#62: Miracles and Madness

05/05

FTP: So we were homeless together for about a week. That was an adventure all it's own. You never really notice the presence of God so much as when you have no idea where your next meal will come from. It seemed like no matter how desperate the situation seemed, a miracle would pave the way.

There was a weird experience where we ended up somewhere downtown in Lake Worth, a few major roadways over from where Ben had lived in the original timeline. We did a lot of travelling around the area during that time we were on the streets; it was honestly kind of liberating. We stopped at this gas station we had never been to before and the lady behind the counter rings up my green tea, looks at me, and says “Haven’t seen you around in a while. How you been?”

This was some older woman in her fifties with glasses on her face and missing teeth acting like I was a familiar dirty traveller. Maybe she was just trying to be polite and thought I looked familiar? Doubt it. Something was up and I think even she sensed it as we left in a hush.

Remember my friend Richee? He hasn't really been relevant to the story but I mentioned him in entry #42; he really helped us out. He loaned me a backpack for my stuff and gave us $20 for food without us even asking. Also he got us McDonalds. Whatever the heck is going on it is good to have one person you can rely on. That seems to be his role in this story- to bail me out of a bind.

Things seemed bad at night. We had no place to go, but something happened to help us out then as well. We had spent the night before in McDonalds, sleeping in the back while the night shift employees covered for us. Not wanting to stick around in one place too long, we moved along toward the beach to have some pleasure amidst our plight. It seemed like we were going to be wandering all night by the time the moon reached the top of the sky. Cops, discomfort, and wildlife drove us from refuge after refuge. It was a quiet one in the morning trip to the corner store where I saw someone familiar.

“Frankie?”

He looked up when I said his name. By his slack jaw and glazed eyes I guessed he was high off his gourd. Typical.

“Do I know you?”

“Yeah, we, uh…” I stumbled on my words. Casey didn't exist so we never had met. He didn't really know me at all.

“What he's trying to say,” Ali explained, “is that you used to hang out with some old friends of ours. I don't know if you remember us. I'm Ali.” She extended a hand.

I don't know if it was the confidence with which she said it or the fact that Frankie, like us, had been trapped in this hall of mirrors for a while. Maybe past Frankie that actually DID remember me had allowed him to let his guard down.

Somehow, Ali talked him into letting us spend the night at his aunt Teresa's as long as we didn't mind sharing the couch with her dog, Gracie. He even smoked us out. All these acts of kindness, from the motel manager whose four kids shared their pizza with us to the homeless man who taught us all about squatting in abandoned buildings in Greenacres, all of it seemed to come only when I had given up or resigned hope. It was the opposite of the Outer Layer, where negativity bred darkness. In fact, light only shone where darkness lurked in this reality, it seemed.

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Darek's presence in the background haunted me. All too often I felt a warmth as an impulse swept over me, one that led me down a different path that ended up at safety. I would sense a presence with ill intent glaring at us and grab Ali’s hand, or straighten out my posture on a whim. These were not my whims. These were his, trying to keep me alive. It was as if he had walked these streets a million years, as if every inclination of his attitude and coldness were bred to help me survive. All of a sudden looking a little nuts was a good thing. Being weird and unapproachable kept the bad influences at bay.

So all those miracles may have lit the way through the week, but Darek's the spark that starts the fire. I feel like seeing Frankie was no coincidence. I feel like that was a scripted encounter by the game master. I feel like Darek's been guiding me toward something for the longest time and, recalling these moments during early April, I can't help but feel that this is a consequence of me and Ali sharing the same space. Darek's and Kendra were doing this together.

03/27

I made my way forward using the glow of the moon off the lake as a guide. That white mist I had seen rising off it in the last visit to the Outer Layer gave it away as soon as I moved a few yards toward the clearing. However, unlike all the other times I had found the lake, Anna was nowhere to be found.

“Hello?” I called out. The night was so clear and the mist was so radiant in it's moonlit glow I could not possibly ignore the beauty of the scene before me. It took my breath away how the reeds at the edge of the water seemed to bow in reverence to the ambiguous source of the churning mist. The mist itself was thinking and wispy, capturing the moon's glow as the moon captured the sun's rays, magnifying it's beauty but not obscuring the vastness of the lake itself. In the past I had visited the lake, both in person and in flashes of memory, and it had been a modest thing, more like a pond that had swelled up after a heavy rainfall. At worst I could manage to make out the far end of it with a little squinting. Now the lake I saw stretched miles in all directions; trees peeked out over the horizon but I could not see the other shoreline.

I moved clockwise along the shore, alternating between staring out through the white mist and calling out for Anna as my eyes traced the shoreline. My pleading and seeking were met with silence as the moon drifted through the sky and I drifted along the side of the surface of water.

“Do I need to go into the lake again, is that it?” I asked no one in particular.  I stared out across the surface once more, contemplative. The mist swirled toward the center. It seemed as though shifting shadows moved over the surface within the obfuscation. I squinted my eyes, trying to catch a clearer look at the phenomenon in the distance. Were those...wings?

As I made the connection between the shape in the mist and Gwen, a violent force rocked across the water and the fog in the center transformed from a cloud to a living vortex of force. Great gusts of wind dragged all the oxygen in the atmosphere towards the anomaly. I dug my feet into the grass and stood my ground. A figure, more solid, shrouded in shadow but certainly sporting wings, flew upward into the sky from out of the vortex. All the pressure released with this expulsion. The gusts I felt dragging me toward the center of the lake suddenly became an atmospheric expanding force away from the lake. I lost my footing and fell on my butt.

Still, I kept my eyes trained as best as I could on the girl tumbling through the air. She did not fall with majesty and grace as one might expect from a winged celestial, but her unceremonious tumble called to mind a plummeting meteorite. I raced toward where it seemed she was heading, never breaking my eyes from her.

Maybe I should have watched the ground because I tripped on an exposed root and smashed my face into the dirt. I actually chuckled to myself a bit, lying there and considering how absurd it was. After all those times in the past, my mind had literally tripped me up. There was nothing to do but shake it off. I kept moving. I'd lost sight of Gwen now but I suspected she wouldn't be too far from the shoreline.

“M...Mat…” A strained voice drifted from the trees as i raced past. I paused and spun around. Gwen staggered into view, one hand clutching her chest, another propping her up against the trunk of a tree. I could tell she had been thrashed by the landing, dirt and damage etching along her body telling a brutal story. The blood seeping from the wound covered by her hand was far more curious and concerning.

“Gwen.” I looked at her sternly. “What is going on?”

“We don't have time!” She snapped. “Listen, the sickness is spreading! You can't stop it; I can't stop it! Don't fight this anymore! Just end it! Kill yourself and you can stop the cycle!”

“That… that's crazy talk.” I managed, but her sudden intensity caught me off guard. Honestly, the thought had crossed my mind before that death might be preferable to this occasional nightmarishness.

“If you die,” she continued, almost as if she hadn't heard me, “then you can't be used as a vector for the illness anymore. Everyone you come into contact with is a part of the monsters web and by continuing to exist you allow it to catch more flies. Please, it's the only way to contain this illness. We tried everything else and we failed.”

I pointed. “What happened to your chest…?”

She glanced down momentarily, a hesitance of omission that spoke louder than her actual response. “I must have been stabbed by something on the way down. That doesn't matter now, does it? This whole reality is crumbling apart. We are living in a perpetually doomed timeline. Every reset has a half-life shorter than the cycle before it. I've seen your thoughts in the darkness! I know you know it's true!”

She seemed wildly desperate to have her voice heard. I focused instead on the visual clues that revealed her deception. Kendra's aura of clarity still hung around me.

“That blood isn't fresh. This happened before you were thrown from the lake.”

She looked at me, the dim distraction of her twisted words finally halted.

“How did you hurt yourself?” I repeated firmly, slowly.

“Lucinda impaled her.” Anna said from behind me. “After she caught her trying to sabotage one of the towers.”

I turned to see my gentle Figment friend battered and bloody. Her hair was a wild mess of tangles and matted clumps. Splotches and scratches decorated her face and her clothes looked like they had been badly tattered through elemental exposure.

“Anna, are you-?”

“I'll be okay.” She said. Her voice felt like it was coming from a far away place, as if the Anna I had known had been locked away somewhere and a stranger occupied her body...