by Elbel, Joy
I was still trying to take in the meaning of her words when she disappeared back inside the tent. Zach and I lived past lives together? And was this being our last life together a good thing or a bad one? It was another helping of crazy that I just didn’t want to deal with. I’d already had my daily dose of weird when she popped her head back out and gave one last cryptic comment.
“I almost forgot—the labradorite for your friend is in that bag as well. And when you see Nestor again, remind him to stop bringing newspapers back with him. Tell him Cleo said to knock it off before he gets himself into trouble. Again.”
Automatically my mind went back to the old man at the hotel in Pittsburgh and the time travelling periodicals he presented to me. I hadn’t had the time or inclination to look at them and almost forgot that I even had them. If what I thought she was suggesting was true, I was going to shred those papers the minute I got home. I already felt like I was swimming upstream no matter which way I headed. Nothing about my life was making sense anymore—at least not by the normal definition of normal. I needed to establish a strict “no unnecessary weirdness” policy and enforce it. Starting now.
Yeah, that new policy lasted a mere twenty seconds. I got into the car and was about to close the door behind me when something caught my eye. There was a small slip of paper near the front tire of the car. I had no words to describe why it intrigued me so much but it did and I was compelled to see what it was.
“Just a second,” I said to Roxanne as I got back out of the car to retrieve it. It was probably nothing more than a discarded gum wrapper yet I had to know for sure. But something told me not to inspect it until I was back in the car and heading toward Tucson. It’s a good thing I listened to my instincts. If I hadn’t, I very well may have passed out right on the spot.
2. Smoke Screen
I woke up to a whirl of confusion—bright lights, tubes in both my nose and throat, and an unbearable urge to throw up. As I started to heave, unknown hands began pushing me over onto my side and a familiar voice encouraged me to expel whatever I could from my stomach. Leaning over the side of the table I was laying on, I retched until there was nothing left inside of me. I rolled back over and through watery eyes, found the face that belonged to that familiar voice.
“What happened to me, Dr. Matthews?” I whispered.
“I was really hoping that you could answer that question for me, Zach. You ingested nearly an entire bottle of the sleeping pills I prescribed for you. Why did you do it?”
Perplexed, I searched my mind for that answer but drew a complete blank. The last thing I could remember was pretending that I was sleep walking to get Mom to stop harassing me. I was so tired. Did I take those pills while I was asleep? I couldn’t trust my brain anymore.
Everything in my mind was so hazy—like I was standing on one side of a wall of smoke and the rest of the world stood on the other. The only time I felt normal was while I was asleep. Sleep solved all of my problems for me. Sleep was where I wanted to be right now.
Ignoring his question, I instead asked him one of my own. “Can someone please turn off the lights? I really need to get some sleep.”
“We’re going to be moving you to another room, Zach. For some evaluations. Someone from transport is on their way up to get you now. I’ll ask them to dim the lights for you. You won’t be allowed to have any visitors for a while but I’ll let Ruby and your family know that you’re okay.”
“No!” I shouted. A sudden burst of energy shot through me at the mere mention of her name. I couldn’t remember why but I knew that she was the reason I was here. I wanted nothing to do with her. I wanted to erase her from my memories and me from hers. “Don’t tell—” I paused for a moment unable to bring myself to speak her name. “Don’t tell her anything!”
Dr. Matthews gave me an odd look like he thought I was crazy or something. I wasn’t crazy but she was trying to drive me there. And I wasn’t going to let her do it. Not anymore.
“Okay,” he replied yet I knew in my heart that he was going to tell her everything whether I gave my consent or not. But I was going to figure out a way around that. I just needed a little time to sleep on it.
Once they removed the tubes, I suddenly realized how terribly sore my throat was. And just how terrible my stomach felt. That’s when my memory started to de-fog. This was all her fault. I wasn’t trying to kill myself. She convinced me that sleep was the only way for us to be together so I did what I needed to do. I didn’t want to fall asleep ever again—dreams were where she had complete control of me.
Where only moments before, sleep was all I craved; now, staying awake seemed like my only hope for survival. I had to stay alert. I had to find a way to convince them that I wasn’t trying to harm myself. But how? It was going to be next to impossible considering the fact that I’d pretty much dug my own grave. I knew what they meant by “evaluations”. They were sending me to the nut ward for observation.
As they wheeled me to my new location, I plotted and schemed of a way to prove my sanity to them. Maybe a few days locked away in a padded cell would work to my advantage. Ruby wouldn’t be allowed in to see me. There was no way for her to taunt and tease me now. Except for in my dreams. The longer I stayed awake the better off I would be. Yes, I could go a few days without sleep. I had to. My life depended on it. My sanity depended on it.
So as they placed me in my new room, they dimmed the lights the way I’d asked Dr. Matthews to do earlier. But once I was alone, I turned every light to its maximum brightness setting. Then I turned on the television as loud as it would go. I wasn’t going to fall into her trap again tonight. Or any other night for that matter. It was time for me to take back control of my own mind. But I was oh so tired....
My eyelids flickered slowly shut repeatedly yet every time I would jerk myself back to consciousness. Steadily, my reaction time became slower and slower so I sat up straight in my bed and reached for the remote control. I needed something more mentally stimulating than CNN if I was going to stay awake.
Music. Music would help me concentrate on what I needed to do. I could stay alert for hours if I found a good music station to “drum” along to. I skipped past all of the TV stations until I got to what I was looking for. Classic rock. Not my first choice in music but upbeat enough to keep my mind off of sleeping.
And my plan worked perfectly—for a while. Queen, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd—they all fulfilled their part in keeping me awake. I was familiar with their songs and able to provide silent percussion without missing a beat.
But after the waning notes of “Another One Bites the Dust” faded into the opening beats of the next song, something changed. The music changed. It wasn’t classic rock anymore. But it was a tune I’d heard before. I’d never heard it on the radio but I distinctly remembered it from my dreams.
It was the music I played the night I imagined her dancing for me. It wasn’t a real song—what was it doing on the classic rock station? It was hypnotic; it was drawing me back down into the land of dreams. I couldn’t allow that to happen. Angrily, I flicked the remote to the next station.
While it was listed as the jazz station, it clearly wasn’t. As the same tribal beat echoed throughout the room, I caught the faint hint of cinnamon in the air. She was doing it to me again—invading my mind. Again, I pushed the button to make it go away.
Station after station, only one tune floated back to me. And the scent of her grew stronger each time I pushed the button on the remote. Distraught, I turned the TV off altogether but that only made things worse. The pounding drums and overpowering odor in the room were now accompanied by one other thing.
Her laughter. I could hear that seductive giggle bouncing through my brain like a ricocheted bullet. It had to stop. Clasping my hands to my ears, I tried desperately to stay in control.
“Make it stop,” I repeatedly whispered to myself. “Make it stop. Make it go away. Make her go away.”
When my hands did nothing to block o
ut the sound, I wrapped a pillow around my head instead. With my torment muffled temporarily, I found the strength to get out of the bed and do what I needed to do.
Once I was done, the music stopped. The cinnamon melted away. Her giggle was the last thing to die out but eventually it, too, was only a memory. But they were all replaced with something even more horrific.
When the smoke screen lifted and I could clearly see what I had done, I realized that I wasn’t going to be leaving this place for a long time. Perhaps…never.
3. Sea of Doubt
I held that scrap of paper tightly inside my fist until it felt like it was going to burn a hole straight through my hand. We were halfway back to Tucson when I finally couldn’t take the suspense any longer. When Roxanne pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank, I knew it was time. It was time to take a peek at the Schrodinger’s cat I’d been clutching for miles.
It was a paradox. Part of me wanted to believe that when I opened my hand, I would find nothing of value to me. The other part—the insane part, apparently—clung to the hope that the longer I took to look at it, the more relevant it would be. There were warring factions at work in my brain. Did I want to put my trust in all of these weird signs or didn’t I? Would I be disappointed if all I found was a scrap of trash? Or would I rejoice in the normalcy of not being bombarded by things that lay just on the other side of life’s veil?
Sooner or later, I would have to accept the fact that normal didn’t exist anymore. Okay, so I was never really “normal” in the first place but I’d hit a level of weirdness that I needed to deal with as rationally as I possibly could. So I bit the bullet and unfurled my fingers.
The crinkled piece of paper in my hand was barely two inches long and half an inch wide but from the strange characters imprinted upon it, I instantly knew what I was looking at. Despite the raging heat of the sun, a cold chill moved up my spine and filtered out toward all of my extremities.
I was holding the discarded contents of a fortune cookie. I was staring down at the Chinese translation of the word “feather”. There was no mistaking it—whatever fortune I found on the reverse side was going to lead me the direction I needed to go next. My fingers trembled as I turned it over and read the next message from my mother.
“To find your future, you must search the past.”
And, I have to admit, that was the moment true panic set in for the first time during all of my recent adventures. I was afraid of what that actually meant. A mere few days ago, I would have looked at that message in an innocuous way but after the newspaper incident and Salma’s parting words; now, my brain was jumping to some very strange conclusions.
Time travel. Was it actually possible? Was there a way for me to go back in time and prevent Zach from going to California? I’d seen enough time travel movies to know that messing with the past could have dire consequences on both the present and future. Was this the only way for me to save Zach? Or was I going completely crazy now too?
When Roxanne got back inside the car, she immediately asked me if I was okay. No, I was far from it but not ready to talk about the latest turn of events. So I sloughed it off as nothing more than concern for what was going on back home and left it at that. The concept of time travel wasn’t appropriate fodder for a casual conversation.
I spoke not another word until we arrived at my hotel room in Tucson. And even then, I said only what needed to be said. Roxanne packed my things while I searched furiously for an open seat on the earliest flight out. Without hesitation, I paid an enormous fee for the first seat I found. I only had two hours left in Tucson and much to accomplish in that span of time. And that’s exactly how I preferred it to be. The more I had to do, the less time I would have to sit idly by thinking about the metaphysical journey that was unfolding before me.
Roxanne got me to the airport with little time to spare. I promised to keep her up to date on how things were going back home. In return, she promised me that she would attempt to track down Mom’s other friend Josette in the meantime. From what I’d learned about their time in Arizona, Josette held an important key to unlocking the mystery that was my mother. And I knew that I was in need of all the help I could get.
The first leg of my flight was from Tucson to Denver. It was relatively short so I pulled out my laptop and wrote until we landed. My flight from Denver to Pittsburgh was longer and there was no way I would keep my mind occupied enough to stop thinking obsessively about everything. So before I even boarded the plane, I took the maximum recommended dose of melatonin to knock myself out.
The plane was barely soaring through the Colorado sky when I fell fast asleep. I was well acquainted with strange dreams but what my brain conjured up during my nap was completely different from what I was used to. In my dream, I was sitting in a theater, empty except for Zach and me. We were feeding each other popcorn and having a normal conversation while the previews flashed by on the screen looming in front of us.
As the opening credits began to roll by, Zach and I fell silent. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie or what it was about, but I knew we’d both been dying to see it since the very first trailer was released. Zach reached over and took my hand and gave it a squeeze. The action was about to start. We were both ready for this.
That was the moment when a searing pain in my left ear rudely prodded me awake. I was approximately thirty minutes away from setting foot on Pennsylvania soil again. That knowledge brought mixed feelings. I wanted to see Zach. But was I truly ready to? I hadn’t been gone long but obviously things had taken a downward spiral in my absence. Helplessly, I’d watched as the Zach I knew faded away leaving me hurt and confused by it all. And now, things were probably even worse than I remembered and I was no closer to helping him than I was when I left—possibly even further than I was before.
Shelly met me at the baggage claim with a warm hug then promptly scolded me for my clandestine mission.
“Ruby! Don’t you ever run away from home like that again without letting us know where you are!” she reprimanded as she commandeered the larger of my two bags and made a beeline for the door.
“Okay. I won’t. I promise. But once I tell you why I did it, I think you’ll understand the motivation behind it.”
“Yes, well, you have an entire two hour drive to do that in. You promised, remember?”
Sigh. No, I hadn’t forgotten but I had changed my mind. Sort of. I was mentally exhausted from the last few hours I’d spent in Arizona and still slightly groggy from the melatonin. And even though I’d grown to despise the phrase, I was currently a victim of the dreaded monster known as jet lag. I needed more sleep so that I could try to recapture the dream I lost during landing.
“I’m extremely tired, Shelly. Can this wait until we get home? Please? I need a nap to clear my head before going in to see Zach. This is more of a sit down over a cup of tea kind of conversation anyway.”
I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to grab me and physically shake the truth right out of me. Maybe it was the pathetic look on my face that made her give in and agree to wait. Regardless, she agreed to my request and started the car. I curled up into a tight little ball and fell quickly back to sleep.
Almost immediately it seemed, I was in the middle of a dream—but not the one I was hoping for. Instead, I was walking down a sandy beach with Zach. We were right at the water’s edge but my usual fear of drowning wasn’t a concern for me. It was like my two near-death experiences had never happened. An alternate timeline of sorts where nothing bad had ever touched either of us. So when Zach asked me if I wanted to go swimming, I instantly said yes.
Zach dove in first but I followed right behind him. No sooner was he in the water than he took off without looking back. I, however, barely made it three feet from the shore. While it looked like normal water to me, it certainly didn’t feel like it. It was thicker than it should have been—more like the consistency of honey.
I paddled as hard as I could to move forwa
rd yet went nowhere. It brought me no fear, merely frustration. I fought off wave after viscous wave, always staying afloat yet making no progress. Exhausted, I finally gave up and bobbed up and down in place while watching Zach swim happily away. That’s when I woke up to Shelly frantically waving her hand around my forehead.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Her behavior was so odd that I questioned whether or not I was still asleep.
“Don’t freak out and whatever you do, don’t touch your forehead.”
Okay, this had to be a dream. There’s no way anyone could say that sentence to someone and expect them not to freak out. I lifted my hand to check my forehead and she swiftly batted it away.
“I told you not to touch it! There’s a honey bee on you. It’s the strangest thing. I had the heat turned up a little too high so I opened the window for a few minutes to cool it down in here. Next thing I know, something buzzes past my face and lands on you. It’s been perched there for the last hundred miles and won’t move no matter what I do. Where did it even come from? It’s October!”
Great. Just freakin’ great. First feathers and now bees. Coupled with the dream I’d just had and the one involving the Bee Still whiskey refinery, I had no doubt that this was another sign telling me what I needed to do. Or in this case, what I wasn’t supposed to do. How could I possibly move forward and be still at the same damn time?
“I’ve given up on trying to find rational explanations for how this kind of stuff happens to me, Shelly. It just does. But it happens for reasons that I’m trying to decipher. A lot happened while I was in Arizona that I need to explain. For now, just pull over the next chance you get so I can get rid of our stowaway passenger.”