Jonah

by Dana Redfield

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “Not all Gaians make it. Depends on what kind of man becoming you are. Some bypass to Geshlama and cannot go to Gaia again except as newborns.”

  “You mean some die in Morlwurl.”

  The boy grasps Jonah's arms. “But you are the best man from Gaia!”

  Jonah hugs him, bangs the tambourine on his back. “Don't you worry. I'll make it.”

  Jonah leans back, studies the boy's handsome face. A thought startles him: What a fine mate he would make for Coral! “When you come to Gaia, you'll stay at our visitors' center—Jo's abode in Apple Valley.”

  “No one from Emray has ever gone to Gaia directly.”

  “But it's going to be a new world, right?”

  Izn shakes his head. “I never thought a Gaian would give me a vision.”

  “You never met Jonah Quiller Mahoney.” He flushes. “Just your ordinary visionary.”

  Izn is all business again, instructing Jonah to remove his silk suit and socks. They won't survive the journey.

  Jonah is not feeling so swell-chested about his visionary talents, looking down the dark well.

  “A man just jumps down there, huh?”

  “That's the easy part….”

  Chapter S (19)

  (S-1.) EARTHSIDE

  When Zion's car conked out again, Triss called Avery Bogart to come get her and take her to the Ford place, where she bought a shiny blue, all-wheel-drive, Windstar minivan. Now Zion won't have to borrow Lulu's Bronco to drive up to Star Rock.

  They invited Avery Bogart over on Thanksgiving and fixed a big turkey with all the trimmings. Avery would just love to go on a vision quest, if he didn't have to go alone.

  “But that's the point,” Triss said, as if she were an authority on vision quests.

  He shook his head. “Jonah is very brave.”

  Coral Kay performed her first violin recital, Aunt Triss playing harmony alongside her, as Coral sawed the bow across the strings, playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Zion and Avery clapped and whistled.

  “I'm going to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' for Daddy on Christmas!” Coral announced.

  Before Avery left that night, he confessed that this was the first time anyone in the Valley had invited him to a holiday dinner since he had moved here from Connecticut in 1993. Dabbing at tears with his fine knuckles, he said that sometimes he felt like he was some kind of alien.

  Triss snapped her brown eyes. “You probably are,” she said, and made another friend for life. Avery walked out the door, beaming.

  Afterward, relaxing on the sofa, Triss said, “Don't know why that brightens a person up, but it never fails.”

  “Do you say it to just anyone?” Zion said.

  “Nope. Just the ones I think might be aliens!” She chuckled.

  “Maybe you strike a vital chord.”

  Triss didn't know what to say about that. They both sat quiet a while, thinking.

  Early in December Coral asked if it was permissible to tell Thunderpaws the secret the women at Jo's Abode had carefully guarded, stacking up faith stones in Coral Kay's doll buggy. It had become a nightly ritual, Coral Kay presenting the stone she had selected for the day, and then everyone talking openly about the secret, encouraging and nurturing each other. They were glad there were no men present to scoff at journeys to Fairyland. Most men would not be able to keep the faith, even with ten buggies full of faith rocks, they all agreed, and this was their bond. Women know, and men only think they know what's going on, except for special men. Was Thunder one of those men? He was a gossip, Coral said—Daddy told her—but would he betray his own family? Or could he keep the secret? They voted. All hands went up.

  So Coral Kay told him the secret that night after he settled on Jonah's bed, where he had slept every night since Daddy went to Fairyland.

  Returning to report to Triss and Zion, Coral's face was long. “He already knew….”

  Triss said, “Then he's trustworthy. He knew and didn't tell even us.”

  Thunder was then invited to attend the nightly faith rock ceremonies, but he only came once, finding it beneath his dignity.

  Mid-December, they put up a splendid tree that Avery brought as a gift, which earned him an invitation for Christmas dinner. In the meantime, he was going to talk to a planning council official about the requirements for installing mobile home hookups. Lulu Greystone already said she wanted to move her trailer on the property.

  For the top of the tree, Coral made a star out of yellow construction paper. She strung a piece of red yarn through it, wrote Jonah across the star in glue, then sprinkled it with blue glitter. Avery held her up so she could place the star around the top.

  That night, feeling a new level of loneliness, Zion cried. There were twenty-eight faith stones in the doll buggy—one, the rose-quartz crystal she gave Coral in the name of the fairies. Jonah had been gone much longer than she had expected. And nothing—absolutely nothing was happening on this side. Though every night she prepared herself, she had not traveled, had not been visited. Even her dreams were vague. Nothing glittered; all was gray. She did find the symbols she had recorded the night before Jonah left, but they were closed to her. They might as well be designs for wallpaper.

  But never mind her loneliness and deep sense of abandonment. She had discovered something disturbing the day before, something that changed everything….

  (S-2.)MORLWURL and the LAND OF DOUBLES

  Jonah's last moments with Izn are a dream half remembered.

  Izn said, “Jump? You Gaians. Why not ease down?” He showed Jonah foot- and handholds down the sides of the shaft. “Below the whirlpool is the tunnel that leads to Morlwurl. I am obliged to tell you…don't try to cross back to Emray. It is as impossible as it is for you to live your life over.”

  His last words were given in faith that Jonah would survive the challenges in Morlwurl and return safely home. Izn told him that when he did arrive home, he wouldn't consciously remember his journey, but it would work on his mind through his soul. He might feel depressed and disoriented for a while. He would see with new eyes. He might not like what he saw…but he would feel he wouldn't lose heart. In time, all would make sense….

  Izn firmly clasped his hand just before Jonah began the descent down the glistening shaft. Jonah wanted to look up again, but his eyes were glazed with tears.

  Now Jonah manages to swim through the whirlpool at the bottom of the shaft without a heart attack from fear.

  The tambourine is still in his possession, and he's still wearing the amulet.

  Drenched, shivering, and naked, he makes his way down the tunnel. It is suffused in silvery light, as if a lightning bolt frozen in time. Black water courses over his feet. The walls are close enough to touch; his head is bowed under the low ceiling. The smell in the tunnel is fetid.

  Jonah can hear the turbulence of rapids and the roar of a waterfall. Underneath it all is a throbbing sound, like drums warning of the approach of an outsider to Morlwurl.

  The water is up to his knees now, surging against his legs, urging him to risk his life to be born again on Gaia. The water quickly rises to his chest, making walking nearly impossible. No way back. The only thing he can do is plunge into the churning black water.

  As he is swept across rapids, his mind is flickering on and off, black and white, like a faulty electrical switch. Waterfalls tumble downward on Earth, but in the flickers, Jonah sees a massive roll of water surging upward and over, like the jaws of a Leviathan monster.

  The throbbing sound fills him like thunder as he is swallowed deep into the belly of Morlwurl.

  Coral Kay…are you listening? Daddy needs to tell you a story….

  Young Izn told me true…going down the well shaft was the easy part.

  I came to on the shores of a black lagoon. There was no sand, only pearls and chunks of black crystals cluttered on the beaches around an ominous lake.

  I thought I was dead.

  I shook my
tambourine and cried.

  The whales and dolphins in Morlwurl were all ghostly white and the water they swam in, as black as Daddy's three-day-old coffee. The mountains glittered like black crystals and so did the boulder I sat upon, rocking, watching, waiting for someone, anyone to come and tell me what to do, where to go. If I'm dead, where's the tunnel of light? I wondered. Where are Mom, Dad, Anthony, and Aunt Coral? Where's Jesus? At least St. Peter ought to come, if only to tell me to go to hell.

  The truth, Coral…I was afraid I was in hell.

  The light filtering down from the strange sky was silvery and the eyes of the whales and dolphins shone like pure laser lights, unearthly blue. They shined their blue eyes like flashlight beams, exposing my hideous body…almost transparent skin that was as slick as the skin of a sardine.

  When I cried out in shock at the sight of my fishlike body, the whales and dolphins answered in a keening cacophony that disturbingly sounded like laughter.

  And then came the voice of a whale calling himself Rolphtaphearson, his voice sounding like blats of a French horn, but in eloquent English, announcing that, verily I was not dead…I had split, and this pitiful body was the “closest amphibious form nature allows for a man in Morlwurl.”

  Well, I thought. If that isn't dead, what the hell is? I was told, “On Earth when you prune a plant, before you place the cuttings in water to start a new plant, are the cuttings dead? You put them in water and they sprout new roots.”

  Yes, Coral, here whales can talk, through their blowholes. At least Rolphtaphearson could talk.

  I was a like a plant cutting out of water, he was telling me—my roots dangerously exposed!

  “How do I return to my native soil?” I demanded in a tone much braver than I felt, but I sensed this was not an occasion to mewl like a lost lamb.

  “You must cross the Land of Doubles,” he said in a booming voice, adding doomfully, “where all imposters fade away.”

  Then he expounded: “Verily, if you are not true unto yourself, if you skim the surface, refusing to plunge to the depths where a man meets himself face to face; if you despise who you are to gain favor in a world that calls evil all who dare to distinguish themselves, then your name shall be CLONE, and when you knock upon the gates and the gatekeeper asks who is there, and you utter the name you have disdained, he will reply ‘I know you not.’”

  “Well, I'm not knocking on any gates,” I replied. “I'm just trying to get home in one piece.” Which comment precisely stated my predicament, the old whale reminded me. I wasn't in one piece. I had split like a clamshell and my double body was off in the Land of Doubles.

  Tooting musically through his blowhole, pausing now and then to spout a plume of dark, iridescent steam, Rolphtaphearson then told me a tall tale. He said that his ancestor, an ancient named Nimoniki, was the one whom my ancestor encountered in the Mediterranean Sea. According to Rolphtaphearson, while fishing, my ancestor heard Nimoniki singing, and because Old Jonah did not understand the language of whales, he assigned to a god the compulsion he felt to warn the people of certain consequences that would befall them if they did not change their ways. Old Jonah meant well, Rolphtaphearson said, but his message fell on deaf ears, and afterward he sorely regretted his attempt to put into words what he felt in his heart to be true. To relieve his angst, he wrote a story that was later corrupted by rulers who used it to promote the legend of a wrathful god who punished all who refused to live by a set of complex laws devised to keep the populace under control.

  Then he told me about Morlwurl.

  Now imagine if you can, Coral, a place where a black river meanders down a canyon bordered by tall, spired black crystal mountains. The river swells into a lake, a home for ghostly white whales and dolphins. The sky is a mirrored dome scribbled with spider-webbed cracks. Clear water is leaking through the larger cracks and the silvery light casts pearly colors on the dark steamy mists the whales are making when they blow the black water into the air.

  “Picture a figure eight,” Rolphtaphearson said. The loop above represents Earthside, the bottom loop, a “mirrored reflection,” where the whales and dolphins killed by humankind come to sing to the whales and dolphins above. Postponing their journey into the light, these special whales and dolphins come to Morlwurl for the purpose of keeping the old songs alive, the true songs, the songs that tell of our true history and who we really are.

  Not a story I could understand by listening to them sing it, for humans have forgotten the language of whales—the mother language, if I cared to know the truth. But an elemental understanding of the mother language was necessary, if a man, woman, or child hoped to remain aboveside to build a new world after the portals closed. The whales and dolphins in Morlwurl were doing their part by singing to their “counterparts” above, and as strange as it may sound, the humans who were killing the whales and dolphins, with hooks, harpoons, nets, guns, and pollutants, were doing their part, too, for the greater the number of whales and dolphins who come to Morlwurl, the louder the music and the more cracks in the sky. When the strange mirrored sky finally collapses, all that is not anchored above will fall, and all that is below will rise, and only those who know the songs will remain to build a new world.

  A new version of the same old weary millennial tale, but going along, I asked how an ordinary man was expected to know the songs whales sing in a language no human can understand.

  “The words by which a man lives compose the music in his heart,” said Rolphtaphearson. “If a man lives by the words of others and not his own, how will he hear the trumpet blast when the portals close? How will he feel the reverberations in his chest, where there would have been a heart's harp, if he had made his own music?”

  He looked at me with an ancient eye, then began to keen in a haunting tone. Then all of the whales and dolphins sang, not music like anything we have heard on Earth, but like you might imagine rubies and emeralds and turquoise would sing, if gemstones had voices. A sound like a blast of amber, a trill of lapis lazuli, blue winds tossing diamonds in the air, a tinkle of topaz like stony raindrops falling into a pool of liquid obsidian.

  I felt the vibrations of their music throughout my body, as if I were a violin and their voices were bows drawn across my skin. I could imagine blissing out on such music for eternity, but for all the beauty, there was a hole in my heart that could only be filled with you, Coral, and the woman who calls herself Zion Rose.

  “Tears are good strong notes in a man's song,” the old whale paused in his song to say.

  “I'm not trying to make a song.” I was beginning to feel pretty angry by now. What good were all these pretty poems and weird stories if I couldn't get home to tell them? And where the hell was the Land of Doubles and how was I to get there?

  Fair questions all, Rolphtaphearson said. Though he had never been to the Land of Doubles himself, he could take me to the shore, but I would need a guide to take me beyond. An “eight dancer,” onewhowas skilled in the “magic of Torro-qua.”

  By then, numb from listening to such unfathomable esoterica, I would have hastened to construct a sled of the pearls and black crystals heaped on the beach and fly it up through the mirrored sky, if he had told me it was the only way home.

  What he proposed seemed as ludicrous. I was to climb up on his immense white back and he would transport me to my destination.

  “This eight dancer—someone like that will just show up?”

  “Every man has such a guide,” he said. “He will come, unless you harbor ill feelings toward him.”

  I resisted asking how the hell I could harbor ill feelings for someone I didn't even know.

  Rolphtaphearson swam over to the rock where I had languished, listening to his tall tales. I was as slick as a sardine and he was even slicker from his spoutings of steam. It was not easy climbing atop his back, keeping hold of the tambourine, which I felt to be immensely important, like a canteen of water to a man stranded on a desert. Stretching out on my stomach, I was sure I wo
uld slide into the water the moment he began to move. He told me to blow on my hands, then press them against his skin, this would help. Sounded like silly advice, but when I tried it, careful not to drop my tambourine, I blew sparks on my hands! Elated by this miracle, I slipped the tambourine under my arm, and pressed my hands on his back. They stuck like metal to magnet.

  Riding atop Rolphtaphearson, I could see far down the canyon. I searched the mists for signs of a guide of any description, as the haunting music behind me continued to vibrate over my strange body.

  Around a curve the mists were soupier, but Rolphtaphearson's blue laser eyes provided light enough. Presently he swam over to the shore and lowered his head, blowing steam to slicken himself, making easier my descent. I hit the ground and slid. The tambourine landed on a pile of pearls. I retrieved it.

  There was no one in sight, but I was not to worry. If my guide's name were written on my heart, he would come. Rolphtaphearson then bade me farewell by singing a song like crystal rose petals tinkling over an iceberg.

  “Remember,” he said as he turned, sweeping me with his blue eye beams. “No one crosses alone.”

  “Wait!” I shouted, but he dove into the water, flipping his tail in a gesture I took for final. That last he said, a direct quote from the story of Abra Cadabra, annoyed me to no end. But that's the way they are over here, a capricious lot, whether purple owls, Sphinx people, ghost whales, or aliens who can see down your eyes to your soul.

  I found another rock to sit upon while I waited for the eight dancer, the guide who would appear if I had no ill feelings toward him and if his name were written on my heart. The moments I spent there on that rock, surrounded by soupy gray mists, were lonely beyond description. I think if a horned devil had come with pitchfork and demanded my soul in exchange for one last look at you, Coral, I would have agreed, feeling as I did that everything I had experienced over here was a dead man's nightmare, from which I would never awaken.