by J M Guillen
“Well, I was pissed. I had no control over the hair-brained crap my parents did, but I could control parkour.”
“So you just went and ate with a weirdo you met in the alley.” Alicia flushed as she glanced at Simon. “No offense.”
“Well, yeah. I knew Simon was up to something.”
“To be fair,” Simon paused to take a drink of his beer, “I was up to somethin’.”
“So, you’d figured out that she was doing something… magical?” Alicia shoved a lock of red hair behind her ear with one savage swipe. “She wasn’t just using her natural talents?”
“It’s very important that we establish our terms, early on.” Simon eyed Alicia. “If you start usin’ words like ‘magic’ or ‘spirit,’ things get messy.” He took a longer drink of his beer. “The difficult bit is the baggage that comes along with certain words.”
“I saw what she did.” Alicia set her jaw stubbornly. “That wasn’t natural.”
“Well.” Simon grinned. “The thing is—”
4
June 13, 199-Six Years Ago
Syracuse, New York
“The thing is that it’s difficult for you to understand what’s happening.” Simon sat across from me, his greasy burger halfway eaten. “There are all kinds a’ stories about this kind of nonsense. Myths and the like.” He took a bite. “This is completely natural.”
“This doesn’t seem natural to me.” I sat and stared at my strawberry shake. When I glanced up at the clock, the time blew me away.
Two-thirty? How long had we been talking? I’d expected to walk in and find out it had all been some kind of con or that he was a clever pervert with a sick sense of humor.
Instead, when I had walked in the door ready to tell the crazy old coot he was full of shit, he had held out an old ball cap to me, ready with another challenge.
“Here’s the game,” he smirked. “Yesterday, I told you that you weren’t gonna make a jump.”
“It was a trick.” I slid into the booth across from him and gave him a confident smile. “I don’t know how you did it, but I’m certain it was bullshit.”
“Language.” He looked at me with genuine disapproval. “If I’m gonna teach you, I need you to at least attempt to be a young lady.”
“Teach me?” I scoffed. “What do you possibly have to teach me, Simon?”
“Here’s how it works.” He set the hat between us on the table. “I want you to put on this ball cap.”
“Why?” I glanced down at the blue and white cap, bewildered.
“Remember yesterday when you couldn’t even catch that fire escape?” He favored me with a wicked grin. “Well, today’s different. Today, you’re gonna break all your personal records.”
“Yeah?” I took the old cap in hand and tried to see anything special about it. “Why should that be?”
“I’ve already told you the way things are.” He took a long drink of his soda. “Up to you now. If you wanna know more, you’ll put the ball cap on.”
“Fine.” I pulled my hair back into a ponytail through the old battered cap. “My God, it’s amazing.” I rolled my eyes.
Yet—
It was. That cap fit perfectly. The moment I had it on my head, I felt the wild and tumultuous storm, deep in my heart. Something… stirred.
It just felt right.
“My goodness. Someone’s lost her sass.” Simon raised an eyebrow.
“Have not.” I glared at him.
“Why don’t you step outside?” He took another sip of his cola. “There’s an alley just to the side of this place. Step back there and see how good your vertical jump is today.”
“Whatever,” I sneered. “Like a ball cap is going to make a difference.”
5
September 26, 1997-Present Day
New York, New York
“I don’t know how much you remember about parkour.” I took a sip of my beer and gazed at my friends. “But I wasn’t exaggerating. A thirty-five inch vertical jump is kind of a big deal.”
“That’s true,” Rehl agreed. “There are basketball players who’d kill to hit that mark.”
“Gotta be a nineteen dexterity at least,” Baxter added.
“So there I am. Fifteen-year-old Liz, in an alleyway behind a greasy diner. I’ve got a shitty blue ball cap on my head and, probably, a pissed off look on my face.”
“Language,” Simon muttered, then favored me with a smile. “You had more than a little spit and fire to you, I’ll agree.”
“I don’t know if you recall,” I confided to my friends, “but I was really proud of the progress I’d made.”
“Like I don’t remember,” Rehl scoffed. “You were all about trying to get us to practice three hours a day after school when you still lived in the city.”
“When I stood in that alleyway and pulled off a vertical jump almost three times as high as anything I had ever done, I flipped my shit.”
Simon harrumphed but didn’t chide about language.
“Three times?” Alicia fixed me with an uncertain glance.
“I could literally jump higher than I was tall.” I shook my head, remembering. “Like I suddenly had a dexterity of…” I glanced at Baxter. “Twenty-two.”
“That’s…” Baxter trailed off, his voice more than a little awed.
“Wonderful,” I admitted. “It was like flying. On my first jump, I could almost see the roof of Merkin’s. I must have looked like a goofy idiot.”
“An hour passed before she came inside,” Simon said.
“It’s not just the jumping, though.” Rehl affixed me with a shrewd eye.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There’s more to what you did in the anime room.”
“Wind. There was wind in there,” Baxter stated.
“I’ll get to that.” I drew in a deep breath to say more.
“How does it work?” Alicia leaned forward, a bit eagerly, I thought. “It must be some kind of psychic ability or mystical power.”
“Again.” Simon affixed her with a stern eye. “Words, and the names we give things, truly matter.” He sighed. “As soon as we decide what Liz does is some kind of ‘magic,’ all kinds of other problems pop up along with it.”
“Like what?” Alicia sipped her beer, obviously not convinced.
“There are all kinds of urban fantasy stories that are popular now.” He favored her with a grin. “People gush on about vampires and werewolves and such. Also, a lot of the old religions are resurfacing.” He gestured to the pentacle hung about her neck.
“Yeah? So?” She leaned back with a huff, almost offended.
“So let’s say you decided what Liz does qualified as some offshoot of ‘magic.’” He gave her a soft smile. “That means one thing to you but somethin’ entirely different to, say, Father O’Callahan at the local parish. Or Miss Juliette, a Baptist in Jacksonville, Mississippi.”
“Prejudices.”
“More’n that.” He turned to regard me. “A lot more.”
“Believe it or not, broom-stache here really knows his weird physics.” I elbowed Simon. “Father O’Callahan is doing more than just railing on about sins and hellfire. Everyone has their own contribution to the reality we experience.”
“So we create our own reality.” Alicia, freshly anointed in the logic of two dozen New Age books, nodded slowly.
“Yes,” I hedged hesitantly.
“No,” Simon stated firmly. “Liz is capable of shifting some of the laws of physics, literally altering reality along a few parameters. Yet neither you, I, nor anyone we know can really explain how that happens. Therefore, it’s kinda ignorant to simply lump it into ‘magic.’”
“Magic is just a mental shorthand anyway,” Rehl muttered thoughtfully. “Altering reality with your will sure looks a lot like magic.”
“Great point!” Simon agreed. “Maybe it’s better to use ‘altering reality’ as the idea for what people like Liz do.”
“But not just Liz,�
� Baxter spoke thoughtfully, gazing at Simon. “You did… something back at the hotel, back when that creature attacked us.”
“Yeah.” I rested my chin on my hands and lent my tone a sarcastic lilt. “Tell us how summoning angelic presences isn’t some kind of ‘magic.’”
“That’s different, I promise.” Simon somehow nodded at Baxter and scowled at me in the same motion. “We’ll get to that.”
“So, if it’s not magic or something psychic,” Rehl puzzled, “what exactly is it? How does Liz do these things?”
6
June 13, 1991-Six Years Ago
Syracuse, New York
“The feller who first taught me a little bit about all this crazy nonsense had a touch of a poetic bent.”
“Yeah?” I took another sip of my strawberry shake. I still didn’t quite know what to think. My heart still thrummed in my chest, and my nerves tingled with readiness to run. “By ‘crazy nonsense’ do you mean ‘conning teenage girls?’”
“Not a con. You been cheatin’.” He cut back to his initial thesis from the day before. “You believed you had an astounding vertical jump, and that it all come from training.”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t keep the sullen tone from my voice. “I’m so stoked to find out I was wrong. Not.”
“So, if it’s not all a result of training, what’s happening here?” He took a bite of fruit salad.
“You tricked me.” I narrowed my eyes. “Somehow.”
“Yes.” He nodded agreeably. “Won’t be the last time I trick you, neither. But was today a trick? Out in the alleyway?”
I gazed at the battered hat on the table between us. It felt impossible to wrap my mind around what I’d done. I’d never come close to being able to leap like that.
It’d felt like flying.
“I just don’t know.”
“It’s weird,” he said. “I get that. Hard to explain. That’s why I thought I’d borrow someone else’s poetic metaphors for a bit.”
“Okay.” I waved my hand, still focused upon the hat.
“My teacher was a guy named Rufus. Cool guy.”
“Rufus?”
He ignored me and carried on, “Rather ’n talk about mystical power or chakras, he cut straight to the heart of things.” Simon
stabbed the air with his fork.
Mystical power? I shook my head. Where had this conversation gone off the rails?
“‘Simon,’ he used to say, ‘I want you to imagine some kind of day care, filled with bitty babies.’”
“He did, did he?” I had just about decided to grab the baseball cap and leave. “Poetic.”
“This isn’t the poetic bit,” he grumbled. “Now imagine one day one of those babies stood up and started to walk.” Simon raised an eyebrow at me. “Pretty crazy right?”
“No.” I stared at him as if he were an idiot. “That’s the natural order of things. Eventually, babies start walking.”
“Ah.” Simon gave me a clever smile. “I see. It’s the natural order for infants to learn to walk. But that’s a miracle to the other babies, right? Something inconceivable!”
“I… guess?”
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s natural for a child to learn to walk, here. What I’m talking about is the reaction of the crawlers.”
“Okay.”
“So what if it’s the natural order for people to alter reality around them? Say, do things that seem impossible to others?”
“So, we’ve moved from Liz having mad skills to New Age juju?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve done?” He leaned forward. “Buttercup, Olympic gymnasts can’t leap the way you did while you wore that hat.”
“So,” I grumbled as I leaned back in my seat, “the old man I met in the alleyway is claiming I have some kind of power? And that it’s human nature to… what, grow into being able to work miracles?”
“I’m forty seven.” He scowled. “Not old.”
I shook my head and took another drink of my shake. “It’s stupid. If people could create miracles, we would hear about it. People would experience all kinds of strange shifts in reality.”
“Would they?” Simon took another bite of his burger and spent a moment chewing. “Like teenage girls who can jump like a grasshopper?”
“I think you’re insane.” I shook my head.
“How high was your vertical jump when you went outside?” Simon reached across the table and took his battered ball cap back. “Are you insane too? How do you account for what happened here?”
“I dunno.”
“I’d like you to consider the possibility that I’ve shown you something incredible. Nothin’ you’ve experienced before can explain it.”
“I get that.” I sipped at my shake and met his blue eyes. “I definitely can’t explain it.”
“I told you that you were cheating yesterday. What I meant is that you weren’t simply leaping under the strength of your muscles, even though you thought you were. There’s another process in play, somethin’ you didn’t know about before.”
“So… I’m a mutant.”
“You’re—?” He blinked. “What?”
“There’s a whole comic series about what you’re talking about… like with the babies? People mutate into the next stage of humanity. There’s all kinds of racism and prejudice, and the heroes deal with it.”
“No, idiot. You aren’t a mutant.” He scowled at me. “It’s a story. Just a metaphor. I’m not revealing secret history here. Just an idea.”
“I’m waiting for the poetry.”
“The thing is, Elizabeth—”
“Liz.”
He chuckled. “The thing is, Rosebud, your mutant comic assumes that I’m talking about something mankind is turning into.” He thrust his fork into a small bowl of fruit salad. “I’m saying, what if this is what humanity is now?”
“Well, again, if humanity has these powers, I think someone would have noticed,” I insisted. “I just don’t follow.”
“That’s because you’re used to being one of the crawlers.” He set his fork down. “That’s okay. I have to tell you a story. It should enlighten you, just a bit.”
7
September 26, 1997-Present Day
New York, New York
“So let me tell y’all a story.” Simon took another sip of his beer. “Actually a buncha stories, but it’s really just one.”
“Is it about monsters who can possess theater screens?” Bax took a sip of beer.
“Yes.” Simon pointed at the scrawny guy. “Kind of.” He paused. “Okay, no.”
“I’m tellin’ a story about the stories people tell. It’s about myths, and the truths behind them.”
“I like mythology!” Alicia smiled, slightly less sullen now that she’d had a drink. “So which ones?”
“Most specifically?” Simon appeared to think for a moment. “The Eden story, the one with the apple, but also the tower of Babel. I can throw in Hesiod and his Chronologies of the Ages of Man, the stories of Atlantis, and the Hindu tales of the Yugas.” He thought a moment. “Those are also the ages of humanity, but from India.”
“Quite the mixed bag.” Baxter eyed him skeptically.
“I’ve heard this one.” I grinned at my friends. “I’ll tell the barkeep we need another round.” I stood and stepped away.
And here Simon said I’d have to tell all this to my friends myself. I smirked. Sucker.
When I came back mere minutes later, Simon was already hard at work, waving one hand while he articulated his favorite theory.
“What I’m saying is all of these examples are actually the same damn story!” He jerked his chin at me as I sat down.
“I don’t see it.” Alicia titled her head and furrowed her brow. “The Judeo-Christian story of Eden and the story of the Tower of Babel take place in the same narrative. How can they be discussing the same event?”
“You know how there are dozens and dozens of different flood myt
hs?”
“Right.” Rehl leaned back to expound, “Some people think there actually was some kind of great flood or perhaps a racial memory of the melt during the Ice Age.”
“That’s bogus though.” Baxter looked around the table. “There may be a lot of stories about the flood, but we know it never happened. Many cultures existed during that time that kept meticulous records.” He paused. “None of them mentioned being entirely wiped out.”
“That’s a good point,” Simon agreed. “The Chinese, the Sumerians, the Babylonians…” He took a drink of his beer. “They all had flood myths. Deluge myths occur in ’most every ancient culture across the world.”
“That’s why I always liked the idea that it was some kind of racial memory.” Rehl gazed at Baxter. “The Ice Age covered most of the northern hemisphere. I’d think the melting of that much ice would be something humanity would remember for a long time.”
“Maybe something in prehistory,” Baxter mused, but I could tell that he wasn’t sold.
“Exactly.” Simon pointed at him. “Well, I’m gonna suggest to you that there’s ’nother event humanity remembers, and we still tell stories ’bout it, just like we do with the Flood.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “This story is about our little magpie here, and people like her.”
“I still don’t see how the tower of Babel ties in with Hesiod.” Alicia shook her bright head. “I studied Greek myths in school. They’re too different.”
“Are they?” Simon chuckled and took a long drink from the mug I’d brought.
“It’s about to get deep in here.” I nudged Rehl.
“Once, everything was perfect.” Simon set his beer down and peered at each of us from across the table. “People were good, the world was happy, and all was prosperous.” He winked. “Perhaps, as in stories of Atlantis or the Satya Yuga, mankind even possessed highly advanced technology; things that we can’t grasp today.”
“Okay.” Alicia still seemed skeptical.