit candles and began a fire in the fire place.

“Jimmy Cat, that was a fine meal.” said Eddie Cat.

“And your Quest Rum is a most excellent beverage.” I added, raising my second mug.

“Quite true,” said Eddie Cat, “but no finer than your catnip wine which is a vintage of surpassing excellence. I’m wondering, if you have a moment to spare from your evening chores, what news you can give us of comings and goings at the Inn and whether there are any quests or great journeys happening that you are aware of.” Eddie Cat patted the seat beside him.

“Thank you, sir.” said Jimmy Cat seating himself on the indicated chair.

“And, by the way, how is your respected father, Stanley Cat?”

“He’s taken to his sickbed, sir.”

“It’s nothing serious, I hope.”

“I’m afraid it is, sir. Doctor Lindsay Cat says he fears that the end is at hand.” Replied Jimmy Cat with tears in his young, green eyes.

“I’m so sorry to hear that.” said Eddie Cat.

“I’m so sorry to hear that too.” I said awkwardly but with real sympathy. Jimmy Cat had impressed me with his serious, respectful manner so unusual in a boy-cat his age. We were all silent for a few moments.

“There have been some strange occurrences here.” said Jimmy Cat, remembering his duty to report on the news. “A fortnight ago we were visited by the Old Woman of the Cards.”

“The Old Woman of the Cards!” exclaimed Eddie Cat. “She lives? I heard of her as a kitten and even then I thought her to be nothing more than an old legend.”

“Aye, she lives, sir. But she be very, very old indeed. She knocked on our door these fourteen days past.” said Jimmy Cat in a hushed tone. “I was the only one awake. At first I took her to be some sort of gnome mutant, so shrunken she was, and hidden within her red hooded cloak. I invited her inside and saw that she was covered with the dust of many leagues of travel. She was very tired and I brought her biscuits and rum coffee. She spoke in so creaky a voice that I had to struggle to make out her words. It seemed as if she were in a trance and she spoke as one who walks in their sleep.”

“‘Young boy.’ She said. ‘Honest, and steadfast young boy. Your heart be true so I come to tell you of strange events that draw near your inn. The cards have spoken to me and you must expect strange guests who arrive for an unknown purpose of great import.’ She drew out a card and laid it flat on the table beside the plate of biscuits. The card showed what looked like an Upright boy standing on a dark hill holding a silvery dagger up to the moonlight. ‘A young prince travels here from afar, another world, another time.’ She drew another card that showed an unformed Upright man hanging upside down from a rope attached to a yellow door frame. ‘A mutation, powerful and in conflict within himself, will follow. These guests will be strangers to each other, yet before one moon has passed over your roof they will embark on a quest together.’ Her eyes were upon me and I felt my body tremble as she gazed into me. ‘Give all possible aid to this endeavor, young Jimmy Cat, for you are fated to be a servant to strange forces at work in the cosmos. The cards have spoken…‘

“And with that the Old Woman of the Cards swept the cards away with her bony paw, stood up and wrapped her cloak about her. I begged her to let me make up a bed for her so that she could rest herself before she set out on the long and wearisome road, but she didn’t even look in my direction as she headed for the door. The door closed behind her and that be the last I’ve seen of the old woman. But three days later, on a windy evening, there was another knock on the door.

“I opened the door and there stood a mutation I supposed he was, but of a sort I’ve never heard of. In outward form he was alike an Upright youth, yet he was not an Upright, or not like any Upright I’ve ever heard of. His ears were slightly pointed, his hair was dark and silken and his eyes were grey-green and farseeing. And all about him was an uncanny feeling, a feeling of magic and strangeness. It seemed as if he glowed with an inner light and were not of this world. He wore a dark hooded cloak and about his waist was a beautiful dagger. I remembered the card of the young prince that the Old Lady of the Cards had drawn. I could see that her prophecy was coming true for here was surely the young prince from afar, ‘another time, another world’ as she had said.

He spoke to me, sirs, with a voice that was flowing, almost like a song, and when he looked into my eyes, time seemed to slow and I could see that his heart was true and good.

‘My name is Jeremiah. I need food and lodging. I can pay these.’

From a small bag he removed three beautiful gold coins and handed them to me. I’ve never seen such a coin before or since sir. On one side was a tree with many branches before the crescent of an old moon. On the other was a symbol of some sort I’ve never seen.” Jimmy Cat reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a shimmering gold disc. He put it on the table before us. My eyes opened as I stared at the uncanny beauty of the coin. The engraving on its surface showed every texture of the tree’s bark with detail that was far beyond ordinary eyesight. There was something about this coin that was different than any object I could ever remember seeing. It had a feeling of unequaled quality, and there was something about the complex shape of the tree that seemed so inevitable, so familiar. On the other side of the coin was a single rune. I felt that I should know the meaning of the rune—it’s flowing lines hung in my mind even as my eyes looked away from it.

“These are strange tidings, indeed, Jimmy Cat.” I said trying my best to imitate the local dialect. “Something is happening. Can you tell us more about this Jeremiah?”

“No sir. He has a corner room that faces the water. He comes and goes but we catch scarcely a glimpse of him. He has the gift of stealth says my mother. Stealth beyond even feline stealth.”

“I believe we will see him soon.” I said with an inner sense of knowing. “I feel there is a powerful inevitability to these occurrences. The old woman read the cards well. Could you show me to my room, Jimmy Cat?” I looked at Eddie Cat. “I hope you don’t mind, but I feel I must be by myself for a while.” Jimmy Cat got up at once. We went upstairs to the room and Jimmy Cat gave me the key.

I unlocked the door and went inside. The room was simple with the moon visible through a porthole-shaped window near the ceiling. There was a larger window of clear diamond-shaped panes that caught the moonlight reflecting on the rippling water of Voyage Bay. Jimmy Cat pulled back bedcovers and fluffed the fine feather pillows.

But at that moment, a middle-aged woman cat, obviously Jimmy cat’s mother, showed up. She wore a shabby housedress and had a face that looked very worn and cross.

“Jimmy Cat, would you come here please.” She sounded angry and irritable and glared suspiciously in my direction. Jimmy Cat went to her. In a hissing whisper, that was perfectly audible across the room, she scolded Jimmy Cat, “What’s the matter with you letting such a horrible mutation into the Inn? Do you think we’re running a flophouse for reality-distorted freaks? And you served him food and drink! What do you suppose our neighbors and customers would say? How many times have I told you that mutations belong with their own kind and not in a respectable business. What are you thinking boy? Do you want to bring disgrace and ruin down on us? Do you want us to be penniless on the street? It would be bad enough if this were an ordinary mutation, but this, this thing, you let in… Just you wait till I tell your poor, sick father. God only knows what kind of diseases or parasites it’s harboring. We’ll have to pay hundreds of credit to have the whole room fumigated. Have you taken leave of your senses, are you utterly determined to see us ruined? Send it away at once and throw out the food and scrub the plates while I talk to your father about your punishment. And don’t you dare ever, EVER to think of doing such a foolish thing again or I’ll box your ears into bloody stumps.”

How I wanted to scratch at her eyes and in my mind I called her all sorts of names, old dish rag, pussy head, lice pussy, dung cat, cat bitch and the like, but I didn’t want to embarrass young Jimmy Cat who had been so nice to me.

I felt in the inside pocket of my overcoat and found that I had a few of the rectangular plastic wafers that would be accepted as currency in Cat City or almost anywhere in Annoying World. The mother withdrew and Jimmy Cat turned to me with a very chagrined expression on his innocent, young face.

“Sir, please don’t be offended by my mother’s harsh words. She has not been herself since my poor father has taken ill. We—” But I waved away Jimmy Cat’s apologies.

“None of this is your fault, Jimmy Cat, and I am all too familiar with how people can react to mutants. I’m only sorry that I have made trouble for you and I can easily find lodging elsewhere. I will be off momentarily, but there is one great service you can do for me if you are willing.”

“Please sir,” replied Jimmy Cat with sincerity, “I would like to help in any way that I can.” Acting from pure intuition I whispered to him confidentially,

“The next time you see this strange prince, Jeremiah, as he called himself, please tell him that you have seen a living snowman and that I have gone on to Cat City. He can find me there if he wishes. Also, don’t mention anything about my departure to Sir Eddie Cat until tomorrow morning.”

“Certainly, sir.” said Jimmy Cat, and he led me down a back staircase so that I could make my departure anonymously. But before I set off, he insisted on giving me a large paper mug of the excellent Quest Rum, and a small paper sack filled with the anchor shaped pastel mints to, “lighten my spirits for the long evening walk,” as he put it. I thanked him profusely for his consideration and set off on the long walk to Cat City.

I walked a long way down the road before I saw the distant lights of Cat City ahead of me. I sipped Quest Rum, ate mints, and my heart felt lightened by Jimmy Cat’s kind treatment of me. My mind pondered the strange prophecies of the Old Woman of the Cards, the beautiful golden coin, and the mysterious Jeremiah.

After a while I found myself under the lime-green blinking neon sign of the Mutant Motel, a squalid little establishment on the outskirts of Cat City. It was a depressing contrast to the rustic charm of the Admiral Black Paw Inn. A grimy sign on the door said “Since N171 Providing Quality Lodgings for Guests of the Reality Challenged Persuasion.”

The night shift motel clerk was an ugly old tom cat wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt. He was watching hugely obese mesomorphic tom cats wrestling on a cheap black and white television. I stood there for several long seconds before the clerk bothered to look up and glare at me with open suspicion. He had a foul smelling catnip stogie in his mouth. It was slimy with saliva and looked like a tube of dog shit. He didn’t even bother taking it out of his mouth when he spoke.

“Can I help you?” His tone was surly and lethargic.

“I want a room.” I told him with cold terseness.

“Credit wafer.” replied the clerk, his mouth slobbering the stogie. He tapped on the counter with his claws to indicate that I should put my credit wafer on the counter. I slapped it down and looked about the dingy motel office while the clerk shuffled some papers. All the while the wrestling cats on the television set were grunting and cursing in the background.

There were wire racks in the motel office that offered a very limited selection of Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks. I found a big twenty-eight ounce cellophane bag of Hungry Tom Cat barbecue flavored Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snack capsules. It wasn’t my favorite flavor, but I could get twice as much for my money than if I bought the little twelve ounce packages. Collecting dust on another shelf were some mutant specialty drinks including a liter bottle of Snow Comfort. I put the bottle and the cellophane bag on the counter next to my credit wafer.

“And these.” The clerk looked at me spitefully, as if he knew I were buying these items just to make more work for him. While he rang me up a slimy thread of catnip stained saliva descended from his mouth onto my card wafer. I felt a distinct urge to wrap my thin and twig-like, but ever-so-strong mutant hands around the Clerk’s throat and squeeze him until his eyes popped out. The clerk ran my credit wafer through a slot. Several seconds later there was a loud beep.

“Declined.” said the clerk triumphantly. I slapped down another credit wafer and could see the clerk’s annoyance when it went through. He handed it back with a greasy plastic access card. “Room 101.” slobbered the clerk and immediately he went back to watching wrestling on the little television set.

Alone in my room, I lay on the uncomfortable bed watching the pale green neon ghost of the motel sign throbbing on and off on the ceiling. Compulsively, I began eating my way through the bag of Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks, the sweetened artificial barbecue flavor mixing unpleasantly with gulps of Snow Comfort. I didn’t feel buzzed at all, only extremely tired but unable to sleep. Bitter, bitter thoughts about Jamie Cat, which I had managed to put out of my mind for a while, came back with a vengeance.

Jamie Cat. Jamie Cat. Somewhere she was feeding all her life energy, and all the moist, warm treasures of her body to Tony Cat who was lapping them up with smug satisfaction. How ludicrous and pathetic was the idea that she would ever consider me anything but an annoying and loathsome mutation— a creepy, freakish thing to roll her eyes at as she and her cool tom cat boyfriend Tony Cat walked down the street together.

Why shouldn’t she think that when it is all too true? I thought writhing on the uncomfortable motel mattress. I felt nauseous thinking about my ugly snowbody sagging on the plastic urine-smelling mattress.

Various dark thoughts and fantasies made a grotesque parade through my mind. I thought about breaking the motel mirror and slashing my wrists with broken mirror fragments. I saw Jamie Cat watching me being carried out dead on a stretcher. Then she’ll be sorry. I thought. Then she’ll realize who really loved her. I ate and drank and felt my head swim feverishly with sugar and alcohol. Attempting to escape my inner chaos I turned on the motel television.

On the TV a luscious young she-cat and her tom-cat boyfriend stood rubbing each other, their tails entwined. Their excited purring was amplified as they took drags from Lover Cat catnip cigarettes. The she-cat was calling her boyfriend, “Ace,” and he was calling her, “my sweet fur thing.” I changed the channel in disgust. The Play Cat channel was on and I saw a big stud-cat mounting a svelte she-cat with big staring eyes and a wet, pink tongue. Next was a music video channel that was featuring the insinuating voice and pelvic gyrations of Electro-Star Tom-Cat, the new singer that all the young she-cats were fawning over. Resentfully, I remembered that Jamie Cat had all of Electro-Star Tom-Cat’s CDs and a huge poster of him hanging up in her room. There was the sound of his unctuous singing and shots of Electro-Star Tom-Cat riding a motorcycle dressed all in leather and studs, then a shot of him dancing in a disgustingly pelvic matter surrounded by spotlights and screaming young she-cats with dilated eyes, then a shot of him pouncing on a big terrified mouse and biting its head off with one bite. I changed the channel and took another handful of Turbo Sugar with a chaser slug of Snow Comfort. The seductive eyes of a luscious she cat were on the tube staring right at me,

“Hey you,” she whispered looking right at me. “Yes you” I glanced nervously around to see if there was anyone else in the room, “No, I mean you.” and she pointed a graceful paw at me, “You big boy-cat.” she said coquettishly, “Oh you’re such a big boy-cat you’re getting me so excited. You know who I’m talking to. I’m talking to you, you big studley Tom-muffin. It’s me, Honey Cat and I know who I’m talking to. You come on down and see me, see me tonight, I’m waiting for you. You know what my number is. Come on down to Adventure Cat City. I’ll be waiting for you at 900 Pussy Plaza. Oh don’t make me wait for you, oh, oh….” She faded out and a slick announcer’s voice came on:

“Are you just lying around in front of the TV stuffing your face? You could be getting down at Adventure Cat City and winning the race! Hey you, don’t put up with a reality that’s shitty. You could be hanging with the girlie cats at Adventure Cat City!” “Adventure Cat City” flashed stroboscopically in bright purple against a hot pink background. Then there was a shot of the Adventure Cat City Casino which was shaped like a giant mouse with red neon eyes. Nearby was the Adventure Cat City Lounge which was shaped like a giant pie-shaped slice of Swiss cheese next to the mouse. “Oceans of liquor! Hot slots and even hotter girlie-cats!” blinked the TV.

I watched the ads with cynical disgust. No sleazy profit-making fat cats were going to make money off of my misery. Oh Jamie Cat. I ate another handful of Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snack Barbecue and felt myself getting older and weaker, felt all the refined sugar drying out my snow crystals, vital moisture being replaced by a perfumed syrup of chemicals. Somewhere, Jamie Cat was sleeping on a bed in Tony Cat’s arms and my whole being writhed in the agony of this possibility. Heartbeat by heartbeat I felt the separation from Jamie Cat and how her energy was being blissfully given to Tony Cat, while I was left in despair, gnawing sugar capsules alone on my urine-smelling motel mattress. Again I thought of the mirror, thought of breaking it into sharp shards of glass and cutting myself with them, cutting myself until all the moisture ran out of my body, cutting myself not to make Jamie Cat sorry, but as an act of mercy, the only way I could think to end the suffering that stretched out the moments so that each blink of the motel’s neon sign was an eternity of darkness.

In counter-rhythm to the throb of the neon was the throbbing of the television, “Hot slots and even hotter girlie-cats!” still blinking hypnotically above the Cat City Casino. Finally they changed the image and a new slogan started blinking, “Win Big! And have it all!” There was a short video clip that showed a middle-aged, out-of-shape tom in shabby clothes playing a slot. The cylinders of the slot spun and with a cash register clang stopped to reveal a row of six red mice. The machine began vomiting an impossible torrent of huge gold coins. Then there was a picture of the same tom, but now he was at the wheel of a big, white yacht, his gut bulging beneath a colorful Bermuda shirt. He had a cocktail glass in one hand, smoked a big fat catnip cigar and wore one of those cheesy, fake yachtsman caps. Luscious young she-cats in bikini bathing suits were all around him and one of them was unzipping his fly and winking at the camera with a big mouse-eating grin. “Win big and have it all!” blinked the TV.

Half-heartedly, I fantasized about winning big at the casino. I could roll up to Jamie Cat in a big stretch limousine and give her a diamond bracelet. I could buy her anything. But that would never buy her love I realized, at best it would only make her a prostitute. I saw Jamie Cat bringing the diamond bracelet, and a bunch of loot home to Tony Cat and them both laughing and laughing. Jamie Cat would go into the bathroom and disgustedly spit out a few snow crystals and gargle with antiseptic mouthwash. Then she’d come out and party with Tony Cat all night. The thought made me nauseous and I took another shot of Snow Comfort to calm myself.

Somehow the additional dose of alcohol ignited a flash of survival instinct, a fight back response. I realized that I was wallowing in potentially suicidal self-pity and that I had to take an action of some sort. I sat up on the motel bed and resolved to check out of the Mutant Motel and, for reasons I was not quite clear about, to travel to Adventure Cat City.

Adventure Cat City was not a real city of course; it was merely the red light district of Cat City, a garish nighttime world of pornography, prostitution and every other sort of vice you might expect. The streets were lined with massage parlors, catnip bars and the so called “chop shops” where aging tom cats could hunt mice that had been fattened and given drugs to slow their reflexes. I passed by “Pussy Galore” a gigantic adult cat video store that claimed to be have the world’s largest collection of videos depicting cats doing just about anything to other cats. I passed “Rhodeo,” a gay bar and dance club where dangerous looking Toms in leather motorcycle outfits stood out front looking for trouble. There was also the “Pink Pussy” a transvestite night club where gigantic, statuesque shemale cats passed out flyers advertising their variety shows.

Sleaze and decadence called from every angle of Adventure Cat City, but I felt strangely comfortable here, it was the anything goes part of town, the one place where no one would pass judgment on me for being a mutation. At one point I saw a female mutation that looked like a gigantic three-headed ostrich. Each of her three faces bore a striking resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her eyes were kindly, world-weary and old, but she was tricked out incongruously in heavily spiked black leather and chains. Scarcely anyone raised an eyebrow. Instinctively, I felt a strong affinity with this creature, and acting on an intuitive impulse I decided to and ask her for advice.

“Excuse me madam, but I am somewhat unfamiliar with this part of town and wonder if you could recommend an establishment appropriate to a mutation in my situation?” This was obviously a very poor question, since it wasn’t necessarily apparent what my situation was, but this mutation had faces that seemed so kind and understanding that I felt it would be all right to ask her anything.

“Hmmm, let’s see now, an appropriate establishment…” The creature had a pleasing, if somewhat falsetto, motherly voice, but a peculiar way of speaking. The middle head did all the real speaking, and the side heads filled up the pauses with a chorus of repetitive phrases such as, “Oh my-oh my-oh my, yes- yes- yes” and “I see-I see-I see.” “An appropriate establishment—oh my-oh my, yes-yes, I see-I see, well I suppose that depends on what sort of diversion or service you might be looking for. Are there any sort of particulars you require?” I thought for a moment,
“Well, let’s see, I’ve been feeling very poorly about an unrequited love affair and I’d like some sort of adventure that would take my mind off of it, but I need to stay somewhere in the Adventure City/Cat City area as I am expecting another party to come find me here eventually.”

”Oh my-oh my, yes-yes-yes, I see-I see-I see. I should think you might find what you are looking for at the Adventure Store, which is just another two blocks down this side of Broadway.”

I walked a short distance down Broadway and found myself standing before a rundown looking store front with a sign that said, “THE ADVENTURE STORE—-YOUR PORTAL TO ADVENTURE.” Beneath the painted sign was a partly broken pink neon sign that blinked, “MORE REAL THAN R A .” A worn out tape recorded voice droned the same message, “….MORE REAL THAN REAL MORE REAL THAN REAL MORE REAL THAN REAL…” endlessly from a bullhorn over the door. This all seemed depressingly mundane, and yet I had another of those strange déjà vu moments. It felt like someone was walking over the grave of long buried memories.

Feeling these presentiments, I walked in. A young, thin Upright man with very pale complexion and spiked florescent magenta hair sat behind a glass counter filled with boxes of Turbo Sugar Skin Popper Snacks and drink boxes of Turbo Sugar Speedo Rush Lite and similar beverages. He wore wraparound mirrored sunglasses, a shirt brilliant with colors, and headphones. He didn’t seem to notice me at all. His head was bobbing and weaving to music from the headphones and he was sucking on a drink box of Turbo Sugar Speedo Rush Ultra Max. The colorful shirt he wore was glossy and had detailed comic book scenes printed on it. All the scenes showed a part man, part machine cyborg built on an heroic scale with bulging metal or protein muscles—it was hard to tell—and all sorts of heavy metal protuberances and integrated armor and weapons. His face was completely hidden behind a black breath mask. In each of the scenes the cyborg was having sex in a different position with a helpless looking thin, pale Upright girl barely pubescent, with big terrified eyes. A huge advertising button on his shirt pocket read,

     “More Real, Than Real Laser Shirts
     You Design.
     Wear Your Favorite Moments.
     29.95 Credit Units.”

     I stood right in front of him, but he still gave no hint that he noticed me, his head bobbing and weaving to a pulsating rhythm. I took out a credit wafer and without the slightest break in his rhythm he passed it through a credit reader and announced,

“Bed Seven.”

I glanced behind him and saw there was a plaster board hallway with numbered doors.

I walked down the hallway with the depressed certainty that what I had paid for was nothing more than a tanning salon session. Perhaps this was how the three-headed mutant interpreted “an establishment appropriate to a mutation in my situation.” A memory resurfaced of a time when I had bought a tanning package. It was when I first met Jamie Cat and I naively thought I could get somewhere with her by improving my pale complexion. The tanning salon looked very similar except that it had fading posters of tropical islands taped up everywhere.

I opened door number seven and found myself in a cramped plasterboard room with a single lightbulb dangling from a wire. The only thing in the room was what appeared to be a battered sarcophagus-like tanning bed. There was the acrid, musky smell of tom-cat perspiration. A torn paper sign entitled, “More Real Than Real Rules and Regulations” was taped to one of the plaster boards. There were six consecutively numbered items:

1. Remove all jewelry and metal appliances.

2. Disrobe completely.

3. Not recommended for pregnant women, people with heart conditions, liver disease, retroviruses, parasitic infections, mutation formations, bodily fluids, DNA or fluid filled cell structures.

4. Obtain permission from your health net. More Real Than Real accepts no responsibility or liability. Use at your own risk.

5. Orgasm Tax (There were several numbers crossed out with black magic marker, and a final uncrossed out number—“23.85 credit units”)

6. Absolutely no refunds.

I wasn’t sure what to make of all the rules and regulations but supposed that they were local tanning regulations. I wasn’t very interested in tanning, but I realized there were no refunds and felt determined to get my credit unit’s worth. I turned the little knob on the doorknob and tested it to make sure it was locked. I hated the thought of anyone seeing me in my bare snow. I disrobed and lay down on the bed. The smell of old tom-cat perspiration was nauseating. Then there was a pneumatic sound and the bed closed in on me. There was darkness, not a glimmer of ultraviolet, and I became alarmed. My snowskin felt prickly all over and I tried to scream, but found my body was completely paralyzed, I couldn’t even blink my eyes. There was a feeling of fur, warm wet fur touching every part of my body. I felt like I was inside the womb of some huge animal. But then I felt electricity flowing into me from the fur and realized that what I thought was fur were really microscopic electro-conductive filaments of some sort, and the wetness was some sort of electrolytic fluid. There was another pneumatic sound and I felt fluids being pumped into my snow tissues. I blacked out for a moment and regained consciousness in a space of florescent pink.

XIII

I was tumbling weightlessly in a universe of undifferentiated florescent pink. The perspiration smell was completely gone and was replaced by a distinctly recognizable Turbo Sugar Power Wad Pink Bubble Gum smell. It was quite pleasurable and I felt my breathing slowing down and my whole body relaxing. My mind felt blank and I was completely relaxed when a flash of lightening, powerful beyond imagining, shattered the pink universe into tiny globules of pink that flashed away like a comet and left me tumbling in outer space. Stars burned in the black emptiness. Then there was another devastating flash of lightening and an enormous stone tablet came hurtling toward me. It seemed about to crush me, but halted right before my face. The tablet was ringed with fire and had chiseled Romanesque lettering on it that read, “NO REFUNDS.” Then there was another great burst of lightening and the tablet shattered into scintillating dust. After the third bolt there was a moment of absolute silence and then from inside my head a voice occurred, a super amplified voice of power with an echo effect that made all my crystals resonate.

“TURBO SUGAR CORPORATION IN LEVERAGED ASSOCIATION WITH TURBO GOD-X SYNERGISTICS, GENESIS-ZEUS TURBO-GRAPHICS AND NEXUS-DEUTERONOMY NEUROPHARMACEUTICALS PRESENTS— TURBO REALITY—NEURAL NET RELEASE TWO THOUSAND TWELVE— IN DOLBY PROSYNAPTICAL SURROUND SENSE.”

There was a loud tearing sound, space somehow tore open and I found myself free-falling toward a huge city of staggering complexity with moving metal buildings and superstructures and self-transforming building-sized machines. There was movement and complexity beyond what my mind could possibly comprehend, and my mutant panoramic vision staggered my snowbrain with an impossible upload of visual information.

My free-falling slowed to a gentle landing on an empty street. The street was curiously still and a striking contrast to all the complex movement and self-transforming machinery I had seen from above. The buildings on the street were tall, but windowless and empty. Many had huge holes where they had been hit by mortar shells and millions of small holes from automatic weapons fire penetrated everything. The ground was strewn with chunks of concrete, shell casings, and metal fragments. A pile of charred Upright limbs smoldered next to a burnt out artillery gun and a dark plumb of acrid smoke from the flesh-fire drifted down the avenue.

I felt disoriented and nauseated by the charred flesh smell of the smoke. Slowly, I rose to my knees and found I was clothed in plain gray coveralls. Before I could stand and get my bearings there was a crashing sound and a terrible vibration that shook ground and buildings. It felt like an earthquake, and in another couple of seconds there was another dreadful crash and shaking. I trembled on my knees and put my hands over my head as the crashes continued at regular intervals growing louder and more violent.

Looking out from between my fingers, I saw that a titanic behemoth was approaching with fat legs of pink flesh at least sixty stories high. I looked up and saw that the legs belonged to what appeared to be a giant infant approximately two hundred meters high wearing a white diaper, a black eye patch and wielding an enormous two bladed battle-axe. The infant was slicing the air with the battle-axe with the speed and agility of a Samurai. Buildings were falling to pieces from the vibrations as the infant approached and enormous chunks of concrete came crashing down, threatening to crush me. The Infant halted before me and trembling with fright, I looked up at the white diaper that filled the sky like a giant cloud above me. The diaper puffed out so much that it was impossible to see the head or upper torso. A voice rang out that seemed to make the whole city shake with its power.

“PREPARE TO FIGHT NEW BOY.” There was a swooshing sound and the battle ax came slicing down through the air bringing a curved razor edge fifty meters across within a centimeter of my face.

“But I don’t want to fight.” I gasped in a comparatively tiny voice.

“You don’t?” suddenly there was a pale, large-eyed boy sitting in front of me wearing faded rags. There was no sign of the terrible infant anywhere except for the huge foot print holes in the street. The boy was small, but good-looking, with large, intelligent gray eyes.

“You really don’t want to fight?” the boy had a British accent.

“No, why would I want to fight?” I asked.

“Everybody else wants to fight.” said the boy. “Everybody wants to fight or do the sexy stuff or fight and do the sexy stuff together. It’s quite boring really. Why’d you pick a snowman as a character? What sort of a powers do you have? I never heard of anyone being a snowman before.” The boy seemed friendly and curious.

“It’s not a character, this is who I really am.” I replied.

“What? That’s ridiculous.” The boy replied contemptuously. “I hope you don’t expect me to believe that. Nobody comes to Turbo Sugar World as who they really are. Besides, there’s no such thing as a living snowman. Is this some sort of trap or surprise attack? Try anything and I’ll be Baby Blaster again in half a nanosecond.”

“Who’s ‘Baby Blaster’?” I asked.

“One of my characters, of course, you retard. Are you still trying to play that you’re not a character.”

“I’m a mutation. I was born this way.”

“Very funny. So funny, I forgot to laugh. I’ll prove you’re a character.” The boy took something out of his pocket, a plastic scanner of some sort that made a humming sound as he made a quick pass with it a few inches from my face. The boys eyes widened and he sat back and stared at me with astonishment. “Holy weird!” He put the scanner back in his pocket. “Holy, holy weird….I thought I’d seen everything down here.” Said the boy. “How’d you get here?”

“I was in a place that I thought was a tanning salon and—“ He cut me off impatiently.

“The neural web doesn’t let anyone through as themselves. It filters anything organic. You must be such an extreme mutation that it didn’t recognize you as a living thing. That is whacked. I can’t believe how whacked that is.” He kept staring at me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Oliver.” said the boy “Oliver Twister.”

“Is that your real name?” I asked.

“Of course it’s not my real name!” said the boy. “It’s my character name. But Oliver Twister is my main character and he’s the same age as my body. C’mon, let’s get out of here before someone wants to fight or do the sexy stuff to us.” I got up and followed Oliver Twister across the street.

“Wait a minute.” I said thinking of something. “If I’m here as myself how come I’m wearing these gray coveralls? I lay down on that bed naked and I’ve never owned a pair of gray coveralls.”

“Well Turbo Sugar World isn’t going to let you come through naked, you know.” said Oliver Twister.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s against the Family Value Code.” said Oliver Twister impatiently as we walked past the still smoldering pile of charred limbs.

“But then why do they allow the sexy stuff?” I asked. He seemed exasperated with my naiveté.

“I don’t know. Why is the sky gray? It’s always been that way.” said Oliver Twister.

I followed Oliver into a long dark alley, our footsteps echoing off walls of dark concrete. Oliver turned toward me and seemed about to say something, but I was suddenly jolted by a terrifically loud beeping sound in my ears. Oliver looked at me with alarm,

“You’re about to get yanked off the TSW, mate.” He said.

Oliver and the alley blurred and became two dimensional and frozen. I saw the words, “ILLEGAL OPERATION. EVENT TERMINATED AT 023.0032” and blacked out.

XIV

I regained awareness in time to hear the pneumatic sound of the sarcophagus-like bed opening up and revealing the plaster board bareness of room number seven. I staggered down the hallway where the young Upright man was still bobbing and weaving rhythmically. He handed me my credit wafer and I walked back out into the nocturnal streets of Adventure Cat City.

My head was spinning and I felt highly disoriented. The effect was like emerging from a gut-wrenchingly emotional movie only to find yourself back in the very same movie theater parking lot as if nothing had happened. I felt that Oliver Twister was about to tell me something very important just at the moment I was “yanked from the TSW” as he put it. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

In a daze I walked down Broadway with no very clear purpose or destination. Vaguely, I realized that I was still being effected by all the neuropharmecuticals that had been pumped into me. Since my descent into the web had been prematurely terminated, all the chemicals were still percolating at peak levels in my brain. Time slowed and drunken groups of boisterous party-cats seemed to float by amid pulses of colored light from store fronts, clubs and bars. The bright lights left ghostly trails in my visual perception and all the sharp edges blurred as if I were underwater. I felt strangely detached from my surroundings and scarcely noticed as I left the garish color of the Adventure Cat City area and strayed into the dark, desolate streets of an industrial area of Cat City.

I liked the darkness, it relaxed my overwrought nervous system and sometimes I even closed my eyes as I drifted down street after street. I felt myself being drawn toward a certain quarter, and allowed myself to flow in that direction. I crossed old railroad tracks and the terrain became more weedy and less industrial. The neuropharmecuticals seemed to have enhanced my psionic powers and I partly glided as I walked and my chakras pulsated with colored light deep within my snow tissues.

I walk-glided down an old dirt logging road, dark woods on either side of me, and felt myself drawing closer to a presence, a presence that had attracted me faintly, almost unconsciously from Adventure Cat City, but now seemed far stronger and more magnetic. It guided me gently, drew me deeper and deeper into the dark woods. No hint of menace troubled me, and I allowed myself to flow toward the center of magnetism. I felt it pulling me as if my snow crystals were made of iron and there was a powerful lodestone hidden in the depths of the forest.

The logging road had become an overgrown trail and coniferous trees scented the darkness. The lights of the city were far away and the faint illumination of a crescent moon barely penetrated tree branches thick with green needles. Psionic power was ever so gradually increasing as I drew near the hidden lodestone and effortless gliding overtook any semblance of walking.

I could hear the sound of a stream now, though the woods were too dark for me to see it. My snow tissues felt the increased moisture in the air and the relaxing rhythm of crickets blended with the sound of clear water flowing over smooth pebbles.

I came over a very slight ridge and could see a small orange-yellow light off in the woods toward my right. This was also the direction of the lodestone and I allowed its attractive magic to draw me off the trail. I glided soundlessly around trees toward what I could now perceive was the orangey-yellow flickering of a small camp fire. There was the crackling and sparks of burning coniferous branches. The fire burned in a tiny clearing and as I glided closer I could see a cloaked figure seated very still beside the fire. I stopped gliding and hovered nearly still, several feet from the clearing. The hood of his cloak was thrown back and firelight glimmered off of long, dark blonde hair. He had the countenance of a beautiful youth, but his ears were slightly pointed, and he had a depth of presence that was difficult to render into words. I knew at once who he was—Jeremiah, the strange prince that the Old Woman of the Cards had foreseen and that Jimmy Cat had met at the Admiral Black Paw Inn.

There’s a transition missing here. I haven’t yet been able to get myself to write about being rescued from the Bridge Realms by Jeremiah. As much as I now realize, a few years later, how much I gained from the Bridge Realms, there is another part of me that still experiences it as some kind of personal failure, a falling off the path in the course of quest necessitating outside rescue. What was it that Galadriel said? “Your quest rests upon the edge of a knife, stray but a little, and you will fall to the ruin of all.” Well I strayed way, way more than a little. I was in a multiply incarnating free fall when Jeremiah pulled me out.

At this phase of my life at least, I have to admit that it was just too personal a moment for me to write about. It might have sounded cartoonish to you, but for me the Bridge Realms were as real as waking up next to fossilized dog shit in a cement alley with a greasy taco wrapper stuck to your face. There are few moments so vulnerable as having a more aware being show you that you are not who you believe yourself to be. It is a shattering moment when you feel yourself awaken to a fierce inner will to break free of an old identity, while at the same time feeling a poignant tug to remain loyal to the old identity, an unwillingness for me, Morris Schnauman, not to be me anymore. I am still not fully free of the Bridge Realms, and perhaps I never will be, because I feel my old identity ache sometimes, like the phantom pain of an amputated limb. On some level it feels like that existence is still continuing, a parallel timeline.

The narrative continues a few years later. I was visiting my parents in the Bronx and it was December, around the time of the shortest day of the year. I had spent the afternoon and evening in Manhattan and watched a late movie so it was close to midnight before I descended into the subway and boarded the uptown D train back to my parents’ house. The subway car was mostly empty, but sitting directly across from me under flickering florescent light was an old man. He wore a very dark blue overcoat, and his hair was white as were his bushy eyebrows. His lean, weathered face was animated by keen, intelligent eyes. I felt sure that he was British, Scotch or Welsh for some reason. There was a strong feeling about him of other times and places. But the most striking peculiarity was that he was staring straight at me, which of course is anomalous behavior on the D train or any subway. Subways are governed by the elevator-eye-contact-taboo where any staring is expected to be furtive, and accidental eye contact is quickly averted. His stare was not menacing; it seemed purposeful, lucid, like a ship’s captain staring across calm waters at another ship. There was a strong feeling of recognition and acknowledgement in the stare which was not unpleasant, but I was unsure how to respond, and having grown up on New York subways, the eye contact aversion instinct in me was deeply conditioned.

I evaded the issue for a few moments, looking for something in my back pack, and when I looked up I saw that the old man was writing or drawing rapidly in a small leather-bound notebook with a handsome fountain pen. For some reason I felt sure that what he was writing or drawing had something to do with me. It felt as if I was an interesting native and a visiting anthropologist was observing me and taking notes, or making a sketch. It was quite a peculiar feeling as I am used to thinking of myself as the observer, and not used to being the subject of what appeared to be thoughtful observation. Or maybe I was just narcissistically reading into it, maybe the old guy was an intense thinker of some sort, and what seemed like an inquiring stare was actually him staring into his own mind’s eye with great intensity, oblivious that another subway passenger was in his line of sight. But it didn’t feel that way, and I’ve increasingly learned to trust my intuitive feelings.

My curiosity was piqued, but I reached into my bag for the book I’d meant to read on the subway. I was more curious about the old man than interested in reading, but I had this idea that if I held the book so that the cover was clearly visible—-I was reading Russell Targ’s Limitless Mind which had a Renaissance era astronomical map on the cover besides the title—–perhaps I might be offering the old man an opening, a conversation piece. There was certainly a feeling of great learning about him, and since he was willing to break with subway etiquette enough to stare, maybe he would ask me about it.

At first I looked into the book only pretending to read, but then I found myself drawn to a few incisive paragraphs about the nonlocality of awareness, and when I looked up I saw that the old man was gone. I was disappointed and a bit surprised as there had been no stops. The D train was going from 59th street to 125th street, one of the longest uninterrupted distances you can travel in a New York City subway, but I supposed he had gotten up and gone into another car (maybe to observe other passengers?) and since the D train makes as much noise as a boiler factory, the sound of an old man walking away could easily escape notice. But what was also peculiar was that someone else had taken his exact seat in this mostly empty car. Sitting across from me where the old man had been was a good-looking youth with blondish hair and large grey eyes. He was possibly eighteen or nineteen, and seemed oddly misplaced. My intuition registered him immediately as not a New Yorker or even and American, but as European or Scandinavian. What was odder was that he was going in the wrong direction on the D train for a tourist, especially since he didn’t get out when the train stopped at 125th. There were record numbers of Europeans in New York with the rise of the euro and fall of the dollar, and some were avoiding the costly Manhattan hotels and staying in Brooklyn, but the Bronx? I hadn’t heard of tourist hotels in the Bronx, but I’d been away for over a year and a half and New York is nothing if not a place always in flux, able to surprise even the natives with its unexpected transformations.

The youth had long, graceful fingers that were occupied with rolling a piece of paper into a cylinder. At first glance I thought he was rolling a cigarette or a joint, but looking more closely I was sure that it was just a hollow cylinder of paper. He evidently completed the operation, which seemed quite purposeful, and then astonished me by getting up and presenting it to me with an air of solemn formality, and an odd sense of old-world manners—was that a slight bow that he gave me? I unrolled the paper and saw a map of some sort. There were concentric circles drawn in fountain pen ink, and strange symbols and glyphs, and I realized that this map was a skillfully drawn copy of the one clearly visible on the cover of my book, though the symbols and glyphs were different…

XVI

I stared at the paper for a few more moments, and then I felt the meaning open, like expanding concentric circles in my mind— this must be Jeremiah standing before me, he had appeared to me before in changeling guises, and it had never seemed like trickery. Maybe Jeremiah was preparing me for his presence, sensing me out from a different persona, or teaching me that things were more transformable than they seem. I raised my eyes from the page—the face was similar, but this was no Scandinavian student—he was smaller, his hair longer, his eyes incomparably more powerful. A blurry picture of him might look like an androgynous youth, but youth has an unfinished quality about it, while his form seemed fully realized and yet untouched by age, and his eyes had a great depth, an intelligence and sense of deep feeling.

“Jeremiah.” I said

“Please excuse my way of stepping forward.” said Jeremiah. “It seemed necessary. There is much to talk about.”

It had been about three years since I heard Jeremiah’s voice. He had a voice that conveyed so much more than a mere transcription of his words could possibly indicate. With him it was always hard to say where speech left off and telepathy began. He melded the two with gentle and seamless elegance. Time seemed to flow slower and deeper around Jeremiah or around me as I beheld him. Time slowed because of the intensity of the encounter, which had so many telepathic layers, and depths of feeling. Time also slowed because Jeremiah flows through time differently, and to be with him is to partially flow in the wake of his movement through time.

“Where would you like to talk?” The D train had just pulled into Tremont Avenue and there were only a few stops left.

“I would like to experience your family and the house you were raised in.” For a moment I thought about how hard it would be to explain any unexpected guest, let alone Jeremiah.

It was, of course, understood, another implicit telepathic layer, that Jeremiah would keep himself perfectly hidden during his stay. This was why he said he would like to “experience” my family, rather than saying he would like to meet them. Jeremiah had many ways to deflect attention, and to influence visual perception. His cloaking abilities went well beyond optical invisibility—- he could conceal all traces of his energy, hiding himself even from the most adept perceiver. That was the subtractive aspect of his gift; the active part was his ability to appear any way he wanted in the mind of a human beholder.

“How do you do that?” I asked Jeremiah. It was understood that I meant his gift of cloaking and disguise.

“It is one of the arts of the Vehrillion.” he replied. “It has a long history going back to the ancient days of Old Terra. In some traditions it was called glamour or glamoury.” Jeremiah could sense that I wanted to know more, the nuts and bolts of how it was done. Through the telepathic bond I could feel him adjust what he knew and put it into a form that would make sense to a person used to scientific explanations. “What is seen is much more of a contrivance, a construction of the brain, than most people realize. Your brain takes a small portion of the information coming in from your senses to construct an inner simulacrum of the outer world. The light that passes through the lens of your eye, for example, appears as an upside down image at the back of your eye. Your brain must turn that image right side up and in many other ways process the incoming information to create the simulacrum. Your perception of what you think you see always involves a time buffer— it takes time for your brain to do all that construction. The simulacrum the brain creates is always an approximation, the brain’s best guess at what things looked like a moment earlier. Since the construction process takes time it can only provide its guesses in the past tense. The time buffer of the construction process is a window of opportunity for the adept. The adept, by heightening awareness, is able to slow time and take advantage of that time buffer to influence the process of construction. This all makes it sound a bit more complicated than it is. Actually, what the adept does is just a more intentional refinement of a natural ability. Many proto-elves have a degree of this ability and you might call such a person charismatic, or say they have charm, that they enchanted you, or put a spell on you. These are all ways of saying that they used influential magic. To put it in scientific terms, you could say that a spell is information. To put a spell on someone is to insert information into their perceptual apparatus.”

Besides the content of what Jeremiah was saying, which my mind found fascinating, there was a more emotional implicit layer—I trust you. I am being as honest with you as possible. Trust and honesty is needed between us. And then, as a reinforcement of this implicit message, and also, in a way, an illustration of the both the content of what he was saying aloud and the implicit layer, Jeremiah dropped all guise. There, in the D train late at night, under the flickering of florescent light, a degree of Jeremiah’s suffering was revealed, the price he had paid to come to Old Terra. For a few long moments Jeremiah allowed me to see him without influence, and I saw the scars, parallel slashes criss-crossing his body—they did not seem healed, they seemed fresh and alive with pain. And there were so many of them, a lattice of fiery tendrils of pain. Unhealed wounds are especially unnatural in his kind, and the mortal insult to his form seemed far more shocking than it would on a human form. It seemed as if the Demiwraith still held him in a prison made of a latticework of living scars.

Thereafter, Jeremiah allowed the scars to be visible to me sometimes. It was a subtle, telepathic layer that it was necessary for me to see them, that it was part of my learning. More often, as a courtesy, he used a slight degree of glamoury to hide the scars from my perception so that I could relate to his unmarred form.

We exited the subway, and walked silently down Kingsbridge Road, the street aglow with orange sodium vapor light. It was late, but there were still a couple of dozen or more stores open, and many more people on the street than in earlier years. The neighborhood was growing, it was mostly Hispanic and black now, when I was a child it had been mostly Irish, Italian, and Jewish. I could feel Jeremiah taking it all in with fascination. Every store was its own world of color and detail. So many people out shopping late. It was only two days till Christmas, and variety store windows were crowded with toys in every color. Brightly lit jewelry stores seemed to have mostly gold chains and medallions that glimmered like pirate treasure.

“There’s been a great change in New York in the last few years,” I told Jeremiah as we walked, “and it began well before 9-11. People are so much friendlier and kinder than they used to be. So many moments of surprising consideration and generosity. My elderly parents are always given seats on the subway, people always offering to carry their things. And I’ve had so many warm interactions with people during my visit. In the past there was a much more hostile, abrasive tone. Now that I only come to New York a couple of times a year I can notice the change very distinctly.” As we walked together in an atmosphere of shared awareness we could see that many of these working class people, though they often looked harried and a bit stressed, also had qualities of gentleness and compassion just beneath the surface. Faces were often impassive, as you might expect given the anonymity of city life, but there was also a sense of solidarity. Winter and inner city hardship were felt by everyone and there were many sorts of cooperation, revealed even in the space that people gave each other on the sidewalk. It was cooperation that didn’t call attention to itself, but if you looked for it, you could see that it was happening on many levels.

“For all the rough edges there is much kindness here,” said Jeremiah, “the people are growing, but you almost never see the signs of new life written about—“Jeremiah gestured at a newsstand we were passing, headlines screaming terrorist bombings in Iraq. “The attention is always given to death and the parasitic forces. Hearts are opening in the midst of adversity, but that never seems worthy of attention. Something horrible happens on the other side of the world and everybody is told. Why is that?”

“I guess because positive events aren’t as dramatic. I may be pleased that my parents always get a seat on the subway, but such small events are not considered newsworthy. It is more exciting for people to read about blood and explosions. There is a saying in the news industry, “If it bleeds it leads.”

Jeremiah repeated the last five words quietly, “If it bleeds, it leads.” his expression was thoughtful as I could feel him turn the phrase over in his mind, looking at it from several angles. We were silent a few moments. “The influence of the Demiwraith and the Feeders can be seen and felt everywhere in this realm, yet there are also signs of healthy life and kindness. This has much to do with what we need to talk about.”

We walked the rest of the way to my parent’s house in silence and I reflected on the last three years since I had seen Jeremiah, and my doubts about whether I was really the ally that he needed. I felt that I had floundered desperately in the Bridge Realms (these feelings all silently shared). Certainly, the experience had shown me dark areas of my personality in need of transformation, but the last three years represented gradual, meandering transformation, with plenty of back-sliding. So many times I felt unworthy of the path that Jeremiah had opened up for me. Jeremiah looked at me, responding to my silent ruminations.

“You see your struggles through the perspective of personal failings. But I’ve shown you the Feeders, I’ve shown you what you and your kind are up against. In my vision you are like a man struggling to walk under an ocean, but who blames himself that his clothes are getting wet.”

XVII

Jeremiah and I stood before my parent’s house. The telepathic link between us was still open so that as I looked at the familiar house there was this uncanny sort of stereoscopic vision. I was seeing it through my own eyes, but my perception of the house was also infused with Jeremiah’s experience of it for the first time. I felt Jeremiah tuning in to the personality of the place, feeling the density of history in this house that was over a century old. Jeremiah’s empathic perception of the place greatly enhanced my perception of it too. Some other night, without Jeremiah, I would have rushed up the marble steps, my tunnel vision focused mostly on fumbling with my keys, scarcely aware of the house except as part of a mechanical process. But as Jeremiah stood before it, I felt the density of history I had with this house coursing through me.

I saw that the house that stood before me now was like the tip of an iceberg. Most of my history with this house, the most intense part of that history, was decades in the past. When I was a child and a young adolescent this house was as large as a continent in my world. But history was still unfolding in this house, and for my elderly parents who were getting too old to be able to deal with the subway, the house was a continent that covered most of the land mass of their world.

The house was, for me, such a powerful nexus of tender feelings and memories that the evoked flood of feelings and memories was almost overwhelming. Jeremiah’s presence seemed to be calling up this vast history, a cascade of moving images whose edges were ragged with emotion. Whether Jeremiah sensed merely a flood of feelings, or if he actually witnessed the images and watched memories unfold in detail, I wasn’t sure. What was sure though was that there was no invasive feeling in the intimate perception shared with Jeremiah. The feeling was one of profound solidarity. There could be no more welcome and unobtrusive witness of the labyrinthine reaches of my memories than Jeremiah.

In general, Jeremiah was the ideal traveling companion, whether you traveled through high desert, inner city or perilous depths within, he was always a gracefully vigilant presence by your side. He “had your back,” as we might have said when this block was the old neighborhood of my early adolescence. On the most literal level, I didn’t have to worry that we might be accosted by muggers as we stood on this dark and lonely street. However much Jeremiah’s powers might have been diminished as he crossed over to Old Terra, it was obvious that no person or small group of people could possibly match his array of skills.

Later we were sitting in my old room which was lined with dusty books on book shelves. Outside the window the #4 train, which rode on elevated tracks, could be seen and heard every few minutes. Just past it was Saint James Park lit by the eerie orange glow of sodium vapor high crime lights.

Suddenly I realized that in a complete lapse of manners I had not offered Jeremiah any food or drink since he entered the house. He had a cloth bag with him, the same one he had with him when I had last seen him three years ago, but for all I knew he hadn’t eaten in days. I apologized for my poor hospitality and ran through a long list of foods we had available, but all he wanted of what I described was almonds, dried apricots and a pear. I went downstairs to get that for him and brought it back on a tray with some ginger tea.

Jeremiah thanked me, and told me that he was grateful to be invited into a home where he was known by anybody in his true form. I could sense that this was not merely polite speech, but that Jeremiah was genuinely appreciative, and I wondered where he had been and what he had lived on for the last three years.

“I’ve been traveling.” said Jeremiah, “learning about your realm. It has been a fascinating experience, but also a lonely path. I have been befriended by people, and have related to some with little disguise, but when I have I can feel them struggling to categorize me in their minds. Based on my body they assume I must be young, but deeper perception tell them that’s not quite right and there is an uneasy confusion in their perception. In all of these encounters I have had to keep my real identity a secret, and this has sometimes been wearisome as the heart always longs for real companionship where it can unburden itself. So I am grateful to be here.”

“I’m grateful to have you here.” I replied. “The problem of how others perceive you is extreme in your case, but not unknown to proto-elves. Young proto-elves, in my experience, often turn out to be old souls in young bodies and are therefore easily misjudged by ordinary folks. So what you are experiencing is an extreme case of a general problem. In a huge metropolis like this,” I gestured toward the window, “most people you encounter are strangers and you have nothing to go by except their appearance. Given enough time, one proto-elf can recognize another, but regular folks may feel uneasy in their presence.”

Jeremiah listened to me attentively, his face illuminated by the light from the window. I turned on no other lights, because I sensed it would be a distraction.

We looked at each other in silence for a few moments, the atmosphere in the room changed, a sense of gravity and dark tidings, and I knew that Jeremiah was preparing me for some ominous revelation.

“There is no gentle way to say this,” said Jeremiah, “the Demiwraith is developing a new strategy, a new way to amplify and extend the suffering of your kind. It hides its mind and activities within powerful cloaking fields, but the new evil that it is spawning is too far-reaching and potent to be altogether hidden. I’ve seen glimpses of it, and the feeling of it is pervasive. If the Demiwraith is allowed to continue its present work it could maintain its hold over your species for thousands of years. The tide that should be turning in your favor could instead be harnessed by the Demiwraith, allowing it to harvest human energy for the foreseeable future.” Jeremiah looked at me with a kind of recognition, “You’ve seen something about this yourself recently.” I nodded and Jeremiah waited for me to gather my thoughts to share what I had seen.

“The vision I had was only about three weeks ago,” I began. “I was writing about the Tolkien books at the time, have you ever read those?”

“They were our favorites on the Ark during the years of the great crossing.” replied Jeremiah.

“Great, than you will understand this vision, because for the first few moments, I thought it was a vision about that mythology, a kind of modern and technological version of it. But as the vision unfolded it seemed too concrete, too temporally immediate, and it left me with a bitter aftertaste, qualities I would have to associate with some evil unfolding now.

“There was a man, I could not see his form distinctly, but I believe he was white, Caucasian, with dark hair and eyes. Much more distinctly I felt his quality, his essence—-he was a kind of alchemist, but also with great knowledge of science and technology. I sensed that the Demiwraith was working through him, giving him abilities and ideas.

“There was a fierce will to power in this man, and he stood before a technological apparatus made of dense metals. It was cylindrical, and there were powerful fields of energy, nuclear, magnetic possibly, I can’t be sure of the technical details, but I was completely sure of what he was trying to do. There was molten material spinning at great speed at the center of the cylinder, matter in an unformed, chaotic state held by fields and bombarded with intense energies or subatomic particles. Here the vision forked and I saw that there were two experiments, in one the chaotic matter was a kind of molten glass or quartz-like material, and in the other it was a smaller amount of molten metal alloy. What was most clear in the vision was what he was trying to do and why. His will was focused with an unbearable, intensity on gaining control of the molten mass, of suffusing it with his mind and will while it was in this chaotic, energized, molten state. He was attempting to create objects of power, objects that would exist at a fulcrum point between and betwixt matter and spirit—-psychoid objects.

“The easier experiment was with the molten glass sphere. He was focusing his will on transferring some of his awareness into its fiery depths and keeping his consciousness within it as it cooled. If he was successful, his awareness would influence patterns of crystallization in a way that would make this object have a parallel resonance with his mind. The sphere would then function as an orb of seeing, something like a crystal ball, or the Palantir of the Tolkien mythology. But this experiment was almost like practice for the second experiment, where I felt the strain of his will, and there was both excitement and frustration, I knew that he had some results, but had not quite succeeded. Spinning at great speed in the second cylinder was a molten disk of metal, its shape always shifting as it spun in a kind of nuclear magnetic potter’s wheel, bombarded with intense energies. The man was straining, focusing his malevolent will on it to influence its shape. He needed to form it into a perfect ring, and he had to keep it in that shape as it cooled, but so far it wasn’t working, he could influence its shape but only in an unstable way—for a moment it looked like a radioactive double convex lens and then a hole or indentation started to form in its center, but then it closed up again. As he bent his mind to it, it scalded and imprinted his mind, so that a fiery wheel burned in his mind always, even when he was away from the apparatus, where the tortured metal continued to spin, waiting for him to master it….

“That is what I saw, but this time, in the telling of it, I saw another detail. At certain moments there was a ring of people around him, I think they were children with blank stares, they seemed to be drugged or enslaved to him in various ways, their distinctness as individual personalities seemed to be submerged, almost erased. I think they had been altered neurologically in some horrible way. It appeared that he was using their energy, or their enslavement, to amplify his will in the experiment. When the visual part of the vision ended, there was a distinct thought form, a direct knowing of something. I now understood that Tolkien had seen glimpses of Atlantean technology, and such psychoid objects existed outside of the mythological realm, they were as real as nuclear reactors and computers.

“Hidden in Tolkien’s papers when he died, but later published in one of the many volumes of his father’s notes edited by his son, Christopher, were some of the most advanced insights into parapsychology and remote viewing to be found anywhere. When I first read these notes a few years ago, when I was living in British Columbia, I knew that Tolkien was well aware that much of what he wrote about was not personal imagination, but a remote viewing of actual technologies, events and hominid types which may still be occurring in parallel realities, and outside of the illusion of linear time, were still happening. And of course, much of your history supports that. But never before had I sensed the potency and terrible danger of this other form of technology.”

(see The Mutant Versus the Machine… for some related thoughts on Tolkien and the recurrent dream of Atlantis that haunted both he and his son Michael.)

Jeremiah looked at me in silence for a few moments. It seemed that he might be waiting politely to see if I had anything more to add, though he also had a way of recognizing the spaces or silences that need to punctuate spoken communication.

“Your vision, especially in this realm, often surpasses mine, and although you reflect on the last three years and your time in the Bridge Realms with such a sense of personal failing, you may not see how much you have grown….but I see it…. Unfortunately, I have also seen some glimpses, though not as distinct as yours, of a new bid for power by the Demiwraith. I have not so much seen it, as you have, but I have felt it, and the feeling has been intensifying, and that has much to do with why we are meeting here today. I need you to write this down, share it with others of your kind. Secrecy works in favor of the Demiwraith. What is being worked on in the shadows must be brought out into the light of day.”

“I will do what I can with that.” I replied, “I notice that I can see and feel many of these things much more distinctly when you are present. Your awareness seems to be boosting mine.”

“Yes, but that is mutual,” replied Jeremiah, “I have an ancestral connection to this realm, but you have a direct one, and you are the strongest link connecting me to what is happening here. We need each other to have more vision of what is going on, but we also need others to be able to intervene. There is particularly the one we have both sensed, but he is still too young to be called upon. There is some great shock he must endure to be awakened…”

An involuntary trembling began in me. I knew who Jeremiah was talking about, though I had never spoken of him to Jeremiah or to anyone, and was never quite sure on what level of reality my experience of him was occurring. To hear him spoken about was a shock.

“Did you pull that out of my mind?”

“No, I sensed him, just as I sensed you, almost from my first moments in this realm when I found myself in the red desert. He is so inextricably interwoven with both of our timelines. But it may be better for us not to focus too much of our attention on him now. We should give him his chance to develop peacefully before the shock awakens him.”

There was another long and many-layered silence and I felt a need to ground the conversation in the practical and ordinary.

“What have you lived on in all this time? What have you done for money?” I asked.

“That has not been a problem at all. Most of the little I needed I brought with me when I crossed over to your realm, and these things were made for great durability. Money seems to be the resource with which almost anything can be acquired in your realm, and that has been easy to find. My skills in the Vehrillion and other abilities, as you know, are greatly diminished in your realm, but finding abandoned treasure, especially if it is buried in the ground, is such an easy task here, where almost no one weaves spells of concealment around anything, and there is so much of it in your realm. Those who bury money usually live lives of desperation and violence, and so often die before they can regain their treasure. I was able to acquire all that I needed before I had even left the red desert.” Jeremiah removed a small bundle wrapped in a cloth from his bag. There were neat stacks of hundred dollar bills tied with string. He held one up and turned it over, looking at it. “Money is so woven with spells that it is easy for an adept to locate it when it is buried in the earth. It’s so distinct from the surrounding soil.” He handed half of the stacks of hundreds over to me. “Please take some.” He said, as if he were giving me some extra string or something taking up room in his bag.

“But you’re going to need this.” I replied, there had to be thousands of dollars in the pile he gave me.

“You’re going to need it too.” replied Jeremiah, and I can always find more if I need to. “Mostly I give it to people I meet who seem to need it. And occasionally I trade it for food or transportation. I’ve done nothing to earn it, and it feels best to pass it along freely. There are so many in your realm who cling to such paper as if it were life itself. It’s better to keep it moving along than to hold on to it.” Jeremiah held another bill up to the light and turned it over. “Anyone can see that there are spells written all over it.”

“Is the Demiwraith involved with money?” I asked.

Very much.” replied Jeremiah. “Money is a representation of energy and wherever there is a great appetite and greed to horde energy you can sense the Demiwraith inserting its mind, and the Feeders getting excited…but it’s not just money, wherever energy is transacted, you will find parasitic forces taking their tax. It is the sexual and emotional energy of your kind that the Feeders and the Demiwraith can feed off of directly. Money is just another way to manipulate those energies. They don’t need money for itself.”

“But this has been going on for thousands of years,” I replied, “What is it that is shifting the equation? I have my own ideas, of course, but I would like to hear your point of view.”

“Many of your kind are struggling to awaken. A great cycle shift is happening, ages of increasing dark may possibly shift into their opposite. Worship of external objects could give way to recognition of the source of manifestation within. The Vehrillion is just one version of the art and science of recognizing and utilizing that inner source of manifestation. If enough of your kind were to tap into this power you would be a great danger to the Demiwraith. The battle would still not be won, because the Demiwraith is a master of these arts, and its taint is on all sorts of energy, which enables it to corrupt those who access what you would call magic as well as those who access sexual energy, creative energy or the energy of money or machines. And yet there is this crucial difference—when your kind reconnects to the inner source of manifestation you are now playing on the same field as the Demiwraith, and this in itself is threatening, as the Demiwraith is used to dominating that realm and manipulating your kind like pieces on a chessboard, while it stands outside the chessboard. When you shift your awareness from the magic of the machine, what you call technology, from the magic of capturing money, territory, and bodies, than you step off the chessboard and are bound to notice the Demiwraith and the strings that have been attached to you for millennia. Then the spirit of rebellion and revolution may come to be focused on the Demiwraith rather than on each other. The Demiwraith will do anything in its power to prevent such a possibility, and so far it has proven the master at keeping your kind battling each other, while it feeds off of the blood, the life energy, of both victor and vanquished, and the cycles of turmoil and harvesting continue indefinitely. But the Demiwraith does not have enough awareness and power to control everything in this realm, and awakening happens despite all its manipulations. Even the magic of the machines has gotten beyond its grasp and created what you call ‘unintended consequences’ that it is unable to manage. Environmental destruction threatens the delicate balance of organic life, which threatens the harvest. And the web of electronic communications your kind has spun over the planet is also a threat as it rivals the global web mind of the Demiwraith and can allow awakening to spread and secrets to be distributed everywhere. The Demiwraith is aware that its control is in jeopardy, it can foresee timelines in which your kind explodes into realms beyond its grasp, and so it devises new and terrible strategies to keep you blind and enslaved.”

“And the visions I had. The power it is feeding to this man, and to the creation of psychoid objects, these are glimpses of the new strategies?”

“Yes,” replied Jeremiah, “These are glimpses of just a few of the new strategies. The Demiwraith knows it must stay ahead of the wave of evolution, and if your kind are destined to tap into the power of inner manifestation it wants to be there first to set the rules and the channels of that manifestation through one entirely in its control—a human Feeder. If that Feeder can be made strong enough to control your kind, then the Demiwraith need only control him, rather than trying to bring a planet full of empowered beings under control.”

“So the Demiwraith seeks to control key nodes of power and by so doing maintains its control over a vast web of connections.” I added.

“Yes, that’s exactly what it does, and so far it has been a very efficient strategy, but there is also vulnerability in that strategy.” replied Jeremiah.

“Someone else could discover those key nodes of control and power and break the web.”

“Yes,” replied Jeremiah, “and we need to be that someone.”

Again I have to make the disclaimer that what I have struggled to represent as dialogue was something far more than the shadow of words can cast. Jeremiah and I communicated well into the night before we decided it was time for sleep. Jeremiah had an ability to go days without sleep if he had to, but apparently it had been days, and he let me know he was grateful for a chance to sleep in a safe place.

XVIII

Sometime during the night I had an experience that was neither dream nor waking. For many years I had glimpses and…I’m not sure what to call them—remote viewings? of the person that Jeremiah and I had discussed earlier in the evening, someone whom we both sensed would be awakened by a great shock. It was a shock to me to discover that Jeremiah had sensed him too, apparently in his first moments in the red desert. I had never discussed him with anyone, could never be quite sure of the blurred boundary between imagination and actual vision of him, and most of the time what I saw or experienced of him were not details or specifics but a felt presence. It was more like living alongside of someone. He seemed to be traveling in a parallel journey, and whenever I cast my attention in his direction he was there, somewhere, though our paths had never crossed on the three dimensional plane. And sometimes I could see him, so I knew what he looked like, and I had known his name, Tommy, from the beginning. But I also knew that we were not flowing through time in the same way. The glimpses I had of his life were always within a three month period or so of his life and while years and decades passed for me, the part of his life that I could see remained the same. Although I was about his age, fourteen or so, when I first became aware of him, I had now advanced into middle age, but the part of his life I could see had not aged.

There were many ways to interpret this. One possibility that occurred to me was that I was seeing a crucial part of his timeline, a part that had some resonance or parallelism with mine. Perhaps this part of his life was still in the future of my timeline. Possibly it was still in his future as well. Some aspects of the visions had this feeling of parallelism, and I felt as if Tommy were living alongside me in some way, but there was also a subtle layer of futurity about the visions, and sometimes I wondered if I weren’t witnessing the life of someone who was yet to be born. One very distinct vision I had of Tommy in the early Seventies might have given some evidence of the futurity idea. In that vision I saw Tommy sitting inside a place where I often saw him—the interior of a beautifully constructed tree house. Everything seemed to be constructed of natural materials, or manmade materials that could have been from any modern time—glass windows, ceramics, and so forth. But on one occasion I saw him holding a kind of glass tablet in his hands. He was looking at text and images that seemed to have a three dimensional quality that appeared behind the glass and he used his fingers to manipulate the images and the text. The object seemed magical or futuristic. For a few moments I watched as Tommy’s fingers gracefully played on this optical surface moving images around as though he were in possession of some sort of magical mirror or scrying device. When I had the vision I don’t think the first personal computer had even been invented yet. Decades later, when tablet computers with touch screens became consumer products, I wondered if I wasn’t starting to catch up with this time in Tommy’s life.

From the point of view of the depth psychology I was schooled in, these Tommy visions would probably be a projection of an inner complex, my personal unconscious manifesting an archetype such as the inner child, the divine child and so forth. The presumption would be that the visions were an artifact of my inner workings rather than an objective viewing of an outer being. For years I took that possibility seriously, but bits of evidence, the tablet computer thing, for example, pointed away from such purely psychological interpretations. Still, the confirmation from Jeremiah was crucial, because it was a confirmation from someone else that Tommy was not only real, but that he was a presently incarnated person whose timeline was converging with mine. This realization may have been a catalyst for what happened later that night. Another catalyst was that I was sleeping in the same room as Jeremiah, and, as he had acknowledged earlier in the evening, we would both be able to see more while in each other’s company.

While I was sleeping I became lucid in one of my dreams and was vaguely aware of my body lying horizontal on the bed. I was not altogether in my body, however, and so I decided to will myself into an out-of-body experience, a state that I have experienced many times before. I felt myself rise up and then into an indefinite space where up and down and other such basic spatial clues were absent. Some sort of spatial orientation resumed with a spiraling feeling; my visual field shifted from velvet blackness to a vague chaotic movement of colors—there were sparks of indigo and cobalt blue, but it was all too fast and chaotic for my mind to catch hold of, and the spiraling seemed to be pulling me downward and I assumed that I was being pulled back into my body. In a few moments I was aware of lying horizontally in bed but….there wasn’t the familiar kinesthetic sense of my own body, and when the body I was in moved, I was aware that it was not my volition, I was in another body and it was much lighter, younger, and it was in a different place, a place much quieter than the Bronx, a place of trees and wind. There was another psyche in this body, and disturbed by something, it was awakening from sleep, and I was a witness to this animation, miraculous as the first dawn in a new world—awareness blossoming in moments like expanding concentric waves of prismatic color and complexity, but these are only words and cannot convey the miracle of this.

As the awareness reached out to take in its surroundings, and to comprehend the transition from sleep to wakefulness, I sensed that this was Tommy, but that I was not viewing him remotely as I had always done before, but from within somehow. It was like a case of possession, but I was the possessing spirit! I had no influence on him as far as I could tell, it wasn’t that kind of possession, but I was a witness to his inner experience, and could feel with him his bodily sensations and inner thoughts and feelings. I didn’t read particular thoughts, it was more like I dwelt in an atmosphere of thoughts and feelings which still had to be interpreted by my psyche. And to interpret or unfold these thought forms I had to slow down, because Tommy, as I had sensed many times before, did not flow through time as I did, moments unfolded slowly and were encountered with a great depth of presence, were felt very deeply. I experienced in him a greater depth of feeling, his awareness was more from the heart, and mine was more from the head, and so our psyches were out of phase. I had to slow down and quiet the rapid fire of my thoughts to synch up with him, to follow his experience.

He lay in bed looking up at the ceiling where there was a play of leaf shadows. Moonlight was intense, it must have been a full moon or near to it, and this was summer or very late spring. It seemed as if we were in a room that was floating among the tree branches. A knowing was drawn from his psyche—–this was a tree house that he had built himself with great skill, using rope instead of nails so as not to harm the tree, and the room was beautifully constructed, almost like a sailboat that floated not in water but in tree branches, and everything in it seemed to be hand-crafted with great skill, the wood work all done by Tommy, and the other objects—beeswax candles, pottery, fabrics were hand-made by people close to him, each object had a history and an emotional resonance. There was a fractal symphony of cricket sounds coming from all directions, the sounds of leaves and wind and the occasional hooting of an owl. The sounds were being heard through Tommy’s hearing which I sensed was greatly superior to mine, catching details and nuances, that my ears, after decades of subway riding and loud rock music, could no longer catch.

Tommy sensed something and he was getting up. He lit a beeswax candle in the shape of a pine cone, and put it in a green ceramic bowl which he placed on a small table. There was a handmade journal on the table and a pen. He opened it to a blank page and wrote, “Jonathan?” I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been. If I could sense him, why shouldn’t he be able to sense me? I formed a word with my mind, and a moment after I did Tommy wrote it, “Yes.” Then he wrote, “Jonathan, what are you trying to tell me?” The words came out of me before I had the chance to consider, “A great shock is coming.” Tommy responded in flowing script, “What should I do?” I replied, “Be strong.” And then a strong intuition told me I should withdraw, and before I could consider that intuition I was withdrawing, the tree house was bellow me in the branches of the tree and I was out in the night air, and in another moment or two I was pulled back into my body, and was lying there in my bed sensing that Jeremiah was nearby and alert.

XIX

I lay awake for many long moments, feeling a sense of déjà vu, of eternal recurrence. I seemed to be at the center axle of a wheel of time, a nexus of possibilities with spokes radiating outward to all other moments of my life. It was as though this were a moment foreordained long ago, and now that I had reached it, awareness of who I was and why I was here had become much more complete and my center of gravity had shifted. Along every spoke of the wheel intuitions poured in, too numerous for individual awareness, but some sort of bookmarked themselves, notating themselves for future recall, a need to read certain Gnostic texts, a need to avoid certain foods and to eat others, an emphasis on fruits of certain colors, and gemstones of the same colors, deeply felt intuitions about what I needed to intensify inner transformation. I sensed Tommy and Jeremiah, they were overlapping fields, and I was a third overlapping field, and these fields had colors, or more like color temperatures, they were more like fields of plasma, luminous, amorphous, ever-changing, shimmering, sparkling, crackling. Tommy’s field shimmered more, Jeremiah’s had more crackling, my field—so much harder to observe yourself—had a lot of tension in the core, the tension was alchemical, it served a purpose, but it felt too dense, felt like its purpose no longer served, that it had to open up, shimmer more, that it was too dense an inner dynamo, too metallic. I saw that these three overlapping fields had not quite harmonized, I saw that many of the bookmarked intuitions were about how to move my color temperature, to change my field to harmonize more with theirs.

Again and again my mind returned to the last words I had sent to Tommy which reverberated with fateful irony as I realized that they applied to me as well as to him.

And then I sensed Tommy drawing closer, sensed his will and energy keeping contact alive, he needed me to help him know certain things, and his presence, as much as Jeremiah’s, enhanced my awareness, and I sensed him as both younger and older.

I also sensed his otherness, sensed how differently we related to time, thought and feeling. Time slowed as he drew near and the most definable otherness was that he approached with his awareness, not with a barrage of words. His consciousness was profoundly less verbal than mine. He communicated more a direct transmission of his self rather than specific thoughts encoded into words. It was more of a radiance, a shimmering wave form of feeling-toned awareness. The strangest thing about it was how natural it seemed and how weird and deceptive and out-moded verbal communication has come to seem since I have experienced it. Tommy’s way of communicating was something hidden in the background of verbal communication. With him, that something was brought forward, and words were way in the background.

Since experiencing this quality of communication, and especially the telepathic link with Jeremiah, it has been difficult for me keep patience with verbal conversation, which so often seems an irritating and shabby contrivance, a carnival slug made of lead, its engraving worn down from use and the cheapness of the metal.

My thoughts were interrupted by the strangest sensation that the air pressure in the room was different and so was the temperature and humidity. I sat up and saw the oddest thing, a corner of the room seem to be missing and it opened onto a desolate city street. The strange thing was that it seemed perfectly natural in a way, as if it had always been that way and I just hadn’t noticed. It was as if the room were a box, a box with an open corner that happened to coincide with this empty street, just a random impingement of two dimensions. Jeremiah was also sitting up and our telepathic link resumed.

The realm opened up before us was dark, the air flowing into the room smelt of darkness, the darkness of an eternal city of night. And we could sense that there were dark forces present beyond the threshold, but the opening of the portal was not a dark trick, there was the feeling of larger inevitability, a need for us to enter too vast for rational consideration. The main reluctance I felt, the hesitation that had to be addressed, was the delicate situation of being in my parent’s house—I just couldn’t allow them to be shocked by an inexplicable disappearance. I knew that this realm was flowing in a time stream separate from the time stream of the visit to my parents and the world in which I had spent most of my waking life. Probably the crossing of this threshold would be like entering the Bridge Realms, the experience that transpired would be independent of my native timeline, but I also knew that there were no guarantees, journeying into the unknown was always perilous. But then again, life is always a journey into the perilous unknown.

This was a nexus of decision, too many factors and unknowns to be fully considered, and when I looked back on it, I realized that this was the moment when telepathic communication with Jeremiah reached an entirely different level, a level where subject and object, I and thou, seemed to dissolve and our minds and intuitions functioned as one, as if we were left and right hemispheres of one brain, the corpus callosum of our telepathy too dense and many layered to keep up the separation of who was thinking what as thoughts, feelings and realizations seemed to arise from our mutuality rather than one of us or the other, and the mutuality of our intuition sensed the inevitability of our crossing the threshold….

We were on a long urban street, which could almost have been some depopulated area of the Bronx, but it was not a cold, December night and there were no cars or lights. Caleb was there, waiting for us, the adolescent son of a family I knew. How long had it been since he died in a thoughtless moment of adolescent risk taking? Five years? Six years? His face still bore some of the make up and eye shadow and a slightly tattered version of the costume he had worn that Halloween night when he had driven himself and a friend off a mountain road at an absurd speed, traces of substances not known to aid driving in his blood.
His eyes were large, sad and very aware, pupils enormous, and feeling-toned telepathy poured from him, feelings of guilt and abandonment, awareness of his death and the consequences, the pain it had caused, the tragic waste of lives that held much promise. The telepathic bond with Caleb was raw and uncontrolled—memories, feelings, images spilling out of him. He came forward and embraced me, feelings of neediness and deep compassion, guilt and love held him here, a level of the lower astral, and there were others here he couldn’t abandon, Jared, the boy he had driven off the embankment, still in shock, his condition maybe even deteriorating, others he had met who had taken him and Jared in, wounded souls, souls that needed his care…

Caleb looked two or three years younger than he had when he died. Intuitively, I sensed that the stress of his situation had caused a kind of reverse aging, a symptom of shock and overwhelm. There was a desperate and haunted look in his eyes.

“Caleb, do you want us to go with you to where Jared is?” His eyes, sad and enormous, assented and we followed him down the darkened street.

There were what seemed like abandoned apartment buildings, vacant lots, most of what we saw seemed lifeless, but occasionally there was a window, light leaking through a closed shade. Behind one such window the sounds of a man and woman locked in exhausted and hysterical argument, recrimination and counter-recrimination, a sense that the argument had gone on for a long time, a very long time.

Feelings of loss, abandonment, guilt and a weirdly tragic sense of stagnation, of being stuck in time, permeated my being and I couldn’t tell how much of this came from the telepathic and empathic link to Caleb and how much from the whole realm. There was, I sensed, a dark emotional magnetism, a tragic magic, pulling me, commitment to help Caleb the point of connection which had possibly opened the portal into the realm.

A woman passed us coming the other way on the street. She wore a shabby overcoat, and although she was not old, she held herself as if she were old, her posture hunched over, what looked like strips of dirty t-shirts tied around her wrists. She gave us a weirdly fearful indirect look, a look that didn’t make contact at all, a look of accusatory victimhood as if we had abused her, or wanted to, a look that would have magnetized the sadism of anyone who was an abuser. Her neurotic torment had a frightening magnetism, the whole street seemed filled by her self-hate, a kind of miasma floating all around us like a smell of stale urine, and part of the miasma was an infinitely bitter self-pity that accused others of her misfortune. Instinctively, the three of us drew closer together. There was no sense that she could be helped, at least not by me. To step into the field of her attention at all was to be immediately cast as an abuser and drawn into a universe of neurotic torment. After we passed her I saw Jeremiah look back, and hold out his hands in a gesture of blessing. I saw a tiny sphere of cobalt blue Vehrillion sapphire elemental leave him and enter the miasma.

Caleb led us to an apartment building which was missing part of its outer wall at ground level. It looked like it had been hit by a bomb blast a long time ago, the exposed wall had jagged edges. We stepped through the open part and into an interior space of support columns and junk, derelict furniture and so forth, and on the vinyl sofa seat of an old car was Jared wrapped in a blanket. His eyes did not make contact with us, and his head still bore signs of the wounds he received in the accident. He was obviously in some sort of state of deep shock, a state I found quite disturbing. Caleb sat down next to him, put his arm around him, whispered his name aloud as if hoping he would reanimate, but he seemed frozen, his blue eyes were open, but the enormously dilated pupils didn’t seem to take us in. Caleb’s efforts seemed both touching and pathetic, and I knew I was out of my depth, I had no idea how to reach someone so far gone, this was a case for Jeremiah’s medicine and I knew that Caleb was the one I could reach and that he he was the one who had reached out to us from this realm. I knelt down by the car seat and Jeremiah followed my example.

“He hasn’t always been like this.” Caleb whispered to us. He took one of Jared’s hands and held it between both of his, and I could feel the transfusion of Caleb’s life energy into Jared, but with no apparent result. “At first he spoke a little bit, fragments mostly, he asked where we were a couple of times, but gradually he became silent…he still has some awareness though, if I try to move him it upsets him and he twists himself in pain. I think there is something about the open wall that he needs, he has to sit facing it, and he prefers to sit on the car seat than anything else…he doesn’t like to be disturbed…” Caleb looked at me, his eyes intelligent and haunted. “I know we’re no longer alive… not alive as we once were, where we once were, but I don’t think Jared can accept that, he just shut down… It was my fault, you know… I was the driver and I was stoned out of my mind…I killed both of us…not just our bodies…I think Jared’s soul is dying…that’s why I had to call to you, suddenly I sensed you could step across, and I had to do something…”

Caleb conveyed so much more than his spoken words. The telepathic bond with him was in some ways more intense than it was with Jeremiah. It was far more emotional, and Caleb’s emotions were much more recognizable than those of Jeremiah. More recognizable than my own emotions, strange as it is to admit that, as his being was centered on feeling, while the leading edge of my perception was intuition and thinking and, as far as I could tell, it was about the same for Jeremiah. The communion with Caleb was intensely emotional, but at the same time my intuition and thinking were heightened and energized by depth of feeling and a will to help these two lost kids.

Intuitions came pouring in, realizations of various sorts, not all of them directly about the present situation, but all of them had tendrils of meaning connecting them to the present situation. For example, I had realizations about the telepathic communion with Tommy which had also happened on what was becoming the longest night of my life. The communion with Tommy was also feeling-centered, but distinctly different. Tommy’s feelings had great depth, but they were more cosmic feelings, feelings with so much spiritual awareness mixed in, the feelings of what some would call an old soul. The depth of telepathic communions I shared that evening with Jeremiah, Tommy and Caleb were in disturbing contrast to Jared. He seemed to be in his own universe of numbed out pain and unreachable… he was like a planet in the most distant reaches of a solar system, the surface frozen, barely illuminated by pale and distant sunlight.

A kind of triage surfaced in my intuition—-Jared was clearly a case for Jeremiah’s magic, he would know how to reach such a distant planet, if anyone could, while Caleb needed me—someone who knew his family, who knew him as he was…

A moment after I had this realization I sensed Jeremiah focusing his energy on Jared, concurring with the triage intuition. The telepathic communion with Jeremiah continued, the intuitions and realizations were partly formed by the communion, the ongoing mutuality of our psyches, even as I had drawn more apart to focus on Caleb. As a narcissistic personality type I was foolishly and unconsciously giving myself credit for intuitions and realizations that came from…who can say where they ultimately come from—-a network of other psyches? A guiding intelligence implicit in the multiverse? Whatever it was it had me saying things to Caleb before I knew what I was going to say.

“You are alive, we need to clear about that, you may be in a different body, a different realm, but you are very much alive.” Caleb reached out to hug me. His body felt frail, but human.
I realized that the opportunity to help Caleb was also keeping me safe in this realm. There was such a clear moral purpose, helping a worthy soul in peril, that the powerful tendency field of this realm couldn’t take full root in me. Similarly, Caleb had survived here because of his moral purpose, his loyalty to Jared.

“Zeitgeist” might be a more familiar way of describing what I am calling a “tendency field”—the spirit, or more literally the “ghost” of the time/place. Some might think of “Zeitgeist” as an abstraction, someone’s interpretation of what was going on, but in the case of this realm it was more like living in the presence of a powerful and toxic field of electromagnetic energy.

Imagine rolling out your sleeping bag directly under high tension power lines. You put your tent up and sometimes there is a weird humming in the hollow flexible aluminum tubes that hold the tent up. You camp out under the lines, never leaving their field of energy. There will be moments where you ignore the effects of the field, and it is in those moments when it can most dominate you, working by infiltration into the depths of you.

This realm had a toxic field, potent and insidious, a dark zeitgeist, as real and inexorable as gravity, but also as light and pervasive as the air, infiltrating your being with every breath. The tendency field was dark, but with definable properties, and I sensed it trying to pull me into a loop, into some dark and repetitive loop of thought forms, dark and dense emotions, mechanical actions. It’s field was like a bad psychiatric med, a neuro-pharmaceutical rubber hammer to the head, a callous traffic cop in the neural network, spraying down over-heated brain cells with a toxic chemical wash. To use the psychological metaphor, the tendency was to magnify neurosis and intensify stereotyped thinking and acting, the loop becomes your universe, and as this happens you are being hollowed out, essence is being corrupted or consumed, until there is nothing left but the loop, a hollowed out mechanical resonance in time, like the ghost that always says or does the same thing, like a looping holographic projection.

The field pulled you toward being inorganic ultimately, but at first the pull was toward dark and dense emotions. And yet as dark and unappealing as my descriptions of the realm may sound, there was something deeply seductive about it as well, there was a glamour of tragic magic that was captivating. It was a place that embraced my pain, my problems, my areas of darkness and burnout, and seemed to invite me to stay with them here forever. Even weirder was the sense that this place served a purpose. It was like a quivering vital organ exposed on the operating table which looks unpleasant and grotesque to a squeamish observer, but which also efficiently serves a vital function. I wondered in those time-slowed moments what functions this realm might serve. Perhaps if I understood that, I would know what would help Jared and Caleb.

A series of intuitive speculation or realizations cascaded through my mind. I wondered if there might not be a recycling process underway, a recycling of living tissue or energy out of essentially dead forms. Perhaps the recovered energy is restored to a spirit coalescing, regathering itself in another incarnation. In other cases maybe the spirit doesn’t coalesce, some people die before they die, they murder their own souls with addictions, toxic thought forms, neurotic loop worlds. They may descend into a low grade almost reptilian consciousness, and while their bodies continue to draw breath and have a pulse, their spirits are already dead, or at the very best horribly disintegrated. When the body stops, the remaining husk of a personality is taken to this realm for the hollowing out of the organic to be completed, and the realm acts like lice cleaning a wound of dead tissue. Perhaps in still other cases, the magnification of the neurosis could help molt an essentially vital spirit out of an obsolescent exoskeleton of neurotic scar tissue. The neurosis gets magnified and hollowed out until the spirit can no longer tolerate the confinement and slips out of the decaying husk of human identity. And maybe there are middle ground cases, spirits whose vitality is still there, but marbled with decay, and perhaps these are the spirits that the living sometimes try to reach with intercessionary prayer, or perhaps, as in this case, with a more direct intervention.

Jared may have been in that last category, a spirit that had withdrawn into itself, that could yield to disintegration and reabsorption, or spontaneously reanimate and molt. Caleb had been keeping Jared from disintegrating, but slowly he was losing ground to the corrosive zeitgeist. Only an alchemical master like Jeremiah had a chance of successful intervention.

All these realization came within a time-slowed moment or two after being embraced by Caleb. His depth of experience with this realm, and my thinking and intuition, merged telepathically, and formed many-layered realizations.

We were also becoming aware that Jeremiah was beginning to get somewhere with Jared. There was continuous eye contact between the two now, and we could feel and see shimmering waves of energy around Jeremiah as he poured vitality into Jared and with real effect. There was starting to be a healthful glow in Jared’s face, and though his pupils were enormously dilated, his eyes were engaged with Jeremiah. Caleb and I stood next to each other, witnessing the process, and then, by some unconscious mutuality, we began sending energy into Jared as well. Our energies were merged, mine and Caleb’s, forming a kind of luminous cloud around Jared, while the energy from Jeremiah was much more focused.

And then we saw a wonderful thing, Jared took a deep breath, and somehow we could see from his eyes and how he took the breath that it was a conscious action, not an autonomic reflex, that there was once again a living personality making choices. Jared was awakening, and there was intense telepathic exchange between him and Jeremiah— I could not perceive the content, but felt the intensity. We felt Jared’s awakening like the first dawn of a sun that had gone cold and was now reigniting and becoming luminous.

Suddenly, I was shocked out of this reverie by a powerful telepathic alert from Jeremiah: Danger! Feeders! Approaching at high speed! Jeremiah stood up, pulling Jared to his feet with him. And now I saw one of them, and the weirdness of its form shocked my mind. It was shaped like an inverted cone, a dull gunpowder grey, and it either spun like a turbine or vibrated so that its edges were blurry, and there was an electricity about it, a static electricity crackled in the air around us. And we sensed that many more of these things approached. Aloud, Caleb said, “We’ve got to draw them away from here!” The reason was a telepathic overlay—-the woman who had taken them in was upstairs, working in a kitchen lit by a single hanging light bulb, and the center of her life, her son, some sort of autistic savant who built strange geometric models all day, was sitting in his darkened room, fear breaking through his strange mental universe. These two were so fragile, we had to move the attack away from them. “This way!” Caleb lead us through a gap in the back wall and we were running from the building, and surrounding us was a horrible buzzing, the sound of a billion hornets, the swarming of the feeders…

We all sensed the intention of the attack, this was a massive immunological alert, and we were the antigens, we had been employing energies, especially what Jeremiah had employed with Jared, that were utterly forbidden in this realm. The feeders were almost completely mechanical beings, like spinning drill bits or, perhaps a closer metaphor, like the erase heads to be found in old-fashioned tape recorders. We were to be erased, cauterized and absorbed into non-existence, and the feeders were like mechanisms, programmed with only one intention, absorption of our energy, and the swarming, buzzing mass of them could only be resisted for moments.

We ran into another building, Jeremiah leading us now, my impressions of it a mosaic of splintered perceptions seen through the orange magma of adrenalin rush. We were running up a staircase, and then we were on the top floor, on a landing, the ceiling partly destroyed, and by some unspoken consensus we were all standing very still, and Jeremiah was doing something, something from the Vehrillion, there were shimmering fields of energy around him, it was a revelation of the magician or wizard, and we could sense the near perfection of his focus, someone imbued with the power to shift the matrix.

And now the matrix was shifting, there was a sort of spherical distortion field in my vision where a moment before there was a ruined ceiling. The sphere was growing, and becoming more definite, and in another heart beat it had all the complexity and radiance of a living planet, and then it encompassed us, there was a splintering and we were in a darkened room, huddling close together, our bodies altered and a bit in shock, and all of us, except Jeremiah, were trembling.

Seismic shockwaves flowed through me, the interface between my mind and my body was unstable, new kinesthetic sensations flooding in, a dangerous state of disequilibrium that felt like it could become a seizure, perhaps an incarnation seizure, as I had experienced in the Bridge Realms. Jeremiah surrounded us with a harmonizing field of energy which helped us stabilize and become calm. Shock transformed into awe and the awe became a recognition of grace. We had been spared annihilation and were now in a different realm, re-embodied, an amazing feeling, a different center of gravity, a lighter, more flexible body, it appeared to be an idealized version of my body when I was an adolescent, the shift in sensations too profound and multi-layered to be languaged. All this had to be processed and reach equilibrium in heart beats, and once I regained my equilibrium I was able to perceive the others and sense that their bodies were also altered, though still familiar, still their essential forms, but different. I could sense that Caleb was more like the age he was when he had the accident, two or three years older than how I had last seen him.

The interior space we were in was almost completely dark and I sensed that there was someone else with us, someone in shock, someone who had a large field of energy which was non threatening, high vitality, chaotic….The sound of a lighter being sparked and a small flame emerging from an ellipse of plastic, orange firelight silhouetting a face, a young face, intense, luminous eyes, highlights of long red hair, seemed to be a young male, and he was staring toward our part of the room. “Who’s there?” —his voice a tremulous whisper, “Is someone there?”

He moved the lighter and was lighting candle wicks, a tray of multicolored candles that had all melted together into a coagulated mass of colored wax. Candlelight threw back the darkness and he could see us now, and we all sat there very still. He was a young male, perhaps seventeen, long red hair and green eyes dilated with awe, and there was a telepathic radiance about him, sparkles of his mind entered mine, not because he intended them, but because his mind was not contained, it was spilling out into the room, and a thought form, one of the sparkles, was that he had taken LSD, taken too much he feared, and he wasn’t sure if we were real or an hallucination.

Respectfully, we all remained still and silent, not sure if we should step out of his perceptual uncertainty and into his reality. He seemed in such a vulnerable state of mind, and an empathic bond amongst the four of us told us to hold back, not to shock his fragile equilibrium, so we sat there very still. Scarcely moving my eyes, I did a quiet survey of his room. It was his room obviously, the room of someone creative and highly individual, but something was off, not quite right, and then I saw the stereo, and it started to gel in my mind. The stereo had a record changer on top, an early Seventies look to it, and then I saw other details of the room….and they also seemed like they might be from that era, but possibly a different version of that era.

Intuition (or was this a message from Jeremiah?) told me that this boy, and in his present state, was our anchor point in this parallel realm. His chaotic and disturbed condition, partly an out-of-body experience, generated a portal, or was in itself a portal. Jeremiah had focused on opening a portal at our end, not on where we would end up once we passed through. We crossed into some sort of possibility nexus, and inevitably were drawn toward a moment in a parallel realm which had an essence or energy that resonated with that of our strange group of four.

We left the lower astral fearing annihilation, and that was close to what the boy was feeling, a precarious, fragile state. Stress fractures already ran through his sanity, he was barely keeping it together, a miscued word or gesture from any of us threatened to shatter his delicate equilibrium. There was a decision to be made—the thought forms were from Jeremiah—he could create a cloaking field around us, we could withdraw from his perception and make our way out of the house, or we could initiate contact, this boy was a root soul in this realm, the anchor point that allowed us to enter it, and perhaps what opened a portal on his end was a will in him to connect with travelers, and to contact parallel realms… The boy made our decision for us, “Who are you?” he asked, and it was a real question that wanted answering, not a fearful testing of the darkness, and we all knew he should be answered, and I sensed that I should address him, I was the only one of us who had lived through the era which seemed to be current in this realm.

“We are friends…travelers…we had to cross over and something about your energy drew us to your realm….it was you, not the chemical you took, that drew us here…”

I could feel his mind accepting this, within the chaos there was a core of deep inner strength, and I caught the edges and glimpses of a long history of paranormal experience. This was no teenager randomly experimenting with substances, but an old soul in a young body who had put himself in such a state because of some moral purpose…I could almost sense what the purpose was— in some way he was seeking help for a world in peril.

Something shifted and now there was so much feeling-toned telepathic content unfolding toward me, an empathic telepath, I remember thinking. I beheld some of the visions that haunted him, that led him to dose himself out of a desperate sense that he must do something. I saw the faces he saw, glimpses of grey-faced men planning to unleash mass horror and death. These visions burdened him with feelings of responsibility, a precarious world somehow on his shoulders, and in his case it did not seem to be an adolescent messiah complex, but a humble and frightening recognition, a sense that the visions had come to him because he was required to do something. But on the plane of ordinary reality he was unable to think of a single thing he could do.

Despite his years, it was apparent, perceiving this telepathic content, that he had a wise, compassionate, but also realistic sense of other people, and he knew that telling about his visions was not going to accomplish anything. At best he would only panic a few people close to him who also couldn’t do anything on the ordinary plane. There were no specifics in his visions, no details of time or place, no names, no dates, just an overwhelming feeling of imminence.

Although the visions were terrifying, he felt that he must bring them closer, and this was why he had taken the acid, this was the moral purpose, and it was helping to hold him together even as his brain chemistry was disturbed and chaotic. He felt that we were here in response to his intentions…

Were we? It seemed like on some level we must be.The intensity of the situation felt like it was overwhelming me, I was still in shock from the body change, the sensations of being sheathed in a new form, a different quality of aliveness, a body that was younger and much more flexible. And then I sensed that much of the overwhelm I was feeling was actually located more in Jared, and somewhat in Caleb who was sensing Jared’s instability. There was a danger he could shut down again and I knew we had to get him out of here. A decision formed in me and was accepted by the group, Jeremiah would stay here with the boy and I would get Jared and Caleb out of the house, we had to adjust to this new realm in some more neutral place, not in a room that was like being inside the mind of this intense young mutant and his overburdened acid trip.

I got up quietly while Jeremiah formed a more exclusive telepathic bond with the boy. There was a large window near Jared and I looked through it, faint moonlight showed woods beyond the back yard of the house, other houses on the left and right, the thick green grass of high summer, a few hundred unobstructed feet and we would be in the woods. I opened the window, it was only five or six feet from the ground.

Caleb was aware of my intentions and he gently got Jared to his feet. Jared was slightly shaky and frail, but it was visually incongruent, because Jared, whom I had never met in his earlier life, was significantly taller than me or Caleb and very athletic looking, the musculature of a young collegiate athlete. He had the strongest body, but his psyche was in shock, and we had to guide him to his feet, and get him moving through the window. Caleb went next, and I followed, feeling the light, adolescent springiness of this body as my feet hit the grass, I closed the window behind us, and we were walking on the grass, the sound of crickets all around us.

Even a few seconds of walking produced an enormous improvement, a solidification in Jared, the movement, and the athletic, graceful body were grounding him, and there were similar effects in all of us, and our emotions were becoming more human and familiar. I felt a bond forming, it was hormonal and energetic, the bond of three young males walking together in an unknown landscape, instinctively forming that male adolescent tribal bond, it seemed to be something that our bodies were doing for us without the need for any intention.

It was strange, but not at all unpleasant, as I felt the shift in age roles, in the previous realm I was decades older, but in these new bodies I appeared to be about two years younger than these two. I estimated that my body was about seventeen and Caleb looked about nineteen and Jared about twenty. We wore different clothing—-blue jeans, sneakers, solid colored t-shirts, all of it seemed comfortably worn, very plain and unobtrusive. Did Jeremiah think of that? I wondered.

We were walking now along the edge of the woods, the houses on our left, back porches lit by yellow bug lights. I noticed that Jared had taken the lead with me and Caleb walking just behind him flanking him on either side. An automatic adolescent male ranking had occurred, Jared clearly recognized as having the alpha body, Caleb and I had similar builds, slim, slightly shorter than average, but very flexible and quick, the untrained athleticism of very active adolescent males. On some bandwidth of male primate intuition we had already registered and adapted to Jared as the physical champion. He was older, larger, stronger and exceptionally handsome, an intense physical charisma, like the captain of a college lacrosse team that had just won the division championship.

The social rankings felt so natural, and yet it was all so odd, in the previous realm Jared was pale and gaunt, and psychically as fragile as a glass figurine. But that was then, and the reality of our present bodies now was so powerful, and I felt my personality shifting, my social identity had been shocked into malleability. Although I knew it intellectually, I had never fully realized how deeply my identity was built up around being a specific age in a specific body type, and now that those givens had shifted, my social identity was shifting, a new identity not fully formed. Caleb and Jared were experiencing their own versions of this process of adaptation.

In the lower astral realm they had bodies, but they were gaunt, more on the pale, ethereal side, malnourished, animated by nervous energy. In this realm their bodies had so much more human vitality—hormones, tanned skin, rippling muscle. They were so much more alive and physical now.

As we walked we became more fully merged with our new embodiments. We also became more distinct and less telepathic. Telepathy had surrounded us atmospherically, like a moon lit cloud, and it was disorienting at times, hard to know which thought or feeling belonged to whom, and sometimes it didn’t have individual origin, but was a mutuality. And it was such a mutuality that had us all walking along the edge between the field and the woods, keeping the backs of the houses a few hundred feet off to our left.

I sensed a message from Jeremiah and spoke it aloud,“They are leaving the house, coming to find us with food and drink.” My voice was a different register than it had been, a bit strange to my ears, but not unpleasant. We turned and began walking back, the woods now at our left and the houses on the right.

Jeremiah and the boy approached. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag of food and we could see he was sober now, Jeremiah had apparently done something to speed the dissolution of the drug. The five of us sat at the edge of the woods and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drank apple juice from paper cups. We were all ravenously hungry, our new bodies soaked in the calories and the food, ordinary as it was, tasted delicious. Awareness of the food mingled with telepathic communion,

Jeremiah and the boy, Paul was his name, had shared a great density of telepathic communication. Paul had shown Jeremiah the visions which had haunted him, and I could see them now myself, unfolding in my mind, enveloping me with their uncanny intensity— there were men standing above an illuminated display, a black and white satellite image projected onto a ground glass screen, advanced military technology, but from the early Seventies, consoles of sheet metal enameled in flat grey with switches and displays, uniformed men wearing headsets who sat at consoles, their faces tense and concentrated. I was inside the vision, an invisible observer in a place of tense men and humming electronic circuitry, a place that was the apex of a vast pyramid of men, bureaucracy and military technology, a place from which nuclear war could be initiated, distant missile silos on alert, missiles with multiple warheads, and standing above the illuminated display a balding man in a white buttoned down shirt, eyes of cold abstraction and will to power, a man imbued with the power of super technology, the power of hydrogen bombs at his finger tips, the apex of the pyramid, and the weapons systems shared a will with him, a will to see their life cycle completed, a will to unleash the fury of shattered atoms at the pyramids of the enemy. At the apex of the enemy were similar men whose minds held parallel thoughts of death and power, of missile ejaculation, the use-it-or-lose-it thoughts of paranoid, technocratic men in late middle age— use it or lose it, use it or lose it, use it or lose it…Use it! Use it now!

I could see and feel the fiery ejaculation of missiles freed from the somnambulant cocoons of their below-ground silos suddenly alive and screaming upward into the stratosphere, all the engineering, the programming, the automated systems finally achieving realization, targeting and guidance systems synergizing into trajectories of geometric precision, all of it culminating at the moment of impact into an orgasmic thermonuclear glory, the blossoming hemisphere unleashing the power, the heat, light and radiation of a star, the shockwave expanding the circumference of obliteration, the death zone in which millions of souls were suddenly unsheathed from their bodies.

But suddenly the whole vision was peeled up, an amazing moment of telepathic alchemy from Jeremiah and the Vehrillion, and I saw the vision that had enveloped me as a separated object like an unscrolled illuminated parchment shimmering with power, runes and moving images squirming and alive on its surface, and at the edges of the illuminated parchment were spindly nerve cells, long luminescent neurons that (it was implicitly known) ran directly into the mind of the Demiwraith. It was the Demiwraith that energized this vision, it was no inevitable timeline but a glowing seed of death fantasy that lived in the minds of late middle-aged men who were at the apex of the pyramid, teetering at the edge of sexual impotence, and in private moments they trembled with the power of reaching for the ring of power, of what they could unleash, use it or lose it, use it or lose it, cried the ghost in the intricate machinery and in their aging bodies, use or lose it, use it or lose it, but the likelihood is that they would lose it, the vast pyramid had the inertia of bloated bureaucracy, it would resist the disequilibrium of such a massive ejaculation which would deplete, maybe even destroy its own bloated body in the chaotic discharge of mutual thermonuclear orgasm.

The vision which had enveloped us with a feeling of prophetic inevitability was revealed now as a death fantasy generated by the mind of the Demiwraith, a fantasy, not an inevitability, a fantasy the Demiwraith had infected into Paul’s mind as a trap for his mutant emergence, a spell woven with fell and subtle power to shrink and shrivel his mutant spirit into fear, paranoia and messianic delusion.

With the revelation of the source of the vision there was a sense of some deeply meaningful deed accomplished. The nexus of the five us, our timelines converging in this spot had altered things, significant things, in multiple realms, and lifetimes of work had somehow contributed to our being here at this time. Jeremy, this boy with the red hair, was a key soul in this realm, and the experience of this evening had helped him enormously, had confirmed for him the inkling he had always had of hidden dimensions, of travelers and magical technologies. This night had empowered him, and freed him from a dangerous, implanted obsession. Jared and Caleb had been rescued from a dark place in the lower astral that would have hollowed them out, and had nearly done so for Jared. They needed to be reembodied, they needed another chance to live out their youth and this realm provided them with unique opportunities. Jeremy would be their guide, and their presence would be a transformative catalyst for him, a chance for him to work with travelers. Jared and Caleb had grown up in a realm that resembled the near future of this realm, and their presence here, would act as a catalyst, would change and stimulate the cauldron of forces at work in this realm. Our minds had coalesced into a telepathic bond and it was hard to see who, if any of us individually, these insights came from. They arose from the mutuality of our intuitive senses and perhaps some intelligence implicit in the universe. It also became mutually apparent that Jeremiah and I must leave, must leave very soon, because we had karmic ties to Old Terra and were needed back there. Our departure was imminent and we found ourselves, as we sat in the tall summer grass joining arms, forming a small circle.We all put our heads toward the center of the circle so that they were almost touching and we felt the cauldron of our energy intensify, the exchange of energy and information both subtle and massive, an exchange of hearts as well as heads for a few moments, and then Jeremiah and I broke the circle and got to our feet.We bowed prayerfully toward Caleb, Jared and Jeremy and turned and walked off into the tall grass.

Jeremiah and I walked a few minutes, feeling a sense of poignant fulfillment as well as sadness. Fulfillment that we helped put three young lives on a more hopeful track, sadness that we were likely taking leave of them forever. Soon we came to what seemed a curtain of flickering shadow which seemed to move slightly. It was a portal of shadows which undulated at the edges as though a breeze were caressing its edges. We stepped through it and then, with a transition as subtle as a breeze on a moonless night, we were in my old darkened room in my parent’s house, and I knew that scarcely a moment had passed in this timeline. I was also returned to my accustomed body, which seemed to be in exactly the state it had been before our departure. The sameness and familiarity of the room and my body were nevertheless a shock, as much of a shock as finding ourselves in some exotic place, just as a sudden silence can be a shock when you have been surrounded by noise.

The precision of the sameness we had returned to, after a night that seemed almost a lifetime was almost eerie, and I noticed that my default body was not even tired.

“It is good, if circumstances allow, to be still for a few moments and feel the changes.” Jeremiah said. I saw that he too had returned to his default body, still crisscrossed with a lattice of scars. We stood silently and I felt a sadness, a sense of the heaviness of the present situation, my parents, now so frail and elderly, sleeping nearby, the many responsibilities and poignant bonds I shared with them palpably in the air. I felt the relative heaviness of my middle-aged body, though I could feel that I was quite healthy and fit for a man of fifty. The lightness, speed and flexibility of the adolescent body I had just traveled in was gone, and with it a certain adolescent instability was gone too. My present body, though not so quicksilver, was more stable, more filled with its own accumulated life wisdom.The sadness was heartfelt, not depressive; it had an edge of mystery and was shot through with a sense of awe and a sense of the strangeness of things, a strangeness that was majestic, but also desolate, like the vast reaches of space. Vast and desolate as it was, ties between travelers could somehow allow them to keep finding each other, and whatever else might change there was a certain feeling of continuity in my timeline, an implicit sense of the sacred quest.

“Some more ginger tea?” I asked Jeremiah.

“Yes, please. There are some things for us to discuss.”

We sat on the floor across from each other as if there were a camp fire between us instead of a dusty old carpet. I heard the #4 train on elevated tracks just a block away, Jerome Avenue, and it seemed a reminder to come back into the present, from wherever I was—a kind of liminal reverie, haunted by both past and parallel—into a place where I could probe into things and make decisions. With unspoken ascent our minds began to merge a bit, to overlap, and in a profound mutuality with Jeremiah we saw and felt a series of things. We could sense the forces of the Demiwraith, arrayed around the entire realm, at the edges of everything, but we knew that wasn’t where we should focus our attention. When you gaze overlong into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you, as Nietzche once said. The more we focused attention on it the more aware of us it became, and the more energy it received. As the I Ching says, you only sharpen the fangs of evil by fighting it directly. It is better to make energetic progress toward the good. And so our psyches sought for what was good, what was in a state that had the potential to shift this darkened realm, to trigger a metamorphosis. The realm appeared before us as a kind of alchemical map, a map that consisted of a lattice work of glowing jewels. Each of these glowing jewels was a soul. Not all the souls were human of course, and there were jewels of many different colors and types. Sensually driven souls glowed red and were common, but there were also rare and hidden gems, one that glowed cobalt blue near the bottom edge, hidden almost from the other jewels. Other jewels seemed molten with a hazel luminosity, a blur of colors that rarely seemed to coalesce into any one color. These seemed to be young, unformed mutants or proto-elves. Then a space seemed to open up in the jeweled lattice and we saw woods bellow us, treetops, then a treehouse in a particular treetop, and we sensed Tommy. He was sleeping but we saw and felt the corona of his energy, in shimmering colors, rising from tree branches. Tommy’s energy was very unique, not quite elf or human, glowing with a soft focused love and compassion, a developing psychic awareness and the perilous unformedness of youth. We sensed that a great shock was coming toward Tommy, a painful awakening. There was another Tommy, one that would come into being after that shock, and it was also that Tommy who was drawing us to this very particular place in the lattice work. It was mostly the Tommy after the shock whom I had sensed for much of my life. A Tommy who radiated a time-slowing, deep and compassionate awareness. Here, however, was Tommy in his innocent and unformed state. He was aware of visions, and the cycle of life and death, but had not yet, in this timeline, descended into the darkness, so his spirit was untempered, not fully awake.

We also felt that we should not approach him, not attempt contact. What had happened earlier in this vast evening, the telepathic link with Tommy, was more than sufficient. The Tommy on the other side of the shock was the one who would need our help as we would need his. That Tommy was closer than I had ever felt him, but still not aligned with my default timeline. Where we saw the more unformed Tommy, the trees were covered in green leaves, and it looked like late Spring or early Summer. Although that season could represent Tommy’s time of life, it seemed more literal than that, seemed like we were viewing a moment near the summer equinox when we had only just passed through the Winter Solstice.

We found ourselves withdrawing from Tommy and the lattice work, and it was as if we were floating somewhere in the night, feeling flows of energy passing through us. It was a place flowing with deep feelings, feeling-toned intuitions passing through us, intimations of inevitabilities reverberating deep inside us. We seemed to be floating in the slipstream of a great current of empathic awareness. An inevitability became apparent to us. What was most needed now was that we learn more from each other. Although Jeremiah and I had never before achieved this level of telepathic mutuality, we were also vastly different from each other. We each needed to be changed by the presence of the other, and by the infinitely detailed experience of each other. As we realized this the telepathic mutuality ebbed away and we were once more sitting across from each other, gazing at each other as if across a campfire, viewing the other from the outside. Perhaps Jeremiah sensed that the telepathic mutuality was too much, too intimate, and paradoxically confused the process of getting to know each other. When he next spoke it was aloud, no telepathic overlay, and I think we both sensed a rightness about that. “I can see now that one reason I was drawn toward this moment of your timeline is because it resonates with the time of the passing of the Old Ones. Your feelings about your elderly parents resonate with feelings about the passing of the Old Ones that I have never fully reconciled.” I hadn’t thought of such a parallelism, but it made sense. When Jeremiah narrated the passing of the Old Ones at the actual campfire in the red desert, I remember the depth of feeling in his voice, his emotions seemed uncharacteristically human, almost raw, feelings of guilt, abandonment, and poignant compassion. As I looked at Jeremiah, and saw the lattice of scars crisscrossing his face, I felt his humanity more than I ever had in the past. The preternatural beauty of his kind, and his parapsychological radiance, the sense of magical ability and intelligence about him sometimes made him seem like a young god, but that was a distorted impression. The incongruity of the scars, which seemed a continual violation of his ageless beauty, reminded me that he struggled and suffered, felt dark feelings, and didn’t have all the answers. He was another traveler, and we were working in parallel, both of us struggling to find our way in a misty and ever-shifting multiverse. Like me, he was making it up as best he could as he went along. We needed each other to navigate the strange nexus of forces that lay before us. With almost invisible subtlety the telepathic bond had returned, and realizations unfolded in the mutuality of our awareness.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Rachel Rey November 1, 2011 at 11:45 pm: I know exactly what you mean. I, too, have had my contacts with the numinous and the divine. It is a never ending struggle to have no wants or needs other than to recognize those souls who in some way have the ability of the indigo children to transmute greed into compassion and hate into love. A near death experience opened my eyes when I was 36 to the greater realm that exists beyond our horizon. I was sent back (against my will, literally) and told in a telepathic voice, “It’s not yet time; you must go back.” Finally,the entire design makes perfect sense. Those of us who seek to be pure of heart and compassionate in all our dealings with others have been given incredible gifts to affect events as they happen. Manifestation of spiritual abundance is the most powerful feeling in the world. I cannot wait to read all of your interpretations of events during these days counting down the seconds to midnight, OR, as I passionately believe, seeing the world down on its knees ready to embrace a new world order.

As a teacher and a mystical individual, I will support your endeavors in any way I can.

R

bashar May 3, 2012 at 5:58 pm: thanks for sharing us

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