Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  “Somewhat?” Rick asked as he looked around, left to right, then started spinning around trying to find the thing that looked like a kid. “You brought that girl back from the brink of death. All I get is somewhat?”

  “I’m sorry,” the being said, and as Rick turned once more, he found himself standing face to face with it again.

  “Sorry, huh? So is this when the answers come?”

  “I thought you understood.”

  Rick shook his head, a sharp little prickle of anger passing through him. “No. Actually, I don’t. But how about this: let me ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Of course.”

  “When you said we did good, what was that all about? Those men, those crazies about to hurt that whole family, did you do that to lure us out here?”

  The being shook his head with a sad look in his eyes. A look, Rick considered upon second glance, that was almost wounded. “The child was healed because I did need someone’s attention. The signs…the globes have been so badly misunderstood, their existence abused, that the world’s attention needed to be shifted away from….”

  “From what?” Rick snapped. “From a reason for people to kill each other?”

  The being nodded. “And you were the only ones who took notice.”

  If you only knew, Rick thought. “Thank God for Senator Bling’s perceptive wife,” he muttered.

  “What is that?”

  “Never mind. And, uh, what then? We’re coming out here, and you appear to me because you got lucky that we had a connection to the military, on top of seeing your little sign with that girl.”

  “Yes,” the being said with that soulful look again.

  “I don’t believe this,” Rick said, all the while his mind tried to grapple with another problem he felt was right in front of him, yet something he was ignoring. Maybe Doc Knight’s shots to the head’s slowed me down.

  “All right,” Rick said at length. “So…so this is what I don’t get. Why contact me now? Why the sign? Why the girl? Why not make yourself known?”

  “You rather that the girl’s life wasn’t saved?”

  “What?” Rick blurted out, again that anger coming back and stoking him. “Of course not. I mean…shit…yes, I am glad she is safe and she’s OK and she won’t die…. She won’t die, will she?”

  “No, she won’t.”

  Rick nodded vigorously. “Good. OK, good. But what I don’t understand is why these…signs that we could just as well have missed?”

  The being took a deep breath—or, Rick considered now, it made a motion that appeared to look like what a human would do before plunging into a complicated narrative, a narrative of something he wasn’t too proud of—and looked Rick in the eyes. “It is forbidden for any one of us to interfere with the free human will. But….”

  “But what?”

  The being waved its right hand through the air and the white eternal expanse all around seemed to fade into a bleak, pitted landscape of some place that appeared to have been burned and bombed beyond recognition. The sky overhead was an oppressive, sickly brownish-black ceiling of corruption. Along the horizons, Rick thought he could vaguely see spires of some sort struggling to stand upright. They could have been anything in this weird, utterly ugly and alien landscape, but somehow he just knew they had been artificially constructed.

  “This place used to be like your world,” the being said. “A paradise.”

  “What happened?”

  “They destroyed themselves,” the being said in a hollow, matter of fact tone.

  Rick found himself at a loss for words. Was there a point in asking how or why? After everything that had been happening since people found the globes….

  No, not found them, a voice in his mind corrected him. Since we tried to figure out what they were.

  “They destroyed themselves,” the being said, “because they had no hope that there was something better lying ahead in the future. With all their differences, if they could have just believed that there was something better to come.”

  “Is that what the globes were for?”

  “That is what I hoped they would do. To give you…Confirmation? Isn’t that what your people are yearning for? Why they watch what you do?”

  “What I do? The show, you mean….”

  The being nodded. “They want a sign of something greater. Something beyond.”

  “So you give us the globes.”

  “Yes. And now I understand why I shouldn’t have.”

  “Because people forced their own beliefs on them? Trying to bash in the head of anyone who disagreed?” Rick almost whispered, the full implications of the entire phenomenon dawning on him now.

  “Yes.”

  “But why so vague? Come on! Why not something more concrete?”

  The being gave a thin, embarrassed smile. “Something more concrete than a twenty-ton globe of granite?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “What more, Rick? More people like Sally Foster?”

  “Exactly!” Rick snapped. “Yes! That’s what I’m talking about. Heal more people like her.”

  “And how many more? And how many more illnesses and tragedies can we avert? We can’t avert them all. We can’t avert man-made tragedies. Tragedies people choose to inflict on each other. But tragedies nevertheless. But we can’t stop them. We can’t interfere with human will.”

  “But….” Rick was about to retort, but realized he couldn’t think of a way to do so.

  The blighted landscape all around faded away, and the field of white returned.

  “I thought the globes would be enough of a sign.”

  “Right. Except they weren’t.”

  “They were a mistake.”

  “Oops,” Rick said as facetiously as he could. “And all the damage done as a result of…of your mistake, because you couldn’t predict this would happen—”

  “It pains me. It pains all of us.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  “I…taking this form…taking this human form…I can feel human feelings, human sensations. I can understand your anger and pain.”

  “So what next? Will there be any more globes?

  The being shook his head immediately. “No. No more.”

  “Well, that’s good. The mess they made, though, can’t be helped, can it?”

  The being shook its head with less enthusiasm now. “No, it can’t.”

  “Well, hopefully,” Rick said slowly, thinking of that hellish landscape, “we’ll manage somehow.”

  “I…I’m certain you will,” the being replied, except Rick caught the hesitation in its voice.

  You little bastard! Rick wanted to scream. Not only did you make a mess of the world because you couldn’t plan ahead, but now you won’t even come clean, fully own up to it. “So this is goodbye, then?” he asked instead.

  The being opened its right hand, as if initiating a handshake.

  “Tell me something again,” Rick said suddenly. “You said you feel our human sensations in this form.”

  “Yes. We do. And I feel what you do. The anger and…and I hope….”

  “You hope there will be no hard feelings, right?”

  The being gave a thin, beatific little smile. “Yes, Rick, no hard feelings.”

  “All right,” Rick said, and extended his own hand, taking the being’s in a firm handshake. Except suddenly he gave the hand a hard yank, seeing the being stumble forward, just like a physical human would. He greeted the being’s forward momentum with a hard left-handed punch into its face.

  The being, again just like a human, staggered backward, completely disoriented. Rick was sure his face even contorted in pain. And he was glad.

  “No hard feelings, pal,” Rick managed before a bright burst of light took him from this place forever.


  10.

  Rick found himself knee deep in thickets, weeds, and overgrown grass all around. The place didn’t look familiar at all. Despite the fact that the sun was coming up, he could recognize nothing around him.

  “No hard feelings, huh?” he mumbled as he tried to negotiate the wild brush, noticing what looked like a paved rural highway some one-hundred feet away. “Except this time you don’t take me back to the Foster house. Asshole.”

  Looking at the brightening horizon, Rick thought that it made sense that he was still in Nebraska. If that being—and whatever other companions he referred to so vaguely—wanted to settle the score for that punch by depositing him in the middle of Kazakhstan or some such place, the location of the sun would have been different.

  “Probably an abandoned road going nowhere,” he whispered to himself again. “Good luck trying to get back to Lincoln.”

  When he patted his pockets, looking for his cell phone, he found it missing. Whether he had lost it in the middle of the fight with Knight or if he had been relieved of it in—relieved of it where? The damned Twilight Zone—would be an interesting question to ponder for the upcoming few hours.

  Except he wouldn’t need to do that, he realized a moment later. His mind reeling at the promise of the sound he heard in the distance, he trampled and sprinted through the brush as quickly as he could, pushing himself like a madman to get to the road.

  I don’t believe this!

  At first it sounded like a car engine in the distance, but a few moments later Rick knew this wasn’t the sort of car that usually ran the back roads of Nebraska. It’s deep, rumbling engine belonged to a very specific car.

  “I do not believe it!” he couldn’t help himself from shouting as he reached the road and saw the low-slung body of Alexander Dorian’s Lamborghini Huracan approaching.

  “I definitely do not believe it!” he shouted again, and started waving frantically.

  As the car came to a stop in front of him, its driver-side door was already opening. A moment later Cornelia was getting out, a smile beaming off her face, springing forward and rushing into his arms.

  “What happened?” Rick could barely gasp between their kisses.

  “What happened?” Cornelia asked with astonishment. “You’re asking me what happened? You just vanish into thin air again and you’re asking me? I mean, where did you go? Back to the…you know…?”

  “Yeah, actually yeah…but wait a minute. Where am I? How did you know to come here?”

  “The Fosters’ place is just around that bend,” Cornelia said, pointing back in the direction she’d come from.

  “Oh,” Rick could merely exclaim. “But how did you know…?”

  “You would show up here? Look at the sky! Do you see any thunder clouds anywhere?”

  This made little sense, so Rick just said, “Thunder clouds?”

  “Yeah, thunder clouds. There are no clouds of any kind anywhere, are there?”

  As a matter of fact, there weren’t, so Rick just shook his head as he looked around.

  “So it looked a little strange with like, dozens of lightning bolts lighting up this area for about two minutes. Don’t you think?”

  That made sense, Rick realized.

  “And you won’t believe what else’s happened,” Cornelia said enthusiastically.

  “I probably won’t.”

  “The cops who showed up—you know, to take care of the bodies in the house—well, they’re telling us that news is coming out of Scotland—Edinburgh actually—that the globe there is gone. It’s disappeared! The news all over the world is picking up on it now. Just heard it on the radio too.”

  “Yeah, it figures,” Rick mumbled. “Not that it really makes any difference at this point.”

  “What…?”

  “Knight and Lacy? Are they all right?”

  Cornelia’s look darkened for a brief moment now and she shook her head, eyes rolling. “Yeah, they’re still getting ready for the end of the world, though. Going on about how they’re not going to bow down and worship anything.”

  Rick couldn’t help expelling a crazy, relieved little bit of laughter at that. “Good. Let’s tell them to keep fighting the system.”

  “Rick?” Cornelia asked, her voice getting a little more grave. “Did…it tell you anything else? Is it over?”

  “I think so.”

  “So…uh, so what was this…?”

  “What was this all about? Well, let’s just say it was about the importance of learning to plan ahead.”

  Cornelia looked utterly puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s a lot less to understand than you might think,” Rick replied, looking around again, feeling like he had grown really, truly tired of Nebraska. “Do you know what I want to do now? Go back to Hawaii and do nothing but play golf for the next three days.”

  “Rick, come on!” Cornelia said as Rick took steps toward the Lamborghini’s passenger side door. “What was all this about?”

  Rick thought about the most succinct way he could summarize everything he had just heard in a place his mind could still barely process. “Let’s put it this way,” he said at length after opening the car’s door. “You know that story you told me about the Virgin Mary on the pancakes?”

  “Yes,” Cornelia said, still sounding and looking understandably baffled.

  “Made you ask the question, if we get miraculous messages from the other side, why does it come in such a lame form as a face on a pancake?”

  “Sure, I guess. That’s the obvious question.”

  “If God wants to send a message, why does he do it on a pancake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe that’s the best he can really do.”

  THE END

  About the Author

  Barna William Donovan, a professor of communication and media studies, is a graduate of the film school of the University of Miami and he earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. His books on film and fandom include “The Asian Influence on Hollywood Action Films,” “Blood, Guns and Testosterone: Action Films, Audiences, and a Thirst for Violence,” and “Conspiracy Films: A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious.” His commentaries on film, television, and popular culture have been quoted in media like the BBC, Variety, LiveScience, Forbes, Yahoo News, HLNTV, and various publications from Europe to Latin America.