“Boris… Boris… Don’t die on me, buddy! You c-can’t die. Please… Boris… p-please, don’t die!”
I attempted once again to get my hands under him. I saw a flicker, and felt the fur somewhat more solidly against my skin. Boris mewled in pain as I reached around him and began to gently move him onto the grass. I could feel broken ribs beneath my fingers, and I saw a sparkling path trailing behind him as I pulled on his damaged body.
He kept slipping from my ‘grasp’, but, finally, I succeeded in moving him out of the road. I could barely see him at that point, my eyes were so full of tears. I put my face down next to his neck and tried to get as close to him as I could, to let him know I was there. I could smell his familiar essence, and thought of all the time we had spent together, just that close. My tears spilled down, covering him with liquid sadness. I knew he was dying… and there was nothing I could do to help him. Nothing, at all. I raised my head up to the sky.
“Giddeon!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Giddeon!!’
My voice filled the street.
“Giddeon!!!”
I didn’t think anything could be worse than the day I experienced that pain from the nuclear holocaust… I was wrong.
“Boris needs help!!” I shouted into the Coronado air.
“Giddeon!! Giddeon!!!” I closed my eyes, and I don’t know if at that point if I was screaming or praying. I suppose I descended into hysterics. “Gi-dd-eon!! Oh, God… Giddeon!!!”
It felt as if I was falling down a dark well, all alone, the sound of my pleas echoing off the smooth, damp sides.
Chapter 55
“Greg! Greg!! It’s alright!! Look at me! Look at me!!” Giddeon was shaking me by my shoulders. I opened my eyes. My hands were covered in blood and there was a roaring in my ears.
We were on my boat.
“Listen… it’s okay! It wasn’t real!! You were in another frame of reference. Boris is right here!!”
I looked around at my blurry surroundings. Things slowly came into focus, and the noise in my head began to subside just a bit. I’m sure I looked like a mad man.
“Wha- what?” I wiped at my eyes and managed to smear more blood on my face. Boris was at the door, looking back with his tail all puffed out and acting like he very much wanted to bolt. He couldn’t, because the door was closed.
“You somehow got into another timeline at the golf course… when you changed the weather!”
“I… I don’t understand. B-Boris?” I looked at my cat and said his name, again. “Boris? Is that you?”
“He’s okay,” said Giddeon.
“Are you sure?” I looked to Gid, and then back to the cat.
“Positive.”
I held a trembling hand down, and tried to calm the frightened animal. “Come here, Boris. Come here.” After a few seconds of coaxing, Boris finally came over and sniffed at my unsteady fingers. He looked up and meowed, obviously wanting an explanation. I’m sure he could smell his own blood.
“It was so real… so awful,” I said, quietly.
“I know.”
Boris jumped up onto the couch. I sat there taking in his presence for the better part of a minute. Finally, I took in a deep breath and let out a laugh that was mixed with a sob. “I… don’t think we can ever let him off the boat, again.”
Giddeon smiled. “He’ll get mighty hungry in here.”
I wiped my eyes on my sleeves. “Yeah… you’re probably right.” I held my hand back out to the cat; he smelled my fingers, again, and tried to lick them. “You see that Boris…? Don’t you ever go in the road, again. That’s what can happen. Do you hear me?”
He looked at me with big, yellow eyes, and meowed.
I got up, went to take a shower, and watched his blood disappear counterclockwise down the drain.
Chapter 56
I was reluctant to open the door, but, finally, late that afternoon, I did. Boris looked back in my direction like he was trying to reassure me that he would be a good cat and stay where it was safe. He then slowly sauntered outside, and went down towards The Boathouse in search of an evening meal. I watched him go, like a nervous parent on a child’s first day of school. I took in a deep breath of the clear, Coronado air and went back inside. Giddeon popped into existence on the couch; there was some type of a drink with an umbrella in it in his hand.
“Want one?”
“What is it?
“A Blue Hawaiian. They’re pretty good.”
I nodded and one appeared on the table. I walked over and took a taste. “Kind of sweet, but, not bad.” I set it back down.
“Wanna go watch the sunset off Maui? We can have some coconut shrimp and Banana’s Foster.”
I’m not sure where he got that combination, but it didn’t sound half bad. I shook my head, though.
“No… I’m gonna stay here and wait for Boris. I don’t really feel like going anywhere.”
He nodded. “I understand. You’ll feel better, tomorrow.”
“Probably. It’s just… it was so real.”
“I know.”
I took another sip of Blue Hawaiian. Some coconut shrimp appeared on a plate next to my drink and I had a bite. Delicious, naturally.
“The timeline outside… is it the ‘real’ one?”
“They’re all real.”
“So Boris is dead, somewhere else?”
“I’m afraid, so… most probably. But, he’s very much alive, here. And, as far as your question goes, yeah, I think the one outside is the ‘real’ one.”
“How do you know?”
“It just feels right.”
I grunted, because I kind of knew what he meant.
He continued, “When you were playing golf, I felt the shift when you altered reality and changed the weather. When I do it, it’s lighter… more of a localized phenomenon. When you did it, it was stronger. Like an entire shift from one world-line to another. Something felt wrong. It just felt… sad. I was here on your boat, and when Boris went to the door, I called him back and shut it. I could swear that I saw another Boris keep on going… I’ve never seen that, before. I don’t know why I did it… shut the door, that is… it just felt… right.”
“Thank God you did.”
“I can’t say for certain that this Boris would have met the same fate, but, I get the feeling that maybe he would have.”
There was that word, again. Fate.
“So, you think this was meant to happen?”
Giddeon shrugged. “Maybe everything’s meant to happen.”
I took another bite of shrimp. It wasn’t quite as good as the first, but it was still extraordinary. I shook my head. “The universe is a strange place.”
Gid nodded. “Like someone once said: ‘It’s not only stranger than you imagine, it’s stranger than you can imagine.”
I nodded, also, and finished my shrimp in silence. I decided I wasn’t in the mood for Banana’s Foster.
Chapter 57
The next day, I woke up with Boris at my side. I realized that I did feel a little better. After a shower and a shave, I donned some shorts, and, also, a T-shirt that said ‘Life is Good’. It had a little stick figure and a surf board on the front. I’m not really sure why I picked that shirt.
It just felt right.
Giddeon appeared at the door, like a normal person, after having stepped on board from the dock. He had on a nearly identical outfit… only his stick figure was playing golf and the shirt was of a different color.
“Doing okay?” queried Gid.
“Yeah… I’m okay. Boris is still asleep.”
“What do you want to do, today?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets, unsure if what I was about to ask was possible. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so, I said, “I want to go see Mom and Dad.”
Giddeon nodded. “Before they died?”
“No… I want to see how they would be, now. If they didn’t have the car wreck.”
He nodded, and a tunnel of light appea
red.
__________
My mom was talking on the phone, there in her kitchen, in Alabama. She looked older; more grey was in her dark ponytail than I remembered. She was chatting about the talent on a reality show from the night before to someone on the other end. My dad was at the table, drinking a cup of coffee and perusing his morning paper. He had on reading glasses and was flipping through the sports section looking over scores… most likely baseball and golf. I went and stood beside my mother, and though I knew it would be futile, reached out to touch her. I could feel just the slightest bit of warmth from her arm as my hand went through it.
I then went over and sat down beside my dad, gazing at the man I hadn’t seen in 8 years. It was so good to see him after all of that time. I could discern every pore in his skin, every crease in his clothing. His nails were neatly trimmed, and I watched him bring his coffee cup to his lips. He took a swallow of the cream-colored liquid… café-au-lait… and glanced over at Mom; an ordinary glance like a husband gives a wife every day after years and years of marriage. It gladdened me to see such a normal interaction, as if nothing had ever happened on that August afternoon. As if that eighteen-wheeler and their car had never met.
I sat there for a while just soaking in the scene and smelling the smells of home…the familiar scents of my mother and my father and their coffee. I stood up just as Mom was finishing her conversation. I heard her say, “Okay, Greg… I’ll talk to you, later. I love you.”
She had been talking to me.
I ‘kissed’ her on the cheek and said,
“I love you, too.”
Chapter 58
It took several weeks for me to totally shake the feeling that all of my waking life on that side was a dream, and that Giddeon was just implanting memories in my head in order to spare me from pain.
I was plagued by the thought that Boris was as dead as my parents, and, even if he wasn’t, that there were no alternate realities. That I was living in a construct of my subconscious mind because I was too fragile to handle the truth.
I was afraid that the truth was this: that I was going to live out my final days in a coma, comforted by make-believe visions of make-believe worlds as I grew progressively weaker and weaker… until one day, having no other choice, my brother did indeed consent to finally have my feeding tube removed.
I would fade into oblivion with only three people, and, possibly, a cat, knowing I was gone.
Despite feeling that way, I still hung out with Giddeon and Boris. I still played golf at Coronado Municipal and North Island while drinking MangoMooManias. I even still went to visit Melody and eat at new restaurants. As the saying goes, ‘The show must go on.’
I supposed that to be true… even if the show was all in my head.
__________
I found that Italian wasn’t as difficult as I’d imagined… Giddeon and I practiced it while watching television broadcasts from the old country. Thanks to his help and my own extra ‘horsepower’, the words began to flow very quickly. I was amazed at how fast something like that could be learned, and, when I was fairly fluent, we moved on to German and French.
It was the languages that eventually brought me out of my melancholy.
As I was well on my way to mastering both French and German, I realized that there had to be truth in all that Giddeon had said about the nature of reality.
The sentence structures, syntax and inflections I was learning seemed too varied and too distinct to be part of a ‘dream’. Fabricating memories was one thing, but fabricating entirely new knowledge and working vocabularies was something else. I decided that Boris was alive, and that when I was ‘petting’ him, it wasn’t just a ghost petting a ghost… it was real. It was my little slice of pie cut from the never-ending cosmos. I began to feel that I had a chance of eventually coming out of my coma… and walking once again amongst the land of the living.
__________
I came to believe that I was over there because of fate, and that fate was that timeline that stretched like a silver strand from the past to the future. It shined brighter than all the rest of the fibers around it because that was the one meant especially for you.
I began to see destiny as a thin filament of glistening light.
A thin filament that contained all of the people and places and things you were meant to experience, and, when you were on it, it vibrated with your resonance.
I felt like if you listened closely enough, you could almost hear its song, radiating and filling space… the space between what was, and what was to come.
__________
I never did get around to calculus.
I just didn’t ever seem to find the time. I think Giddeon secretly slipped in the fundamentals of it into our conversations, but, it never really seemed like mathematics when he did.
__________
I grew more and more curious about the nature of matter and energy, and joined Man’s quest to understand his own existence.
__________
We took tours of atom smashers located around the globe, and watched as scientists attempted to peer into the subatomic world. I observed as they measured the results of energetic beams slamming into each other by the latticework of intricate particle pathways left behind.
Phosphorescent trails from pieces of reality scattered this way and that.
Giddeon explained, that by scientific consensus in our time, there were four fundamental forces… they were the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. The Holy Grail was a theory unifying all four… a fundamental Theory of Everything that explained how all of the forces exchanged information and interacted.
Gravity was the odd man out.
It didn’t seem to fit with any of the proposed models in our era. On large scales, there was a beauty and symmetry to the universe. It was elegant and smooth. It was when you went deeper into the fabric of space and time that things began to get jumbled… that things became messy, and gravity presented more of a dilemma.
According to my subconscious, as far as the scientists knew, the constituents of matter seemed to be composed of 19 or 20 subunits, each with certain masses and ‘spins’ that didn’t really seem to make much sense. Why those particular masses? Why those particular spins? No one had figured it out. And, to make matters worse, when energy is applied to those subunits, it gets absorbed and elicits changes in those particles, sometimes converting them into other players in a type of microscopic shell game.
I learned about quarks and neutrinos, electrons and muons. I listened to Giddeon lecture on about how, at very small scales, space was more discrete… that things seemed to be either ‘here’ or ‘there’… and, there was no ‘in between’. He related how we were limited by the wavelengths of the energy used to ‘observe’ the smallest aspects of the universe, and, also, how when one became more certain about the position of a piece of matter, the less sure one could be about its velocity. He called that the Uncertainty Principle, and the quantum weirdness of it had been confounding scientists for decades.
My tutor relayed to me that the researchers’ latest hope of finding the unifying theory behind all four forces is called Superstring Theory. It’s a theory that postulates that the ultimate building blocks of the universe aren’t really particles, but, tiny vibratory ‘strings’… and, that nodes from the oscillations on these strings represent the different quarks and various other players in the quantum world.
I’m not sure I buy it, although the scientists sure seemed a lot smarter than me as they poured over plates and data… all the while scribbling down their findings on notepads and chalkboards.
The complexity and potential shapes and forms of all of the miniature constituents made my head spin. Giddeon just laughed and said not to worry about it… that it had the same effect on all of those guys in the white coats, too. He said that the scientists were perplexed because the complexity they perceived was really just a reflection.
As above, so below.<
br />
__________
Giddeon’s theory is that everything is how it is simply because that’s the way we think it is. He said that all explanations are just temporary, because when viewed from another angle, everything changes… and that scientists are actually more akin to lawyers, each arguing their case in the court of reality. He believes creation wasn’t something that happened long ago, but, instead, is occurring each and every day, each and every second. And, it’s always one step ahead of discovery. Gid said that matter and energy are complicated, because we are complicated… also, he reiterated once again that science just really allows for all of us to incrementally believe in magic.
Coronado Dreaming (The Silver Strand Series) Page 22