“NO!” Mickey growls with a beastly expression, shoving Cider away from her, then blocking the door, and repeating “no!” in a begging, whimpering squeals and shouts.
“Please. Don't, go. Don't leave, you’re new memories, hahaha, you mustn't leave me alone again, you can't hahaha, you can't leave me alone again. No! no not again no no nooo, please,” Mickey says with his voice changing by the syllable.
Their shadows appear to be growing, sharpening and flickering over the steeple walls. Twisting around the candle's light glazing the white of their eyes in the light of flames brightening with the rising intensity of Mickey's mad tantrum. Anna and Cider are standing with their backs pressed against a shattered piano, next to the fireplace with candle flame inches from them. Cider stands in front of her, holding his arm protectively across her chest. They're opposite the door of their escape, that's guarded by this unraveling lonely lunatic who’s mad ranting is only escalating. Cider’s gun is drawn, waiting to see if Mickey will calm down, but he won't derail his raging mental break down. The medic's unhinging, monstrously screaming through a maelstrom of manically shifting emotions. He stops spinning in place to face them with a pathetic whimper, then snaps into a mindless gaze.
“If I kill you, then you have to stay. You'll never leave, you’ll be with me, forever,” Mickey growls, then howls with a laughter that strips Anna bare of her bravery, lost but for the feeble safety of Cider’s arm across her chest.
“You'll be here with me...you'll be my new friends forever,” Mickey growls.
“I told you so,” Anna says to Cider.
“Jeez, now's not the time for that Anna,” he quips.
“Shut up, we’re gonna die anyway,” she yells at him.
“Take out your gun,” he says.
“He's not alive Cider!”
“Aim for his eyes, shoot things that might not be alive in the eyes,” he says.
“What if he's a ghost?” she asks.
“We have to try to see anyway, right,” Cider says. The madman of a medic pulls a hand full of syringes from one of his many pants pockets, presumably to stab them with.
“Did you actually touch him?”
“No, I mean yeah, I shook his hand...for a while.”
“We’re gonna die and be trapped in this desolate place. With this lunatic!” she yells in his ear.
“May die,” he corrects her.
“Cider!”
“I'll take at least one of you with me, hehehe, but which will it be? hahahaha. Which one will be my friend forever and ever,” Mickey says in the distorting voice of a demonically disturbed medic.
“See I told ya he wasn’t a ghost,” Cider says as though he won an argument, just before a wooden shriek cracks like thunder through the room, then thundering again.
“More company, the more the merrier,” Mickey says, lustily licking his lips. Someone, a few people are wrapping violently at the door, banging again and again, and coming to sound like room shaking rumbling drum roll. The morning shines through as the heavy door shrills and splinters, then breaks under a stampede of jack boots. Followed by violent shouts pouring in from the other side as a six man death squad enters with long fox fur coats and rifles in white gloved hands.
“What, no no, oh no, why?” the medic begs, “no, no they’re coming for me, to take me away,” he shouts in fear. No longer laughing, now cowering in place crouching away from the noise with bent trembling knees. Daylight breaks over the shoulders of the last two of the soldiers storming the tiny decaying dwelling. With wrathful faces their rifles butts already strike Mickey's head and take the wind from his stomach. One soldier snatches Mickey’s dog tags, leaving red welts around his neck. The medics trips on the candlestick while back pedaling, and wrestled to the ground and beaten until he lays motionless. He hardly had the chance to beg or plea. Cider doesn’t move, and Anna isn't breathing, only hoping the soldiers don’t even see her. After breaking his bones the fox furs lift him to his feet and deliver a final stroke to break his nose to blood. Not even acknowledging the silent two, they drag his broken body through the opened doorway and take him away whimpering and weakly struggling.
“Yes, finally, yes,” Mickey shouts halfway down the trodden clay path.
“What?” she asks.
“Shhh,” he says.
“Yes! hahaha, finally!, finally!, I can see it for myself. I will be free, finally free of all of this, ahahaha!” Mickey's practically singing, elated there's a change to his eternity of living everyday that is exactly the same. After a few seconds the two tiptoe to the doorway to see Mickey being dragged on his back down the trampled path back toward the trenches. His exuberant face disappears as they turn around a shallow hill. Cider immediately starts pillaging the pilfered nest, throwing anything shiny he can see into a canvas sack.
“They're taking me away, hahaha, to a better place. finally it must be, yes finally I am free of this life,” his screams of joy, and praise for his captors reach their ears from over the hills.
“My heaven, hahaha my own heaven,” The medic shouts in embrace of his own death with every shred of his being.
“Salvation, eternal bliss, hahaha,” Mickey shouts almost a minute later. Another man shouts something inaudible. Then the crackling bolts of a four man firing squad snap in their ears, as echoes of the sound of Mickeys exorcism from this existence. Anna stands with arms folded next to the dead medic's makeshift mailbox. Cider lights a tasteless smoke, and spills out a drop of the tasteless whiskey.
“Well that was that huh,” he says.
“You think he's going to heaven?” she asks.
“I'm not religious, I believe in chance, probability and that. But if it's real to him, maybe. Maybe he’s going to his heaven, whatever that is,” he says shrugging as to say it’s not his problem.
“I suppose not. I mean he killed those people, thousands, does it matter more if you believe that you're right to do what you have done, or is it just that you have done it?” she asks.
“Something to ponder I suppose, but either way he faced the firing line,” he says.
“Let's get out of here, this place gives me the creeps,” she says shivering with folded arms.
“We need gas,” he says.
“He said it was where?”
“There’s some right here,” she says pointing to two red five gallon canisters leaning against the other side of the rotting cottage.
“That makes things a lot simpler, wonder why he didn’t just say that. Are they full?” he asks.
“They're heavy, ones full,” she says nearly falling over trying to lift it.
“This one isn’t as heavy,” she says.
“Half empty or half full?”
“Whatever, let's get the hell out of here already,” she says. They grab and drag the gallon jugs, leaving snail trails as inch high trenches through the grassy knoll and thick gossamer. They backtrack through the gap in the tree line they'd come through. Stopping to stomp suspended craters of the sky’s reflection from the pond's still surface, and leaving the red sycamore tree blemished by their initials. Struggling to pull her jug, Anna knocks the white picket gate post out of place as they pass through it, then descends the mossy stone slab stairs. The promise of paved streets and the car seat are consoling to her tired feet and wobbly arms hardly holding the heavy red jug. Back on the paved path leaving the daily war and picket fence far behind, and closer to getting out of this melancholic stillness masquerading as serenity.
They reach the pristine seeming soot covered car, hardly even able to see it's pearl white paint. The smoke is still standing in the cabin, and their webs still in the place they've left them when leaving it behind.
“Okay, fill her up,” she says dropping the jug with a thud and getting in the driver’s seat, “and no more smoking unless you blow it out window.”
“Fine,” he says.
“And hurry up will ya. I wanna drive already, and remember no smoking while you’re pumping gas either. We d
on't want to blow up now do we,” she says nearly singing.
“Fine,” he sighs, though happy they made it out and that she’s still with him. The engine rumbles awake, galloping in place, until she jams the shifter into first, and pushes the pedal to the floor. The car glides at forty miles per hour while wavering from one side of the road to the other like a bowling ball on a lane with bumpers. He sits patiently, thinking of what he might have done somewhere, or to someone to end up being a bowling ball for miles and miles on end. She has her head out the window in the windless air, yelling with elation into the green, black and white vacuum as she drives.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Pink lemonade
She suspects she’s been at the wheel for much longer than she thinks, though she doesn’t really know. The outlines of the sloping hills, the road, of everything she can see start to soften. She sees the steering wheel slowly spreading, splitting into two wheels, then three. Her hands multiply into ghostly duplicates, with each aglow as pink and yellow reverberating blurs resembling visible echoes radiating outward. Filling the interior of the car with pink and yellow fluorescent light flowing from everything they can see.
“What’s happening?” She asks, enamored by the eye pleasing mackle.
“I don't know,” he drones, lost in amusement of the road splitting in all directions, every second a new path branches out on either side. Probability waves as yellow and pink phantom like light emanates from their bodies in every possible place they can be, of every infinitely passing instant of the present. The phantoms of the car speed up and slow down, swerve, straighten, running off the road, crashing into the hills, rolling over with her driving and him driving at the same time, always though down the road, roads. The two look over at the other seeing every one of their expressions sweeping across their faces at once.
“Oh!” he says, as his movements echo infinitely outward. “these are probability waves, we’re between places at the moment.
“A probability wave?” she asks.
“What is a probability wave?” he asks. Looking down at her, “it’s what could have been at any given instant rather than what is of the present, our present.”
“Wait, what?” she asks a bit befuddled.
“Whenever you do something, you are doing it in the circumstance that you are in, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” she says, waiting for more.
“So there are so many things you could’ve done under the same circumstance, like thinking of what you should have said after you’ve already said something else.”
“Yeah so. That happens to everyone,” she says.
“So when you do one thing and not the other, of any of the other plausible actions of that instant, the actions not taken are still made.”
“How could they be if I, or whoever hasn’t done them, having instead done another?” she asks.
“Each of the infinite number of other possibilities become like an echo. The start of a probability path divergent to the path you’re on according to the acion that you’ve taken, you’ve taken. It still happens but to one of the infinite others of you,” he says, “echoes of yourself.”
“So it’s all predetermined is what you’re saying, like fate?”
“No, sort of, I mean to me you are who you are based on choice and circumstance, but in a weird sort of way you, me, anything that ever moved, let alone thought, exists as every possible thing or person you can be at the same time.”
“How do you suppose that?”
“Because if the infinite others, the echoes of you, are echoes to you, then you must also be an echo to them,” he says, “the probability wave actually exists at all times and we can only see them now because we are between places, between Altos and not on the proper train. I think it's the probability waves cast pink and yellow, ebbing and flowing florescence at the instant of divergence, that it’s what actually fills the entire eternity, but who knows, you know,” he says.
“Ours?” she asks.
“If you want to think that, sure,” he says, “but I was thinking of everything to ever exist simultaneously echoing to fill the volume of all known and unknown realities, physical or not,” he says.
“Then which one is the real one, me? the rock we see, or the pink and yellow ebbing and flowing echo?” she asks.
“All of them, us, me, you them, everything is at once. Though the one you see I guess, as you see it, is as it is when you see it.”
“Wait, then what’s the length of a moment, a single instant in time when a divergence from one path to another can take place?” she asks biting her bottom lip white.
“I don’t know, the smallest measurement in time, but who’s measurement. The whole of existence is completely filled with the infinite variations of all things contained in it, of itself, and it’s infinity. Infinity, eternity, the same thing really,” he says.
“So, inch by inch, if the big bang-”
“The big bang?” he asks, stressing the the.
“Uh, a big bang occurs in the smallest fraction of a measurement of time later or before, and the entire universe would be different,” she says.
“An, entire universe, but yeah something like that,” he says.
“Even so, if all things were the same and the moon collides with the earth an inch off, this would place each slightly out of orbit right?” she asks.
“Hmm, yes I suppose, I think I know what you’re getting at,” he says.
“So that means every possible way, inch by inch by inch must have occurred and will occur, throughout...forever,” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
“So it's that every eventuality of a single moment, in all the infinities of time, is in every conceivable place at once, and fills the entirety of eternity,” she says.
“Close, but I suppose that the probability waves, that expand infinitely are what eternity itself is made of,” he says.
“You’re saying existence itself exists within itself and due to itself at the same time?” she asks.
“There’s something about entropy I forgot, I think it's related,” he says stroking his chin behind an innumerable number of pink and yellow phantom facial expressions.
“Wait, then what is the future, you said splits at the present, so what is the future?”
“There is no future and no past, only the forever present. We can only ever be in the present through the passage of time. Everything is a construct, to attempt understand what we perceive Anna. Just because we understand things as describable doesn’t mean that anything actually is,” he says.
“Maybe, then a planet can reach its moon's orbit, but how can it reach out of the orbit of its sun?” she asks.
“Yes, sounds impossible, but that’s probably happening all around us right now. Infinitely exploding bursts of all things possible, existing in one place at once,” he says.
“Then how come we don’t see it? feel it?” she asks.
“Why would we evolve to? We are progeny of our own Alto, our own standard. We don’t feel it, or see it, we don’t perceive it so it doesn’t seem real to us,” he says.
“Hmm,” she hums with a look of consternation, “then what’s the scale?”
“The scale you mean the scope?”
“I guess”
“Infinitesimally small to the too big to even be perceivable, everything, all things, the fabric of existence itself, Anna, eternity the all of it,” he says. Anna stares at her open hands, contemplating all the constellations she’s ever seen, as microscopic spheres radiate pink and yellow waves of probability from her open palms.
“Why do you keep saying eternity?” she asks.
“Eternity is the body of all of time, all of existence.”
“Like an ocean?” she asks.
“Yeah, I kinda see that Carrots. Sort of like the ocean currents of existence,” he says.
“Then what’s at its surface?”
“What do you mean?”
“Every ocean has a sur
face with waves, you know, air above and land and birds and that kind of stuff,” she says.
“I never thought of that part, what’s outside of eternity?”
“And how big is it?” she asks.
“How big? I guess that depends on the scope of your perception of it, it goes on infinitely though. So expansive It'll overload anyone to think of it as existing in the first place. Don’t believe me? try it for a while,” he says, “I have.”
“Yes, but you didn’t say that you do, you see,” she says. Both of their pupils are dilated to the size of nickels as they look to each other and around to the flowing and ebbing pink and yellow in awe.
“What's one, of the infinite number of one’s?” he asks her as though a riddle.
“I have no idea, what do you think?”
“Hell if I know,”
“I asked what you think, not what you know?”
“What's the difference?” she asks.
“I don't know, it's just a thought,” he says.
“Ahh what do you know?” she says dismissively.
“The reason why you ask.”
“Huh,” she says.
“Is to know instead of to think,” he says.
“Well if I have to think about it, it sounds like the answer is nothing,” she says with uncertainty.
“But that’s only half the answer,” he quips.
“What’s the other half?” she asks stumped.
“Everything, one thing is all things, it's the infinity of a thing and all things collected?”
“I guess,” she says.
“What’s one person, to the one they love and who loves them?”
“Everything,” she answers, “why is everything pink and yellow?”
“I don’t know, but it makes me think of pink lemonade,” he says, as they careen through the pink and yellow probability waves radiating infinitely outward to fill the volume of existence, that they themselves persist within and perpetuate. The mackle is oscillating as shimmering fluorescent light while humming like millions of harp chords strummed at once. Converging minutes later into a seemingly singular, physically solid path of perceivable reality.
The Altonevers Page 14