The obol caromed to a stop between the doppel's sneakers, and the doppel squatted to pick it up.
"Give me that.” The urgent command spooked the twin, and as Noel strode briskly forward, the stranger bolted. “Hey! I need that!” He chased after, baying, “Stop!"
The doppel ran soundlessly off the main promenade onto drear paths, and when his hood went up, he vanished among shadows in the city's somnolent streets.
* * * *
Sunset layers the west in snake-bands. Under the ponderosas, design managers are skeletal silhouettes with lambent faces blunt and lobed as moray eels. They remind Noel and Ny'a that death is a clear destination in Heavinside. No one dies by accident or homicidal intent. The Contexture patterns every mortal moment to the dead-certain and final secret joy assured all. “Yet, if your doppel does not exchange with you, or returns without the obol, what can Sierra Tree do for Ny'a? On Errth, we have no dominion, no way to retrieve her obol.” Their somniferous voices are transparent to the silence behind. “We instructed you carefully about the preliminary trip. You knew to transport naught with you save the clothes you wore."
A light wind carries a concussion of odors from far in the big forest. Noel draws a breath of resinous air full of pine balsam and leaf incense, and before he can answer, Ny'a speaks up, “I told you already, I pressed it on him at the last instant. If he didn't come back, if something went wrong with your calibrations, I didn't want to live."
Noel waits on a reply. All he hears is his heart. Ruby carats glitter in the far keeps of the woods. Before that bejeweled world, the managers move as shadow creatures, taking their own counsel. Voices riffle. “If your doppel arrives here at all, he arrives with the obol—or Ny'a goes to her final secret joy within days. And with her gone, your doppel is without a templet. For him, Sierra Tree must then make special accommodations. That is troublesome for us."
On the walk back to the treemerges of Saille, under nightfall long and purple, Noel admits, “He's not who I thought he'd be."
"The doppel."
Noel casts a contemptuous look at the carpet of pine needles and erratic mushrooms. “He looks like I do, but he's not me."
"Of course not.” In frail starlight, the moon not yet risen, she stops, and her sinuous hair settles across her shoulders and the ardor of her face like swirled ink. “He lives on Errth, Noel. What did you think?"
"I thought ... well, I thought I would know him better.” He lifts a stricken look and meets a face as full of sorrow as a bucket brims with water. “He didn't recognize me. I was just a ghost to him. And, I see now, he's no more than a ghost to me. That whole world, Ny'a—it's just a dream gone bad."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going, just as I planned.” He starts walking again, with determined strides. “I have to now. I'll bring back your obol."
"You?” She firmly takes his elbow and fixes him with a cinched stare, restraining her hope. “You're coming back? To me?"
"You were right, Ny'a. You wouldn't like him.” His damaged expression heals a little at the sound of her surprise. “I'm sorry, sorry I even started this crazy misadventure. I'll get the obol and come back with it."
"If he hasn't lost it,” she whispers.
"I'll find it,” he whispers back.
They clasp hands and meander out of the woods to a pond zebra-striped with looming shadows from the forest. On a shale ledge above a gravel beach, they sit together, and he leans his face into her hair, inhaling deeply, the scent of her the philosophy he intends to take with him.
"We're always going to be together,” she assures him, “even if you don't come back."
"I'm coming back."
"That certainty stays here in Heavinside.” A moonbeam through the trees lies at their feet like a dagger. “On Errth, nothing is certain, Noel. Nothing except dying."
* * * *
The Clock's Cryptic Face
Sunlight sifted like sawdust through the branches. Leon sat on the back of a park bench, high top sneakers on the seat, inspecting the jade piece he'd picked up yesterday from his double. Smaller than a quarter, bigger than a nickel, thinner than a dime, it felt cool like something refrigerated. No matter how long he palmed it or held it in the sun, it remained cool. On each face of its polished green surface, it bore nine dots: and nothing else. “Sacrament here.” He muttered his pitch as prospective buyers ambled past his bench. “Chalk dust. Tar angel. Sacrament."
Turtles approached, flat-palming him cash and smooth as a handshake taking a color-coded blotter to trade for their score at the far end of the park. The work bored him, a temp job these past eight months, with no chance to boost product or steal cash from this bottom-end street operation. But he liked the hours, sitting in the park, earning enough in four more months to open his own house and go wholesale. He usually could feel his brain vibrate when he contemplated the staggering possibilities. Not today. The jade piece imparted a watchful serenity as he turned it this way and that. “Sacrament here. Chalk dust. Tar angel."
"What you got there, Leon?” This soft voice rolling out words dark as blueberries belonged to the only person who mattered in his world. “Lemme see."
Without looking over his shoulder, he upheld the jade wafer, and long, clear fingernails with French manicured licorice tips plucked it away. A sigh immediately followed, sharp as the fulcrum point just before climax. He gave a lopsided smile to the sunny acres. “Cool, yeah?"
"Like ice.” She slid onto the park bench, sitting between his legs. In wraparound sunglasses, black camisole, tight sable pants and jet ribbon ankle-wrap sandals, she looked slinky as a shadow at high noon. “What is it?"
"Like I know.” He told her how he got it from his twin in the dead of night under the bridge.
The jade reflection clicked in her dark lenses as she walked it between her fingers. “You were tweaked!"
He grabbed her black, chopped hair in a fist and gently shook her head. “You know better."
"For real?"
"Like looking in a mirror. But with long hair and no patch.” He stared at the afternoon shadows on the tessellated pavement as if trying to solve a geometry problem. “Who you think he is?"
A turtle scuffled up, and during the transaction, she slipped the wafer between her peach-glossed lips. The chill hurt her teeth, and that ache rang like bravery in her soul, a grievous glory to find herself here on this park bench where money buys the most desperate happiness on the planet—and she wants none of it because of a shrewd fear she inherited from the stoned sadness of her mother and the unwept loneliness of a sister weary of everything but the blue smoke in a glass pipe. She spit it out.
"Hey!” Leon leapfrogged her, almost bowling over the turtle to get to the jade coin on its wayward roll among pavement cracks and cigarette butts. “What's your problem, Taima?"
Taima held him in an eyelock right through those dark glasses. “That thing was stealing my head."
"Yeah.” With a helpless grin of agreement, he plucked it from the ground. “You noticed that too. How you figure?"
She slung her jaw to one side, contemplating her indignation, and dropped her voice, “It's spooky, Leon. Lose it."
"You crazy?” He spun around and sat next to her, holding the jade piece before them. It shone coolly in the sunlight. “This here is some kind of magic."
Brittle stars write a Braille of blind chance across the heavens. Noel proceeds alone upon a flagstone path in an old, forsaken garden outside Saille. Vaporous moonbeams light the way among knuckled crabapple trees and mossy rock heaps of a fallen wall. Kragh the Hermit, a short, brutish man wearing the tawed leathers of animals he has killed, has come down from his stone hut in a high country of vast heath and silver weather. At each full moon, for the last eighty moons, Kragh has met Noel and other curious anamnestics among indomitable, brooding trees in a blue hush of moonsmoke. The drama is the point that sews them together: this theater of the wild world, the broken world.
Like Noel, Kragh is a
n anamnestic, but unlike his avid disciple, the Hermit long ago abandoned his treemerge to live by his own wits and the wilderness's bounty. He sits upright among toadstools and fireflies in an amphitheater of disheveled garden terraces.
"Know El!” His husky voice booms among hardwoods bearded in pea-vine. One of Kragh's many other adherents had been a doppel, a rabbi when on Errth, and from him the Hermit has learned that El is a Biblical name of God, and he delights in exhorting Noel to remember that his name means to be born and “If you're born here in Heavinside, you surely know El.” Kragh can be funny, but he isn't spiritual in any traditional sense and when pressed will only reluctantly admit, “The world itself is scripture."
Noel sits heavily on the ground. With breaths tight as sobs, he relates what has happened.
"First, steady yourself.” Kragh leans forward, greased braids of beaded hair clicking. “Errth is no place for emotional fools."
"I, never should, have gone."
"Given. But now you're going again. You must.” The inner quiet Kragh radiates purifies Noel's attention, and the sobs stop. “That's why you sent for me."
Noel wipes tears with his wrists.
"Your doppel is not you.” Kragh sits back in the dark, Mongoloid eye-folds like incisions. “Repeat that."
"My doppel is not me."
"People die on Errth by error and malevolence each minute of every hour on any given day."
Noel's head hangs heavily between his shoulders. “This isn't news, Kragh."
The Hermit's dark copper skin seems to absorb moonlight, giving none back. “Whoever your doppel is, he has suffered. He lives on Errth where no happiness goes unwept for long. He will prove dangerous."
"My treemerge has prepared me.” Anger edges Noel. “Listen, old fellow, you're the reason I started thinking about trading places with my doppel.” He tilts his head back at an accusatory angle. “Your philosophy is about living authentically, right? Being your own true self. That's what I decided to do. Live in the wild and broken world. It was supposed to be an act of compassion. Now it's all gone wrong. And I don't know if I can fix it. I may not make it back. So I came to say good-bye."
"What makes a good-bye good, Know El?” Kragh beams, full of himself, wise wayfarer, hunter of animals and aphorisms. He proudly unrolls an old trophy: “We wave to show our hand is empty. An empty hand, full of longing."
"I think we can file that under casuistry."
"Spoken by a man who has his food grown for him.” Kragh barks a laugh. “When you have to feed yourself, you soon realize Hello and Good-bye happen. Empty and Full. There are no choices except in dreams, and most people don't dream well enough to own even those choices."
Noel lowers his face into his palms. “I don't think I ever really understood you."
"Good.” Kragh places hands hard and brown as bricks on Noel's shoulders. “Now we have someplace to go when you return."
* * * *
Sunset layered the west in snake-bands. Leon and Taima stood beneath the steel undercarriage of a colossal bridge. “I saw him right here.” Adrenaline wafted through him, and he ran in place, full of chagrin. “I lost it! He tried talking. Told me his name. And I freaked. I just lit out."
"But you didn't totally freak.” Taima sidled up behind and slipped her hands into the pockets of his black zipper jacket. “You got the jade thingee."
He pressed back against her. “Yeah."
"What was his name?"
"Joel ... no, wait. Noel.” From out the pocket of his jeans, he drew the jade and rotated himself in Taima's embrace until he faced her, noses almost touching. “I'm thinking maybe with us here together with the thing, you know, where I first got it, like we might ... sense something."
The honey depths of her eyes evinced assent. She clasped her hands atop his, and the obol, two million years out of place, transformed twilight into a flaming sword. With the burning edge of day sheathing itself once more in darkness, a black thought shadowed both their minds simultaneously. An angel had decisively banished them and their world entire into a darkness of accident and crime before brusquely withdrawing to some brighter reality undisclosed, forbidden, leaving them alone together in gray obscurity growing darker.
They sprang apart, and the obol jingled on the cobbles.
"God, Leon!” Taima covered her mouth with both hands and gazed hard at him through a blear of hot tears. “God!"
"Buggin'!” Leon grinned with surly bravado and squatted over the obol yet did not touch it. “What happened?"
"You felt it, Leon.” She backed off. “I felt you feeling it."
His shoulders rippled. “Yeah, I felt it. It felt like taking a breath on a really cold night. In some strange place far from home. And that unreal lonely feeling gets down all inside you like you don't even have a home."
"That's damnation, Leon.” She kept backing off. “It felt like being damned."
"Damnation!” He laughed half-heartedly. “Where'd you pick that up, Taima. Sunday school?"
She looked away at a river gray as pavement and a red stain lingering in the sky. “Tell me you never went to Sunday school."
"My house, Sunday was just another day watching out for my drunk moms and her stoner boyfriends.” He picked up the obol, and the deformed loneliness in it was gone. Gone deep into his heart, something informed him, something that had found its own way far in and stood looking around at ground zero in the core of him, a core he had never even known was there. Through a remote voice, he heard himself speaking, “Cross her any day and Sunday, she don't smack you, she sticks you with her cigarette at the back of the neck under the hair where the burn don't show."
Taima kept looking away as if ashamed. “Leave that thing there, Leon. Let's go.” She extended a hand for him without turning. “Come on, baby. Let's get out of here."
Leon pocketed the jade piece and bounced upright. He took Taima's hand, and they hurried off in the violet air. Strangeness accompanied them. Their footfalls resounded as in a cave. Spurts of light, small and brief as match flares, swirled along the river-railing and dimmed to retinal shadows when looked at directly. And all the while, in their hearts, sadness folded like wind through a wheat field.
"You kept it.” She stopped short and faced him, outraged. “Leon.” She let his name hang a culpable moment, then took his elbow and towed him to the railing. “Throw it in the river."
He shuffled uncomfortably.
"Throw it—or I walk."
He jutted his lower lip, then shrugged and turned away. “So walk."
* * * *
Night hoists Orion* into the sky. In that large, open field enclosed by ponderosa giants, the Many Worlds swirl as diaphanous rainbows, a tipped-over whirlpool. The moon is not yet up, and darkness makes visible the faint vortex of hypnotic spectra that is the zero portal. When shouts pounce from the night forest—"Go, Noel! Go now!"—Noel doesn't bother looking over his shoulder for Ny'a. The design managers have forbidden her coming anywhere near the zero portal. He purposefully strides into the whorl of chromatic transparencies.
[Footnote *: Proper motion of the stars in the constellation Orion will, over two million years, snap the famous Belt and distort the familiar trapezoid of the Hunter's torso to an anvil pattern. Far more dramatically, the massive red giant Betelgeuse will, long before, have vanished in a supernova, leaving behind the spectacular Blue Rose Nebula, by the time of our story a contusion of purple and maroon gas clouds perhaps more aptly named the Black Eye Nebula.]
So finely tuned are the portal calibrations from Noel's preliminary crossing that he experiences no emotional displacement whatsoever. Tall trunks with boughs creaking like saddles vanish, and he doesn't even blink when the city of night leaps forward. A convergence of car exhaust, sewer stench, pulsating garbage fumes and a din of traffic noise greeted him. He breathed it in, this anguished scent of wild and despoiled humanity, and he scanned the nocturnal street for his own face, ignoring the city's misery, vagrantly sorrowing sirens Doppl
er shifting across town.
He spotted his doppel through the heavily lettered storefront window of a Cuban-Chinese restaurant. His original self sat across a small formica tabletop from a young, angular woman with hair like clipped raven feathers. They were arguing stiffly, unwilling to make a scene, though there was no one else in the restaurant to notice except the tired woman with tarnished skin at the take-out counter.
Underground thunder of a subway tolled as Noel sidestepped among hurrying pedestrians and shoved through the glass door of the restaurant. The doppel noticed him at once and stood up so abruptly his chair crashed backward.
The young woman in black twisted in her seat and gaped at Leon's twin dressed in white and silver motley like a ghost harlequin.
Noel walked directly to his doppel and stood very close, eyes venomous, staring hard into his own startled stare, and said down low, “Give me what you took."
"What?” The doppel blinked as if not comprehending.
"It's in your left pants pocket.” From the instant he pushed through the door, Noel felt the attenuated passage to Ny'a, a soulful swoon across two million years to where she waited, dying. “I will take it."
The doppel swaggered back a step. “Damn—who are you?"
"Leon—” At the core of the woman's amazed stare comprehension dimly swirled. “It's his."
"Shut up, Taima!” Leon slashed forward, blurred fist aimed at Noel's nose. Noel turned from the waist and caught his assailant's fist in a peculiar overhand grip that electrocuted the whole arm. A screech seared from Leon.
Noel, holding the tormented arm in a nerve-lock, reached into Leon's left pants pocket and extricated the obol. Then he stepped on the fallen chair, levering it upright, and dropped his agonized doppel into it. In Noel's palm, the jade squeezed radiance from the sponges in his bones. He smiled good-naturedly at the startled woman behind the takeout counter and pushed into the street.
"Wait up.” Taima scurried after him. “Slow down."
FSF Magazine, May 2007 Page 16