(Ibrihim)
My blood was boiling with impatience as I pulled into the motel. I
wanted to keep driving, but it was already after two in the morning, and it was
a struggle to stay awake. I wouldn’t get to the True Source any faster dying
on a dark country road. The thought of how close I was drove me, though.
I had found the same story with unknown origins in at least one person
in all the recent towns. As I got closer, it was more and more likely for people
to know the story. In the last town, almost everyone knew it. I was so close. Relief flooded me when the road came over a
gentle rise and a town opened up in front of me. No, not a town: it was big enough
to be a city.
I pulled into the first motel I saw, calculating how little sleep with
which I could get away even as I came to a stop in the gravel parking lot.
Above the office, a red neon sign spelled out the name Trail of Tears Motel
under the iconic image of a native American sitting on his horse with his head
bowed. “That is not a good sign,” I muttered
to myself, and I was so tired I was not even sure if I was talking about omens
or critiquing the quality of advertising signage.
Behind the desk was a young woman in a black t-shirt and pink hair who
looked as tired as I was. Something tickled the back of my brain when I walked
into the office, and I focused on the sensation. As the instinct resolved
itself, I took a moment to look around the room. My eyes immediately fell on a
man sitting on one of the lobby chairs, watching me. Except that something about
him said, “I am not a man.”
It was his face. His eyes. There was no emotion there, none of the
little subtle messages that people are always sending each other. I wondered
whether he was showing me this willingly, or if he had just never learned how
to put on the masks like I did. Either
way, I felt comforted by his calm presence, and I let myself openly look him
over.
His face was nothing much to look at, neither pretty nor ugly: forgettable.
But he had a beautiful head of golden curls and eyes such a light brown they
made me think of sunlight on wheat. He wore a perfectly tailored cream suit and
expensive brown marbled leather loafers, and he wore them well. I saw him
appraising me just as openly and made an instant decision: I threw on my confident-seductive
guy mask and sauntered over to sit in the chair next to him.
“Hey there,” I said casually, “I’m Ibrahim.”
He looked flatly at me for a second before responding, “I am Phineas
Gold.”
I couldn’t quite place his accent. An American might think it was English,
but I was born in London. It was something else, but more than that, it was too
melodious to be human. I let my thoughts focus for a moment while keeping the
distraction off my face. My mind conjured the voice in my memory for a second
before I realized what was strange. It had too many subharmonics. I tucked the
thought away for later and focused back on the confident mask.
“So what’s a cutie like you doing waiting around a motel lobby? Elicit rendezvous?”
“I was waiting for you, Ibrahim Alexander Youssef. You already knew
that.” He said it in a perfectly measured tone, no emotional inflection at all.
He did not wait for me to respond before continuing, “I am here to ask you to
stop seeking the True Source.”
I had not been prepared for his words. I almost completely froze up
before I realized I was having a stress reaction. My blood felt cold; my skin
prickled; my mind raced. I had to close my eyes for a moment to take back
control of my mind, dissociate my reason, and lock away the amygdala stress
response. It had been years since I needed to exert that much control. I opened
my eyes, and he was watching me.
“I see,” he stated mildly, “you are clearly not one who will be dissuaded. Please take care Mr. Youssef.”
“Wait,” I blurted out as he began to rise, “you never even made your
argument. Look, I am getting a room here at this establishment. Why not come
back to my room and,” I let the corner of my mouth quirk into a sly smile while
I took a breath, “convince me.”
Emotion touched his face for the first time, a genuine smile. He pulled
a business card out of his suit, leaned forward, and pressed into my hand,
letting it linger there a moment before saying, “perhaps another time.” The touch of his hand set off alarms in my
brain. His hand was warm and soft, but somehow it was not human. I did not want
to let him go, but the moment passed, and he was standing up.
I looked at the business card. It was a thick cream white with the name
Phineas Gold embossed in gold leaf on one side and a phone number on the other.
I started to ask where an 161 area code came from, but he had already walked
out the door.
I sighed and made my way up to the counter. The pink-haired woman was
smirking at me. “It’s OK buddy. We all strike out sometimes.”
I gave her a genuine smile. “I’m not so sure I did strike out. Hey . .
. umm . . . Is it too late to extend my booking? Say a week? I have a feeling I
want to stay around here.”
She gave me a just-between-us-girls smile and a wink and began typing
something on her computer. My mind wandered. I thought back to the feel of Gold’s
hand. It was warm and comforting and lovely, and yet it made some part of the
back of my mind panic. Why? I focused all my attention on the sensation and the
question of why it was there. It only took a moment to recognize the mixed sensory
inputs, and the solution popped in my mind. “Crabgrass syndrome,” I murmured out
loud.
“What was that?” The woman behind the counter was giving me a strange
look. She was holding out a key card and looked like she had been saying
something to me.
“Sorry,” I blurted sheepishly, “It’s late, and I’m tired. My mind
started wandering. What were you saying?”
She smiled again. “I said, Welcome to Black Oak, Oklahoma.”
---
(Mellisa)
I took one more look through the telescope. I knew I wouldn’t see
anything new, but I was bored. I saw the same city street, a curb outside of an
office building. There were few people on the sidewalk, and a slight breeze was
blowing the dogwood pollen into little yellow tornadoes. I was tempted to
fiddle with the angle of my rifle to account for the breeze, but its direction
and speed had not changed since I had adjusted it five minutes ago. I closed my
eyes.
A memory came to me. My father was having one of his bad days, but I
was still too young to understand what that meant. He had spent most of the day
in bed, then suddenly got up and started playing a tune on the piano. He seemed
to be trying to work out some song he had heard before through trial and error.
When he would hit the right melodic line or harmony, he’d stop and write it
down on the blank music paper he always kept around.
I knew something wasn’t right when he was still at it the next morning.
He clearly hadn’t slept, and I didn’t think had eaten anything all the day
before. I had to make myself cereal and milk for breakfast because I was far too
little to use the stove yet. The milk had started to turn sour.
Then my father came into the kitchen in a beaming mood. He made pancakes
from scratch and then carried me into the living room, sitting me down on the
piano bench right next to him. “I’ve been trying to remember this song for
days, and it finally came to me. I want you to hear it. It’s so beautiful.”
I could hear the sadness from the first few chords. I now know that’s
just called a minor key. Then my father started singing. He had the greatest voice
of anyone I had ever known: deep and smooth and warm, and the London accent he
had retained from his youth just made his songs sound cooler somehow. Then
after the first few lines, he closed his eyes and lost himself in the music. I’ve
never seen anyone else do that, not like Daddy. When he did it, he just . . .
went away. It was just his soul coming out in that perfect voice.
It was the first time I had ever heard anyone sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
I never could have believed a human voice could hold that much sadness, and I
was just too young to process it. I think he just accidentally revealed too
much. He didn’t mean it. He never did. He just didn’t understand how to turn
down his intensity for a child. It shattered all my childish illusions, and I learned
all at once at that moment what death meant . . . and Daddy was dying.
“I wanted you to hear something,” my father whispered, “that could
actually communicate how much I loved your mother. That was the love from which
you were born.”
Tears ran down my face. I opened my eyes and saw water spots on the butt
of my rifle. “Shit,” I spat to myself
while shaking the tears from my face, “what the fuck is wrong with me lately?”
I took a few quick breaths and checked my senses. The time was almost here. I
settled myself into place at my rifle and closed my eyes. 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . .
.
I was already packing the rifle up before the bullet was a quarter of
the way to its destination. Five miles away a woman in a business suit walked
out of the building and stepped up to the curb to hail a taxi. She looked up
for an instant from her phone. I couldn’t
help myself; I looked in the telescope. I knew what I would see, but I still
wanted confirmation anyway. Sure enough, the headless body of a woman lay on a sidewalk.
I was already down the fire escape before anyone realized something had
happened. I had already shaken out my skirt into an ankle length gown, let my hair
down, and was casually pulling my wheeled cello case down the street before
anyone got over the shock enough to call the police.
I was almost to my hotel, having only heard the faintest hint of sirens
in the distance, and breathing easier when my phone went off. I froze. I carefully
pulled earpiece out of my purse and put it in my ear.
“This is Mel.”
“Great job, Mel” the gruff masculine voice on the other end replied. He
sounded genuinely proud.
“What the fuck, Jacob? How do you know I finished already? For that
matter, how the fuck do you even know where I am?”
“Easy there, Mel. We had to send Observers out to find all the
remaining agents. We need you. There is a crisis.”
“Shit” I spat. “I didn’t know The Program even still had Observers.” I
sighed. I needed to focus on what’s important, not get paranoid now. “What’s
the crisis.”
“The psychics over in the Stargate division have all started having spontaneous
visions. They aren’t very clear or useful. . .” I huffed. When were they
useful? Those guys could be super-powerful psychics, trained, drugged, and
sensory-deprived to the extremes until they see all of space and time, just
never anything that is actually useful when you need it. He continued as if I
hadn’t interrupted him, “BUT there is a common theme in all the visions. Natural
disasters, mass killings, airline accidents, and so on.”
“Shit. Do we have another Mothman nexus?”
“That’s what we think. All the visions occur in the same place, and
that’s where we are sending all remaining agents.”
“All remaining agents,” I echoed. After a beat, I worked up the courage
to ask, “how many of us are left?”
Jacob seemed to take forever to answer, like he was deciding whether to
lie. Eventually, his gruff voice defeatedly mumbled, “three. Including you.”
Fuck.
I slowed my breathing and calmed myself before asking, “All right then.
Where am I headed to?”
“Black Oak Oklahoma”
---
(Ibrihim)
Sleep was impossible. My mind raced in excitement. I was feeling the
euphoria that comes when my mind has a good puzzle to try to solve. Phineas Gold
offered an extremely tantalizing puzzle and the added endorphins of a new crush
on top of that. As my thoughts returned to him over and over, it was almost enough
to push the excitement and frustration of being so close to the True Source out
of my mind. Almost.
In a desperate attempt to sleep, I focused on my training and
deliberately relaxed my body, one muscle at a time. It took 15 minutes, and my
body was so relaxed that it had entered a state of sleep paralysis. My mind was
more alert than ever. On a whim, I tried an old yoga trick and sat up suddenly.
I was instantly standing on the other side of the room, looking down on my body.
Astral projection was not completely novel to me, but I rarely used it.
I started to think about what I could do to amuse my mind until it fell
asleep, but my thoughts returned to Gold. I stopped myself when I realized I
was squandering an Astral projection pacing back and forth in front of my own body.
The absurdity broke my concentration, and with the familiar BZZZZ POP sound, I
was back in my relaxed, but entirely awake, body.
“Fuck it,” I said to myself and dialed the bloody number.
---
“I am surprised you called,” Gold was saying a few hours later.
“Hhhmmm?” I replied absentmindedly. I had never seen skin so pale. I
had also never seen any human being with skin so perfect and unblemished, not
even stymied by such a lowly human imperfection as body hair. My fingertips running
lightly over his chest sent amazing sensations up my arm, while that same
little panic at the back of my mind flooded my blood with adrenaline, intensifying
every sensation. It was very distracting. “Why would you be surprised?” I asked
after a moment.
“Most people find my presence . . . uncomfortable. It affects you too,
but for some reason you do not care.”
I shrugged. “I simply have an uncommonly high capacity for
metacognition. It is easier for me to understand my own irrational impulses,
biases, and evolutionary fears. Once I understand an impulse, I can choose how
I want to respond to it. Knowledge is power. I understand why you make people
uncomfortable, so it does not bother me.”
I realized he was staring at my face, and it dawned on me that I had
not been wearing a mask at all. I had shown my true self. And he was not
looking at me like I was strange; he was not judging me as being too cold, and
intellectual, and intense. He was just seeing me.
“So what is it?” he asked eventually.
“What?”
“The reason I make people uncomfortable?”
“Oh,” I stuttered, trying to bring my mind back. I took a moment to
organize my thoughts, deciding how to begin. “Do you know what Crabgrass
syndrome is?”
“The hangover you get from trying too hard to get high on really shitty
weed?” I laughed despite myself. “I have
a passing familiarity with it, but for the sake of letting me listen to your
lovely accent, please explain it to me.”
“Well, it is something that sometimes occurs in people who have a
traumatic brain injury that causes lesions at the inferior occipital-parietal
juncture.” I kept waiting for that look people give me, but it never came, so I
continued. “Anyway, the lesions cut special connections between the vision
center and emotional centers of the brain.
Otherwise, people with this syndrome can see fine. And they can function fine in almost all
situations. But when they see someone they love, their brain cannot find the emotional
connection between the image and the idea of the person, and it just freaks
out.”
“So your brain is expecting some emotional connection from me you
cannot find?”
“Exactly. I never even knew it was there until I met you and sensed its
absence. Somehow, there is something that tells my brain that someone is human.
And, well, it is missing in you because you are not human.”
He did not react at all. After a moment he asked me in that same mild, unjudgmental
voice, “For most people, knowing I am not human would be another reason to
avoid me. Why does it not bother you?”
I trailed my fingers down his thigh while I tried to think of the right
words. He just watched me think. Finally I started hesitantly, still trying to
get the words right as I said them, “because. . . because the world is beautiful.
It is . . . shit. Let me start again.” I
sat up in the bed next to him, keeping my hands to myself.
“There is this idea that gets used a lot in fiction: existential
horror. It works by just pitting protagonists against a vast, uncaring
universe. It is the idea that we really do not matter. It is the idea that
there are no gods to save us: that we are truly alone in a sea of randomness,
and none of it matters. I guess for most people, this is about the most
frightening thing they can imagine. Not me. For me, I am OK with the universe
being random. What scares me is that the universe is fundamentally . . . ugly,
boring, jejune, uninteresting.
I need there to be beauty in there, or what is the point? And so I seek it out. All the beauty in the
world, all the beauty in the chaos and complexity. It is a perspective that extends
to how I love. I want it all. Deep down I just want to love everyone, and the
more a person reflects how amazing and diverse and beautiful the world is, the
better. So, what others might think of as strange or scary,” I said as I traced
my fingertips down his chest again, feeling that same bizarre tingle, “I just think
of as . . . novel.”
“You’re right,” he said as he propped himself up on his elbow, “about
the universe. Both your fear and your hope. It is mostly random, and that
randomness produces a lot of noise. Most of it is boring and ugly. But that
same randomness also occasionally produces such amazing beauty.” He reached up
and touched my chin, “And you are truly a beautiful creation of this universe.”
His hand grabbed the hair at the back of my head and pulled me down into a
kiss.
---
(Mellisa)
I was ready to sleep the sleep of the dead for a good 12 hours when I
pulled into the motel in the early hours of the morning. Black Oak was bigger
than I was expecting, considering I had never heard of it before, and finding a
motel was pleasantly easy. I stumbled out of my car and looked up. My brain
felt like it exploded.
Walking out of the motel office was a man who was clearly not a man.
His presence felt like a wind tunnel, like a blast furnace, like the surface of
the sun. When I tried to look at him, I could only make out a silhouette in the
middle of a light like a thousand arc welders. I had never even heard of an
aura like this. It was like he was a walking ley line. At some point, I must
have stumbled to my hands and knees. Then he was standing there next to me. A
touch on my shoulder, and my psychic senses suddenly felt like a wet blanket
had been thrown on them. Even so, it was like being next to an oven with him
this close.
“Are you. . .” I croaked, “are you the Mothman?”
His laugh was genuine, and it crashed over me like a tsunami. I got the
distinct impression of hearing bells. No. I was feeling bells, golden bells, like
holding a tuning fork except somehow my mind knew it was specifically bells
made of gold. And I was feeling them ringing inside every single cell in my
body at once. Then he was just gone.
I stumbled to my feet in time to see a man who looked strangely
familiar walk out of the office and towards one of the rooms. Instincts were
shouting out me, but I was too dazed to make any sense of them. As I stomped towards the office, I muttered
bitterly to myself, “Welcome to fucking Black Oak, Oklahoma.”
---
(Ibrihim)
I still could not sleep, but I was content laying in Gold’s arms in the
dark. The fear response was almost completely gone, and I found myself thinking
about those people who frolic with lions. In the dark, I heard him barely whisper,
“I see where she gets it from.”
I was not sure if he was asleep or not, so I answered in the same quite
whisper, “who?”
“Your daughter.”
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