© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Thirteen: Poking the Universe
The
kid with the big glasses snuggled into the corner of his bed and read his book,
his eyes swollen and captivated, his lanky, skinny body folded up into itself.
His big ears were trained like radar dishes, in auto-scan mode, surveilling for
the sound of Papa’s slippered feet approaching, but his mind was fully engaged
in the story of a monster shark, a monster that apparently had a vendetta for
all humans, but especially naked women. Rodney was unsure of this aspect. Why
naked women? It made him feel funny, kind of unsettled, because the monster
shark did kind of have it in for attractive women.
Today was Shabbos, and Papa didn’t like him
reading anything that wasn’t on the Rabbi’s approved list for Sabbath-reading
material, and just in case, he had his Chaim Potok close at hand, The Promise, which he liked well
enough—he’d read it five times, the first time when he was only seven years
old—but these days he couldn’t get enough with the monster stories.
Today he was engrossed in Peter Benchley’s Jaws, newly out in paperback, and he
adored it, except for all the sex parts, which quite frankly, he just didn’t...get. He understood sex well enough, he
knew where everything was supposed to go between a woman and a man, I mean come
on, he was almost eleven years old and he had heard about this stuff for years,
all his friends knew about it, and they loved to share, and Papa had explained
things, sort of, but in this book the people just didn’t seem to get it, they
were doing everything all wrong, even using their mouths, and what kind of crazy was that? It was all kind
nauseating, to tell the truth. He wished they would get it right, because that
would make it all the more, I don’t know, delicious.
Still, the shark stuff was really, really
good. And Rodney didn’t really feel guilty about reading a popular novel like
this, even on Shabbos, because sharks were part of nature, and there was all
kinds of stuff about the ocean and fishing and people on the beach, and nature and
Shabbos walked hand in hand, all the Rabbis said so. Still, the book was full
of all kinds of dirty words, and even filthier situations, but Rodney wasn’t
reading it for all the sin and stuff, but for the monster. And this great white shark was a really, really cool
monster.
He didn’t suppose that the Angel of the
Sabbath would mind his reading material, at least not all that much. If it did,
it had never said anything to Rodney.
Supposedly, Hollywood was going to make a
movie out of the book, and Rodney would just have to see a movie like that. He would give anything to see a
movie about a monster shark biting people in half. Godzilla was great, stomping
on cities, and War of the Gargantuas
was almost to die for—when the evil, green gargantua gobbled that singer, oh,
it was thrilling! But to see a shark do something like that, that was so much
more personal, and almost—I don’t know, real, I guess. Sharks were real, and
they really could be monsters, and the thought of one going off all
half-cocked, on a real mission to munch down on as many people as possible,
ooh, but that was enough to put you into a coma.
He paused in his reading, body tensing. He
had that peculiar sensation again. He felt that he was being watched. He knew
that his brothers and sisters weren’t anywhere near. No, it wasn’t a human spy.
No, it was G-d. G-d was watching him. He got this feeling often, and he never
told anyone about it. Because the weird thing was, Rodney sensed it was a
feminine being watching, that weirdly, somehow G-d was a woman, and G-d was
taking an interest in him, right at this moment.
Maybe it was an angel? The Angel? That could explain it. Except, of course, angels weren’t
female either—they were genderless creatures, sexless (no wonder they seemed to
be always so pissed off, turning into demons and stuff). He didn’t think that
this Presence was a demon, although sometimes he worried a little bit about it,
because what if it was a dybbuk?
Rodney certainly wouldn’t call a priest, but he might just call Peter Blatty.
Sometimes he talked to the—feeling, this Presence. Rodney addressed
the feeling, as if the Person—thing, angel—were right there in the room with him,
standing just before him. He would say stuff like: “Hey, how’re things in
Paradise? What’s with all the frustration down here, anyway? You turning Your
back on us again?”
He showed the Presence his book.
“This is Jaws,
and it’s pretty scary. Lots of blood and guts floating in the water, I’m having
nightmares about it,” he told the Presence. He showed the Presence his Chaim
Potok novel. “This is also good, I’ve read it a bunch of times, but there’s no
monsters in it. Thank goodness there’s no weird, um—sex—you know, in it. But the truth is, I find monsters fascinating.
I can’t help it.”
A tarantula came crawling out from under his
bed, a hairy spider the size of his hand, and it scuttled across his floor
toward the bedroom door. Rodney howled. Without hardly a thought he hurled the
novel in his hands at the crazy-sized spider. There was something bizarre about
it—something weirder than just the fact that a huge spider was scrambling
around on his bedroom floor.
Distantly, he heard his parents cry out to
him from different parts of the house. Without knowing when he did it, he was
standing at the end of his bed, hopping up and down, staring at the spider. It
looked strange. It was tumbling end over end. Someone came stomping up the
stairs, and they were going to walk straight into the spider! Such a large,
acrobatic spider, doing strange maneuvers out there—it had been right under his
bed, a monster of a spider, just inches below him.
“There’s a huge spider at the top of the
stairs! Watch out!” Rodney cried.
“Spiders? He brings me up the stairs for
spiders? My son wants to exchange spiders for heart attacks, maybe?” his father
roared, almost at the top of the stairs.
The tarantula was now very still, just
waiting there close to the stairs, a mere ten feet beyond Rodney’s bedroom
door. It had all its legs up in the air—was it playing dead? He blinked and
tilted his head for a different perspective. Maybe the spider was the other way
around, with all its legs underneath it, and was pretending to be a ball, could
that be it?
“Is this your spider?” his father roared,
stomping toward the play-acting acrobatic arachnid.
“Don’t get close to it! It might be
poisonous!” Rodney cried, because a thing like this, a hairy spider that could tumble
like a ball, a thing like that just had to be poisonous, didn’t it?
“My son, the rocket scientist,” his father
roared, stomping in his slippers, his big furry-red robe flapping, exposing the
legs of blue-checkered pajamas underneath, and his skinny, hairy legs that
looked a whole lot like spider legs.
“Papa!” Rodney screamed, literally shrieking,
because his father was bending down to pluck up the spider in his bare hands!
His mother would at least use a tissue, but his father snatched the spider and
came stomping toward Rodney, hardly missing a beat.
No, no, it was impossible, his father was
actually bringing the tarantula back into Rodney’s room, holding it out in all
its squirming mess, and Rodney was screaming, bouncing backward on his bed,
going from the foot of his single bed up to the bookcase headboard in two giant
bounces, and now he was perched up high at the top of his headboard, his hands
planted on the ceiling, and his feet were tap dancing a staccato rhythm in his
terror.
“Look at him, standing up there, our son,”
his father said, shaking the tarantula in his fist, at arms’ length, as if he
meant to drop it back into Rodney’s room, like an errant sock—why don’t you put
these tarantulas away? You leave them all over the house!
His mother was there now, just behind his
father, rolling her eyes.
“Rodney, son,” she said, calmly, exaggerating
her calmness, plucking the tarantula out of her husband’s hand, coming into the
room.
“No! Don’t bring it back in here!” Rodney
screamed, utterly terrified now, because his own mother was holding out the
thing, and she was coming across the room, bringing him the spider like a gift,
his own mother! Sure, he expected such torments from the old man, but not his
mother!
“Shhh! Shush Rodney, shhhh!” his mother soothed,
holding the tarantula up toward him. “It’s a dust bunny, just a ball of lint
and hair and dead skin, it’s not a spider, see?”
Rodney couldn’t hear her words—his eyes were
locked on the furry legs writhing between his mother’s fingers.
“Stop this, now,” his father said, stepping
up beside his wife, looking at Rodney with his “calm eyes,” which Rodney
understood to mean the very close proximity of one of his father’s eruptions.
First the calm, and then the volcano.
Rodney snapped his mouth shut, staring into
his father’s eyes much the way a wild thing stares into the approaching
headlights of doom.
“Does this look like a spider?” his father
snapped in his master of interrogation tone.
Rodney set aside his terror and obediently
looked away from his father’s eyes to the—hairball,
the nasty looking dust bunny in his mother’s fingers; a universal gray ball of
lint and dust, nothing more. Rodney blinked. No writhing legs, no hideous
spider body.
Then the true terror began, because his
father was walking back toward the book on the floor, the book he had hurled at
his imagined spider, and Rodney knew it was the shark book, the terror novel,
the book full of unspeakable sex acts and violence and blood.
“The boy has a dybbuk,” his father growled. “Let’s
see what he has been feeding his evil ghost, hmmm? How has our dear son been
spending his Shabbos?”
When the old man put extra emphasis on
Shabbos, you knew trouble was coming quickly.
“Come down from there, Boychik,” his mother
soothed, reaching out her hand—still holding the imaginary spider.
Rodney went well around the hand and stepped
down onto his bed, and immediately threw his body down to scramble under his
covers even though it was only two in the afternoon.
“What is this? Who is Asher Lev?” his father
demanded, squinting at the book in his hand. Without his reading glasses he was
unable to read the author’s name.
Rodney blinked. It was a hardback book. His
father was holding a solid, heavy book, not the paperback that Rodney had hurled
across the room. It was a book that Rodney didn’t even own—he had read it,
twice, borrowed from the library, but this was obviously no library book.
“That’s the latest Potok,” his mother said. “You
know, The Promise, The Chosen, he’s Rodney favorite writer.”
“This is how our son treats expensive books?
He might have snapped the spine, throwing books like this,” his father said,
and tossed the book onto the foot of Rodney’s bed. “Our son, the millionaire,
wipes himself with twenty-dollar bills.”
Rodney felt the paperback book, Jaws, against his arm, beneath the
covers, and he pushed it down further, toward the edge of the bed and the
wall—maybe it might fall over the side—because what if his father snatched away
the covers?
His father seized his own thinning hair and
yanked on it exaggeratedly, and sighed, and turned, taking slow steps out of
his meshugganah son’s room.
“Take him to see Doctor Morgenstern, maybe
get him some pills,” his father muttered. “Put his head in a cast. Something.
Master of the Universe. Something.”
“Are you calm now, Boychik?” his mother
soothed, putting out a hand to push his hair out of his eyes, but Rodney
withdrew toward the wall. “You read too many monster books, and those terrible
funny books, and you watch too many of those movies.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” he muttered. “I thought it
was a spider.”
“Pfft! A spider he says. Spiders are a part
of life, Rodney. Spiders are everywhere,” his mother said, slowly turning and
walking away from him, shoulders slumped beneath her housecoat. “Last week it
was the woman with the strange green eyes, following you all over town. Girls
and spiders, you are going to be meeting a lot of girls and spiders, Rodney.
They are not so scary”
“They’re everywhere,” Rodney said.
He stared at the ceiling for a while,
thinking. Hadn’t he thrown Jaws at
the spider? He was sure that he had. And he was positive, as well, that it had
been a tarantula—a very large tarantula, and very hairy—that had scuttled madly
out from underneath his bed, long legs flailing, moving much faster than any
tarantula he’d ever seen on TV. In fact, there had been too many legs, way too
many, probably twelve legs with too many joints instead of the usual eight. It
had been an alien spider, not a dust bunny. The dust bunnies had come together,
under his bed, all that dead skin—pieces of Rodney, and somehow, they had come
alive. Like a golem, only a spider version, and not made out of clay, but out
of dust bunnies.
Rodney knew that he read too much. Everyone
told him so, even his teachers. Studying the Torah all the day long, that was acceptable. But not these books,
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Peter
Blatty’s The Exorcist, yeah, meshuggahs, he knew, and maybe he was
too. Just a crazy boy who read too many books in a crazy world.
Go
outside, play, see the sun, run around with the other kids, get beat up by a
few bullies, just put down the books, Rodney! Live life!
Movies were good, they were absorbing, and
they creeped you out, when the monster’s big hand moved in Frankenstein, or when King Kong came close, his face leering into
the camera—that was all good, mesmerizing, hypnotizing—but books, oh books were
different. And somehow, people just didn’t seem to know that secret, the magic
of books!
You crossed over into another world through
books. Even the kiddy show, Gumby, it
really got it right. You held a book full of words in your hand, eyes looking
at the words, just black dots on white paper, and letters connected into words
and the words made sentences and paragraphs and then you were there, you were
immersed, it was real, all about you, inside the book, traveling, walking
through the forest, you had made it from your bleak world into a shiny world of
musketeers, orcs and ents, and wolves fighting bulldogs and Martians attacking,
and the world ending—the world beginning. Dracula crept on the bricks,
slithering down the walls like a giant, blood-sucking bug. Samwise was real and
so was Aragorn, and Cyrano—he screamed for giants because mortal men were too
puny.
Rodney stretched out and his foot nudged the
hardback book. He sat up and reached down while working the book forward with
his feet, and snagged the hardback book from the corner of his bed. He turned
it over and around in his hands, studying it for clues. It was a new book, the
kind you kept and didn’t read beyond the first reading (that’s why they made
paperbacks, you could beat the stuffing out of it, reading it ten times, and
then you could use it to prop up a wobbly table leg). He opened the front cover
and there on the flyleaf was a scrawled inscription in dark blue ink.
To
Rodney, the kid with possibilities. Seize the data. Phoebe.
Who in creation was Phoebe? He didn’t know
any Phoebe. From his reading, he recognized it as a mythological kind of name.
But nobody had ever given him My Name is
Asher Lev, a book about a boy who didn’t fit in and couldn’t stop his art
even though his ultra-religious family didn’t understand.
What did seize
the data even mean? Phoebe must have intended to scrawl seize the day. Although, now that he
thought about it, he had never appreciated the whole carpe diem hutzpah, what a cliché, as if you could grab a day with
your hands, just grab it and shake it, and hold onto it, and save it for, well,
a rainy day. Seize the data? Wasn’t that like seizing...numbers? Seize the numbers? That was crazy talk.
He had thrown his paperback Jaws across the room and his father had retrieved
this hardback book. It looked brand new. Phoebe. Good thing his father didn’t
have his reading glasses. He would have given Rodney a two-hour lecture on the
dangerous world of the...shiksa. Poor
Asher had received plenty of those lectures, but the shiksas seemed stronger
than lectures, in Asher’s case. And if shiksa women did crazy things like in Jaws, with their jaws, no less, well,
Rodney didn’t need any warnings, because he didn’t want anyone biting him...downstairs.
Now, a woman like Ayn Rand, that was
different. Although she wasn’t religious, she was no skiksa, and finding a
woman like Ayn, that was acceptable. She had strayed from the fold, but she was
a great woman, and had helped G-d’s people, and was fixing the damaged world.
From the corner of his eye Rodney caught a
flash of light. The fear thrilled in him again. Slowly, he turned his head. The
flash had come from the small rectangle mirror on his little dresser. The
mirror was his window—he never told anyone about this peculiarity, but Rodney
had always viewed mirrors as windows, not mere objects that reflected light.
When he was very young, he had fallen through a mirror, and had been trapped in
the other world for hours, weeping, but when his mother had come running into
the room to see why he was wailing so loudly, the other boy charged the mirror
and Rodney had fallen back through into his own room, and she had chided him
for allowing a dream to upset him like this.
What Rodney had found so upsetting was not
the fact that he had fallen through the mirror, but that the other Rodney had
fallen through into his own room, and that mirror Rodney, also a toddler, had
not sat about crying, trying to get back to his own world, but had gone about
exploring Rodney’s bedroom, picking things up, studying all Rodney’s toys and
books. When the other little boy had opened the books, apparently he could not
read, or it could have been that the books were written backwards to the little
boy from the mirror. For years now, Rodney had practiced reading books held up
to his mirror, just in case he ever found himself in the inverted world again.
Sometimes windows were open, but usually they
were closed. And thus mirrors were usually closed windows, but Rodney always
checked. He could never pass a mirror without giving it an ethereal...touch, just to see. There were mirrors
all over the city with solitary fingerprints that belonged to Rodney. Since
that one time when he was hardly more than an infant, he had poked at the
universe, but it had never poked back again.
He climbed off his bed, still clutching the
hardback book, and approached his small mirror. The other Rodney approached his
mirror, as well. They worked about each other, each attempting to peer beyond
their bodies, looking into the opposing worlds. Rodney still felt it amazing,
that when you looked into a mirror, that it went on, and on, and that you could
see details far back beyond what a mirror should hold in its comparatively
small confines, and when you worked yourself over to the edge, you seemed to be
seeing a whole new world through that small rectangle with details much varied in
comparison to your own world.
His parents enjoyed reminiscing about how as an
infant he had been obsessed with staring at his own reflection, and how they
had feared that he would become a narcissist, or at least inordinately vain.
His father guffawed about that now, seeing as Rodney would never win any beauty
contests (but his mother always assured him that he had been a truly gorgeous
child).
What they had never understood was that he
was always looking past the other child. He wished he could remove that other
Rodney from the picture, so that he could see more of that other world way back
in there in the tunnel of light.
Rodney somehow sensed that the window was
open. If he pushed at the universe right now, it would give in to him. That the
small rectangle of light before him was now an open passage and that if he were
only courageous enough, he could slip through. If he desired it, he could pass.
And it would not be merely his consciousness escaping into a book held within
his hands, but that he would now, finally, be over there. He felt it. There was
a strange breeze in the air, and holding up his left hand, he felt the playful
puff of wind, and it was coming from his mirror.
An electric tingle danced up and down his
spine. He grinned. The other Rodney, staring into his eyes, grinned
simultaneously. It looked as if they both felt utterly stupid, standing here
with a book in their hands, grinning at each other, each feeling the tingle of
excitement and the siren call of dangerous adventure.
Rodney blinked, his grin turning to a frown,
because the other boy was holding a paperback copy of swaJ.
He held up his own book, My Name is Asher Lev. He held it up for his reflection to inspect,
but that other boy held up the same backward paperback.
Rodney inhaled sharply. The other boy was not
wearing his kippah. Rodney always wore his yarmulke, it was practically his
security blanket. The other boy nodded his head, even though Rodney was very
still. He looked eager, that other kid, he wanted this trade, almost as bad as
Rodney.
Rodney trembled and his breath came out
between his teeth in a shuddering gasp. He bowed his head, almost as if in
prayer, and his forehead came very close to the surface of the mirror. The
other boy stared into his eyes, and he could feel that boy willing the
transaction—come on! Come on! What are you waiting for?
He continued his bow, and when his forehead
should have touched the glass of the mirror, he tasted...mint. That was odd. He
shivered, and it felt like cool water was pouring over his head, and he
continued, taking a step forward, reaching up his hands for the glass, and a
sensation of dizziness swept over him, and it felt as if he did an abrupt
somersault in the air—this kid must be a practitioner of judo!
Rodney gasped and stumbled away from the
mirror.
Then he stood straight and walked toward the
mirror again. A stranger was staring back at him—an adult! It looked like his
Uncle Sidney! The same goony Adam’s apple jutting out, the same too-thick
glasses. Rodney started, and reached toward his own face as the stranger
mirrored him. He was exploring that stranger’s face, and it was him, only much,
much older—he was no longer an eleven-year-old boy, but an adult. He had beard
stubble on his own chin, how crazy was that?
But wait, look, the boy, that other boy from
the mirror, he was back there, behind the adult Rodney’s shoulder, going
through Rodney’s headboard bookcase, yanking free the big dictionary where
Rodney hid his ultra-secret stash of embarrassing pantyhose women, the
cardboard pictures that came with stockings, which Rodney had liberated from
Mrs. Randall’s garbage when he was helpfully carrying her pail out to the
dumpster.
Rodney wanted to shout at the kid, but that
would be stupid, yelling at a child for rummaging through another child’s facsimile
of would-be-porn of the softest variety. For somehow, suddenly, he realized the
innocence of it, the pathetic innocence. He had been a young boy when he kept
that collection of slightly suggestive contraband—he had experienced such guilt
at harboring such foul secrets. He used to believe that if his father had
discovered him, Rodney would be turned out on the street, barefoot, cutoff from
the family, and that everyone would...know.
When I was a boy, he thought. He had just
come through the mirror, but wait, that had happened when he was just a child,
he couldn’t have been more than ten years of age, no, no, wait, he was eleven!
Yes, the day of the spider, and the book...the book!
He glanced down at the book in his hands. He
stared at it dumbly.
veL rehsA
si emaN yM
Finally, he turned away from the small mirror
on the other boy’s dresser, but continued to study the book. Everything was
reversed. Flipping through the pages, yes indeed, it was all backward, but the
funny thing was, he could read it. It actually felt, well, normal, that
suddenly this backward was the normal.
The air felt too sweet, as if too many people
were burning too many kinds of incense, although it smelled clean, and not
smoky at all. He strode from his bedroom, or the other kid’s bedroom, and out
onto what appeared to be a theatre set, or a movie set, with a lot of planking
and chairs spaced around, and the further he progressed into this world, the
more obvious it was that everything was fake, just set up and propped against the
glass of the rectangle in his room, the window—the portal to this place,
wherever this was. This was a big box of a room, like a warehouse, only with no
rooms except the staged room, the other little boy’s room.
But all pretense of a “behind the scenes”
peek into the underpinnings of reality fell away beyond the clapboard stage
that contained the fabricated “boy’s room” mirroring his own room. This was no
behind-the-scenes glimpse into reality. Rodney knew instinctively that this was
a one-off trick—this wasn’t something set up behind every mirror in the world.
Although, it did seem possible that whoever pulled off this prank could
probably do the same thing anywhere else, plus any variety more of stupendous
shenanigans besides. The entity involved in setting this up—really, such an
entity was limitless in how they might play with someone like Rodney.
The “stage” represented a message to Rodney.
For he now understood that he was not a boy wandering from one world into
another, a male Elise in Wonderland; rather, he was an adult, unmoored from his
present, adrift in remembering (or reliving) something that had happened to him
in his past, and at present his memories were flooding back into him, but in
reverse. Yes, he remembered all this, but he couldn’t for the life of him
remember what came next.
Rodney snatched up one of the folding chairs
and half-dragged it behind him. He strode to the door marked Exit and seized
the knob. The best thing he could do was follow this journey through to the
end, because there was no way in hell that he was ever going to go back to his
childhood, at least not voluntarily. The best option when you’re going through
hell is to just keep on going, and hopefully, sooner or later, this too would
pass.
He remembered the woman with the strange
green eyes. Very tall, very strong, and kind of...what? Detached? Disconnected?
Inhuman? There was something attractive about her, but something bizarre too, as
in uncanny-valley bizarre. Maybe she was a robot.
Uncanny valley? Not from 1975, certainly,
which is the year he just left behind in his old bedroom, with his mirror
doppleganger moodily surveying his stash of leggy, youthful lust. He must have
his memories backed up into the 1990s, right?
He had to admit it, he still liked
long-legged women, and the sight of an attractive woman adjusting her stockings?
Whoa boy. But who was he kidding, even an unattractive woman adjusting her
stockings could do the trick. Yes, he was a sad little man, but at the very
least, he was the first to admit that fact. Come on, he was thirty years old,
and a virgin. So he wasn’t that bad, and yet he was hopeless. Face the facts.
Forward. He opened the door and stepped into
a day that was far too bright. He squinted his eyes and inhaled, ah, yes, that
same sweet smell, freshness, cleanness, it was the scent of holiness. And such
golden light, it was like the light of paradise, everything with a slight halo,
with rainbow hues. It made him sleepy.
He strolled out into pastureland, or a
meadow, a very green meadow, lush and slightly moist. The grasses felt
wonderful beneath his bare feet. He glanced back at the building, just to
ascertain his direction and did an abrupt double-take—the building was gone. It
was all flat meadows, or a very large glade, encircled by tall deciduous trees,
apparently in the full blush of Spring, because the air was warm, but with
chill breezes.
Just keep going. He strolled toward a small,
ornamental-looking tree that stood out in the middle of the clearing, alone,
and decorative. Some kind of fruit tree, although there only seemed to be one
shapeless glob hanging from the lowest branches. In truth, the poor tree
appeared to be on its last legs, or rather, roots.
He unfolded the chair and plunked himself
down, and yawned. Oh, but he was sleepy. He supposed a short Shabbos coma might
be in order, but come on, shouldn’t he be more excited? This was a new world,
and he was here.
But something troubled the back of his mind,
tickling at him, insistent, and yammering. Someone was messing with him. The
leggy woman with the hypnotic green eyes. She, yes, it was her, Phoebe, yes
Phoebe was pulling his strings. Seize the data, what a ding-a-ling, messing
with Rodney. Didn’t she have any idea of just how smart he was?
He glanced up at the fruit. There was
something compelling about it. He just wanted to reach up and pluck it and sink
in his teeth.
But not really, he wasn’t hungry. It just
wasn’t all that appealing, as far as fruit went—now a ripe banana, oh that
would be nice. He’d pluck a solitary banana in an instant, not that he thought
bananas grew singularly like berries. The truth was, he wasn’t much of a fruit
guy. Except tomatoes, but wait, that was a fruit, right?
He moved out of the chair and lay upon the
short grass about the base of the strange fruit tree. He closed his eyes.
He knew he was being manipulated right now.
Some force was attempting him to take that fruit, and eat it. He couldn’t
discern the reason for this exertion of influence, or what might happen if he
actually did seize the fruit, but he wasn’t going to do it.
They had messed with him, this whole journey,
first with the spider, then with the books appearing and the swapping of the
books, followed by the biggie, getting him to cross through the portal, and now
here, at the base of this tree, they were still trying to force his choice,
like some cheap magician on the street corner, inviting him to guess which
walnut shell hid the pea. Well, he was going to take a nap, and then see how he
felt about that fruit.
Rodney was exhausted. Sleep would not be
difficult. The sky was beautiful, but he didn’t need to study it. He now knew
where he was—he was through the Red Door, in a different place within that
world than their usual point of origin, but he recognized some of the mountain ranges.
And the sky, that was a dead giveaway, you could never forget a sky like
that—it imprinted upon you, within you, throughout you.
So now he was up to speed. His memory seemed
to be back in place. He even remembered Phoebe, the waitress who took them to
that strange restaurant, which they called Café Real. But he didn’t remember
anything beyond their sitting down to eat dessert in that place. He remembered,
okay wait, let’s see, Joss Chen was having trouble, and the man had risen and
walked into the kitchen area, apparently a place where he wasn’t supposed to
go, and there had been an uproar, but the rest of them had stayed at the
table...and then what?
He couldn’t remember beyond that, when Joss Chen
made his dash for some kind of escape. But wait, he did remember, let’s see,
that okay, it was a fact, that he was not a child in the 1970s; in fact, he was
born in 1987, and the current year was 2017. He had read all those books from
the 1970s, but what he had just gone through didn’t in fact seem to be his
childhood—it was all like a template. He had just lived someone else’s
experiences.
All that with the mirrors, oh, it had
happened. That had all been real: his fascination with mirrors as a baby, his
accidentally falling through the mirror and the other boy taking his place,
going through his things. But later, he remembered all of that as a dream, just
a bad dream. And when it happened again when he was eleven years old, didn’t he
remember that as a dream, as well?
He had gone and seen Doctor Morgenstern, and
there had been some medicine involved through the years, diagnoses of mild
schizophrenia, which was later rescinded and diagnosed a second time as slight
personality disorder and possible bipolar disorder. But wait, wait, just hold
on a second. It was Doctor Morgenstern, that tiny gnome-like man, who had diagnosed
dreams, and medicine, and alternative explanations—and yet Morgenstern was the
fictional author of The Princess Bride,
actually written by author William Goldman! Some part of Rodney had known that,
even when he was living it.
A dream, indeed!
A part of him had always known that none of
it had been a dream, it had all been real, but he figured that perhaps life was
just easier to accept and go along with, if you followed the program, and just
accepted what it fed you. When the program told you that you were
hallucinating, you just had to run with that. And when it explained something
by pulling the dream bag down over your head, it was best to just say, yes sir,
I’ll go along with whatever you tell me.
This was the System, the Abyss, the very
thing he and the gang met each week to discuss. The only real difference was
that he was beginning to discern the signs when the process was occurring. And
right now, um, right now...
...well, yawn, right now he was just so
sleepy. His warm, buzzing mind quieted, and he sank down through several levels
of sleep. And his sleep was sweet, and golden.
He found himself in a glorious, golden city.
The streets flowed with crowds of happy, smiling people. Rodney stood and
stared at them for a while. All his meticulous decipherings were seemingly
washed right out of his head. He couldn’t even remember his own name, but this
was just fine, because he understood that he was in a dream.
The only bizarre thing was that this seemed
very much a real place. It seemed absolutely as real as any place he had ever
visited, and perhaps realer.
Rodney stood on the edge of the city, and
looking back he could see a winding road, paved with cobblestones, leading into
a forest far away, and he thought he could make out ruins far off standing
above the forest, with ivy-covered spires and domed roofs with gaping holes.
He glanced back at the city and thought the
people were very handsome, mostly yellow heads, dirty blondes, and
fair-skinned, with a few dusky-hued people standing about in discussion. But something
was drawing him away from the city, toward those ruins. For some reason he
could not understand, he wanted to see the ruins. They just seemed more
interesting than the golden people in the golden city.
An incredibly fat bumblebee came swooping in
front of his face and Rodney swiped it away.
“Begone furry beast!” he laughed. The bee
buzzed away.
This was nice. He noticed a wide platter
stacked with loaves of bread sitting upon a bench at the juncture where the
cobbled road entered the golden city. That bread looked delicious. He hurried
over to it and snatched a loaf out of platter, then turned and hurried down the
cobblestone road. Yes, this was right, this was good, he was following the
correct path.
He almost wanted to start singing: “We’re off
to see the Wizard!” And he even skipped some, but after fifty yards he lost
interest in being funny. He strolled and nibbled off his loaf of bread.
What a great baguette, probably as good as
anything baked in Paris.
The weather felt wonderful, he could sense it
in every fiber of his being, the sunlight, the fresh air. His feet felt light
and he felt strong. Yes, oh yes indeed, this was a good place, and he was so
happy he had come here. He was thinking better and clearer, minute by minute.
Rodney stared back over his shoulder for a
while as he walked, watching the golden city grow smaller. Maybe he’d come back
this way, go back into the city and meet a few of the people. Right now,
however, he wanted the ruins. That was the real destination for him. He felt he
might find some of the most important answers to all the debilitating questions
of his life.
When he glanced back forward, he was startled
by how close the forest already loomed. He thought he had a mile or more to
walk, but he was already almost here after no more than a hundred yards, it was
strange, like magic.
He thought he heard a scream from somewhere
far off. Probably just a bird, he told himself. He had heard peacocks do their
haunting banshee wail, and you could swear that was a woman shrieking.
Rodney slowed in his stroll. It was looking
decided darker now. Was night coming on? He felt a chill breeze wash across
him. And in that breeze, a stench. That was horrible, like something had died.
You didn’t dream foul smells, did you?
Something flashed by in the trees off to his
left. He peered that way, and thought he saw a dog darting between trees,
perhaps twenty yards away. A large dog. It reminded him of the Big Bad Wolf,
from the cartoons, the guy after the pigs.
Rodney made a loud squealing noise, doing a
fairly decent impression of a pig. But then he thought better of it. Perhaps it
wasn’t such a bright idea to offer pig calls to a creature that reminded you of
the Big Bad Wolf.
His thinking seemed a little clearer, and
cleaner. He was able to remember the tree with the weird glob of fruit, the
fake room, the mirror, the spider, Café Real, the restaurant, Joss Chen, and
the fact that they hadn’t seen Hank in a few days, and that Frederic was sick,
had crossed over to this world, and Frances had come with him.
Wait, not this
world, but the one above it, or was he still thinking too slowly? But he
was taking a nap, right now, in Sky Valley, no, what had Phoebe called it? High
Vale? He was asleep in High Vale, beneath that solitary tree, and this world,
where he walked right now, it was all a dream world—a very real-seeming dream
world, but still a dream. He hoped he was thinking clearly enough to keep this
all straight in his head.
He heard laughter. He stopped on the road and
noticed for the first time that the cobblestones were all gone, and he was
walking barefoot on a dirt path. He looked back over his shoulder, and shook his
head. There was absolutely no sign of the golden city, and things were
decidedly looking darker. Maybe he should just head back that way. But the
forest already seemed to surround him, and he saw no trace of the path.
Weird the way dreams could change things up
on you, very disconcerting.
Perhaps he should have asked some of those
people, those happy, friendly people, what was up with the ruins in the forest?
Maybe there were things that he should know before going there, I mean, why
were there ruins in this world? Who had lived there before they became ruins?
Then, looking deeper into the forest he saw
people in rags peering out at him. At least some of the ragged-looking people
wore rags—many of them were naked, wearing filth as their only clothes. Uh-oh,
this was a very different kind of community compared to the golden people in
the golden city. Oh boy, that did tend to happen in dreams. Clothes just
vanished.
Of course, looking down at his own feet, they
were filthy, and his pants were his childhood pajama bottoms, and he wore a
Superman t-shirt that looked two sizes too small, and his clothes looked pretty
nasty. Perhaps he did belong out here in the ruins with the ragged people.
He waved at the people, and even that slight
motion sent most of the ragged, toothless people running and hiding. Oh well,
at least they didn’t seem dangerous.
Then he heard a loud pounding, the kind of
sound he could imagine a large elephant making when it came charging through
the jungle toward you.
Something big came smashing through the
forest, and a big, naked brute of a man suddenly appeared and came directly
toward Rodney.
“I think I made a mistake,” Rodney began,
reminding himself that this was all a dream, and that he could wake himself
whenever he needed to.
The giant naked brute shook the ground with
his swollen, angry-red feet, and he barely carried a toppling bobble-head upon
his disproportionately small, narrow shoulders. Rodney was able to think that
the giant brute seemed somehow familiar, when suddenly the giant snatched
Rodney up into the air, and shook him furiously before his massive, drooling
mouth.
“Why did you come here!” the naked giant
howled. “You shouldn’t have come here! Don’t you know that I hate you! This is
my place! My place!”
Rodney wet himself, suspended ten feet above
the ground as the giant shook him, rattling his neck and head and spine.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Rodney shouted, because
he did recognize the angry, horribly naked giant—it was Barney, last time seen in Rodney’s zombie video game, and before
that he was a brain in a vat.
“I am going to kill you!” shrieked and
blubbered the giant, spitting all over Rodney’s face, shaking him harder, and
harder. “Because I am so hungry!”
My neck is going to snap, thought Rodney,
distantly, but he couldn’t wake himself from this horrible nightmare. And he
finally realized that perhaps this wasn’t a dream.
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der.
Rood Der — Episode Thirteen: Poking the Universe
If you like Rood Der, try
Vestigial Surreality online free:
© Copyright 2017 Douglas Christian Larsen. Rood Der. All Rights Reserved by the Author, Douglas Christian Larsen. No part of this serial fiction may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited, but please feel free to share the story with anyone, only not for sale or resale. This work is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental (wink, wink).
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