by Mark Kraver
“Hey,” he said, jogging to her side. “Let me take you back to the cab.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’s gone.”
“What?”
“He turned around as soon as I got out. He’s taking my friends back to the airport or something.” She began to cry again.
“Oh man, don’t cry. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you out here. Now stop crying.” He grabbed her shoulders and looked into her smeared, heavy made-up eyes. “Seriously, calm down.”
“I won’t be any trouble. What happened back there?” she asked, blowing a glistening snot bubble out of her nose and then wiping it away with the back of her hand.
Now what do I do, he thought, looking back and forth between the jammed off-ramp and the woods. Hell, he wasn’t crazy about heading into those bushes, anyway. He worried he might find out where that stench was coming from. “Come on. I’ll tell you later,” he said, pulling on Freckle’s shoulder, taking care not to grab her snot-covered hand. They hadn’t gone one hundred feet when she stopped walking, her face as white as the snow-capped mountains of Utah.
“What is it now?”
“I forgot my bag,” she blurted out with a new volley of tears and panic.
“Really?” he said, looking back at the line of headlights streaming into the distance as far as the eye could see. “What did you have in it?”
“All my clothing, my makeup, my money.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“Two thousand dollars.”
“Wow, you’ll never see that again.” Immediately he regretted his choice of words.
All he could do was let her cry it out for a few minutes until she regained her composure. She sobbed so hard she gagged on her own mucus and threw up what looked like airplane peanuts or pretzels. He moved upwind, to avoid simulating a like performance. He could use an antacid right about now, he thought, turning his head and trying not to look at her.
“Oh, well,” she said. “I can always call my daddy.”
He took her by the arm and weaved through stand still traffic up the off-ramp. “Why didn’t your father come with you in the first place?”
“There wasn’t enough room on the plane.”
“He let you go by yourself?”
“People in my church were with me too, so he felt it would be safe.”
“You mean those other girls?”
“Yes, and others. We got split up at the airport. There wasn’t a big enough ride for all of us.”
“Hey, your girlfriends will keep your bag safe.”
“You think so?”
He smiled and nodded.
They walked across the overpass and looked down the expressway.
“This is what traffic looks like every day in California,” he joked.
“Thank you, Vince,” she said, looking at the lights of the nearby city. “I prayed for someone to help me on this pilgrimage.”
He ignored her, but she persisted.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Are you going to tell me I’m going to hell if I’m not?” he asked, before turning and picking up the pace.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said, matching his stride. Then she said under her breath, “but you are.”
He kept walking. He hadn’t thought about that subject for years. He had been brought up in a good Christian environment, Sunday school and even Vacation Bible School until he began high school. He didn’t know why he didn’t go to church anymore, other than he had heard it all before, and didn’t need a refresher course every Sunday. After all, he had an intelligence quotient of almost one hundred and fifty and was the only person he knew who had read both the Old and New Testaments back to back, word for word, cover to cover. He had read the entire King James Version before he was thirteen, and hadn’t understood then, nor now, why his Christian God had to be so cruel in the Old Testament and so good in the New. He remembered asking his pastor if the Bible was talking about two different Gods.
Conrad marched down the road with his very own missionary in tow, not believing he had gotten himself into this mess. To his surprise, the town wasn’t that far from the exit, and it was alive with the hustle and bustle of traffic tie-ups and all-night diners. The town had seen better days. The houses were in poor condition, even by the light of the overcast crescent moon.
“Christ, it’s almost three in the morning, and it looks like Saturday night at the races,” he said, more to himself than to Freckles, as they crossed a crowded intersection. Conrad was looking for a place to eat and a television, so he could check on the whereabouts of that damn cloud. Several storefronts had been broken into, and glass was everywhere. Rowdy bands of young and old were marauding up and down the streets drinking and looking for something to steal. “Wow, good thing this is not Judgement Day.”
“Christ has risen. Aren’t you afraid of his wrath?” Freckles said, in response to him using the Lord’s name in vain. She seemed oblivious to all the mayhem surrounding them.
“You believe someone as powerful as almighty God gives a crap if his name is used in vain?” he said. He was feeling increasingly frustrated with the religious importance being placed on this cloud. In his opinion, it was nothing more than a scientific phenomenon. Why would Jesus, of all people carry his girlfriend in a cloud to the UN in the first place?
“It’s written in the Bible,” she said, as if that was the only defense she needed. “It’s even one of the Ten Commandments.”
This was all he could take. He was tired and hungry. His side was now non-stop aching from all the walking. He felt like he had been skirting religion ever since he had his last showdown with his pastor as a teen, and his pent-up anxiety exploded on the poor ignorant girl.
“Man wrote the Bible for his own means. The Bible is purely liturgical. It’s a written record of the stories people told to explain their belief in God. I believe there is a God. I mean, how could the universe be explained otherwise? But the Bible is written by man, in man’s language, that by its very nature is too primitive to explain God with words alone. I don’t mean to degrade your beliefs. I find it hard to believe in anything written down hundreds, if not thousands of years after it was supposed to have happened, let alone in a collection of stories that had been sorted, deleted, edited, transcribed, and reinterpreted as many times as the Holy Bible.” To drive his meaning home, he hesitated before using her own precious scripture to make his point, “Even in Jeremiah 12, Israel's neighbors, in order to avoid destruction, were offered prosperity if they stop swearing by the names of their idols and swear only by the name of Yahweh.”
A look of something new—anger, maybe—flashed in Freckles’ eyes. “Do you even know how the Bible was written?” she said, her voice low and resolute.
Conrad was too riled up to acknowledge her question. “And don’t even get me started on that crazy Book of Mormon. You do know the reason you are Mormon in the first place? Because your parents are Mormon. If your parents were Buddhist, you’d be Buddhist, too. That’s why the religions of the world want their followers to overpopulate the world,” he said.
She looked at him, her head shaking slowly with a mixture of disbelief and fury.
“Listen,” he said, feeling tired and wanting to defuse the moment, “I’m sorry. Let’s go to that café and get something to eat. Maybe we’ll see something on a television. Go to the lady’s room, clean yourself up, and don’t forget to wash those hands,” he added, pushing through the crowd waiting outside an all-night dinner.
“Sorry, hun,” said a robust waitress at the door. She seemed to have been tasked with the responsibility of pushing away customers rather than finding them seats. “It’s about a hundred and twenty-minute wait. We’re not turning tables very fast tonight.”
“Thanks. Where can I find a TV while we wait? I’d like to get an update on that—”
“Cloud?” the waitress asked, cutting him off. “Honey, our TV is too crowded ri
ght now for you to watch it. I can’t let you in. The fire marshal is watching us like a hawk tonight. The cloud will be here when it gets here—if it gets here at all.”
“Oh, it’s a-coming,” yelled one of the other pancake-slinging waitresses. Cheers erupted behind her as customers agreed.
“Supposed to be here around one o’clock this afternoon. It ought to be a real zoo by then,” the waitress laughed as if she wasn’t already working inside a zoo.
“Well, where could I watch a TV?” he asked.
“Mabel didn’t someone say they were watching that cloud down at Holy Rosary?” the waitress yelled to the cook behind the counter as she picked up empty plates to seat the next group.
“Yeah, we came from there about an hour ago, praise the Lord,” someone called out from a packed table to the left of the front door.
“There you go,” the waitress said, turning to plow through the crowded tables and disappearing into the kitchen with plates stacked up one arm.
“Where is Holy Rosary—Church?” Conrad yelled to the rowdy table of late-night evangelists.
“Catholic Church. Not far. Two blocks south.”
“Thanks,” Conrad yelled back and left the building.
He waited out front for fifteen minutes, listening to everyone’s cloud theories, until Freckles came out of the bathroom.
“I was about to go in looking for you. What happened? Did you have a prayer meeting or something?” he joked.
“You men think it’s so simple. You urinate anywhere you want. As a matter of fact, I did have a word or two of prayer with some girls while we waited in line.”
“Let’s go. We can get snacks at the gas station. It’ll be light soon,” Conrad said, looking at his watch that was as dead as a doornail. He was afraid to look at his phone for the time, fearing it was dead, too. Instead, he was relying on the phase and position of the moon just visible through the hazy, predawn sky. They walked to a gas station convenience store.
Conrad held up his hands as they walked past the young foreign-looking employee holding a shotgun guarding against looters. Freckles yawned and smiled at the young man with a sleepy naive look as she passed him. Sleep deprivation left her completely oblivious to her surrounding situation. Conrad snatched up a couple of candy bars, some beef jerky, chips, two diet orange sodas, and laid them on the checkout counter. He cracked open a drink as soon as he took out his credit card. He smiled at the gentleman running the checkout counter and said, “Crazy night.”
“Indeed,” the clerk answered with a sing-song accent and solemn look.
“Pakistani?”
The clerk nodded.
“What do you think about all of this cloud business?”
He shrugged, not wanting to comment.
“Yeah, me too.”
Boom!
Conrad jerked his head towards the sound and saw someone outside pulling the shotgun from the boy-guard’s hands. The assailant struck the boy in the face to the ground with the butt of the gun before kicking him and shouted something that was muffled by the storefront’s massive glass windows. He kicked the poor boy on the ground once more and pumped the shotgun with one hand in the air. The brute then turned and looked straight into Conrad’s eyes. With a quick hop the gunman kicked the front door open. The measuring tape on the side of the entrance made it clear he was massive, but his size didn’t matter as he trained the shotgun on the clerk who was pointing his own handgun at the intruder.
Boom, pow, pow, pow! rang out in a deafening crack-a-boom of violent flashes as the two freely exchanged lead.
A blurring light streaked in Conrad’s eyes as he threw himself over the bewildered Freckles and jerked his body out of the line of fire. Lying on top of her on the grimy floor, he shushed her complaints. When he could hear nothing, he lifted his head, expecting to see the body of the massive man with the shotgun on the floor. Nothing. He stood and scanned the convenience store. No one was there. He looked behind the counter and no one was there either. Not even any blood.
“What happened?” Freckles asked. She was slowing rising, smoothing out her clothes and looking around the store with the confused eyes of someone emerging from a frightening dream.
“I’m not sure. Where did everyone go?”
She shook her head, not wanting to know.
“Hey, is anyone here?” Conrad shouted to the back of the store, but no one answered. “Strange,” he muttered. He looked at the now-unappetizing items he had placed on the checkout counter and felt—in addition to his near constant abdominal pain—what he hoped was hunger cramps.
“I guess breakfast is on me,” he said, a grin pushing at the corner of his mouth. “You think they’ll take plastic?” He poured another big gulp of orange soda into his thirsty mouth.
“Does the Pope wear a funny hat?” she asked as a response.
Conrad almost blew orange drink out his nose.
Chapter 38
Modern science says:
'The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.' From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.
Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943, Earth
Library of Souls
Dreams
As their cloud floated over the bonfire-lit beaches of America, Logan twitched in deep REM sleep. She dreamt she was flying over coral-colored desert sand dunes through pillow-filled skies glistening with sunlight. The sand dunes subsided, replaced by a green line of vegetation surrounding a wide river.
The serpentine flow in her head rolled her body in flight to follow the meandering course of the majestic river. She loved the sensation, steering her body one way and then the other as the river wound right and left. Shifting her eyes back and forth, faster and faster, she realized she wasn’t miles away, flying over an ancient riverbank, but instead dreaming a lucid dream.
“I’m dreaming. Where am I?” she asked Yahweh, who had appeared next to her at a newly materialized campfire.
“You are dreaming,” Yahweh whispered in her ear.
“It’s not real?” she asked, looking at her hands.
“Nonetheless, here we are.”
They sat among the fiery night’s azure looking at stars that she could not identify. “Those stars are all wrong,” she said.
“Only from your point of view,” Yahweh mused.
“Where am I?” she asked again, distracted by the confusion in the unfamiliar sky.
“Heaven,” Yahweh answered, pointing to a bright dawning sun rising over a rapidly appearing horizon.
“Heaven?” She twitched with a jolt of adrenaline rushing through her veins, making her body erect. “Am I dead?”
“No. You don’t have to be dead to go to Heaven,” Yahweh frowned. “That would defeat the whole purpose. Your people would never make it to Heaven if you were to all die.”
“Don’t let me see anymore. I’m afraid,” she said, trying to hide her eyes. But the tighter she closed her eyes, the more she could see.
“You are afraid of your destiny? Then perhaps you need to know more about your past,” Yahweh said, waving his hand in a circle over his head, stirring the stars of the strange sky into a spiraling cyclone.
She looked up at the tightly wound spiral, marveling at its complexities and simplicities.
“What you see is a Dark-matter ‘Halo’ Graviton Transport, the Elohim’s lifeline to the universe. It is the way by which we can move from our world to yours, and how your people can experience what exists beyond all that you have known. Even now, it waits beyond your planet’s solar system for the exodus,” Yahweh said.
The term ‘the exodus’ made Logan’s stomach flutter but she said nothing.
Yahweh twirled his arm in the air, dispersing the Halo into a larger swirling dust cloud in space.
“What is happening?” she asked.
“Your beginnings. Watch and behold, the Nartac Nebula,
” Yahweh said, directing her eyes to an area over his head. There, the center of a solar accretion disk was forming from the condensing nebular dust particles. A small point of light crackled and flickered to life in the deep blackness of the spiral’s timeless center, igniting into a blazing proto-star that lit up the surrounding universe. A star was born in the universe at the speed of light. Cosmic rays blasted from the new sun, revealing many tiny orbiting timeless eddies in space where planetesimals concentrated their mass to form planets.
Before Logan’s eyes, the larger planets swirled into hurricane-like structures that tracked around the maturing sun, gobbling up smaller particles, asteroids, comets and planetesimals in their path until little debris was left in their orbital pathways. They began streaking toward that newly forming solar system. They passed an occasional ice ball of frozen gases and rock-hard asteroids at the outer limits of the sun’s radiance. She tried to identify them as they passed. Each, almost close enough to touch.
“I believe this one has never caught on in your lexicon of space exploration. It is called Eris, and its moon is Dysnomia,” Yahweh said, instructing her on the orientation of her dream.
“That’s amazing. It looks like it has an atmosphere.”
“Only an atmosphere when it approaches the sun; otherwise the gases freeze and fall to the surface as crystals.”
Logan felt more amazed than ever as they flew at unbelievable speed toward the distant star.
As they approached the next rock in space, he said, “You call this Pluto, but as you can see it is only three-fourths the size of Eris and has half the atmosphere. It is no more important than the other outer asteroids beyond this system. These outer celestial bodies have always been, and will remain, rocks floating at the outer reaches of your sun’s control. Leftovers, blown too far into the orbit of this star to be of any significance to you or me, other than their small gravitational effects on the orbital trajectories of other planets within their sphere of influence,” said Yahweh. “And yet under their rocky surfaces are oceans of life.”