by Michael Priv
“What then?”
“A spaceship.”
Linda flailed her arms in frustration. She looked at me with angry eyes.
“Promise to hear me out, Linda. It’s kind of unusual, I know. I feel for you. I do understand.” Linda waved me off in desperation. Here we go, the moment of truth. I decided to lay it on her as gently and to the point as I could. “You see,” I started uncertainly, “this planet is a prison facility of an ancient galactic empire. Everybody you see walking around here is a convict, we’re all prisoners.”
“I’m gonna hurt you real bad,” Linda interrupted, squinting at me, fists clenched, infuriated, anger showing red on her caramel skin. “You…”
“Hear me out, please. You promised.”
She shut up reluctantly and looked away, still breaking the communication but covertly now, simmering. “ We’re all prisoners here. We just are. Not because I say so, you get it? We were all brought here forcibly, and we can’t leave. Most of us are locked up with the same verdict: nonconformity, the highest crime there is. So, you’re all nonconformists one way or another.”
Linda glared at me, furious. “You think I’m stupid? Why are you doing this, Norman? Why are you brushing me off like this? Tell me what’s going on. I swear to God…”
“You promised to hear me out, Linda. Can you just listen? Or do I have to start charging you a hundred grand for every interruption?” She gave me a crooked smile. “Any bulk discount? If I let you keep the bag, can I interrupt all the time?”
“Shut up. Keep the bag.” I waved her off. “Listen to me, will you?”
“Why am I supposed to listen to this nonsense? What possible purpose could this idiocy serve, Picky? Please!” “ Give me three minutes, okay? Two minutes?” I was begging. I always knew it’d be hard, but now it seemed impossible even to begin. “Humor me, hon. You know I’m crazy about you, right?”
“You’re just crazy! Not about me, Norman. You’re totally nuts.” “Yeah, I know, but are you crazy about me?” I inquired slyly. “Yes, okay.” She simmered down a bit. “All right, I’m crazy about you. Now what?” “Wonderful. Just shut up for two minutes. Where were we? Right, so we are all prisoners here, and most of us have served a very long term already and we will never get out. But we’re actually immortal souls, fooled into believing ourselves to be one-life animals. That’s a part of the sentence. Or, rather, that isthe sentence. We’re not mortal, and we’re not animals at all, we’re not even biological in nature, we’re units of thought, souls, residing in bodies.”
Linda’s derisive snorting interrupted me. I took her hand in mine and ignored the snorting. She relaxed a tiny bit. “In my case, I’m different. I arrived here voluntarily as a part of a military force a long time ago. We were butchered by the Guards and so…”
“By whom?! The Guards too now?” Linda’s sarcasm knew no bounds.
“Linda, listen to me. This is a prison. It has guards. That’s normal, okay? Prisons always have guards.”
She stared at me, shaking her head in disbelief at the idiocy she was hearing. “The Guards wiped us out in the Andes some five thousand years ago. We reincarnate. We are always trying to escape from here, but the only spaceship on this planet belongs to the Guards and they keep it wellhidden. You see now?”
Linda kept staring at me.
“Blink twice if you hear the sounds coming out of my mouth, hon.” “I don’t understand,” Linda finally said . “Do you actually believe this crap? You need to see a specialist, Norm—again. You’re scaring me. Please, I’m begging you.”
I mulled the situation over in my mind. The straight-forward approach was not going to do it; I saw it now. “Okay, sweetie, listen, you got me.” I had an idea. Might work. “It’s all bullshit. You’re right. Ha-ha! Actually, it’s a movie I saw. Good movie. I wanna tell you, okay? Sci-Fi. I forgot the name now. Let’s see, something like Forever
Dead or something. Great flick, four stars, I think, maybe five.” “Name some actors?” Linda relaxed a bit more but not completely, assessing now if I was perhaps less crazy than she thought.
“I think this guy, you know, from Transformers, what’s his name?”
“Shia Labeouf?”
“Yeah, him, I guess. And the girl was Halle Berry. Very pretty. Maybe not.”
“An interracial couple? Like us? Are you making this up?” Linda questioned with renewed suspicion.
“No, of course not. What are you talking about? Halle Berry’s white.”
“What?!” “Sure. You didn’t know? Black is a marketing ploy nowadays. They promote in Africa. Emerging markets and all that. Everybody wants to be black now.”
“You arecrazy. I see it very clearly.” Linda rolled her eyes in exaggerated torment and folded her arms over her turquoise blouse in a pious, long-suffering manner.
“Okay, so let me tell you, okay? It’s a great movie. A love story.” Linda perked up through her mock piety. A love story, her favorite. I went on, encouraged. “Oh, yes indeed, a great love story that spanned ages, millions of years even, all over the galaxy. These guys are immortals, they love each other forever.”
“Forever?” Linda asked dreamily. “ Totally! They never die as souls. Only their bodies die, so they learned to recognize each other’s soul in any body—man, woman, any combination. Can you imagine? True love, babe. Awesome.”
A glance in her direction confirmed that I had her now: eyes misting over, gentle smile on her lips. Girls. “ So, listen, this chick—yes, it was Halle Berry, now I remember,” I went on with more conviction. “She gets in trouble back home, falsely accused, of course, framed, convicted and they ship her to this faraway planet as a prisoner forever. Man, you should’ve seen the tears and all. Totally heart wrenching. She gets torn away from her life, her family, her friends, her boyfriend she had back there. But he didn’t love her, he was in on the frame-up and then helping the authorities. Can you imagine? What a dick. She trusted him!”
“Who, Shia Labeouf betrayed her?” “No, no, her boyfriend on her planet where she lived. Sh ia was her true love through millions of years, but they would only find each other every thousand years or so, you know? It’s hard, they reincarnate in different bodies among billions of other people, sometimes on different planets. They can’t always find each other so they have boyfriends and girlfriends meanwhile, they get married with other people, they live their lives one after another, a succession of lives in different bodies that age and die. But they never stop looking for each other, never ever stop searching.”
No objections there. Linda gobbled it all up. “Did her true love find her?” she asked quietly.
“What do you think?” I asked, also quietly. “I think he did.” She gazed affectionately straight into my eyes. The bastards might have taken her memory, but they didn’t destroy her soul. Deep down she always knew.
“M -hm.” I nodded vigorously. “She got shipped to this other planet, the prison planet, and there he found her or she found him, whatever happened, but they did find each other—you can imagine the happy reunion!” Linda sighed. “He actually came there first, to that planet, as a part of a military force, which was ambushed and killed off by the enemy. Total wipe out, all dead. She came in long after that happened.”
“Looking for him, for her love?” Linda whispered quietly, hushed. “ Well, not totally. Like I said, she was framed for a crime she didn’t commit. But—maybe, since the power of her intention was pure magic, it affected her fate a whole lot. The point is, she did come here.”
“Here?” Her head snapped in my direction, eyes squinted in suspicion.
“I mean there, to thatplanet in the movie, you know? Not here ‘here’ but more like therehere.’” “Okay, fine . So, they met and stayed together for thousands of years, loving each other more than life itself?” Linda asked, settling back for a new load of mush.
“Well, not exactly stayed together for thousands of years , no. Deep inside their souls they did always stay together, not in
actual life, though. They stay together as much as possible, whenever they can find each other. But anyway, what I wanted to say is that he was a POW, right? And those prisoners of war were always trying to escape from the prison planet, but they needed a spaceship, and they didn’t have one, obviously, so for thousands of years they searched for the Guards’ transport. The Guards on that prison planet, they had a spaceship for emergencies, supplies and personnel. They hid that space transport in a hollowed-out hill.”
Linda sat straight. She grabbed my wrist and squeezed hard. I looked into her eyes. She stared at me in complete astonishment. “You don’t want to tell me you’re an extraterrestrial for real, do you?”
“’Course not, hon. Don’t be silly. There is no such thing,” I smiled reassuringly.
“Then what’s this?” she asked, shoving the laptop in my direction. “What’s on the picture? A hollowed-out hill. How…” I kept silent, looking straight forward now, driving. Linda jerked her head a few times, as if wanting to get out of the car but said nothing. I was done explaining. Nothing else I could say, really, except repeating more of the same. The moment of truth. The truth had always existed first, and the piles of lies always came later in time. So, appealing directly to the truth was powerful, as it could blow the layers of lies to smithereens—in theory.
A long silence followed. This ordeal of an explanation was beginning to get on my nerves.
“I don’t believe you,” Linda finally said without much conviction. “Oh, you don’t, do you?” I asked , a little annoyed—enough already. “So how did you explain your feelings for me? Have you thought about your initial reaction to me? Did it surprise you that sixty seconds into our acquaintance you could think of nothing else but having my baby?”
“You got me there. I was so horny for you, I felt sick. Just ravenous.” I nodded my understanding. “Isn’t that unusual? You fell in love immediately, completely, and extremely. How did you explain such intensity to yourself?”
“Obviously, you’re so adorable. Who wouldn’t want to have your baby? What about you? You couldn’t live without me, either, I bet.” “Are you kidding? I had my hands in your pants the second opportunity presented itself, remember?” “I do!” Linda laughed. “And mine in yours. We were both done in under a second, I guess—the quickest quickie in the known universe.”
“Well? Is that how you usually respond to men, especially younger, white men, uneducated, depressed, minimum wage earners?”
Linda did not answer, thinking hard, a persistent small smile not leaving her lips. I guessed it worked because, surprisingly, the only questions she had after pondering deeply what she’d just heard revolved around our relationship.
“We gravitate toward each other all the time through the ages…” I heard Linda gasp at that, I never knew how much she loved such stuff. “…but like I said we don’t always find each other. Most of the time we don’t. But we keep trying, we always keep trying. We never stop, never give up. And we do manage to be together every so often.”
“True love?” Linda whispered.
I nodded. “Definitely, hon.”
“Why? What makes it so?”
“ My best guess is through the ages we worked all the kinks out of our insecurities, so we don’t hold back, we automatically match our vibrations. With no back-off and make-wrong, we can always agree, rather than disagree, right?”
“Right, Picky, I agree!” Linda laughed. We both laughed. “True love is many things,” Linda said. “One of them is definitely agreement.”
“Yep, w e agree. I say you’re absolutely the best, one and only and the most adorable and desirable woman in the world. Do you agree?” Linda caressed my face, smiling. “See? That’s what I’m talking about, we both agree. Seriously, agreement breeds closeness, trust, willingness to open up, willingness to communicate in many different ways, including sex. No agreement—hit the road, Jack, again and again.”
“ But listen, Picky, there must be more. It sounds pedestrian. Where is magic? How would we keep running into each other without magic?”
“ Like I said, that’s the magic called ‘intention.’ In this universe thought matters a whole lot. Our intention to be together is what makes things happen, if common agreement is strong. We keep looking for each other lifetime after lifetime, longing to be together and love each other, and so we gravitate toward each other, propelled by the power of our intention. Intention is King. That is magic.”
“ Intention? Yeah, I see it. We make things happen. You’re right—that’s magic. Hey, wait, if I’m in prison right now and you’re here accidentally, then how would we ever meet if you didn’t happen to land here by mistake? Seems like a pure coincidence.”
I shrugged. “We’re together, aren’t we? That’s exactly how intention works. And it’s not the first time we’ve met here on Earth, either. Pure coincidences don’t exist.”
“Do you love me?” Linda asked quietly.
“I sure do, honey. No worries about that.”
With a smile, Linda leaned toward me and kissed me. “But if you are immortal and I’m not,” she started. “ Hey, you’re as immortal as me, Linda. We aren’t different in any way except that somebody fucked up your long-term memory for you. That’s all.”
“Is that memory failure, is it permanent?” Linda’s eyes right next to me, begging silently for the right answer. “I want to remember our other lives together.”
“Oh, no!” I lied. “’C ourse it isn’t permanent. We’ll patch you up, you’ll remember what you had for breakfast on May 18th of 1267, I swear.”
“ Oh yeah, on Tuesday, was it? Had eggs.” Linda smiled and snuggled to me as much as she could in the car. I put my arm around her. “Picky, does it seem normal to you that you were dumped onto a planet held by the enemy? Doesn’t it look suspicious that nobody knew about the prison guards?”
No kidding, definitely suspicious. And look how quickly Linda picked it up. “You’re brilliant, you know that?” I caressed Linda’s face and she cradled my hand to her chest. “Very suspicious indeed,” I agreed. “But who the hell knows? So here we are.”
“Hey, listen.” Linda perked up again. “ How do they transport billions of souls here from way out there somewhere, light years away? On that spaceship somehow? How do you even package souls on a spaceship?”
“They don’t package souls or ship souls or anything like that. They have technology. They’ve had it for eons, kind of like a teleportation rig for thought units. You know, we are thought-based energy units. That’s what spirits are. Stick a transmitter there and a receiver here, somewhere in the ocean, and zap, here you are. Instantaneously.”
“That would be faster than the speed of light. Einstein said that was impossible.” Linda seemed confused. Well, those matters were quite confusing, I agreed.
“Speed of thought is faster than the speed of light. Thought is instantaneous.”
I think she understood. We drove in silence for a while, my hand in hers, contented smile on her face. She suddenly bolted upright again. “But if you’re escaping, what am I supposed to do? Leave everything and everybody and run away with you? My job and all?”
“Well, look, I’ d be a very rich man on Baltizor. I’d receive my back one-eighth-pay with interest for about five thousand years. Probably one hell of a lot of money.”
“But what about my parents? My friends? My job?” I kept silent, letting her come to some conclusions on her own. In truth, life as she knew it was over. She pondered that for a while in silence, a pensive frown on her face.
“What about my ‘forever dead’ sentence? I mean if I’m a convicted criminal?”
“You were convicted in Murabi Empire. We would be going to Baltizor United Stars, not Murabi.”
Linda nodded, lost in thought again. “What’s it like over there?” “Safe and orderly. Predictable. Respectful. Friendly. Very stable. A little boring but an okay life. Nice. Especially if you got money. People are polite. Practically no crime or po
verty. You’ll like it there.”
“How can a place like that exist? Societies here on Earth always seem to be in a state of agitation or on the verge of collapsing or something.”
“This is a planet of criminals. That makes all the difference. Things get hysterical here on a regular basis. Look, United States is only 240 years old and look at the rifts in this society. It seems we are already teetering on the verge of something or other. Murabi Empire is over 800,000 years old. Baltizor Confederacy is well over 300,000 years old. Those societies are very stable, rock-solid, unshakable. Everybody is more or less okay financially and mentally stable. Upward mobility is difficult but so is downward mobility. Things seldom change. People like it that way. They can plan ahead.”
Linda was thoughtful for a minute. “So, the bureaucracy must be quite prevalent then?”
“Yes, bureaucracy is definitely important there.”
“If I have no papers of any kind and in fact I’m an illegal, would they allow me to stay?” Linda was dubious. “You’d be my wife. Hey, look, I don’t know. One problem at a time, hon. As my best friend Bill Hall used to say, ‘we’ll jump off that cliff when we get there.’ We can’t jump off of it now, okay? We got no cliff.”
Linda nodded. “As long as we jump together,” she finally said. “Bet your sweet ass on that,” I agreed.
We drove in silence for a spell, holding hands and thinking. “Picky, where are we going now?”
“Don’t know. Driving north right now, then east. Where do you think we should be going?” “ Well, what we really need right now is some help with the poem. That’d be the Santa Cruz Faculty of Foreign Languages. You know the one I’m talking about?”