by James Cole
“What are we going to do?” asked Jinni.
Jeremy’s heart ached at the slurring of her words and her glazed eyes, sure proof that her bodily systems were already slowing down. Jinni was freezing before his eyes. After all they had withstood, would they now succumb to the dropping temperature?
“First off,” Jeremy replied, “you’ll be warmer riding behind me.”
Jinni climbed aboard, leaving her jet-ski bobbing in the river. Jeremy goosed the throttle. After putting two or three miles between them and their would-be attackers, Jeremy slowed. He didn’t know what else to do but to pull over and to take shelter in the woods. At least there they could gain some protection from the brutal wind. As he zeroed in on a sand bar where they could stop, a better idea came to him. Taking advantage of their slower speed, Jeremy twisted around to look at his hunkered-down passenger.
“Jinni, honey,” he said, “if you can just hang on for a little while longer, I think I know a place we can go.”
Jinni garnered a tepid smile. “I’m right behind you,” she said in a weak voice.
Jeremy accelerated past the sand bar with a broad, sweeping turn and continued toward the lake. Feeling more optimistic in anticipation of warmer quarters, his thoughts meandered back to Monika’s curious edict on the cliff, a few minutes before:
The man whom you knew as Grady turned me on to the Source…
Years ago, she had added with a certain gleam in her eye. Monika loved to tease and this was yet another carrot she dangled before Jeremy, presumably a clue to help him unravel her secrets. But when and under what circumstances could Monika have known Grady? It was obvious that she had since lost touch with him because it wasn’t until Jeremy mentioned Grady’s blue eyes that she had tracked Grady down. Interestingly, while Grady might have turned Monika on to the Source years ago, he apparently never spelled out to her where he found it.
Also sticking in Jeremy’s craw was something Monika uttered back at the ceremony. After she gave Trey his drink of the Source, she asked a curious request of him: Call me Claire, she said. What thought processes did Monika entertain that could trigger such a statement? It wasn’t the first time she had expressed similar sentiments. Jeremy remembered when he first informed her of the out-of-place, or rather the out-of-time wingtips in Claire’s painting, The Ends, how Monika, after admitting authorship, had joked that Claire’s spirit might be living within her, or something to that effect. While Jeremy wasn’t quite ready to accept this indwelling of spirits, Monika was, undoubtedly, the resident expert in all things related to Claire. She knew about the lotus, what it did, where it could be found; she knew Claire’s painting technique, including how to prepare the same unique paints that Claire used. Monika even subscribed to a philosophy she referred to as Claire’s Way.
Had Monika so wrapped herself in Claire’s lotus and Claire’s paintings and Claire’s Way that she believed she was Claire?
Had Jeremy’s powers of reasoning not been hampered by his dropping core temperature, he would likely have cut the thread right there, for though he reached the ensuing conclusion via logical steps, the conclusion was anything but logical. This evening Jeremy had seen Claire for the first time on Grady’s home movie. His assumption had been that Monika and Claire were related, but what if the eerie resemblance was due not to them being of the same blood-line but of the same exact blood? Could it be possible that Monika and Claire were, in fact, one and the same person?
Everything pointed toward that end; everything, that is, save Monika’s apparent agelessness. If Monika and Claire were the same person, how, after so many trips around the sun, had she managed to preserve her vitality and youthful appearance? Plastic surgery and makeup? Jeremy knew this could not be the case.
Jeremy remembered Monika’s riddle – when the time comes, you will become and time will come. Monika touted some grand effect of the Source, a certain change, or becoming, that she claimed would befall anyone who drank of it. The mystery had been what this purported change might be. The last line of the riddle – and time will come – held the answer. If Claire and Monika really were the same person, then she had most certainly been granted extra time. Might her insinuated claim be that the Source arrested the aging process and that she was the living proof? Had Grady, as a child – all those years ago – discovered the lotus tree and given Claire a taste of its fruit? Was this fruit, known also as the Source, responsible for Claire’s youthful longevity?
Jeremy’s mind reeled. If all this were true, as Monika’s clues seemed to indicate, the tree of the King’s Pinnacle represented perhaps the most sought-after, most fabulously amazing discovery mankind had ever known. Jeremy felt a large measure of dismay as he corrected himself: The Source would have been the most amazing discovery, had he not just succeeded in blowing it to smithereens.
*****
Once in the lake, Jeremy guided the jet-ski south along the shoreline until they drew even with the secret beach. The warm place he promised Jinni was exactly where it was supposed to be, anchored 300 yards to the west.
Jeremy could scarcely feel his body as they climbed on board the houseboat. Jinni had ceased her violent shivering, but acted more like a zombie than a functioning human being. Inside, Jeremy stripped away her wet clothes and replaced them with several layers of dry clothes retrieved from a drawer. Finally he switched his clothes out and crawled into bed with Jinni. They snuggled for a good while, until he felt warmer and she at last began to show signs of recovery.
“This is Monika’s boat?”
Jeremy interpreted Jinni’s revived shivering as a good sign. It meant her body was once again doing its part to reheat itself.
“Yes,” he replied.
“And these are her clothes I’m wearing?” she asked disdainfully.
“It’s better than freezing.”
“I suppose.” After a thoughtful pause, she added, “What was that you said back there on the cliff – something about a ring?”
Jeremy laughed. “It’s right over there in my coat pocket, if I didn’t lose it during all the excitement. Let me show you-”
“Don’t get up,” insisted Jinni. “You know I don’t care diddly-squat about the ring, except to know that you made real plans for us – permanent plans.”
“So the answer you gave me on the cliff still stands?” he asked.
“Yes, you idiot. You could have asked me a year ago and I would have said the same thing. The day we met, I knew.”
“I did too, Jinni.”
She elbowed him in his ribs. “Then why are you just now asking?”
With a sly smile, he replied, “I guess I was waiting for the perfect moment.”
“What, a near-death experience?”
When they kissed, Jinni’s lips were warm. At least he could be confident that her thought processes were no longer muddled by the hypothermia. She meant what she said.
As they cuddled – in Monika’s bed of all places – Jeremy attempted to get Jinni up to speed with respect to the Source and Monika. As quickly as he could manage, he told her how Monika’s clues and insinuations led him to believe that she and Claire were the same person.
Jinni reacted skeptically. She asked, “Which do you think is more likely, that Monika and Claire are the same person or that Monika is making all of this up in order to gain control over the people in her group. I can see how a lot of people would want to follow her if she made them believe she had something that would keep them young.”
“You make a good point,” conceded Jeremy. “I know Monika used the Unreal in that same fashion to wield influence over her group and over me. Now that I think about it, how brilliant would it be for her to fabricate this lie about her being Claire and having sole access to some magical potion that staves off aging? It would take years for all those twenty-year-olds to realize that the Source was nothing more than a modern-day snake oil being peddled by a hustler. Then again,” added Jeremy, “if that is true, why did we have to go through all that we did
to destroy it?”
“We did it because Grady asked us to,” replied Jinni.
Despite Jeremy’s feeling that there was more information to mine from the subject, they needed to get moving. They had survived the jump, the rapids, the gunfire and the cold, but they still had worries. In all likelihood, the police were still in the vicinity searching for Jeremy and that made the fast-approaching daylight their enemy.
Begrudgingly, Jeremy crawled from the cozy bed. “We need to get to the other side.”
“Then where?” Jinni asked. “Won’t we need transportation once we get there?”
Jeremy thought for a moment before he walked to the front of the boat. He found the decal in the upper right corner of the windshield:
Sid’s Marina
Slip A-17
“So far, so good,” he said as he passed Jinni on the way out the back sliding door of the cabin. He examined the two extra keys on the key chain hanging from the jet-ski’s ignition. The butt of the each key sported the insignia of a galloping horse and, in cursive script below it, the word Mustang. These were the keys to Monika’s car.
“You wouldn’t happen to know how to get to Sid’s Marina from here, would you?” he asked.
“Not hardly.”
Jeremy scurried back toward the bow. He found what he was looking for in the small drawer next to the steering wheel. He powered up the handheld GPS and scrolled down until he found an entry entitled Sid’s. According to the digital display, the marina was nine miles from their present position.
“Got it,” he announced exuberantly. “With any luck, we’ll find Monika’s car parked at Sid’s Marina. We just have to get there before first light.”
“What do you think Monika and Tavalin are doing right now?” asked Jinni.
“You know they’re doing all they can to figure out a way to track us down and kill us.” For the first time, Jeremy thought about what they left behind in the river. “Did we leave the keys in the other jet-ski?”
“I don’t remember taking them out,” replied Jinni.
“Wouldn’t that be something…?”
*****
The jet-ski's hull sliced the water with a sound like a hard falling rain as Jinni and Jeremy rode west across the lake toward Sid’s Marina. There was no sign of the police or of Monika and Tavalin, though the Spanish Armada could have been alongside and they would not have known it on account of the fog. Jeremy drove slower than he would have liked as he scanned for unseen obstacles while Jinni monitored the GPS and kept them on the right heading.
As the jet-ski’s headlights poked and prodded at the impenetrable fog, Jeremy took another stab at the unresolved riddles surrounding Monika, Claire, and the Source. Ever since Jeremy heard Monika’s spiel at the secret beach bonfire, he had hoped that it was like she said, that he could dare to believe in the supernatural and know that something big is coming down. It was obvious now that Monika was speaking of the Source. And her riddle for him, when the time comes, you will become, and time will come, in retrospect, was a perfect allusion to the ceremony, where she planned to administer the Source to him and to her other disciples.
But was it really as Jinni suggested? Had it instead all been a clever campaign of deceit, hatched and ingeniously implemented by Monika so she could gain the allegiance of her group? It was certainly possible, but there were still some nagging details to address. When he and Jinni cut into the fruit from the tree in the gorge, Jeremy recognized the smell, and not just from Monika’s ceremonial chalice at the abandoned church. His intuition insisted on another connection; an earlier link. The inkling grew until Jeremy traced the smell of the Source back to the most unlikeliest of places: Grady’s kitchen. On the day they met, Grady made eggs, sausage, biscuits and, to drink, the fruit juice with the odd aftertaste. Hadn’t the purple lotus fruit and the liquid contained in the chalice emited the same fermented-sweet aroma as had Grady’s homemade juice?
Jeremy really couldn’t trust his memory enough to say for sure, but the possibility took him back around to the questions raised by the secret research project. After his stellar performance at the Fryin’ Bacon Triathlon, he and June had found his mitochondria to be different; intelligently redesigned, to quote June. This explained well his increased endurance but did not address how his mitochondria got changed in the first place. Could the change be a result of his unwitting drinking of the Source?
Considering the timing of his visit to Grady’s house, which preceded the race, and in light of his and June’s findings, Jeremy had an idea as to how the Source might suspend aging. Molecular biologists have long theorized a link between aging and the release of free radicals by one’s mitochondria. Their reasoning went something like this: As people get older, their mitochondria accumulate errors due to imperfect replication, which results in an increase in the release of free radicals, a byproduct of energy production. Like molecular bullets, these highly-reactive molecules punch holes into everything they come into contact with, including cellular DNA. The damage accumulates over time until the DNA, which serves as the blueprint for the body, produces imperfect proteins and enzymes that do not work as they were originally designed. The outward effect is a slow, broad-based decline of bodily functions, which sounds a lot like a description of the aging process. The Source might work by mitigating the changes in the mitochondria over time so that they function just as well in an older individual as they do in the young. There is no increase in free radical production and the integrity of the DNA is thusly maintained.
And though Jeremy could not explain many of the things that had occurred of late in and around Reefers Woods – especially the prophetic visions and dreams – he was ready to accept that which Monika and Grady believed and the science supported. The effect was real, but what did it mean in exact terms for him personally? Supposing he could avoid death by trauma, which no change at the cellular level could protect against, could he dare entertain the unimaginable, incredibly marvelous notion that he might not only stay young but also live indefinitely?
Without warning, legions of glorious snowflakes burst forth from above, inundating the bubble of light that encompassed the jet-ski like a snow globe hard shaken. As rare as snow events were in this part of the country, Jeremy would not have been surprised to learn that the snow fell on them alone, a sign of joy and hope and deliverance from all who would do them harm.
Not only had Grady known where to find the Source, he had arranged for Jeremy to drink of it long before Monika offered him a swig of the same. Jeremy wanted to stop the jet-ski and tell Jinni the splendid news, but he didn’t right away. He began to worry that while Jinni would certainly be happy for him, she might not be happy for them. If all this was really true, how would Jinni feel, knowing that for every year that passed, she would age and he would not? And how excruciating would it be for him to watch her fight her losing battle against Old Man Time while he maintained the vitality of youth?
And if this change were such a wonderful thing, why had all the signs, and indeed, every instinct in his body steered him away from the ceremony and the vow at the altar? If he had already become, didn’t that mean that all his objections were for naught or would another shot of the Source have been harmful in some way?
Finally Jeremy hit upon the notion that it was the other part of the ceremony, the part that comprised Claire’s Way that was inherently wrong. The vow, or more precisely, the disavow, made it wrong. All this made sense in the context of Grady’s admonition when he said that Reefers Woods holds the source of things… both good and evil. Jeremy had assumed that these things were separate. However, what Grady really meant was that the Source, by itself, could be used in one of two ways. Presumably, the way that Jeremy had received it, as a free gift from Grady was of the good variety, whereas Monika’s way changed that which was meant for good to evil.
*****
The pitched roof of the easterly dock house rose to meet them like a phoenix from the fog and snow. They puttered by the de
serted waterfront of Sid’s Marina, pulling behind them a symmetrical wake.
“Home sweet home,” crooned Jeremy as he maneuvered into covered slip #A-17.
Jinni stood by, her arms wrapped around her, while Jeremy worked to secure the jet-ski.
The long row of docked boats bumped and swayed under the dying influence of the jet-ski’s wake, reminding Jeremy how everything in and on the lake was connected to every other thing in the water by the water itself. Though the jet-ski was still now, the repercussions of its passage through the water carried on. Jeremy saw this as an analogy to his travels and travails in and around Reefers Woods. When Tavalin first took Jeremy past the Keep Out sign on Sticks River Road, a chain of events was set into motion that propagated throughout every aspect of Jeremy’s life. Lives were changed and lives were lost, all because Jeremy ventured into that place known as Reefers Woods. Everything that happened from that point forward seemed beyond his control, almost preordained.
“There,” he said as he finished tying off the ropes. “All secure, right where it’s supposed to be.”
Turning his attention to Jinni, he asked, “Are you cold?”
“Just a little chilly, that’s all.”
Jeremy put his arm around Jinni and they walked together down the aisle of the pier. He smiled to himself. Somehow, he had emerged from it all with the real girl of his dreams at his hip. As they passed by, the long row of boats bobbed in the water as if nodding their approval.
They emerged from the covered pier into a world made white by the snow.
“What do you think?” Jeremy swept his free arm in a grand arc.
“It’s beautiful,” replied Jinni. “The forecast didn’t say anything about a snow storm.”