by Weston Ochse
Because they kept returning to the same time, their reality took shortcuts and created the same characters with which to interact. This was why some characters were able to remember interactions with the TST’s avatars while others didn’t. But as strong as the construct was, the active minds of each member, their desires to come to terms with their environment, help others, and solve mysteries, caused ripples throughout the landscape, ripples that could send any of them into the Sefid at any moment. Which was why each of them were placed in unlikely positions, doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, in the hopes that they wouldn’t resort to their old selves, that they would become something new.
In Boy Scout’s case, he was made to be the very opposite of what he was, playing out a short period of life, then restarting, over and over and over in a controlled loop. His interaction with Joon was normally the end, but there were a few times where he’d not done vile things to her—a very precious few—the memories of what he’d done now fresh in his mind and all in an attempt to tempt the Sefid to take him.
Which it had never done.
So it was now a particular irony that he wanted to go there of his own accord.
Faood stood in his entari, what Narco had teasingly called the whirling dervish dress. Not really a dress, the entari was a garment that covered the body from the top of the chest to the bottom of the ankles. It was wide at the bottom and basically a skirt, so when Faood spun, the fabric flared. He wore a sikke atop his head. The conical wool fez was form-fitted to his head and made him look a foot taller. He admitted he didn’t have to wear the ensemble to travel through to the Sefid, but it helped him focus.
Boy Scout, on the other hand, was stripped to his underwear. He’d need to get in the pool. The water acted as a conduit for the daeva’s power. Proximity to the creature was important. But first, Faood needed to dance the variation of the dhikr that caused Boy Scout to shift reality. Once Boy Scout was slipstreaming, Faood would join him.
“I could just dance a few steps and put you in a fugue, like I did after Narco attacked, but this is more difficult. I need you to go very deep, so I’m going... how you say? Old school,” Faood said.
Bully, Lore, McQueen, and Criminal were in the other room. Seeing his dhikr would have a deleterious effect on them, so it was reasoned that they could come out when it was over.
Boy Scout sat on one of the round stones, the water up to his chest. Narco sat slumped beside him, his face barely above the water.
Faood stood on shore.
“Unlike before, where we wanted you to think of yourself in Los Angeles, I want you to instead focus on the image of a burning sky.”
“Burning, as in a daeva?” Boy Scout asked, glancing at the pulsating creature.
“Think bigger. Think... are you certain you want to do this? It might not work. I might lose you and not be able to find you.”
Boy Scout waved his hand impatiently. “I’m going.”
Faood licked his lips and nodded. “So imagine a burning sky. Think a hundred daeva. Imagine if the entire sky were burning.”
“Is that it? Are the daeva the key to the Sefid?”
“They are the power source that allows us to do what we do. Master Rumi discovered it first, after trapping a daeva and experimenting. He also discovered that they are a gateway to the Sefid. We must go through their minds to get there.”
“Through their minds?”
“Not literally, but it’s the best explanation. Our consciousness will touch the consciousness of the daeva to allow us to enter the Sefid.”
Boy Scout had become accustomed to being near the sleeping daeva, but only because it had never been awake. The idea of going into its mind was seriously disturbing.
“Just keep concentrating on the burning sky and I will guide you through. Also, never speak with anything. Even if it claims to know you, do not speak with it.”
“What’ll happen if I speak with it?”
“You don’t want to know. Just don’t speak.”
“What about you? Shouldn’t I speak to you?”
“Speak to no one. You won’t even know who I am.”
“How will I know not to speak? On each of our previous journeys, we weren’t even aware that it wasn’t real.”
“This is different. Your frame of mind dictates what you remember and don’t remember. Where before we concentrated on the process being secret, now it’s completely out in the open. You’re not going to Los Angeles. You’re going to the Sefid with all of your faculties.”
Boy Scout wasn’t sure if he understood that last part, but he did have one final question. “You said you’ve done this before?”
Faood nodded.
“How many times?”
“Once.”
“Did it work?”
Faood sighed. “You’re the one who pressed to come along. You don’t have to come. I can do this without you.”
Boy Scout waved his right hand. “No, I understand. I just wanted to know what I was getting into.” He paused. “Go ahead. Do the dance.”
Faood nodded, then he flexed his arms and stretched his knees for a moment.
“But really,” Boy Scout asked. “Did it work?”
Faood began to dance.
As always, Boy Scout’s gaze went to the man’s feet.
Faood spun slowly at first, then started to pick up speed. His arms were up and his head was cocked to the right, accentuated by the length of the fez. But his feet were the motor for it all. Staying in one place, Faood spun and spun, his feet, propelling him.
Boy Scout became mesmerized by the movement, trying to count the steps.
Then Boy Scout blinked and he was no longer in the cistern.
Wind whipped around him, sending him staggering. He looked down and saw that he was standing on a rough black surface, much like hard tar. He wore tennis shoes and was in gym sweats. His legs and lungs felt as if he’d just tossed off five miles. A gust of wind hit him again, and he went down on one knee. He looked out and saw that he was impossibly high up. He could see all of… where was he? All of New York laid out in front of him.
There up in Midtown rose the Empire State Building, made iconic back in the 1930s with King Kong gripping the needle while swatting at biplanes. Turning to his right, he took in the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. He kept turning and saw Red Hook, then Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty, facing east and beckoning the world to come into her bosom. And finally, Ellis Island—that first place so many of his country’s ancestors had stopped before they made America their home.
Where was he to see all this? Lower Manhattan, certainly. But the only building high enough to have this view would have been… one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He jerked his head around and saw the other building, right there. But that would be impossible. Both towers had been destroyed on September 11, 2001, when each had been hit by a plane.
Then came an explosion with a wave of sound so loud it was like heaven was scraped raw and screaming. He was thrown off his feet. He hit the roof hard and rolled as it undulated beneath him. He found himself bouncing from the middle toward the edge, closer and closer. He reached out, desperate to grab something… anything.
And then it stopped.
The screaming sky.
The building shaking itself to pieces.
He was almost back on his feet when the second explosion hit. Although mentally he knew this was the remainder of the fuel blowing from the remains of the first aircraft, it seemed as if another plane had hit right after the first. He flew into the air, straight up. The wind caught him, and like a giant hand smacked him back toward the center of the roof, then slammed him down.
The landing shot the air out of from his lungs. He lay gasping, not only to breathe, but because of his left shoulder. The bursa sac must have ruptured because of the sheer level of exquisite pain he was feeling. A wash of heat and fire suddenly enveloped the top of the roof. Had he not been pushed to the middle, Boy Scout would
have become a smoking cinder.
He pushed his way to his feet using his right arm, which then cradled his left, helping to immobilize it to reduce the pain. He could look at his watch, but he didn’t need to. He knew what time it was. It was 8:46 a.m. Flight 11, which had left Logan Airport in Boston and was bound for Los Angeles International Airport, had just struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Its eighty-one passengers and eleven crew members had perished instantly as the plane entered between the ninety-third and ninety-ninth floors.
As bad as his shoulder felt, his insides twisted at the unimaginable loss of life the world was about to experience. Boy Scout knew he wasn’t really there. He was supposed to have gone to the Sefid, but he had somehow gotten off track, probably because he’d been recently thinking about the Falling Man. He had an hour and forty-two minutes to stay alive on the North Tower before it collapsed. But he only had seventeen minutes until Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower.
He’d been just finishing working out when the planes hit. He’d driven home oblivious to the events, instead listening to a CD of Pearl Jam’s greatest hits and belting out the lyrics to "Jeremy." He’d just gotten out of the shower when his friend Dave Conrad called him and told him to turn on the television. Boy Scout had asked what channel, but Dave had said, Any of them. And he’d been right. Even MTV was covering the event.
But now he was here, reliving it.
But to what end?
He stood as close to the edge as he could with the powerful winds and waited.
At 9:02 a.m he saw Flight 175 coming as inexorably as a wave.
At 9:03 he watched in stunned silence as the plane hit the South Tower farther down than the one that hit the North Tower. The explosion was tremendous and parts of the plane flew to the north and east.
A hot wind blew, drying his tears.
He wasn’t about to stand here and watch another three thousand murders. He wasn’t about to go down with the tower. He screamed, then took off running. He hit the edge at full speed and propelled himself outward. For one brief second, he was weightless. Then gravity yanked him hard. He was falling, tumbling—his view of the ground, then the building, then the plane, then the sky, then the ground. The plaza was beneath him. He could see people looking up at him and pointing. Now at a hundred and twenty-two miles an hour, he couldn’t do anything but strike the earth, just as the planes had struck the towers. Right before he hit, he saw a young blond-haired boy, much the same as he had been as a child, standing and holding his mother’s hand, a thumb in his mouth, tears in his eyes, watching him. In the boy’s eyes, he saw the reflection of the sky—a sky on fire, a burning sky—and the boy and the city and the country and the world would never be the same again.
Then the universe slammed into him.
A brief instance of pain was replaced by nothing.
Sweet nothing. No 9/11. No ruined shoulder. No body. Just. Plain. Nothing. And it was all white.
There was so much white that there was no up. No down. No sideways. Just white. He might as well have been floating in a snowflake. There was nothing to be seen. He held out a hand but there was nothing there. He held out his other. Still nothing. He reached for his face, but there was no reaching and no face. He was an essence. And as much as it should matter to him, it didn’t. He embraced the white, the nothing that surrounded him. It was a relief from the visage of the boy and the burning sky and the soon-to-collapse buildings, each one a dagger in the innocence of a world where such things only happened in horror books or the very darkest dystopian science fiction novels.
Welcome to the Sefid, he said to himself.
Chapter Thirty-Two
TIME PASSED, OR at least he thought it did. He had zero points of reference. There was no up. There was no down. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see anything but white. It was as if he’d ceased to exist, but hadn’t really. His thoughts went to one of his sophomore reading assignments: Johnny Got His Gun. By the title, he’d thought that the teacher had assigned the class an action book, but it was far from that. Boy Scout learned that Dalton Trumbo, the author, hated war of all types. The book was an anti-war book—a testament to what could happen to an American native son. The main character had been severely wounded in World War I. He’d lost his arms and legs. He also lost his mouth, ears, nose and eyes. All he had was his sense of touch—which was more than Boy Scout currently had. He remembered obsessing about the book, wondering and desperate to know how it felt to be Joe Bonham, the main character. Even now, he could see their parallels, as both Joe and now Boy Scout meandered from reality to remembrance and back, sometimes blurring the lines between.
Back then, Boy Scout had been captivated by the idea of a complete loss of self. He’d even tried to get a graduate assistant in the psych department to let him use a sensory deprivation tank, to no avail. Ultimately he’d moved on, but the idea of Joe had stayed with him. Even as he rode convoys along the Highway of Death he’d thought about what might happen if his truck hit an IED and he ended up like Joe.
And now he was here.
The Sefid.
He tried to look around, hoping to see darkness mar the white, but it was impenetrable.
Was he stuck here forever?
Had he done something wrong?
Had his side trip to the Twin Towers thrown him off course?
Then it came to him. Maybe the mode of propulsion in this colorless universe was by thought.
So he thought about moving forward.
Then he thought about moving backward.
Then he stopped thinking altogether. Even if it was working, he had no reference for movement, nothing to mark his passage. In the event he was already in the right place, he didn’t want to travel too far away, to risk being lost forever.
His last thought reminded him of Lore, the story she’d told him. It was the formative event that had caused her to be the hard-nosed, intelligent, incredibly competent woman she was today.
She’d been eight years old and her family had gone on vacation to Franklin, North Carolina. They were staying in a cabin high in the Smokey Mountains. Everything was fine the first night. She and her younger brother got along, but her father had been pining from being away from the pulpit for a full week. Her mother had arranged the outing so that none of them would be near the usual technology—no Internet. No cell phone service. Just the woods, the mountains, and family.
Then the next morning they awoke and little Laurie May wasn’t there.
As it turned out, she’d gotten tired of the cabin and had decided to go home. Never mind that it was more than two hundred miles away. Never mind that there was a fresh foot and a half of snow on the ground. She was as determined as her mother and as competent as her father, so she set out on foot. Three hours later they found her, huddled beneath a tree and hypothermic. The tracks in the fresh snow had led them right to her.
Later, she told them that she’d gotten lost and had tried to go back to the cabin, but the darkness and the cold had been too much. After they returned home—vacation cut short—she was determined to learn all she could about the outdoors and how to survive it. Her mother said she should join the Girl Scouts, but Lore would have none of that. As far as she was concerned, even at the age of eight, the Girl Scouts were nothing more than a cookie delivery service. What she wanted was more like the Cub Scouts, and then the Boy Scouts when she got older. While girl’s organizations concentrated on family values and community, the boy’s clubs worked on small outdoor projects and even went camping. It wasn’t long before she discovered that her gender stood as a prohibition for such a thing.
Then she discovered Outward Bound.
Although the program had been designed for struggling teens, she found the outdoor curriculum exactly what she was looking for. She fought with her parents for the chance to go and by the time she turned nine, they finally relented. So for the next eight years, she spent all of her money making certain she could go on at least two Outward Bound events
a year—backpacking, canyoneering, canoeing, dog sledding, mountaineering, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, sailing, sea kayaking, skiing, and snowboarding. By the time she was eighteen and ready for college, she received scholarships from dozens of universities because her applications glowed with her outdoor accomplishments and how she’d eventually become an instructor who had positively impacted lives.
The next great adventure club was the military, which she gained by going to ROTC in college and being commissioned in the US Army Reserves at graduation. But instead of staying in the reserves, she’d found a way to immediately go active duty, offering her services as an intelligence officer to special mission units, which assured her that she’d see operational action, if not combat.
All because she’d gotten mad at herself for getting lost in the Smokey Mountain wilderness. To this day she had a tremendous fear of getting lost and always compensated by being the most prepared.
If only Boy Scout had her with him now. He was certain she’d know what to do.
A sound crept into his consciousness. Creaking. Repetitive creaking. He spun, or at least tried to, then he saw it. A stark black dot on the horizon, growing larger. The creaking became louder. Closer and closer. He felt intense, almost gleeful excitement at seeing something, anything. McQueen had run from what had come at him, but all Boy Scout wanted to do was embrace it.
When he finally recognized what it was, his brain misfired. He tried to wrap his thoughts around the image that was appearing before him. How could it get to the Sefid? How could this even be here? He’d thought he’d taken care of everything, giving him to the woman at the Afghan Hands program. Hadn’t she taken care of the boy? Or had she maybe been forced to give him back? But then to who?