Reasons Only Time Allows

by Micah Thomas

  “So, what,” Nestor rasped in that voice that had once caused Thelon so much anxiety, “you trying to get out of the deal now? Wiseman, you should know better than to cross me.”

  “What deal?” Thelon asked, staring accusingly at Wiseman.

  “Nestor,” Wiseman lectured, “it is a matter of contract law that parties impacted. Those intended to be bound by the covenant should also be equal arm’s length participants in the negotiated exchange. What you and I had while I was without leverage was merely an invitation to offer, but without Thelonious, no offer could be made–I will not be party to theft. That is not my essential nature.”

  Nestor glared and lunged at Wiseman with a speed and ferocity that took Thelon aback. Nestor fell to the ground as Wiseman was incorporeal, and Thelon saw in second sight that he really was only a green fog or something—but not something Nestor could touch.

  Nestor scrambled back up, ready to try again, but Wiseman raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “No. Not here. Here you are in my construct of the mind and represent no peril to me as long as we have time, which incidentally is ticking as the others work through their psychodramas. And lo, Nestor, what do you think Cassandra will do to you?”

  “I’ll eat that bitch’s heart blood after I slaughter her and her fool.”

  “Well, that may be, but I am going to withdraw for a moment to let you brothers sort out family business. When I return, I will close this simulation and return you to the real of this place and let the chips fall where they may. Toodles.”

  And with that, Wiseman dissipated into a fog that quickly faded.

  Nestor turned to Thelon, murder in his eyes.

  Thelon sighed. He was fairly sure that whatever protections Wiseman had for himself did not extend to him or Nestor. This sucks. “We gonna fight it out? Is that what this is?”

  “I don’t need to fight you. I own you.” Nestor sat and crossed his legs.

  Thelon sat opposite him. This whole time, Nestor was some fucked up version of me. Damn. “Okay. You think you own me. You’ve won, and you’re going to wait out the clock. No need to score another basket. I get it.”

  Nestor grunted, but said nothing as his rough, raspy breathing slowed.

  “I know you’ve killed many of us—our other selves in other timelines and universes and shit. I don’t know why, and while I have an interest in that, dude, what the fuck happened to you? What is the story on all this?” Thelon gestured to his own face and neck.

  Nestor was silent.

  Thelon studied him. The whites of his eyes were yellow and bloodshot, and he had years and road wear on Thelon. Something bad happened to you. Twisted you. You had plans for me. Fucked up my good time. And here we are. I brought them to Black Star.

  “Funny, you liked talking at me when I couldn’t reply and now that I can run my mouth at you, you got nothing,” Thelon pressed. “Look, I did everything you said. I betrayed T—you know that guy? I dragged Henry and Cassie across the country and fed them drugs and jumped through your hoops. Don’t I get anything?”

  Still no response from Nestor besides a lizard gaze.

  “You look all bad and talk a lot of shit, but I think you’re lying. I think you’re full of shit. Caca. Doodoo. I think you are good at getting me to feel crazy, to feel anxiety. Seeing you in your fucked up flesh, I think you’re just another Wizard of Oz, a broken man behind a curtain, and I’m not remotely scared of you now. How do you like that, you decaying piece of dried dog shit?”

  Nestor smiled, revealing broken teeth, stumps red and gummy, and a white fuzzy tongue. “You don’t know anything.” He raised an arm and pointed to Thelon’s side, just a notch below his ribcage. Nestor’s finger was missing three quarters of its nail, but he picked at something in the air and twisted his finger. Though it was a foot away from his flesh, Thelon felt that dirty fingertip poke into him and he knew that he could slip back into the terror which so characterized his last few weeks.

  “You are my finger puppet,” Nestor said. “I play you like a guitar. Strum here and feel that. Strum there, feel that. And I do this not to hurt you—which I could in ways you have not yet begun to imagine—but I’ve only had the will to live and the vision to see what we could become. I do it, and have done it, since the day you ruined my life and the lives of all other Thelons.”

  Thelon let Nestor poke his guts, but he reached the attention of that hook of his. The secret strange extra hand extended from his umbilical, and while Nestor gloated, Thelon slipped that appendage across the floor. Like a snake, it moved with absolute attention up Nestor’s chest and then, with speed fast as time allowed, it tightened around Nestor’s garroted neck.

  Nestor tried to scream, but Thelon controlled his breath and for a moment, let none escape. His fingering stopped immediately.

  “Oh, I’m a puppet, poor little Pinocchio, but no one controls my strings anymore.” He loosened his grip but added length and another wraparound of his tendril. His strength coursed through him. “Now, I’m going to tell you what I know happened to me, and in the time remaining, you will tell me what happened to us. Nod if you understand me.”

  Nestor’s yellow eyes bulged in his skull. Far from subdued, his body vibrated with contained rage, but he nodded.

  Thelon kept his focus but began his audit of experience. “Hakim came to Earth through Black Star, the same way Wiseman and Henry did. He created this palace and this refuge. I was eighteen, and I went to Eden. I got in trouble because another thing like Wiseman was there and made me do something terrible, but it wasn’t personal. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cynthia said that all of this story up to this point was because of some other experiment, years and continents away, had broken time, and so what we did was all just fallout in a broken series of worlds.”

  Nestor nodded, but said nothing and stopped straining against Thelon. Rather than loosen his hold, Thelon tightened it.

  Thelon continued, “I hooked up with Henry, but that only worked because I’d been dosed with drugs and dreaming in a fancy fucking bathtub on the Moon.”

  Nestor choked out something, but Thelon didn’t catch it and loosened to let him speak.

  “They were opening you up,” Nestor repeated.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A person exists in all time, loosely connected to each other, but closed. A read-only file with no writing. Hakim saw that you were flexible. Malleable. All Thelons were. So, he began to open you up, but he didn’t know…he and those things like him, they lack imagination. Powerful, yes, but static. Stuck in their ways.”

  Thelon nodded and said, “Okay. That makes sense. When Henry came to me, I had an epiphany about the way the worlds touched. That was the plan. To save humanity of that instance of the world by killing them and sending their souls to another instance without demons. Why didn’t it work? Why did the EP open up?”

  Nestor smiled. “Let go of me and I’ll show you. I can’t tell you, but I can show you the errors of your assumption.”

  “Negative, bro. A smart guy once said if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t really understand it. Also, I don’t fucking trust you.”

  Nestor let drool drip down his chin and rolled his head around in his confines as he moaned.

  “That’s gross.”

  “We are almost out of time. And when we are out of time, you lose ever knowing what happened.”

  Thelon knew he was at a stalemate and it sucked, but he also knew Nestor was right about time. There wasn’t a clock or anything, but this was going nowhere, so he withdrew his hook and pulled himself as tightly closed as he could and pulsed in a vibration of fortitude. If nothing else, at least he wouldn’t let Nestor poke at him again.

  Nestor rubbed his scarred neck. “Henry didn’t shuttle souls across the gap between worlds. You did. Henry didn’t make the Energy Portal, and neither did Cassie, and neither did scientists who wanted to peer into those places. You did. There is no Energy Portal. It’s you, my brother. It’s
you and me and always has been.”

  “Talk sense. You said you were going to show me, not tell me. Show it.”

  Nestor got to his feet, his body a compilation of badly set broken bones and fucked posture. “Get up, fool, and I’ll show you what you can’t see.”

  Thelon stood, body braced and ready in case Nestor tried to tackle him, but he didn’t.

  Nestor sighed and breathed close to Thelon’s ear, his breath stank like a turd, an expulsion of smoke clung to the air around Thelon. Nestor stepped around him, breathing like one blowing steam on a cold winter’s day. The smoke stuff became fog in headlights. The contours of shadows revealed more of Thelon’s energetic anatomy than he’d imagined he carried.

  Thelon’s jaw fell open at the sight of it all. Interlaced to his body, but on an altogether different, new spectrum of energy. This wasn’t at all his hook, his sight or attention which he had grown to a super power. No, no, no. No. Fuck.

  A rotating series of gears interlocked, churning with horrible precision. A machine set to unravel time and the tear between worlds. Lines of force flowed through Thelon, and like a many laned highway merged into the zipper of lane merger and rough unfinished construction, these lines emanated from him—through him. They collided and wrecked upon each other and even now, he saw this material passed from all worlds, including this one. Back, back, back to the farm, to the Black Star farm, and the dreamers there who facilitated it and tugged these lines like pasta, stretching and folding them together. Even demons—beings here which Cassie Prime and Henry Prime had been seeking to destroy—saw his light, a pinpoint stuck in one place. They rode that line—that stupid fucking highway—through him, passing back to the one world where all were converging. There was little left in those places, and that was the timer. That was all the reason time allowed.

  I am the broken wheel. He was the gate that even if closed, had already let the barbarians over the wall, the rot into the core of the apple. He was it, and he knew, as knowledge was imparted in this smoke illuminated horror, that Nestor was correct. I already lost. There’s hardly anything left to merge anymore. We fucked the world.

  “Now you see,” Nestor said, and he sat back down and laughed a terrible laugh.

  Thelon swung his arms and hook through the smoke and steam, yet could not touch the machine there, only waved the smoke away until he couldn’t see it moving anymore.

  Thelon asked, “Why then? Why are we here? Was this fucking pointless?”

  A kinder voice answered as jolly Black Santa rematerialized a few feet away. “Hmph. I don’t know about you two, but I got a kick out of that show. Time’s up though. Your friends have finished their work. What will it be? Have you reached a decision?”

  Thelon said, “Wiseman, good to see you, but we’re not done. I still don’t know what this was all about. What was your invitation for?”

  “Nestor, do you want to restate it?”

  Nestor spat, but said, “Wiseman was to open you completely, finish the work of collapsing the world in exchange for access and continued presence as a being with flesh and influence as is his nature. I was to get your body, which I worked so hard to create and empower, which I sacrificed all for to own the world and shape it as I desire to my nature— as it should have always been. Free from that bitch of time and space which no longer binds me.”

  “Well said. Thelonious, do you have a counteroffer? Time is ticking. This world will be pulled through the gate as the gate is nearly complete in migration. When it’s done, there will be only one world and I have the swing vote to decide what happens to you.”

  Thelon thought hard. This story didn’t make sense, or it did if he squinted, but the sense wasn’t logical. “Are Henry and Cassie okay? Like, no matter what, they’re okay?”

  Wiseman nodded. “They are. Well, they are a handful, but they are fine and will survive this.”

  “Got it. My counteroffer is this: I’m going to click my heels together three times and when I do, I want to be back at the farm with my friends, and I want to go home and get married, and I don’t want to see Nestor ever again.”

  Nestor barked and lunged at Thelon, but Wiseman held the cards and if Thelon didn’t want to integrate into that part of him, that exile from shittier times, then it would not be.

  Wiseman said, “No violence here, please. All prior negotiated deals remain untouched. My obligation to you,” he nodded to Nestor, “is complete. All worlds are now one.”

  Wiseman nodded to Thelon. “Mister Thelonious has declined a merger of the spirit with the aforementioned Nestor. This will render both of you incomplete forever. With that, our business is finished. I am correct in that summary, yes?”

  Wishing he could say kill the fucker, Thelon understood something about Wiseman. He’s like Hakim. They manipulate us. They have powers over us, but they don’t kill. Anticlimactic, but fine. “Yeah. We all live to see another day in a world that’s about to get fucked so completely, but at least we all live and let live.”

  “A wise choice,” Black Santa said, and it was so.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THELON AWOKE IN the dark of the Cahokia mound. Alone and with dirt in his mouth, he felt hung over, but okay. He called out, “Hello?” but no one was in the mound with him.

  A loud, penetrating vibration as if something nearby exploded, shook the earth of the mound and sent pebbles and dirt falling onto him. In the total darkness, he crawled then stood and walked, arms outstretched, reaching for the wall, searching for the entrance.

  I survived. It worked. He wanted to know, to be able to conjure that fog to see if the EP—his own personal gate—was closed, but he’d have to wait and see if anyone else could validate it for him, but he knew in his heart that at the very least, Nestor was gone out of him. The panic days were over, and he could be himself once more. Unless there’s scar tissue. Still, his inner dialog contradicted him, so there was that. He found the tunnel entrance and exited to bright sunlight.

  Blink. Blink. Rub eyes. Blink. It’s bright as fuck and I’m not ready for it.

  Another ground-shaking blast and a wave of heat smacked him. That’s a bomb. That’s a fucking bomb.

  Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he shook off some of the dirt and then let it ride, brown and red stains on his linen whites. With no one else around the big mound, he headed over to the house, excited to see how his friends had faired, but worried about the noises. What the ever-loving fuck is that ruckus?

  The camp was in disarray. The tents and sweat lodges had all tipped over with blankets and tarps littering the grass. Elderly dreamers paced in circles, some curled in a fetal pose weeping, and on the hill, the big house, smoke rose in a column. There was evidence of flame, a scorched upper floor, and a blown-out hole where a room once existed. Looks like fire is out, though...

  He went around to the back of the house and froze at the tense scene waiting there.

  Cassie and Henry, equally as muddied as Thelon, stood, clinging to each other, faces tight and jaws clenched in anger. They glared from their protective hold on each other.

  What the hell?

  Thelon saw, huddled by the rented SUV parked out back, squatting on the ground and also holding each other, were Wiseman, Cynthia, and Lena.

  “What the hell is going on?” Thelon asked.

  Cynthia let out a yelp as she saw him. “Talk to them! Please, talk to them! Oh, God. I don’t want to die.” She let out another frightened shout and held her free hand to her face as tears fell and mingled with snot in an uncharacteristic ugly cry.

  “Henry,” Thelon said and cautiously approached his friends who’d made no sign of recognizing his presence. Something is very wrong here.

  “We want his head,” Henry said, but his voice was strange and feminine. Cruel and not how Henry would or should talk.

  “Easy, bro. Who is ‘we’?” Thelon asked and eased himself into the twenty feet between the huddled Black Star folks and his best buds. He rubbed his hands against his thi
ghs. Too warm, his body broke into sweats, and it wasn’t just the sun shining on him. The fire. Jesus Christ. They have the fire again.

  Lena pulled away from the huddle and stood behind Thelon, hand on his shoulder. “Henry, I’m sorry for what I did and for what I was going to do. Understand that I’m changed now. I was broken then and so were you.” Her voice was pleading, and Thelon had no fucking idea what she was on about.

  Cassie answered, “That was a different life. I remember and I’m not mad. I’m sorry I killed you. It didn’t have to be that way, but I was not in control of myself and you did have a big fucking gun pointed at me.”

  Thelon asked, “Wait. What is going on?”

  Lena moved closer so her mouth was near Thelon’s ear. “Look at them. Look carefully.”

  Thelon did, and in doing so, shifted his attention. Time slowed and gave him grace to operate before anything bad happened—or wouldn’t happen—and he saw what had happened. Oh, God damn it.

  Cassie Prime and Henry Prime had been won over. The EP had closed, and the ecosystem of time and universes had indeed flattened and integrated, but in this case—this deeply personal case—Cassie Prime lodged and matrixed into Henry, and Henry Prime likewise embedded within Cassie.

  He focused on normal time and vision and said, “Okay, I’ve got it. We’re all fucked up and we’ve been through a…ugh. An ordeal. Emotions are running pretty high.”

  His body trembled, adrenaline flowing at the scope of the mess that was going to be their new normal, but he stepped close to his friends. Thelon left the apologetic Lena behind him as he wrapped his arms around his much more complicated lovers.