The Inner Movement

by Brandt Legg

  “Yes. I forgive you everything,” I said.

  “I wish it were that simple, but you must know the stories. You must understand where it began and the last ending. When you remember all of that, the agony of it, the rage,” she steadied herself against a dryer, “that is when you can decide if you will forgive or not.”

  “Look, um, what’s your name?”

  “I am Amparo.”

  “Amparo?” I looked at her. “You’re the one who told Kyle about meeting Spencer?” The dryer whirred.

  “Yes,” she stared long at me. “A very small favor to help you.”

  The implications of her being the same person who helped Spencer contact us multiplied beyond what I could handle. The dryer stopped.

  “Okay, thanks. But listen, you really don’t know me. If whatever you’re talking about happened in another lifetime, then I’m over it, okay? Really, you could have cut my head off with a butter knife, and I wouldn’t hold it against you anymore, okay? I don’t hold grudges. You’re all right, really, it’s over.”

  She smiled one of those wise, all-knowing smiles that only old people are able to pull off. “You are young.” She put a finger to my cheek. “I will wait. But you and I may yet have little time. Karma is forever.”

  She was quiet. “You shall see it as a vision. It will come because we have met. I am so very sorry for what you are going to see, Niño. And then we will meet again because we must.”

  I took my clothes from the dryer and said goodbye. It would have been easy to forget about her because my brain was on complete overload, but the pain in her eyes was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, even in all my Outviews. I needed to understand karma better, needed a book.

  I dialed Sam’s cell from the payphone outside the Laundromat.

  “Sam, it’s Nate.”

  “I didn’t recognize the number.”

  “I’m at a payphone. Listen, I’m mixed up in something. I don’t want to talk too much about it over the phone, but maybe tomorrow afternoon, if you have some time, I could come over?”

  “Sure, anytime, but what’s this about?”

  “My dad didn’t die the way you think. And there are some people who want that fact to remain a secret. And they may be after me.”

  “Are you serious? Are you saying what I think you are?”

  “Yes. And I can’t go to the FBI because it’s people within the government.”

  “You really are in a mess, aren’t you? How did you learn all this?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”

  “If you’re right about all this, then what you need is a good lawyer. And my sister’s one of the best. She’s a top criminal defense attorney and sues the government all the time. I couldn’t tell you how many corruption cases she’s been involved in. We can trust her. If you want, I’ll call her and see if she can be on the phone with us tomorrow. What time do you want to come over?”

  “Oh Sam, that would be fantastic. I’ll be back by three.” Once again Sam, unlike Mom, believed me right away.

  “Good. I’ll set it up.”

  Walking back to the Station, I was relieved. An experienced lawyer would know how to navigate this. But they’d want proof, and I wasn’t sure how to provide that. There must be a way. Maybe the things from my dad’s desk held some answers.

  Kyle was waiting in the parking lot at the Station when I got back. Linh was home safe with Bà. Heading to Amber’s, we talked about karma.

  “In Buddhist teachings”—it was one of his topics—“for every event that occurs, there will follow a reciprocal event. It can happen in this lifetime or in another.”

  “So, if I did something bad in my last life, I may have already paid my karmic debt in that lifetime?”

  “That’s how I understand it. Like if you steal something from me today, you should try to clear that within this life so you don’t make your next incarnation more difficult. And if you do many good deeds, then it can make things easier for this life and others that follow.”

  “Seems like a fair system.”

  “It is one way to explain all the inequalities in the world.”

  “So all the rich people were really charitable or poor last time around, and this is their reward?”

  “I don’t think it’s nearly that simple.”

  “Now you sound like Spencer.”

  “I’d like to hear how he explains it.”

  We backtracked several times and crisscrossed up side streets to make sure we weren’t being followed.

  30

  Amber was sitting on her wide front porch reading The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. She hugged us both, then handed me a phone and gave Kyle two, one for Linh. “Prepaid. Untraceable. We have to be able to communicate.” She wouldn’t let me pay her back. “I’ve programmed in all our numbers.”

  “Amber, this is great. I’ve been going through cell phone withdrawal.” I laughed. Kyle pointed out that the NSA could still pickup key words so we agreed not to use names, even Lightyear or anything specific.

  After Kyle left, Amber cooked a fancy dinner with help from the housekeeper. Luckily her sister phoned, which gave me a break from Amber’s nonstop questions about Spencer, Rose and my “powers.” Kyle called to say everything was fine. No sign of anyone. I convinced Amber we needed to give all the New Age talk a rest. “It’s too much sometimes. I just want to feel normal.”

  “Let’s talk about football,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you liked football.”

  “I got it from my dad. He’s a Raiders fan, so I like the Chargers.”

  “That must be hard being a Chargers fan.”

  “Shut up. Who do you like?”

  “The only California team that matters, the 49ers, of course.” She knew more obscure stats about players than I did. We were still talking football when the housekeeper stopped in the living room to say she was leaving.

  Around 7:30 Amber went into the kitchen for drinks. I started sweating, like someone had cranked the temperature up to a hundred. She returned with two sodas just as I realized this was the same warning heat I felt before the mountain lion showed up. Looking at Amber, I held my finger to my lips and went quietly to the window.

  “Come on,” I whispered.

  “What? Is someone out there?”

  “I don’t see anyone, but Lightyear agents are definitely here.” I slung my pack on and headed toward the back.

  “Where are we going?” Amber asked.

  “We have to leave,” I said firmly.

  She hesitated.

  “Now!” I grabbed her hand, and shot across the backyard into the trees. Behind a scrub oak, I looked back at the house; there was still no sign of movement, but my temperature had not cooled. “Do you know where these woods come out?” I asked her.

  “It connects to Lithia Park,” she said.

  “Let’s go.” We tore through the trees and twenty minutes later entered the southwest side of the park. I called Kyle and asked him to pick us up where he taught me to meditate.

  By the time we got to the Japanese Garden, Kyle was parked in his aunt’s car. I climbed in the front. “What happened?” he asked, pulling away.

  “Someone came to Amber’s.”

  “Who? How did they find you?” he asked.

  “We didn’t actually see anyone,” Amber said.

  Kyle looked at me.

  “They were there. You guys should know by now that I’m not just paranoid,” I said.

  “You are paranoid, but even paranoid people have enemies,” Kyle said.

  “Why your aunt’s car?” I asked.

  “I thought it was a good idea because they know mine.”

  Amber reluctantly agreed to sleep at a friend’s house, and a few minutes later Kyle and I were alone.

  “If they came for you at Amber’s, then they’ll find you anytime now, and then what?”

  “I don’t know, but right now I need a place to stay tonight by myself. I don’t
want my friends in any more danger than they already are.”

  “I’ve got my aunt’s keys to the theater on this ring.”

  “The Shakespeare Theater? Isn’t that a little unusual.”

  “And you’re not!”

  “I guess it’s one of the last places they would look.”

  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is huge in Ashland. They do 750 performances across three theaters, with an annual attendance of about 400,000. The Elizabethan theater has a traditional open roof and is modeled after London’s original Fortune Theatre and the famous Globe of 1599.

  “Look at the stars,” Kyle said. “It’ll be just like camping. Too bad your sleeping bag is in my car. But you can find something in wardrobe and sleep backstage anyway. Just be out by six in the morning. I’ll call your phone to wake you.”

  Once Kyle was gone I questioned my actions. What the hell was I doing? People were after me! They knew I was at Amber’s. How long would it take them to pick me up? The federal government was massive, and there were departments no one knew about. The motives and manipulations of the darkest parts were frightening. And, as Spencer put it, the people wielding the power from those places might be the closest thing to evil. “The universe is beautiful, peaceful and loving. But there are people who are something else entirely,” he had said. And those were the ones hunting me.

  31

  The backstage area was actually a three-story building over a maze of dressing rooms, storage areas, and steps to the towers. The place smelled like plywood, make-up, roses, and sweat. I found the wardrobe area and a pile of blankets, then discovered a side room filled with all types of props and four mattresses. I tipped one flat and lay down, apparently going out instantly because when I checked my phone it was 3:28 a.m., almost six hours of sleep, with just one Outview—Amparo and me on a fishing boat, of course ending in my death. She failed to save me, but it didn’t seem to warrant her pain and desperation for forgiveness. I wandered around looking for a Coke machine or even water and found myself back in the amphitheater under dazzling stars.

  I stared up into the universe and tried to raise my guides, meditating and begging. I desperately wanted someone to talk to me in clear and simple terms. Spencer had said humans are on about the slowest vibration, that guides and more evolved entities have to slow their vibration extremely just to get to a human level of understanding. Because of the substantial reduction in the original vibration, much of their actual message is lost in translation. He also had explained that information from guides is so far beyond our comprehension that when we begin opening up to our soul and the universe, we become easily confused and overwhelmed. I knew just what he meant. But my guides must be protecting me somehow because I was still alive and free.

  Then I heard her voice. “It reminds me of another time long ago . . . ”

  “Amparo, what are you doing here?” I was startled. “How did you know?”

  “I’m just waiting, hoping . . . ”

  “Until you get my forgiveness?”

  She nodded.

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “I saw you, Amparo. You and I were on a big fishing boat somewhere in the North Pacific. It seemed to be in the 1960s, so either you’re not really alive right now or it was a simultaneous incarnation.”

  “Yes, my soul is living five lives in present time.”

  “Okay, so there was a tragic accident, but you tried to help me. I mean, you struggled and even though you didn’t save me . . . You couldn’t hold on any longer; our hands slipped apart. I was looking right into your eyes as that piece of equipment crushed me. It wasn’t your fault, but I forgive you.”

  “No, Niño, there is more.”

  “Fine, we’ve had other lifetimes, you told me that. It doesn’t matter to me what happened. I’m only concerned with this life and staying alive.”

  “You are mistaken. There is much that concerns you that has little or nothing to do with this incarnation.”

  “Please, let’s leave it in the past.”

  “It cannot remain there, Niño. It will not stay in the past until there is understanding and forgiveness.” Her eyes carried the injuries of centuries.

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “Take my hand and look back between us. See what is there, and then do what your heart wants.”

  “I forgive you.”

  “You may decide to kill me.”

  “You’ve got to be joking!” But I could tell she was not.

  “There were three great betrayals. They were all my doing. You have never retaliated in any way, although you had opportunities.”

  “I guess you were never a slave.” She didn’t know what I meant.

  “Please.” She gave me her dry, wrinkled hand, I closed my eyes and the Outviews took over, catapulting across time into ancient dwellings of my soul.

  The first encounter occurred more than two thousand years ago. We were peasant oarsmen on a Roman merchant ship somewhere in the Mediterranean. Amparo stole a small amount of food and was caught. Rather than take the punishment, “she” claimed to be working at my direction. In the hours that followed, another accuser, Amparo’s friend, stepped forward and charged that I was responsible for earlier thefts. That man also reported me for attempting to recruit him in my “gang of thieves.” I was thrown overboard. After treading water for half a day, I drowned.

  I had done nothing to deserve that awful fate. The peasant I was had never wronged Amparo, didn’t even know “him.” Furious, I wanted to scream and tell her what she had done. Amparo didn’t know of the peasant’s family—his sisters, nieces, and nephews who loved him and always waited for his return, wondering what happened. I wanted her to know all about the life she took. But still, I could forgive her.

  Another meeting of our souls occurred during the late thirteenth century in northern Italy. Amparo was my mother, and I, not yet eighteen, was a married woman, Helna, with a two-year-old child. It was during an early and particularly brutal era of the Catholic Church’s Inquisition. It was the pope’s way of putting down competing religions by forcing the heretics to convert or face prison, torture, and death. This would continue in various forms for six hundred years. My mother was charged with heresy and kept in prison for several years without trial. And trial was not how we understand it today but a public humiliation where only a full confession would offer any kind of reduced punishment, meaning avoiding death. But since that required implicating others, it was its own kind of cruelty. Amparo (my mother) falsely accused me to avoid more torture. I never saw my husband or son again. And that was worse than the different tortures the Church inflicted upon me before my death in prison.

  The pain of never holding my son again left a gaping emptiness of longing, I was lost. As Nate, I relived the betrayal of my mother from that time and knew Helna’s complete rage as she suffered away in a crowded dungeon. The anger flowed through the modern me. Helna needed revenge, and I wanted to give it to her. I had to destroy the person who caused the agony. It was a consuming narcotic; I was ready to kill her.

  What I saw next would take a year to retell in enough detail so that one could begin to understand the layers of emotions and drama that led to the third betrayal. I lived it all that night, suffering as if it had happened to Nate today in Ashland, Oregon, rather than to Erich in the Harz Mountain region in Germany during the peak of Nazi power. Prior to the war, I had lived in Halberstadt and fell in love with Rachel, a beautiful Jewish girl. Neither family approved, but we stole moments and were planning to marry. The rise of the Nazis changed all that, and, within the turmoil of the SS rounding up our friends, we managed to escape to the mountains with twelve of her relatives, including her eight-year-old brother and ten-year-old sister.

  My late grandfather had once had a small cabin deep in the forest high above the Bode Gorge in the Harz Mountains. I’d only been there once as a young boy but had his handwritten map and after more than a week in the wilderness found it. He had spoken of a woman, Marle
ne, who lived in the village, eight miles from his cabin, and my mother said she could be trusted. She turned out to be our lifeline, selling us several chickens and a goat, and occasionally sending her fifteen-year-old daughter with flour and grains. That, along with hunting and gathering in the forest, kept us alive. A small stream, two miles away, supplied water. The treks were long and we couldn’t do it in the winter, but then there was plenty of snow to melt. We were able to build a second room onto the cabin so it wasn’t quite so crowded.

  We lived that way for seventeen months before the SS discovered us, led by Marlene’s daughter, who I now know as Amparo. I never found out why she betrayed us. Everything quickly disintegrated into horrors. Rachel’s father was beaten to death, and I had to watch Rachel and her sister raped before we left the woods. Three days without food ended at Dachau. It would take more than two years for all of us to slowly die as part of one of the worst nightmares in human history.

  It wasn’t like watching a movie of these lifetimes. I actually relived them in full 3D suffering. It would be impossible for me as Nate to ever get the sadistic guards from the death camp out of my mind. The things I witnessed in the Italian medieval prison would have been enough to steal the beauty from my life. But then Amparo sent me to Dachau, and I would never again, in any lifetime, be able to enjoy a peaceful existence without being haunted by those images.

  Amparo would have to die. How could anyone cause such misery? And she certainly couldn’t be trusted. She had probably already contacted Lightyear. They could be waiting outside, or maybe they’d just come in and shoot me. But didn’t she like me to have long tortuous deaths? A simple bullet wouldn’t do—better to dream up a nice slow painful way to go. Surely the folks at Lightyear could handle that.

  I did not want to open my eyes because if I did I may have never stopped crying, and I needed to decide the best way to murder the old lady next to me. Her hand was still in mine and my disgust made me want to squeeze so tight her bones would snap.

  “Please look at me.” It was the voice of the peasant sailor who’d gotten me tossed into the Mediterranean.