“Do you think anyone else has ever made it this far?” Alex asked his mother one evening when she seemed to be doing better and up for conversation.
“Hard to picture dunomads in a place like this. Even the ones your father described seemed to be from the desert.”
“What did he say about them?”
“Oh just hypothesizing. He didn’t know anything for sure, but he was pretty convinced that the ones who attacked Teleopolis were probably the city’s criminals. They saw us and were jealous.”
“Of our freedoms.”
Olesianna let out a little chuckle, not quite a laugh, but more like a derisive snort. “For our freedoms,” she repeated distastefully. “No. For our stuff. We had everything, and they were within sight but starving in the desert.”
“And that’s what made them attack us?” It was counter to the standard Teleopolan tale, and for that alone, it intrigued Alex, but something didn’t seem completely right about it.
“That was your father’s theory.”
“So the hate was about wanting our things…” Alex said to himself, referring to the reason the dunomad’s version of the will.
“Probably. We had all of the food and water.”
“So it was our fault.”
“Oh no, your father would disagree with that, Alex.”
Alex felt a stinging disappointment from his father, a figure with whom he still had a relationship even if it was distant and imagined.
Olesianna continued. “Life’s more complicated than that.”
A thought quickly jumped into Alex’s mind. He recalled one of the nuggets from his book on politics and something a man named Mill or maybe Benjamin thought up. It was that you could govern a society by numbers, equating the good with the bad, determining which outweighed which, and decide from there. It had been an attractive idea to him but now it suddenly seemed in conflict with what his father was telling him through his mother. Alex wondered: if there could somehow have been some person who had seen everything from the beginning and could put it all in perspective, would he or she be able to put it all in numbers? Alex felt for sure that he could have if given the opportunity, and he could say for certain whose fault it was. Even if people couldn’t know what the truth was, it still existed, didn’t it?
They were both quiet for a long time, one focused on the now the other, the past.
Alex’s thoughts meandered along until the next one came out as words. “So do you think anyone else ever made it to the mountains?”
“I don’t think so, Alex.” Olesianna was leaning against the window now, her eyes closed.
“I bet they took the same path we did.”
Olesianna forced out the words, trying to humor her son. “Why do you say that?”
“I just have a feeling.” Alex paused for a minute and then continued. “I think it’s interesting how people can take the same path, but can’t have the same experiences on it.”
Olesianna gave an agreeing murmur, but Alex felt like she was no longer listening.
“Is it just me, or do those trees look funny?” Alex asked.
“What do you mean?” She asked listlessly.
“Those trees in the distance, down that hill. They look… funny.”
“They look like normal trees, Alex.”
But Alex was sure. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something strange about them.”
Eventually, after navigating down a rather treacherous hillside, Alex came to understand what was peculiar about this forest. When he first saw them, Alex would have guessed they were a mile or so away, but it wasn’t till nightfall that they reached grove of the enormous tree trunks. They were so large in fact that they had created an optical illusion, appearing to be much closer when in fact they were five times the size of a normal tree and nearly that distance further away.
Nothing else in the area appeared to be equally disproportionate. The rest of the foliage remained similarly sized to those in the mountains, as did the fauna. Unnerved by the trees though, Olesianna begged Alex to make their journey through this valley as quick as possible and he agreed. For the night, Alex spent an hour camouflaging the hover car in a nestled slope along a hillside. He used branches and debris to cover up their presence and when he got inside and closed the door, found that the twigs and leaves made a wondrous frame around the windshield. Alex stared up at the beauty before him. Through the sticks and grass was a scene in nature that was nearly indescribable in its beauty.
Above, were swaying saplings and an occasional owl soaring across the black and purple sky as the nearly full moon rested precariously on the limbs of those giant trees – a type of redwood, unbeknownst to Alex. He stared at the scene for hours until finally he slipped into a dreamful sleep, the picture before him still lingering under his eyelids.
Suddenly, Alex awoke to find himself in cold darkness. Everything was black, and though he could not see a thing and only felt a hard surface against his face and prone body, he knew that the darkness before him stretched on forever. There was a strange haze hovering around him, masking the sounds of this frigid place the way a mist obscures vision. Rolling onto his back, Alex was suddenly blinded by a sharp rift of light above him. It was long and narrow and stretched on and on. It was like he was looking through a massive door that was opened just a crack, the sun itself on just the other side. Feeling dirt and pebbles against his back Alex squirmed and tried to sit up. His hands were bloodied and his hip was badly bruised. He was going to die there in the crevasse.
Alex sat up with a start and quickly threw off his blanket. He was sweating and felt confined. Where once the camouflaged hover car had given him a sense of fortification and safety through the night, it now seemed like a coffin. He had to get free. Scrambling outside and stumbling into an open area between the giant trees, Alex fell onto his back and spread out his arms and his legs as far as he could. The grass was soft and cold and the dew helped to cool his overheated body. Looking up at the sky, Alex was no longer trapped in his dream, that frightful memory of the crevasse which still haunted him. He was out in the open now and safe.
An inch worm from a blade of grass slowly crawled across Alex’s chest and he tilted his chin down to watch its journey. Alex imagined a tiny version of himself standing there. In an instant, a sort of epiphany struck him. Alex found himself looking up from the surface of his own chest, his hand resting on one of the course hairs of the worm as he jogged alongside it. He could see how much larger the trees were to his tiny body and the body of the worm. They were now so enormous from where he stood that he felt feverish.
Alex could recall having a high temperature when he was younger and having an odd pulsing sensation in his arms, as if they were both very large and very small at the same time. It was like his body was inflated with air, every touch as ill-defined as the tingling pinpricks of a numb extremity. Now hovering in this state, Alex felt as if he could truly understand things like ultimate truth, the proportion of the sun to an ant, or what a view from nowhere might look like.
Lost in this daze, Alex did not hear the commotion near the hover car until Olesianna’s voice called out.
“Alex!” she shrieked. “Alex!” She was screaming his name at the top of her lungs. The forest echoed and Alex sat up quickly. His mother spotted him and frantically clambered over the hover car, rushing towards his form in the moonlight. She gripped Alex in a hug, pinning his arms to his side and holding him there tightly while rocking back and forth. Olesianna’s eyes were wide and wild.
“I thought you’d left,” Olesianna said, breathlessly.
“I just needed some air.”
“But you wouldn’t have gone too far would you?”
“No. No, I’d never go too far.” Alex managed to put his hand on the small of his mother’s back and pat her lightly. He decided that morning, just before the sun rose, that they needed to move on and so he pushed the hover car through the descending hills on a south-westerly course until after tw
o more days, the mountains leveled out and an all too familiar sight came into view.
Nestled at the foot of the mountains, and seemingly surrounded on all sides by brown and gray peaks, was a flat plane of sand.
“Another desert?”
“I guess so.”
Olesianna rung her dry hands together nervously and then looked to Alex. “What do we do?”
“Well,” Alex began. “Deserts are the hardest places to survive in, but they’re also the easiest to travel over. We could cover five times the ground we have been when moving through the valleys.”
“But towards what?”
Refusing to answer this, Alex pressed on. Now proficient in the car’s abilities along slopes, loose gravel and over obstacles, Alex navigated the hover car down a dried river bed and into the desert valley below. Before long, Olesianna was lulled into silence by the monotony of the landscape and Alex was left to his own thoughts. Both recounted their past lives in Teleopolis and without realizing it, Alex’s foot grew heavier. Gradually, he pushed the hover car up to ninety-five miles per hour, flying across the unremarkable terrain.
Rather suddenly, for they were travelling at a very high speed, they came upon some loose sand, where once the ground had been sun baked earth. It happened just as Olesianna felt she could stay awake no longer, for she only found sleep in brief moments of immense fatigue. When the panic had been numbed, she would drift into a nightmare only to wake shortly afterwards in a fright. This hard-won state of rest was ripped away and replaced with a surge of adrenaline as the sound of the loose sand whipped against the underside of the hover car. They were enveloped in a tan fog as Alex hit the brakes hard. Two seconds later they were flying through the air.
The hover car had decelerated quickly but still crested the first sand dune at forty miles per hour. It cleared the dip on the other side of the peak and landed directly on the ridge of the next bank. All in all, it would have been a nearly flawless stunt except that the hover car’s systems, as a safety measure against sudden drops, automatically tried to cushion their fall by diverting all power to the lift plate. They bounced off this second dune’s peak, displacing a lot of loose sand in the process and continued on, with a good deal of momentum, plowing steeply into the leeward side of the next dune. The engine sputtered to a stop.
Olesianna’s body screamed for her to wake. A survival mechanism was warning her that she was dying and pulled her out of unconsciousness. She was covered in as much sweat as if she had been completely submerged in water. The heat inside the hover car was something she had never experienced before. It burnt her skin and she felt as if her eyes were boiling inside of her head. She shut them tightly and put her hands to them, trying to push against the pressure she felt in her skull. Touching the metal door handle too quickly to feel the searing heat, she opened the door of the hover car. It was sunset but the temperature had not yet fallen and the hover car was still oven hot from the time it spent in the sun without power. Taking in a breath of comparably cooler air, she regained herself. Her body ached with muscle cramps so tight they felt stronger than any muscle she possessed. She quickly went back into the car to get Alex ignoring the dizzying blur of piping hot air that escaped from the door. But he was not there. Alex was gone and there was dried blood caked onto the dashboard. She quickly pulled herself back outside and ran over to the driver’s side door. It looked as if he had fallen out after the vehicle came to a stop and then flopped around in the sand before getting to his feet and heading off towards the mountains in the distance.
Only at this moment, when the question where is Alex? had been addressed, did Olesianna feel the tremendous thirst in her throat. It came so suddenly that she felt as if she was choking on a toxic gas. It was thirst beyond what the word normally describes, the kind of thirst that instantly alarms the possessor, begins to put her priorities into a very strict order, alerts her to the danger of continuing on any course other than immediate rectification, and makes everything else but quenching that thirst, secondary.
Olesianna glanced at the hover car and saw that the top storage crate had been dislodged and was now on the hood, and a third submerged into the sand. The large water tank was empty. If it had been compromised and drained, any evidence would have long since evaporated. She quickly snatched the mostly empty canteen in the front seat with her shirt as an improvised oven mitt, and then trudged off into the desert, following Alex’s footsteps in the sand as the sun fell behind the horizon.
Twenty-Three
Teleopolis was usually sunny but that day it looked like a rain storm might sweep in off the coast and wet the land. Nevertheless, Kyleonard, a local boy, was determined to get outside and play. His father had mentioned new neighbors down the road, living in the shanty house, as it was nicknamed, and a boy around Kyle’s age was among them. Kyleonard was desperate and so he trotted down to the rundown home.
There in the driveway by the garage was a boy of about ten who seemed to be lost in a world of his own. He talked softly to himself, narrating some kind of journey that took him to the furthest reaches of civilization.
“Hey.”
The boy in the drive way stood up and looked around.
“Do you wanna play?” Kyle asked.
“Sure,” the boy, Alexavier, responded. “What do you wanna play?”
“How about ball?”
“I don’t know how to play ball,” Alex replied.
“Are you kidding? Everyone knows how to play ball! Come on.”
Kyle took Alex to his driveway up the street where he tried to instruct him in the basic rules of ball. “My dad says if I practice real hard I can get into the big games where I can make more money than the governor does. Isn’t that great?”
Alex looked down at the ball and the over at the net which was guarded by a mean looking cloth figure poised in a ready position. Something didn’t seem right to Alex about making more money than the man who ran Teleopolis, but Kyle seemed far too happy to aspire to such wealth and fame for Alex to challenge it. “That would be great,” Alex agreed.
They played ball for a while and, not surprisingly, Kyle kept winning. After each victory, Kyle did a jumping dance and made strange noises and gestures Alex didn’t understand.
“What’s the score?” Kyleonard would ask repeatedly.
“I don’t know,” Alex replied, truly indifferent to the notion.
“Well I have fifteen points…” and Kyle would trail off insinuating that Alex had accumulated none. Later, when Alex started to understand the game and gain points at an alarming rate, Kyleonard continued bringing up the score, holding his numerical superiority over Alex until finally, Alex surpassed him. Kyle was a boy raised on ball courts, driven by his ball playing father and surrounded by other kids like him and dad’s like his. Unfortunately for Kyle, he was not very good at sports. He was small and not particularly coordinated. Being measured worthy by his mastery of a pastime had made him quick to cheat and desperate not to fail. It also and made him eager to win at things that weren’t really a game, such as conversations. Now, here he was being beaten by a boy who had just started the game. Kyle felt betrayed. He had been working his entire young life to master the sport, and was suddenly, in a painfully plain, quantitative way, inferior.
Kyleonard quickly started to get more aggressive, adding new rules and counting points for himself when there were none to be gained. As a result, Alex backed off. He let Kyle have the ball because it seemed obvious to him that Kyle wanted it far more than he did. Pretty quickly, Alex understood, in the simple, intuitive way that a ten-year-old would, that Kyle’s sense of worth teetered very precariously on a numbered scale.
“Let’s play something else,” Kyle offered after he had retaken a sufficient enough lead over Alex to declare himself the winner. “What do you wanna play? I know. Let’s play dunomads and cavalry.”
“Okay.” Alex was reluctant, but prepared himself to fight an oncoming wave of evil desert men as he hid behind a tree.
“Who’s gonna be who?”
“What?” Alex asked.
“I’ll be the cavalry, you can be the dunomad.”
“Why don’t we both be cavalry?”
“Then who do we fight?”
“The dunomads.” Alex made a gesture down the street at the wave of dunomads he had created in his mind.
Kyle looked perplexed. “Oh,” he finally ascertained. “You’re one of those kids with an imagination.” He said the word as if it was a disease of character.
Alex had no idea how to react to this. Kyle was very serious though, as if such a thing precluded him from associating with Alex. Behind him, in a window on Kyle’s house, a man stood watching them, the curtain drawn aside.
Kyle noticed him too. “I have to go,” he said.
“Bye.” Alex turned and walked down the street back to his house. “Did you win?” he heard a deep male voice ask Kyle from the porch.
“Sure did, Dad.”
“That’s my boy.”
This first meeting was enough to sufficiently summarize Kyle and Alex’s strained friendship thereafter. Kyle was always competitive and always inferior to Alex’s natural abilities. They were polar opposites in that Alex was naturally gifted but never tried, and Kyleonard tried but had no gift. Still, Alex was a general outcast and so Kyle could beat him in other competitions. Kyle could keep Alex at his side and appear the better for not being that other kid. Over the course of second school, Kyle sought to make Alex’s life miserable in any way he could covertly get away with it. Sadly, nearly no one else would talk to him and so Alex accepted the situation, thinking it even a blessing at times.
Now, trudging deliriously through the desert, and overcome with a fever and a mild head wound from the hover car crash, Alex could not recall exactly what it was that Kyle had done to him all those years ago to make him try to escape the city, but all the anguish, the humiliation and the desperation were present.
Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy) Page 26