“Not that light,” says Pandora. “That’s the temporary light I gave you earlier today. That light doesn’t last forever. It isn’t yours. It’s borrowed from the plasmasphere and can hold a charge for just so long. Instead, we must recover your original light. The power of our intentions will lead us to the exact coordinates of that event.”
Syd gazes at the bands of color on the horizon, bewitched. “That’s what I’ve been searching for, too” she says, “every time I play the game.”
“The game?” says Pandora.
Syd nods. “The Anesthesia Game. Where I try to remember the answer to a question while I look for the lost light.”
Pandora’s arched white brows form a deep vee against her polished bronze skin. “This is no game, my dear,” she says gravely. “Lives are at stake.”
A storm lights up on the horizon and a shiver races through them both.
Pandora regards Syd deeply for what feels like an eternity. When she shakes herself out of it, she says, “It won’t be easy, darling child. In order to harvest the necessary signal, I have to sacrifice particle form for a time.”
Syd’s eyes dart side-to-side. “You have to become a wave,” she says.
Pandora holds Syd at arm’s length, her eyes glowing. “You know about waves, do you?”
Like an unread book under her mattress whose information she’d absorbed in her sleep, Syd doesn’t know how she knows what she knows. But she knows. “It’s how I survive,” she says.
Pandora smiles broadly. “Waves are possibilities. They change everything!”
“But you can’t stay one,” says Syd.
“No.” The gypsy’s smile vanishes. “I must be quick. Efficient.”
“And there’s no guarantee of return…”
Pandora swallows hard. “…to a particle,” she says, finishing Syd’s thought. “No. It’s a risk. And this isn’t the only risk, just the first.”
“What…” begins Syd, but Pandora raises her index finger in warning.
“One thing at a time,” she says.
They shimmy left and right on the summit, jostled from the second world as commotion surrounds them in the first. Noise, yelps, machines, someone calling out in despair, “Sydney! Oh Sydney!” She feels she has to respond.
“Don’t,” Pandora commands. “Don’t do it. Zeon…and even the storm that created it…are ephemeral. If you respond we may lose this window.”
But the pull is so strong.
“Sydney!” she hears her mother wailing softly, more and more clearly. “Sydney, please come back! Ohhhhhh, Sydney!”
She can’t help herself. She drops down the chute, opens her eyes, blinks. There around her bed is her family—her mom, her dad, Aunt Hannah. “Where’s Dane?” she says. “Why isn’t he here?”
Crying softly, her mother leaves the room.
Why isn’t she answering! Can’t she hear me?
“Don’t you people have any backup generators in this hospital?” demands her father.
“Even the generators are out,” yells someone in the hall.
“Signals are scrambled,” says someone else. “Even planes aren’t allowed to fly.”
Voices whirl around her, above and below. She wants to answer them, but she isn’t strong enough to animate her physical body. She just isn’t. It won’t respond. She tries to push herself into it; make it sit up. Anything.
It’s a wall of flesh and bone.
The next thing she knows, she’s back on the mountain.
“Oh, thank God,” says Pandora. “You must stay focused or all will be lost! I’ll travel in to get the zeon, but if you’re not here when I return…” She brushes her hands together. “That will be that.”
Pandora
Staring into the infinite chasm, Pandora knows she has no choice. The thing she has avoided for lifetimes must now be done. Do it. She squeezes her eyes shut and wills herself de-solidified, swept into the stream of awareness from whence she derived. She wills herself dispersed, while at the same time in control of her boundaries, her dynamics. To accomplish this mission, she must not lose track of her energy ever. She must hold the signal together well enough to recall it when the time comes.
She reopens her eyes, and in that split second, lets go and abandons particle form.
She is confused, then bewildered, then exhilarated. Loose in the wild abandon, the freedom is chilling, nearly unbearable in its piqued ecstasy. But even her ecstasy must be guarded. She allows herself to be part of it and yet…not. She is a wave! Wave properties allow her to shed all predetermined outcomes. She rolls up and down the sea of consciousness freely, still set on the horizon where the blue draws her closer. The zeon has consciousness too, she knows. Everything does. She sees this more clearly now than she ever has. It is one thing to know something with the mind, and quite another to know without human intellectual or emotional filters of any sort.
To just know.
She travels through the atmosphere’s upper region to the ionosphere into the magnetosphere. Everything is charged; she has to fight to keep her energy from being scrambled. She is nearly there…nearly within reach of the stream of zeon in the river of deep dense plasma. In the near distance, a familiar purple orb radiates before her.
Anjah, she thinks, but tries not to conjure with any depth, because that, too, will deter her from her path and possibly even convert her back to particle form. Everything outside of this single focus is a threat to her existence. Anjah carries too much weight, too much history, though she has to confess ignorance to his precise origin, or even his attachment to her. But he’s been a good enough guide. Or informant, really. And she knows that he knows where she is. He knows what she’s finally doing. He will guard her, she supposes. He will help. After all, it is he who brought her here in the first place.
When she arrives at the outer reaches of zeon, its signal is so powerful she’s pulled to the surface of its pole. She resists. Resistance takes more concentration than she thinks she has, but she knows she cannot fail. Failure would either disperse her completely, or convert her instantly to a particle form so dense she risks losing all wave properties, not just now, but forever. Even as a wave, she has a heart that warns her of the danger. She feels it beat…or really, thud, in the center of her awareness. Pa-boom. Pa-boom. Pa-BOOM. Her plan is to gather particles of zeon on the surface of her wave and carry them back. How much is enough? How much is too much? She has no idea.
Blocking the distracting presence of Anjah and the danger that lurks everywhere around her, she begins by focusing deeply. She concentrates, setting her intention to zeon. She is all about blue. Her consciousness attracts it; pulls it in. She feels it defecting from the plasma river, bouncing up, and moving toward her. One infinitesimal particle and another collect on the foam of her whitecap swell as she pretends to be one of them. She is blue. She is zeon. Another particle jumps to her surface. And another. They are one thing. They are family.
She doesn’t know how long she’s there, how could she? Her human aspect is still bound by time, but the plasma is not. The zeon can take its sweet time gathering or not gathering. The zeon is part of the infinity she resists. It is not individuated. It doesn’t fight its nature. It just is. Only Pandora fights.
Another particle jumps; attaches. And another.
Though she conjures patience, deep within her soul she knows this is taking time. The minute she thinks this, fear colors her signal and she begins to lose her charge. Now Anjah places himself in her view, separating her from the zeon. “Get away,” she wants to think, but can’t allow herself to form the thought. Forming the thought would doom the mission, and he knows it. So why isn’t he helping? Isn’t this what he’s been leading her to for a lifetime at least?
His interference makes it impossible for her to harvest any more blue, but then again, maybe it’s because she’s out of time. Or maybe he’s telling her she has enough—that any more would be dangerous. Whatever it is, she has to accept it without examination. E
xamining it wastes precious time and energy.
She returns her focus to the mountain. Equipped with the particles of zeon that singe the membrane of her energy, she remains a wave until she reaches the peak. There, she deposits the zeon particles at a safe distance, instantly returning to particle form.
“Elysha,” she says, gasping for air, “these are yours.”
The girl instinctively places her arms in front of her and calls out to the radiant blue. The particles are drawn to her bloodstream like yin to yang. One, and then another, and another gather in an orderly row.
Pandora watches, terrified. Will it be enough? Did she collect enough? She’s in no shape to do that again. She should have stopped all her nasty habits long ago. Should never have started them! She should have listened to Anjah. Notwithstanding his irritating manner, he tried to tell her, didn’t he? A thousand times.
Pandora checks her thoughts, refocuses, and aligns herself with the process. Watching Elysha now in all her majesty, calling the zeon forth and absorbing it, Pandora’s consciousness becomes a dizzying time lapse of so many lifetimes. She is alert and super-conscious. She sees every particle, however infinitesimal adhere to the girl’s mutated blood, to her disease. She sees the disease. She sees the tiny spinning decagon-shaped molecules consuming the child’s blood. She sees the treacherous signal they radiate to each other as they conspire to overcome their host. She sees their shock as the zeon enters; watches them gather in protest, rising up against the intruder. She sees the zeon now, absorbed into the girl’s etheric envelope and deeper, into her body temeer. She sees the child nearly collapse from the battle. She watches.
She waits.
Sydney
It’s funny how you can suddenly know things that you never knew. How obvious everything is when it finally comes together after years of ranting to the universe, Why me?! Why!
The tiny specks of crystal blue, if it can even be called blue—calling zeon ‘blue’ is like calling the sun ‘yellow’. Zeon is not a pigment anymore than the sun is a pigment. It is light of the highest frequency. It is light of a nature unavailable before the magnetic storm that produced it arrived. Nature is a constant creation. Syd used to think that the palette belonged to God, but more and more she realizes that long ago, God gave it to us. The palette is ours.
Understanding this finally, she stands with her arms outstretched watching the zeon particles gather one by one, as if called by name. Joey, Roger, Martha, and Stan, ha ha! Individually and collectively they are aware of her. Aware of her problem. Her curse. They have intelligence. They penetrate her energy with that awareness, attracted like tiny missiles to the dark, ten-sided, spinning weapons of destruction that course through her. She sees them, too, the arsenal. She tries not to worry about the fact that there are many more dark ten-sided weapons of destruction than there are crystal particles of zeon to combat them. Warfare is warfare. All weaponry is not equal. Let’s see what the zeon can do.
Scanning the surface of her inner body, she sees the zeon are strategic. Somehow they locate the dissonant signal. They hover then attack. They attack then attach. They cling for dear life. They won’t let go. But are there enough of them? There is so much disease. Her system is a sea of inky black marauders. There goes another blue, and another. They seek and find. They attack and attach. One by one, they neutralize the signal of the marauders. The invaders weaken to a neutral gray. Their last gasp is a vibration that Syd can feel from head to toe. She shivers and seizes as her brain registers the signal switch of each cluster.
Even here, in this eternal land, on this majestic peak on this infinite landscape where the physical world is subordinate, she collapses into Pandora’s arms from the fight within her. It is too much. She’s endured the physical fight and the personal battle longer than her memory mercifully allows. How long has it been?
Eternity.
While she fights, Pandora holds her, kisses her forehead, strokes the glorious strands of flaxen hair that magically reappear on her bald scalp—in this world, anyway. Pandora watches with her as the zeon continues to zap one after another hostile invader—attack and attach; attack and attach. Until finally…finally…the zeon is in control. It assumes strategic locations in her blood and nervous systems, like Swiss guards—in the brain, the marrow, the spleen, the liver, the kidney, the colon, the upper and lower tracts—routing out the particles of cowardly disease that dare to hide. We will find you!
Her hands shake; her legs jerk; her eyes roll back in her head as the zeon seizes command. Her spirit moves in and out of her physical body as it is first shocked by the battle, then shocked again into a state of wellness she hasn’t experienced in so long, it’s more foreign to her than the disease itself. She doesn’t know which condition is worse.
Mitsy
“Get the doctor,” Mitsy commands. “Oh my God, get the doctor, Aaron. She’s returning. She’s trying to talk.”
Aaron rushes out as Hannah rushes in.
“What are you saying?” Hannah mutters almost unintelligibly. “I heard what you said to Aaron! She’s returning! Are you saying she talked?”
Mitsy shakes her head. “No, but I feel she will. I feel it!”
Hannah sits beside her. “I hope to hell you’re right,” she says.
Mitsy looks up. “What about Pandora?”
Hannah shakes her head. “She’s on life support. Still brain activity, but…” She places her head in her hands. “I’m sorry, Mits. I really am.”
Mitsy swallows hard, her eyes darting left and right. “And…and Dane?”
“Cracked skull, broken pelvis, shoulder, arm…you name it. They induced a coma.”
“Oh my God.”
Hannah nods. “But he’s young,” she says. “The doctors haven’t given up hope. Anyway, we can only focus on one disaster at a time.”
“But his family…”
“We called Zelda. She’s trying to contact his father.”
Mitsy nods faintly, but really, she’s too stunned to take in anything beyond the condition of her daughter. All she knows is that if she hadn’t returned to the farm, she would likely be dead by now. The rudimentary strength she rediscovered back here is what makes it possible for her to sit upright in the midst of this storm. She is resolved to save her daughter. She can feel Pandora guiding her. See her in the light, Mitsy! The light! And breathe, for God’s sake! Breathe! Find your center and stay there!
Sydney’s leg jerks, breaking Mitsy’s meditation. She reaches for it; holds it.
“Have you heard from Jonah?” she asks Hannah. “About Daizee?”
Hannah shakes her head. “My phone still isn’t working. One of the techs said the entire electromagnetic field is whacked out by this storm. CME’s, he called them. Coronal Mass…whatevers.” She shrugs. “She was right,” she says, referring to Pandora. “There was something about her I didn’t like, I admit it, but the woman knew what she was talking about.”
Mitsy dismisses the comment. “It is what it is,” she says just as Aaron rushes back into the room followed by Dr. Blanca. The doctor observes Syd closely, takes her vitals, and warns them gently. “The body may show what appear to be signs of life…”
“No,” Mitsy says, “no!” She wags her finger. She will not allow anyone to steal her hope.
“You have to decide,” the doctor says compassionately.
Aaron steps back in horror. “Decide what?” he says.
She folds her arms. “How far we want to take this when the power returns.” She shakes her head sadly. “I’m sorry, but a transplant is no longer an option.”
Sydney
Syd floats. She has no pain. She floats in and out of one world and the next, through past and present without boundaries or fear. She floats through the hospital, through Z’s house and barn, through her room in Darien, and back to the farm where she walks right past Hannah and her mother leaving the barn.
Next she’s in the house, opening the mudroom door. The Persian cat darts outside be
fore she can close it. On the hill, he jumps at her, startled, clawing the air all around her. He sees her; he sees everything.
“Where’s my dog?” she says, and tiptoes back through the house for her puppy. “There you are!” she exclaims, and joyfully chases Godiva out the front door, around the bushes to the back, where she sees the aurora in the southern sky. It takes her breath away. It’s here, too, not just on the mountain—so rich and abundant! She’s glad to see it; glad it penetrates both worlds. The zeon has given her new life, at least in this form. Her energy is low, but responsive. Wherever she is now, she has freedom to move back and forth. Whether she keeps this freedom or relinquishes it is a question she can’t answer right now.
The next thing she knows she’s riding Daizee, lost to the lower world, in a gallop across the horizon where she’s released to a cot in the Darien clinic awaiting anesthesia. How can she be in so many places at once? She’s happy when Roz enters the room. She hasn’t seen her in so long. Her heart glows; she loves Roz. She misses her, too, but not enough to stay here.
“Ask me a question,” she tells Roz.
“What kind of question?” Roz says.
“You know, The Anesthesia Game. Ask me anything at all. When I wake up, I have to give you the answer.”
“Oh right,” says Roz. She ponders and ponders. She turns her back, cups her chin and frowns then flips back around. “Okay, I’ve got it!” she says.
Syd waits in anticipation. This has to be good; it took her long enough.
“Okay, what’s the spirit name of the gypsy who took your light?” Roz says.
Syd has to go deep to remember. “The gypsy who took my light?” she says, stalling. “The gypsy who…”
“Your original light,” says Roz.
Syd thinks. The answer dribbles in. “She was a queen, I think.”
“Whether she was a queen or not, I don’t know. But you must remember her spirit name,” Roz says. “It’s important. Think hard. To win the game, you must know her name.”
The Anesthesia Game Page 30