AD INFINITUM

by

William E. Fripp III

Prologue

In the last few minutes before consciousness returned to Susan Burgess, she dreamed.

She was shopping; she watched herself move from store to store in the mall making purchases, stopping at several kiosks, buying an Orange Julius. She saw herself visit the mall restroom and hover over the commode rather than allow her skin to make contact with the billions of germs she imagined were there, remnants of every customer more daring and therefore less sanitary than she.

Now she was in the parking lot, looking for her car. She carries her packages in one hand by the straps of all five bags, her keys in the other hand as she thumbs the unlock button of her keyless remote. She had parked in the lot next to Sears, she was sure of it and then she spots her silver Volvo only one row over. Pretty close, she thinks proudly and finally makes it to her space. She presses the button on the remote and-nothing!

“Damn it!”, she says aloud, and shakes the keys on her Snoopy keychain to try and fish up the one for the door, abstractedly trying to assist herself with her over burdened right hand. Another vehicle, a white panel truck, slides into the space beside her. Susan has to move closer to her car to avoid it.

A violet colored lace bra falls from her Victoria’s Secret parcel onto the dusty pavement and kneeling down to retrieve it she dumps the remaining personal items from the bag onto the parking lot. In her momentary rage, she barely registers the metallic sliding sound of the van door opening behind her and as she squats in the narrow space between the van and the Volvo to gather her belongings, she curses the driver.

“Cuttin’ it pretty goddamned close aren’t you?”

She hears a man’s voice admonish, “Such language!” the sound of a blunt instrument cutting the air and then the world turns black.

The first of the five senses to return to Susan was that of smell; pungent, acrid and cloying, the smell of urine and rotted vegetation. This was accompanied by a dull, throbbing buzz in her skull that vibrated from the marrow outward, an incessant, pounding roar that washed over her and made her shudder.

She started violently and found her limbs stopped short. Her fevered brain flashed the image of a dog reaching the end of its chain. She tried to open her eyes and was blinded by an intense white light. She blinked furiously, tears flowing, her vision a field of red.

She tried each of her limbs experimentally and confirmed that she was indeed bound, naked and lying on her back and as the truth of her predicament dawned she panicked. She tried to scream but was able to manage only a distressed croaking, a hoarse shouted whisper that succeeded only in frightening her all the more. She began to thrash, to assail the binds that held her with the blind frenzy of sheer hysteria. She felt the table she was on move half a foot to the left (or was it right?), heard the screech of the metal sliders on the legs as they scraped over the floor. She continued convulsing and screaming her mute protest until her convulsions caused her to bruise her coccyx and then she lay sobbing in pain and an agony of fear. Then a new sound made her catch her breath and listen, trembling like a feral kitten in a rainstorm.

A door opened and closed; the sound of someone descending a flight of stairs, coming nearer; another door closing. There is a new odor too, a body odor like nothing she had ever experienced, like a hundred unwashed bodies wallowing in sewage. Her revulsion triggered her gag reflex, but some survival instinct warned not to offend whoever this was, that doing so might be fatal and she desperately wanted this not to be fatal.

The smell traveled from one end of the table to another, following footsteps around and up the other side to where Susan’s head was turned. She tried again to open her eyes.

Silhouetted against the backdrop of her tear blurred and red spotted vision she was able to determine that her captor was tall, impossibly thin and quite naked, his ribs showing under a mat of greasy black hair and his manhood standing unimpressively erect in mock salute. As her vision cleared, she found his face and in his eyes Susan Burgess recognized her doom leering out from under bushy brows, grinning stupidly.

She screamed at him to let her go and he screamed back, mocking her and dancing back and forth, “LET ME GOOOO! LET ME GOOOOO”, laughing cruelly, taunting her. Abruptly he stopped and pointing one skeletal, black nailed talon, he growled like a rabid dog. “You ain’t goin nowhere, bitch. Scream all the fuck you want.”

Incensed and ashamed, all thoughts of appeasing this half ape went out the window.

Her bruised and swollen features twisting in fury, she spat, “You go and fuck yourself you smelly little TURD!”

The smile vanished from his face. He drew back one bony arm and slapped her resoundingly, the impact slamming her head back painfully against the unyielding table. Stars swam before her eyes, and tears of shame and rage choked her as she sobbed. He leaned close to her, close enough that she could smell his breath on her cheek, sour and reeking of rotted food. He snaked out his tongue and licked her cheek, causing her to retch.

He whispered in her ear,“Shhhhhhh…you just hush now…you just keep reaaaallll still and quiet. We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you because of your filthy mouth, would we? Noooo..you were meant for something better and soon…very soon, you’re gonna do your part…very soon”

He stood and walked back down and around the table, checking Susan’s bindings as he went.

“Yes, little girl, you are special. I’ve been looking for you for weeks and then bang! You just show up at the mall, just like you were meant to be there right then. Right at that precise fuckin time. Just like you had been sent!”

Satisfied that Susan was securely tied, the smelly little man sat down at a card table that held a computer monitor and keyboard and hit the space bar. A flying Windows screen saver flashed briefly then gave way to the desktop.

Susan, useless without her glasses, squinted and strained her already swollen eyes to try and focus on the background image on the desktop and after a few tense minutes made out the outlines of a calendar, large squares with numbers and days and at the top in large red letters she read the word February.

She scanned the rest of the squares, the numbers and days coming in and out of focus, the strain on her eyes making her head ache. She saw one day, the last day, highlighted red with something notated in black writing she couldn’t make out. Her captor superimposed a clock over the calendar and pushed himself away from the table. For a second, he blocked the screen, then as he moved again, Susan could see the seconds ticking by on the clock and next to it the day on the calendar in red, with black writing. Desperately she focused her bloodshot eyes and read the date: the 29^th. February 29^th. Leap Day. The clock was counting down to zero. Thirty seconds to go.

The man was standing over her now, and Susan could see him clearly, looming over her like some insane scarecrow werewolf. Over his head he held a butcher knife, the glow from the computer monitor mirrored in the stainless steel. Fifteen seconds to zero. Susan began to struggle again, straining every muscle against her bonds, pleading with him with her eyes, but the smelly man was somewhere else, his eyes focused outside of this plane. A drop of drool dripped from his grinning mouth and he giggled dementedly just as the countdown ended. The alarm sounded.

As the blade fell, the last thing Susan Burgess ever saw were the words on the calendar written in black on a blood red background:

AWAKENING.

Chapter One

There is more than one reality intertwined with our destiny as human beings, more than one lifetime for each of us, countless second chances to make the same mistakes or create new ones. What we naively label a soul is actually so unnamable as to be beyond descriptive understanding, yet at the last there must be a straw to grasp at, a buoy to cling to as time thunders overhead and your vision fades – wondering, remembering, dieing…

The physics are beyond normal discernment, the mathematical calculation of Life, Death or Transition best left to those with the wherewithal for understanding it, but the truth is that time is layered like the earth is layered, and like a tree displays it’s age from the rings at its center, you can cut through the layers of time, find the rings at the leading edge and re-enter the timeline, not in the past or the future but only in the now, to re-live life over and over, constantly being reborn only to grow old and wither again and again, while the maelstrom that is time rages invisible all around you and you are oblivious, never cognizant of who you were before or who you will be and usually only vaguely aware of who you are now. But there are those who do know. There are those who retain their katra throughout Transition and carry it forward into the next incarnation.

They are aware of their pasts; they remember.

Life on this planet was no accident. After the last of the planet’s birth pangs, when things had cooled down enough and the primordial ooze had offered up the first vestiges of life, the Sojourners had come.

Born eons before our so-called big bang, the original Sojourners were the genitors of life to untold millions of planets across a myriad of universes and dimensions, seeding the multiverse with life in all of its diverse and intricate configurations, then moving on to another, and another, ad infinitum.

Some of these offspring survived and flourished; others were consumed by the natural indigenous life on their adopted worlds; others were wiped out entirely by natural disasters. Yet, even when their children began to arm themselves and war with one another, the Sojourners never looked back, never retraced their path to marvel at their own handiwork, always moving forward, seeding new worlds as they went.

It was not until one race of their progeny completely destroyed their entire planet and themselves along with it that the Sojourners took notice of what they had wrought. They were appalled and ashamed that the indigenous life of an entire planet had been eradicated by one of their brood. Something had to be done.

So they joined together all of the life stuff they possessed, all of the seeds yet to be planted and marshalling their energy together, the energy of Life itself, they created the Void, a place where the seeds of life can germinate and develop before they are planted and a place for souls to return at the end, to re-join the time stream and be re-born.

But there were some among the Sojourners who resented this change of their life’s work, who believed that to so constrict the boundaries of life was to eliminate its random nature, that chaos was necessary and that good, evil, right and wrong were all the same thing. These wayward few broke off from their Sojourner cousins and began organizing the people on each world the Sojourners interfered in, creating religions and cults that preached against them and forced their followers to make war against them.

The oldest and most powerful of the Wayward, a being known as the Other, who had managed to draw unto itself all of the negative energies created by the lowest and most basic instincts of life, waged a war against the Sojourners that covered entire planets, solar systems and galaxies, crossing dimensions to set up its foul religion and slaughtering  billions of innocents in its name, drinking in the energy created by the pain and suffering of the tortured and the dead and using it as fuel in its campaign for domination of the multiverse.

Planet by planet, system by system, the Other was defeated, but because it was a creature like the Sojourners themselves, a creature of pure energy, it could not be killed, only banished to the Void. There it would fester and roil while its disciples fed it power though sacrifice and bloodshed until eventually, like all souls in the Void, it would be re-born, reincarnated and sent to a different world, where the process would begin again.

Eventually, the Other was re-born into the time stream of a little planet in a tiny nine planet system at the edge of an unimpressive little galaxy that its inhabitants would eventually call Earth. It had been reborn in a time in the planet’s history when religion on its own had just begun, when man was just beginning to question the power behind his very existence. They were ripe for the picking.

The Other appeared to them, a being of superior intellect and amazing abilities and they worshipped him as a God. He told them they were his children, that they owed fealty to him and that should they disobey, death was all that awaited them. He created a cult of followers blindly obedient to him and he sent them out into the world to win him worshipers.

Through their own sentries already on earth, the Sojourners became aware of the Other’s growing power and confronted him. The resulting conflict caused volcanoes to erupt, tidal waves to flood the land and very nearly destroyed every living thing on the planet.

The Other was driven back into the Void, but this time the Sojourners were able to trap it in this time sphere, the one that enveloped Earth, and though it could still reincarnate, it could only manifest inside that sphere, destined to relive life after life on Earth, no longer able to leave and enslave the other worlds the Sojourners protected.

And so it has been for generations uncounted. The Sojourners keeping watch; the Wayward serving the Other, awaiting the Re-Birth which they help bring about by murder and torture and chaos and a ritual every February 29^th, Leap Day, called the Awakening. By simultaneously snuffing out hundreds of lives at one instant, the Wayward create a disturbance in the Void that attracts the Other and hastens its reincarnation.

The Sojourners, dedicated to preserving and protecting their offspring, set up their own society on earth called the Elder Council, sentries who themselves volunteered to stay in the time stream of Earth and leapfrog through time, watching for signs of the Other’s return. During a ritual called the Interval, the elders choose warriors from the people they created, awaken in them their past incarnations and train them to battle against powers not of this earth.

By switching on those people in whom the souls of the Sojourners abide, the balance can be kept and the traditions and rituals passed down to future generations.

And things would have stayed this way unchanged until the earth inevitably ripped itself apart or was blotted from the heavens by the final exhalations of a dieing sun, if not for the unnamable soul known as Walter Cavanaugh.

Chapter Two

Not all souls recycled from the ages are elder souls. Some are only on their first thousand, or hundred reformations and some still are New Lighters, brand new beings sprung from the same Well as all the trillions before them, untainted by the residue of time and the corruption created by the Wayward.

Walter Cavanaugh was one of those, born brand new in April of 1965 knowing practically from the beginning that his soul was untainted. His earliest childhood memories started at the age of three and by the time he was ten, time meant nothing to him. Walter could slow, even stop time when he wanted to and observe his surroundings as though in a museum, and though he himself could not move in this altered state, he could see, hear and, oddly enough, smell everything around him. It was an exceptional gift, but Walter was an exceptional boy. He was the valedictorian, the bookworm, the smart kid, the usual prime target for bullies, but no one ever bothered Walter. There was something about him, some power that emanated from him that warned off trouble, and, unfortunately scared off friends as well. So Walter was lonely, but he knew that he was not actually alone. He knew that there were others like him, others that shared his gift.

When Walter was fifteen, he had accompanied his parents to the airport to see them off on their second honeymoon, a trip to the Greek Islands, a place his mother had always dreamed of seeing. He walked with them through the concourse, sat with them as they waited to board the plane and hugged them before they walked down the covered walkway and into the jet.

He walked quickly to a nearby viewing window and took position there to watch as their plane taxied to the top of the runway, begin to build up power and finally hurtle across the concrete on its way skyward. And then, for no reason, the plane simply exploded.

He crumpled against the glass wide mouthed in horror-struck disbelief; this simply could not be happening. In one horrific moment, his entire world had been vaporized in a titanic blast of jet fuel and flying debris and as this realization struck home, his aura pulsed and time stopped, and he watched, rising with the thick black smoke of the flaming jet, the soul stuff of four hundred and twenty passengers exploding into shards of brilliant, white light etched against the backdrop of the liquid flames and then dissipating into the ether. He heard the tortured mental screaming of every person in that plane as the orange black conflagration engulfed their mortal forms and his nostrils flared from the acrid stench, he was overcome by what he had seen and his sanity teetered on the brink.

For weeks after the crash he neither ate nor slept. School officials who came to check on him when he did not show up for classes found him ragged and malnourished in his mother’s walk-in closet, where Walter had slowed time to a crawl, wallowing in his grief.

Having no extended family and no means of support, officials eventually had him admitted to a psychiatric hospital as a ward of the state and left him to his own fate. It was there in a sterile and Spartan room of the Carolinas Health Care Behavioral Health Center that Walter Cavanaugh transformed from a brand new child of light, to a being older and darker than the monstrous ages of man’s beginning.

At first, Walter was barely more than catatonic, hardly conscious and even less aware of where he was than when in his mother’s closet due to a steady program of psycho suppressive medications and the monotonous buzz of the one television set in the main room where he spent the majority of his time.

Day after long day, Walter sat staring bleary –eyed and mute as The Days of Our Lives spread out before him, and Jerry Springer spewed forth the detritus from the dregs of the societal abyss. He learned the actual retail prices of Rice-a-Roni and countless kitchen appliances and the reason why men are inferior to women in practically every way that mattered. He watched the talking heads drone on and on about the state of the union and the collapse of society and murder after murder after murder and eventually this cacophony of mindless patter caused Walter to numb the part of him that cared about life, his own or anyone else’s. He grew a callous over his will to live and the longer the flickering images of humanity’s underbelly flashed incessantly in front of his eyes, the thicker and more hardened the callous became until at last he could stomach no more and he decided that the time had come to act, the time had come to rid himself of this nightmarish existence and join his family in the flames and the smoke and the stench and for his Light to be extinguished.

It was actually a very easy thing to accomplish. The staff at the Behavioral Health Center, though conscientious, had weeks before stopped trying to get through to Walter and pretty much left him to his own devices, with the exception of ensuring that he ate, bathed and swallowed his medications. Overworked and understaffed, the doctors and nurses focused more on the patients they regarded as more likely to benefit from their time and therefore more apt to leave and go home to their families, rather than Walter who, so far, had shown no interest in anything other than Wheel of Fortune. But Walter’s final, tragic spin had landed on bankrupt, and no, Vanna, I would not like to buy a vowel thank you very much, but I will take what’s behind door number three, which for Walter happened to be a broken shard of a bathroom mirror and a long, jagged gash up his right forearm. Shouldn’t this hurt? Walter asked himself. The thought struck him as ridiculous and for the first time in months, Walter Cavanaugh tried to laugh. What came out was a choking, hoarse, braying cackle in a voice Walter did not recognize, a voice that bespoke long awaited triumph and a frustrated, furious ire that had spent decades smoldering in the Void.

Chapter Three

What we see with our eyes and what is actually around us to be seen are vastly different. Hidden behind the visible spectrum are whole vistas, endless landscapes of light and sound and smell, each as real as the next, each as much a part of the fabric of the cosmos as the stardust it was created from. The shared collective consciousness we label reality is but one wave in the ocean of time, our physical forms merely vessels necessary to traverse this space at this time. Religions have been born and millions have died fighting over whose version of what happens next is correct or coerced.

Popular culture has created and perpetuated a myth, a romanticized archetype of the near death experience involving long tunnels and reunited relatives and of brilliant white light accompanied by a sense of disembodied peace.

For Walter, it was quite different.

He did not really open his eyes, because he had no physical eyes, but the sensation was essentially the same. The Void was filled with an utterly black and all but viscous murk, the stench of which was overwhelming and if Walter had still had guts he would have heaved them up. His “vision” was greasy, as though the world was slathered in Vaseline, and even though he “saw”, he could make out nothing solid, nothing with any substance, only vague impressions of vaporous mist.

He looked down at his hand and was shocked to find the he could not see it, reached over with his other hand to grab his wrist and grabbed nothing and felt his stomach churn and knot even as he realized his stomach was back in his body and that he was dead. He wished desperately for insanity, tried determinedly to lose his mind so he could shed responsibility for what he had done, but he could not. He cried out in anguish and heard nothing and screamed louder until he understood that he could scream forever with not even an echo in response and he broke down and wept inside his soul. It would have suited Walter just fine to have wept throughout eternity.

Then, without warning, a mammoth explosion of polychromatic light slammed into what was left of Walter and he saw, no – he became thousands upon thousands of mingled souls, saw in an instant thousands of lives flash before his eyes, lived thousands of entire lifetimes all at once and when finally it stopped he was alone with the Other in its natural state, a polyglot of impenetrable darkness with a million faces and a million eyes all staring at him with an unmistakably vicious glee.

Then, to his astonishment, he heard voices.

Dimly, as though from the deepest gulfs of space, Walter heard people talking, barely audible yet distinct. He tried to open his eyes and when he could not he started convulsively.  A burning pain radiated up his right arm and the voices grew louder.

“Hold him down, we can’t have him jumping around like that”.

He recognized the voice as one of the night shift nurses and tried again to open his eyes. Bright, brilliant white exploded into his head and he gasped, drawing great, racking breaths as his brain exploded in excruciating pain. He tried to come forward into the light, but the black entity held him back. He fought against it, but it was too powerful and as his desperation mounted, the Other plunged its bulk into the light ahead of Walter and disappeared.

Walter opened his eyes. Standing above him, covered in his blood, was the night shift nurse.

“Welcome back Mr. Cavanaugh”, the nurse exhaled in relieved exhaustion. “Next time, try an overdose. Less mess that way.”

Walter fixed his watering eyes on hers and croaked weakly, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She frowned at him. “Do you know what day it is?”

He frowned back, trying to dredge up the information from the muddied waters of his drug addled memory. “Wednesday?” he asked.

“Good. Now the date?”

“February”, he managed. “February something, I think.”

The nurse smiled at him, a condescending smile like a professor might give a stupid pupil. “It’s the 29^th. Leap Day.”

Walter was quickly bandaged and transported by ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital, where he was sedated, sutured and admitted overnight for observation. He slept fitfully, frequently waking in a cold sweat expecting to find himself back in the Void, alone and drifting through time. And there was something else as well, something oddly not quite right, some niggling worm in the back of his skull that seemed natural yet alien to him, like something he should remember feeling but couldn’t. It tugged at him, prodded him, nudging his psyche as though trying to force it aside and the harder Walter tried to push back, the more insistent it became.

Most disturbing, at least to Walter, was that he could no longer affect time, no longer stop the world. His great gift was gone and he mourned its loss more than he mourned his parents. His untainted soul had lost its luminous aura and now it glowed darkly, no longer emanating light, but pulsing with hatred and malice and feeding on itself like a black hole in the center of a rogue galaxy, feasting on the light and shedding its indignation like Hawkings radiation gone insane.

After twenty four hours, Walter was transferred back to his room at the behavioral health center, this time with a guard sitting just outside his partly opened door. No chances were taken that he would repeat his suicide attempt; at least not while still a patient. Walter felt as though he were a bug in a giant jar, his bandaged wrist a white flag of surrender, the clot of blood that showed through the bandages a scarlet letter announcing his weakness to the world. His shame was great and he chafed at being so closely scrutinized by these complete strangers, was insulted by the casual attitude with which they watched him, as though he were a pot ready to boil over at any moment. He withdrew inside himself; refused to get out of bed, or to eat, or take his meds and so he was taken back to the hospital, heavily sedated and fed intravenously while the city decided what to do with him.

In his hospital bed, connected to the beeping and humming and dripping devices that marked the time with maddening regularity, Walter languished in self loathing, hating his life, hating his fate, hating god and cursing the earth that bore him. Hate saturated him, coursed from him and he reveled in it. Walter’s soul was floundering, and in desperation he tried one last time to find the buoy, to grasp the last straw of his humanity and he knew that eternity was in the balance.

He strained against the bonds confining his aura, concentrated until his head ached and throbbed and cold sweat stood out on his forehead, but he could not free himself. He could sense that the lifeline was still there, he could feel the edges of it like a man hanging on by his fingernails to the edges of a sheer cliff, but try as he might he could not pull himself up and over. He began to lose control of his will; his pulse pounded in his ears and then there was someone else behind his eyes, directing his thoughts, controlling his actions and as he fought despondently to keep from crying out, Walter Cavanaugh was replaced.

Walter Cavanaugh was no more.

He had been banished to the Void, exiled from this wave in the time stream and in his body now resided the katra of the Other.

It looked out through its new eyes and breathed in through its new nostrils, taking in the smells and the sounds and the colors of this world like an expatriate returned home, experiencing everything at once and exalting in the enormity of it all. It closed its eyes and held the breath in, absorbing as much of the refreshed atmosphere as it could before slowly exhaling, euphoria reaching every nerve of its new body. Memories of past incarnations flooded back to it and the flesh of its new body tingled. It had been here before; only a generation earlier it had brought the world into a war that saw the birth of the nuclear age and its terrible weapons, weapons the Other knew it could use to spread terror and fear and destruction. That was its only purpose. It was interested only in conquest and war. And now, it had found Walter Cavanaugh, a New Lighter who had chosen to extinguish his Light and sacrifice his untainted soul through the taking of his own life and who had, by some miraculous coincidence, chosen the exact moment of the Awakening.

The Other ran an inventory of the psyche it had taken from Walter, “remembering” Walter’s life and relationships, rehearsing lines until it had Walter down pat. It could hear Walter crying out in the Void, but it paid no attention. Walter was history. The Other had assumed his past and present and his future had been pre-empted by the utter emptiness of the Void.

Chapter Four

Kimberly Holly was not Switched on. She had no idea that she was in actuality merely a conduit for an entity over two thousand years old; that her soul self had been perpetually recycled since before the time of Christ and that she was heir to a legacy that had been handed down since time immemorial.

There is a school of thought that asserts that the heavens once were vacant and only a cosmic soup of vapors and gases made up our universe, a miasm of pre-quantum dark matter, inert and stagnate. Then, out of the nothingness, the chemical nuclei collided and the gases ignited in a super massive nuclear “big bang” and from this the stars were born and began to propagate, radiating stardust in all directions at the speed of light and filling the cosmos with life.

Yet another school maintains that the planets and stars and the life found on them were molded and sculpted by a higher power, made from the very clay of the planet itself by a creator who set the board of the cosmos with carefully and meticulously crafted pieces shaped in its own image and then from the firmament moved them at its will.

Kimberly Holly was a person who tried, she told herself, to see ideas from different perspectives, to weigh all sides before making decisions, a careful person. If you don’t make waves, you won’t rock the boat she remembered her father preaching, and she loved her father. She had watched him work and struggle through life, nose to the grind stone and back to the wheel until finally his body gave out and his spirit shattered and he became an invalid.

He had sacrificed all for his little family, for Kimberly and her mother and never could she remember hearing him complain, so she never did either.

She never complained about taking free lunches at school or about getting one present a year for Christmas and birthday combined, never complained about her mother drinking herself blind every night or having to clean her mother’s vomit from the bathroom floor and put her to bed while she screeched at her father about how terrible her life had become. Kimberly just grew to expect it after a while and resigned herself to being daughter and housekeeper and to making sure that her father knew he was loved and appreciated despite the drunken tirades from his mate.

She was popular enough in school, but never a standout. She never took a strong stance on anything controversial, for fear of one side or the other ostracizing and alienating her. Even in college when other students were out protesting one thing or another, sharing ideas and trying out new thoughts and speech, Kimberly remained diplomatically pragmatic, espousing which ever idea was popular depending on the leanings of the listener. Thus, she never had to actually make up her mind one way or the other about anything and very neatly avoided making waves, conveniently keeping the boat rock steady and in the process blunting the instrument of her intellect and jamming the very powerful radar she didn’t even know she possessed.

College was a challenge, the only big one she had ever faced, having to take care of her mother and father as they grew older and work to support herself as well as pay for school. She squeaked through, earning her degree and entering the field of hospital administration at the age of twenty-six. Her first job was behind the reception desk in the outpatient surgery department at Mercy Hospital in Pineville; processing patients through the system, making sure family members were kept informed of how procedures were going, making coffee, picking up magazines tossed haphazardly here and there about the room, generally keeping house and keeping the bureaucracy informed of it all through the magic of fiber optics and intranet. It was perfect for her.

She stayed there in Pineville, happily out of the way, driving back and forth from work to her one bedroom apartment in Charlotte and quietly existed, not making any waves or rocking any boats for three years. Eventually however, room needed to made for people who wanted to advance, who had more of what her supervisor had termed “get up and go” and Kimberly was forced to do just that, suddenly jobless and alone.

She had made few friends, but the one good one she had helped her jazz up her resume and took her shopping for “interview clothes” – “You need some serious help with your closet, girl” – took her to a salon for a hair and nails update and gave her some of her unused makeup, which she fished out of a cloth bag bulging with amber colored compacts, a rainbow cascade of different colored eyeliners, lipsticks and nail polishes and which belched forth a fine dust of perfumed powder with every jostle. Claire handed a lipstick to Kimberly.

“Here. You do know how to use this stuff, right?”

“Of course I do. I’m not a complete hag.”

“I know, it’s just I can’t remember ever seeing you wear make-up. Or a dress. Or leave the house. Or go on a date. Or…”

“OKAY. I get it. I’m just not ready for that stuff right now. I need to get my career in order first.”

”Kimberly – screw that career shit. Find a big, tall good looking man, screw his brains out until you got him hooked then start having babies.”

Kimberly laughed. “Right, Claire. Have you even heard of the women’s movement?”

“But you ain’t movin, Liz! You worked for three years in that place, never missed a day of work, never went home early and when you took the one vacation they forced you to take in that whole time, you stayed in this depressing little hole and watched television!”

“I like watching television.”

“Bullshit.”

Claire got some various makeup products together and put them in a separate little bag that zipped across the top and handed it to Kimberly.

“Here. You keep these. Use them. Go to a bar, find some hot redneck, buy some rubbers, bring him back here and rock his world.”

Kimberly burst out laughing, the first good laugh she’d had in a while. Claire joined her and together they filled the room with the music of it.

Finally getting herself under control and stifling giggles she managed to thank Claire as her friend left the apartment and went across the hallway to her own.

She took the bag of makeup to her bathroom and placed it on the counter next to the little sink. She regarded her reflection in the mirror, rendered even more pale by the antiseptic glow of the white light spilling around her face and as she stared into her own green eyes, she wondered why she didn’t recognize herself, why she couldn’t imagine being the person in the glass who stared back at her with such sadness, such melancholy, wondered if she would ever find out who that was staring back at her. These questions confused her, dismayed her and she knew that even to herself, even to her ghostly reflection in the bathroom mirror, she could never utter her fears aloud, because to do so would be rocking the boat, to do so would make waves, tsunamis and that the obligatory flood threatened to wash away everything Kimberly Holly had been brought up to believe, discount the lessons she had learned through her own experience, through her own suffering and the pain of her father, so she dismissed her sour image with a wave of her hand, retreated back into the tortoise shell of her spare little rooms and went to bed.

The next few weeks passed with a boring monotony that, if left untreated, develops into full-blown routine. Kimberly scoured the Charlotte Observer’s classifieds for job openings, (especially the Sunday editions which were always thicker) circling the ones she would send resumes to in red ink. She narrowed the list to fifteen, most of them from temporary agencies seeking office workers and administrative assistants, mailed out her resumes with silent prayers of “God speed” and waited.

Within a few days, she started receiving phone calls and setting up interview appointments. After a week of dead ends and promises of return calls that never came, Kimberly started the next week with a growing sense of dread, imagining her possessions on the sidewalk and her car repossessed, and when she pulled up into the parking space in front of Apple One temporary agency she had very nearly driven off.

She had arrived fifteen minutes early wearing her new clothes and make-up, feeling a bit nervous and fervently wishing she had eaten some breakfast before she got there. That’s all I need, she thought, gurgling guts in the middle of the interview. She giggled abstractedly, drawing a curious glance from the only other applicant in the lobby, a hugely fat black man, immaculately dressed and polished, who smiled back at Kimberly when their eyes met. Kimberly demurely dropped her gaze and took an interest in a magazine on the little table next to her.

A prim, proper looking woman in her fifties, well coiffed and exuding the faint, powdery aroma of White Shoulders walked up from the back of the office, from behind the cubicles and the separator walls where agents were making cold calls, talking with clients and drinking their morning coffee and sat down at the desk facing the front entrance in the reception area. The phone was ringing and the woman answered it, giving the standard company greeting.

“Good morning, Apple One. This is Diane, how may I help you?” A pause. “Yes, one minute please”. She pressed a button on the phone. “Marcus, you have a call. Line one”. Finally, she focused her attention on the lobby and caught Kimberly’s eyes.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

Kimberly glanced at the man with her in the lobby and said, “I believe this gentleman was here first.”

The obese man placed one beefy hand on the seat next to him, tucked one leg under his enormous bulk and stood, a loud jet of breath escaping from his lungs like the sound of a locomotive pulling into a depot as he straightened his double vested suit coat and smoothed the wrinkles out of his slacks. He waddled up to the reception desk and wheezily informed the woman that he was here to apply for work. When asked if this was his first time at Apple One, he said that, yes, it was his first time and he was given a clipboard with paperwork to fill out. The woman leaned to her right, peered around the man and spoke to Kimberly.

“Is this your first time, too miss?” she falsettoed.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Then you’ll need to fill these out”, she said and handed Kimberly another clipboard and a pen, which she didn’t need (who comes to a job interview without a pen?). The paperwork consisted of a standard form job application as well as state and federal tax forms. Kimberly dutifully filled these out, and returned the clipboard to Diane the receptionist.

After roughly twenty minutes, a young man in Khakis, a blue button down shirt and a tie walked up from the cubicle area and motioned for the gigantic black man to come with him. After another few minutes of straightening and smoothing, the two disappeared behind the partition separating the cubicles from the lobby and Kimberly was left alone.

Almost a full hour passed. Kimberly was starting to become irritated and twice had talked herself into just getting up and walking out, but had stayed rather than risk losing out on a potential job. She had never been paid all that much and hadn’t saved a dime. Her mother and father had been taken to a nursing home when it was established that Kimberly did not make enough money to care for them at home in their dotage, although it seemed she did make enough to pay the balance of the monthly fee for the nursing home that her parents social security benefits didn’t cover. She really needed to work and she was not about to leave until she had at least placed an application.

She was lost in this reverie when she recognized her name. “Miss Holly?” Kimberly looked in the direction the voice was coming from and saw a very tall and statuesque brunette woman of Indian descent with long jet black and arrow straight hair that cascaded past her shoulders down to the small of her back. “I’m Indira Singh”, the woman informed her. “Would you follow me, please?”

Kimberly rose and followed. They crossed the room to the back corner and a cubicle that housed a desk with a computer terminal and two chairs. There was a poster on the wall next to the desk with a picture of a windowsill and an open window on it. Through the faux window a faux sun shone on a row of yellow faux flowers in a faux flower box.

Indira Singh observed Kimberly admiring the poster and said in a friendly tone, “I thought the room could use a window. And it’s always nice outside this way”. Kimberly smiled back at her.

The woman sat down behind the desk. She took a sip of coffee from a ceramic mug that read “My Karma Ran Over My Dogma” and hit the space bar on her keyboard. The YinYang screen saver disappeared and was replaced by an open database file, the fields already filled in with Kimberly’s name, address and telephone numbers from her application. She perused this and the resume on her desk for several minutes, and then addressed Kimberly directly for the first time.

Kimberly looked up and into Indira Singh’s eyes and caught her breath. The woman’s eyes were absolutely the most beautiful shade of brown that Kimberly had ever seen. Her pupils seemed to dominate the entire surface of the eye, with only the merest suggestion of white at the corners. They were a deep, dark chestnut brown and when the light played off of them, even the sterile light of the fluorescent tubes buzzing overhead, shades of gold and amber exploded like Fourth of July sparklers and danced in a field of chocolate. Kimberly wondered abstractedly what colors she could discover if the poster on the wall could actually shine real sunlight into the cramped cubicle instead of the medicinal glare of the overhead lights.

She felt warmed by the experience, felt comforted by this woman whom she had never seen before in her life yet with whom she immediately felt a feeling of a deep friendship rekindled, as of a long lost relation remembered with fondness and trust.

The woman spoke perfect English, her singsong voice melodic in its Eastern dialect, with no loss of the ethnic quality of her heritage.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

Kimberly had never liked coffee, in fact hadn’t had coffee for years. It gave her indigestion.

“I’d love a cup, thank you”, she was surprised to hear herself say.

Excusing herself, the woman rose and walked to the back of the office where a table was set up with coffee and danish, took a Styrofoam cup from the top of a stack next to the coffee machine and filled it. She asked if Kimberly wanted sugar or creamer. When Kimberly ordered it black, she came back to the desk, handed the steaming cup to Kimberly and sat back down.

“I looked over your resume and I think I have the perfect place for you. It’s really quite lucky that would come here today, actually.”

This was not what Kimberly had expected at all. “Really?” she asked, mentally kicking herself for the surprise in her voice. It didn’t sound confident.

Indira smiled. “Really. Just this morning I had a request for a temp to hire for the nursing reception desk at the,” she paused and pulled a folder from underneath several others on her desk and recited “Carolina’s Health Care Behavioral Health Center on Billingsley Road. They need someone immediately, they said.” She refocused her formidable gaze on Kimberly. “Can you begin immediately?”

“Do you mean today?”

Again, Indira smiled and Kimberly could not resist smiling back. “No,” she said, “tomorrow morning at nine will be just fine. You have a white uniform, I hope?” Kimberly did. “Good. Now, about how you’ll be paid. The client will keep track of your hours, but you will need to fill out this form,” she handed Kimberly a triplicate form, “every week and have your supervisor sign it. Then you bring it here and drop it off every Friday. You can either come here to pick up you check on Tuesday or have it mailed to you.”

“Just mail it”, Kimberly replied.

“Fine.” She tapped a few keys on her keyboard then turned back to Kimberly. “Okay, if you have any questions about anything or if you have any problems just call and ask for me. And good luck. I think you’ll find this a great experience.”

Kimberly thought that was a little odd, but shrugged it off. Maybe she’s trying to motivate me.

“Thanks, I’m sure I will.”

Indira Singh extended her hand. As Kimberly took it, the other woman smiled her warm and inviting smile and for the rest of the day Kimberly Holly felt right with the world.

Chapter Five

Aaron Stiles was by all accounts a genius.

He had a perfect recollection of every event in his life, from what he had eaten for dinner the night before back to the very day of his birth; the pain, the bright lights, the cold hands and the sterile smell that every hospital must share he remembered as though it had happened an hour ago, instead of the thirty three years that had actually passed. Most people wish they had that kind of recall, some people even pretend they have it, claiming they “have a photographic memory”. These are the same people who invariably forget birthdays, anniversaries and office deadlines. Aaron forgot nothing.

In actuality, total recall was more of a curse than anything, or at least that’s how Aaron saw it. When you are the smartest kid, the smartest person of any age in the room, everyone always expects you to have an answer for everything and when you don’t, they scoff in the condescending way that envious people do. They believe that they have bested you, that they must show you that you really aren’t as smart as you think you are, and it doesn’t matter that they couldn’t answer the question themselves, because they aren’t the so-called genius.

So Aaron spent most of his youth having to prove himself over and over again; passing test after test, skipping grades, graduating high school at fourteen and beginning college level academics by sixteen. His parents had Aaron slated for a doctorate and pushed him towards it with a firm hand.

They weren’t over aggressive, never demanding anything Aaron wasn’t capable of giving, always supportive and encouraging but they made it clear what they expected and hoped for and Aaron was obliged to succeed out of his love for them. He graduated from College with a degree in mathematics at the age of twenty, finishing eight years of credits in four, and set out to unlock the secrets of the universe. His future was set. The Plan, as his mother had called it, had been set in motion and carried out and from there on everything else was supposed to be gravy. Except that hidden in Aaron’s remarkable brain was a genetic glitch, a hiccup in the synaptic pathways that lay dormant, like a lion lying in wait for the last straggler in a herd of gazelle to come within striking distance. In Aaron’s twenty-first year the lion leapt.

The first signs that there may be trouble appeared two weeks after Aaron began his first job as a mechanical engineer for Boeing. He was seated at his desk hunched over his laptop, calculating the stress the wings of a jumbo jet liner would encounter at x speed and y altitude, when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a shadow detach itself from a darkened corner and slide along the wall. He started and spun around in his chair, knocking his coffee mug over and spilling the steaming liquid onto his laptop, which immediately began to sputter and pop as two elements never meant to interact with each other waged war inside his ThinkPad. Jumping up, he looked at the corner and along the wall and saw-nothing. He experienced a slight twinge of sick fear when the realization came that he was alone in the office.

He turned his attention to his thoroughly soaked laptop, unplugging the power cord and trying in vain to sop up the coffee with a paper towel, succeeding only in distributing it over more of the ThinkPad’s keyboard. He turned the machine upside down over his trash can, and coffee poured out in a thin stream, splashing the Big Mac box and large Coke left over from lunch. Aaron groaned.

“Great. Just frikkin great”.

He stood on his toes and peered over the partition separating him from his nearest neighbor and found no one there. In fact, Aaron was completely alone in the entire office. He checked his watch and saw that it was nine o’clock; three hours after everyone else had gone home.

He had no idea if the machine could be saved, if all the calculations and equations he had stored on the hard drive would be recoverable. He envisioned hours and hours of work to re-calculate his data and wondered if the cost of a new laptop would have to come out of his next paycheck.  The company had provided the first one, but Aaron doubted that there was an “act of shadow person” clause in his contract.

“Shit!” he said to no one. Then, since he knew he was alone, he leaned back and shouted, “SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!”

Satisfied as his profane outburst echoed across the office, Aaron collapsed into his chair and held his face in hands.

I’m seeing ghosts now, he thought. Wonderful. What next, a rubber room? Straight jacket? Writing on the walls with my feet?

After a few minutes, he gathered up his soggy paperwork, packed up his flooded laptop and headed for the exit. He locked the office door behind him and started for the elevators, then decided to stop in the men’s room. He went in, peed, then went to the lavatory, dispensed a dollop of soap into his palm and began to wash his hands. Finishing, he straightened, grabbed a wad of brown paper towels from a stack on the lavatory and looked at himself in the mirror.

“God you look like crap”, he said and looked away to toss his used paper towel in the waste basket. From behind him a loud BANG exploded in the small lavatory and a little scream escaped from his throat. He jerked his head around toward the stalls.

He went over and kicked each stall door open. There was no one there. Behind him, on their own volition, both faucets in the long vanity opened up full stream, the hot water creating a cloud of steam that quickly fogged the rectangular mirror. He walked cautiously back to the mirror. What he saw stopped him short, his breath catching in his throat.

Scrawled in crooked letters across the dripping glass were the words “We see you”.

He squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, so tight that tears were forced from the corners, squeezed until his eyeballs ached and inside his mind reason and perception struggled for dominance;

-I did not see that, that was not there, I am working too hard and I’m stressed out about my laptop and that is simply NOT THERE because I am alone here in this bathroom and I know I didn’t write “we see you” on that mirror, so it is definitely NOT THERE-

He opened his eyes abruptly and focused his blurred vision on the mirror. Other than a few specks and streaks the mirror was empty. He stared at the pale, overworked scarecrow that stared back at him and drawing in a great calming breath, he turned and left the room.

At first, Aaron’s co-workers, family and friends were unaware of the dilemma brewing in his mind. They could not hear the voices; they did not see the ghosts. They were ignorant of the growing doubt and confusion that were gnawing away at his confidence like termites undermining the foundations of a house, but as his reason began to falter, so did his work and ability to relate. Within six months it had become obvious that something had gone terribly wrong.

His parents took him to see several doctors, searching for a prognosis that could explain why their son had become sullen and withdrawn, why he talked to himself and had conversations with empty air and why he was so afraid to leave his room. After a myriad of tests including CAT scans, MRI’s and two full body scans, they could find no anomalies, no abnormalities to explain Aaron’s symptoms so they did what doctors do when they can’t find answers; they guessed.

The diagnosis was schizophrenia. The doctors explained that the disease could be controlled but that Aaron would be on anti-psychotic medication for the rest of his life and they warned that if he ever stopped the treatment the symptoms would return, probably worse than before.

“Most people with this disorder lead perfectly normal lives,” the head of the psychiatric department told Betty Stiles, Aaron’s mother.

“Most people? What about the ones that don’t?”

The doctor regarded the top of his shoes for a moment before answering. “In the most severe cases, the medication only lessens the symptoms rather than stopping them altogether. These patients can become disassociative, depressed, combative and even violent. The suicide rate for schizophrenics is much higher for those patients who either do not respond to or refuse to take their meds than for those who do what they should and follow the program.”

Tears flowed down Betty Stiles’ cheeks. “How do I tell my son he’s crazy? How do I do that?”

“You tell him the truth. You tell him he has a disease, a disease that millions of people have, a disease that we can control.” He reached out and took Mrs. Stiles hands in his and looked into her eyes. “You tell him he’s going to be just fine.”

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