B. Alexander Howerton (15 page)

Mary quickly, shyly glanced up at him, then back down.  “I
have duties.  I can’t abandon my patients….”

“You know the RAF can replace you tomorrow.  There’s another
girl, back in England, just like you, who wants to find adventure like you. 
You’ve found your adventure, and it’s with me.  Whaddaya say?”

“I… I don’t know.  This is all so sudden.  I’ll have to
think for a while.”

Just then there was a commotion down the hill, toward the
town.  A couple of the townsfolk were running up the hill toward the hospital. 
Aung See met them at the stairs.  Very rapid speech was exchanged, completely
indecipherable to Mary and Bill.

Finally, the excited visitors ran back down the hill, and
Aung See turned, concern distorting her face.

“What is it, Aung See?”

“Japanese attack Kunming, blow up a lot of Burma Road!  Very
many lives lost, many wounded!  We’ll be busy soon!”

Bill jumped up.  “I’ve got to go.  They’ll need supplies up
there, splints and bandages and fresh water.  And I can probably fly some of
the most severely wounded back here.”  He raced inside to get dressed and
gather his belongings.

“Wait, Bill,…” Mary called after him.

She waited for him by the screen door, and stopped him when
he came rushing out.  “Bill, you are not recovered enough yet to leave.  You
are still liable to extreme dizziness and fainting spells.  You are in no
condition to fly.”

Bill shot here a stern look.  “Tell that to the boys who are
now missing a leg, or got their guts blown out, and their only chance to
survive is if I get up there to them.”  He saw the look of panic on her face,
and caught himself short.  “Listen, Mary, we have to do everything we can to
help.  But when this is all over, then you and I will leave this stinking
hellhole forever.  Will you come with me?”

Mary smiled through her tears.  “Yes.  Yes I will.  Oh,
Bill!”  she threw herself into his arms.  He hugged her back.

“I love you, Mary.”

“I… love you, Bill.”

He pulled her arms from around him, gave her a quick kiss,
and said, “Wait here for me.  I’ll be back.  I promise.”

That was the last she ever saw of him.  The Japanese shot
him down over Yunnan-yi, just over the China-Burma border.  The wreckage report
said he must have died instantly, feeling little or no pain.  She cried for
hours in her room every night for weeks on end, rocking and hugging the strange
stone.  She asked it repeatedly, “Why, why, why?  Why did you take him from
me?  What have I done to deserve this?”  The stone, cold and impassive, gave no
answer.

“Julia? Is that you?” Alan could hardly believe his eyes. 
He had not seen her in almost a year.  He had tried to call her several times,
always leaving messages, in the month after The Procedure, but she did not
return any of them.  He had rung her doorbell once, but then lost his nerve and
escaped before he even knew if she had responded over the intercom. 

Now he was trying to enjoy the Festival of the Arts that was
held every year during the first weekend of June in downtown Grand Rapids.  He
was there with his buddy Steve, who had gone to get them gyros from a food
booth at the other end of the festival.  Alan was saving some grandstand seat
for them to see one of their favorite bands, Troll for Trout, at the Calder
Stage. 

He had been glancing around, observing the crowd, when he
spied Julia and Carol in line to get cups of cappuccino.  Swallowing hard, he
had worked up the nerve to go speak to her.  ‘Screw the seats,’ he thought,  ‘I
probably won’t get a chance like this again in a million years.’

He approached her and called to her.  She turned and
recognized him instantly.  A million emotions traveled across her face in the
nanosecond before she answered, “Alan! How are you?”

He stepped awkwardly forward, intending to give her a hug,
them backed up.  She inclined toward him, and he approached again.  They hugged
briefly, barely putting their arms around one another.  Carol watched them with
a blank expression.

“So,” Alan tried to sound casual, “How’ve you been?”

“Good, good,” Julia nodded.  “You?”

“Well, you know, good as can be expected.”  He thrust his
hands nervously into the pockets of his shorts.

They both looked around at the crowd, trying to avoid eye
contact.  “So,” Alan asked, “You two having fun down here?”

“Oh yeah.  We’re going to check out Troll For Trout later.”

“You too?  Me too!”  Alan mentally kicked himself for
sounding like such a dork.  Then a flood of memories washed over him unbidden. 
Troll For Trout had been one of their mutual favorite bands.  He remembered
their first date, dancing and drinking to their music with their friends down
at The BOB, and all the other times they had seen them together.  He suddenly
could not take it anymore.

He leaned forward and gently took hold of Julia’s upper
arm.  He leaned close and whispered, “I would really like to talk with you. 
Alone.  Just for a second.”  He stared deeply and sincerely into her eyes.

Julia was taken aback.  She looked at him, then over at
Carol.  She remained impassive, her arms crossed.  The cappuccino line had
moved beyond them, and they had lost their place.

She looked back at Alan.  His face was so sincere, it was
almost painful to look at.  “OK,” she said, “just for a moment.”

With a smile, Alan led her a short distance away.  In the
plaza of downtown Grand Rapids there were intermittent plots of cultivated
greenery, with grass growing all around and short shade trees rising in their
midst.  Alan led Julia under one of these trees and sat down.  Not knowing what
else to do, Julia sat down across from him, but not too close, and looked at
him.  Alan was looking around at the crowd.  Finally, he turned back and
settled on Julia’s face.  He took a deep breath and said, “I still love you
very much.”

A single tear escaped from the corner of Julia’s eye.  “I
love you, too.  The time we shared together will always be special to me.”

“That sounds pretty final.”

Julia looked down at her nails.  “It has to be, Alan.  I
can’t handle it any other way.”

Alan looked away, struggling to maintain his composure.  He
sucked in and bit his lower lip, to keep it from trembling.

Julia looked back up at him.  “Look, Alan, I love you,
deeply.  Nothing can change that.  But we’ve been damaged, you and me.  It can
never be right again, never be whole again.  At least not for me.  At least not
in this lifetime.  I don’t have the strength to face another crisis.  The last
one almost wiped me out.  I’m still in therapy, and probably will be for the
rest of my life.”

Alan whipped around, unable to control his tears.  “So
that’s it?  You’re just going to give up on life?  You’re just going to throw
away love?  No one will care for you like I do.  You know that.”

“Yes, I know that, Alan.”  She was crying now, too.  “But
it’s all just too much.  I can’t take it.  I wasn’t built for this kind of
grief.  Maybe you’re strong enough, but I’m not.”

Alan’s hands shot out and grabbed hers.  “Let me be strong
enough for both of us.  You can lean on me.  I’ll take all your pain and throw
it into the wind, and it will blow away.”

Julia pulled her hands back and wiped her eyes with one of
them.  “That’s a wonderful fairytale, Alan, but it’s not real.  Our dead baby
is real.”

Alan sat up straighter.  “That hurts.”

Julia said sternly, “Don’t you think I know that?  I’ve been
trying to deal with the pain for almost a year now.  Sometimes it hurts worse
than the first day.  Sometimes I miss you so much, but I know if I get back
together with you, eventually I’ll have a bad day, and I’ll blow up at you, and
we’ll be right back here again.  I’ll never get over it.  Can’t you see that it
just can’t work?”   She looked at him pleadingly.

After a short silence, Alan set his jaw.  “So that’s it
then.  You really don’t want to give it another try?”  Julia shook her head
vigorously but briefly.  The tears began to well up again in her eyes.  She
fumbled in her purse for a tissue.

Alan tipped his head back, dropped his jaw, and sighed as if
part of his soul was fleeing him.  He looked slowly back down at Julia.  “Then
I guess there’s nothing left to say.”

She wiped her eyes with the tissue, returned his gaze,
shrugged her shoulders, and said, “I guess not.”

He stood up and offered her his hand.  She took it and
pulled herself up. He did not let her go, but pulled her into a close embrace. 
Surprising herself, she responded.  They held each other close and tight, for
what seemed an eternity, because each knew it was for the last time.

Finally, not releasing the intensity of his hug, Alan said
softly, “Goodbye, Julia.  I’ll love you forever.”

“Goodbye, Alan.  I’ll love you forever, too.”

The sudden shaking of Alan’s back informed Julia that he was
sobbing silently but uncontrollably.  Neither could she hold back her tears.

Finally, it was Alan who slowly disengaged the embrace.  He
held her at arm’s length, and chuckled through his tears once.  “See you
around?”

“Maybe.”  Her face told him, ‘probably not.’

Alan pursed his lips together in determination and nodded
abruptly once.  “OK then.  Bye.”

“Bye.”  Alan somehow tore himself away and tried to walk
with composure over to where he expected to meet Steve.  Julia returned to
Carol.  They both separately pretended to enjoy the rest of the festival.

BrightRedLight zipped swiftly amongst the dense vegetation,
darting this way and that, frolicking in the glow of a pleasant, permanent afternoon. 
It was always afternoon in this part of the world, for the Earth had long since
been slowed in its rotation to gravitational lock with the sun.  Now the same
face always presented itself to the burning orb, which was now much redder and
bigger than it had been a mere couple of billion years ago.  The plant life,
which would be completely unrecognizable to humans, had adapted and evolved
into bizarre configurations to accommodate its new environment.  The other side
of the Earth now eternally faced the inky blackness of space.  There were far
fewer stars than there used to be, and the sky looked rather lonely.  But
BrightRedLight did not know that, because he never went to that side of the
Earth.  He (a beam of pure energy has no gender, but ‘he’ thought of himself as
a ‘he’) had an instinctive aversion to it.  It held a dread, as if he knew that
if he voyaged there, he would feel sharp sensations that once upon a time would
have been known as ‘pain’ and ‘sorrow’.

DarkBlueLight, on the other hand, was ‘terrified’ of
approaching anywhere near where there might be sunlight.  ‘She’ preferred the
dark, cold recesses of the perpetual night.  It comforted her in a way she
could not explain, even if there were any being to whom she could explain it. 
She had no capacity for specific memories, but she had known the sensation of
anguish and longing stretching back through the ages, and it was somehow
associated with the bright side of Earth.  She could not bring herself to
venture there.

BrightRedLight spent the unumbered days playfully scooting
around the landscape, enjoying the mere fact of existence.  He had no emotions,
no memories, but he ‘knew’ certain things.  He knew he was alone, and that was
not the natural order of things.  He knew there had been others like him, who
had been alone, but now they were not, and they were no longer here.  They had
gone somewhere else, where they belonged.  BrightRedLight knew he belonged,
too, but there was some unknown task he was required to perform before he would
be complete and could go to the Belonging Place.  He instinctively sensed that
it was ‘up.’  Several times over the eons he had attempted to go ‘up,’ but had
failed every time.  He had no idea what science was, but if he did, he might
have learned that the frequency of his lightbeam was such that the ionosphere
reflected it back to Earth every time he tried to escape.  He had to change his
frequency to one that could penetrate the atmospheric barrier, but he was
completely ignorant of the required method.

If DarkBlueLight could have observed BrightRedLight, she
would have noticed that she moved at a much more measured pace.  She often
stopped to examine things more closely.  She was known to spend upwards of
three centuries inspecting a starflower, subsisting on the meager light of some
distant sun, or pondering a frozen rivulet of water clinging to a
mountainside.  She was in no hurry. She ‘knew’ that when the proper time
arrived for her to learn how to belong, that she would instinctively know what
to do.  Until then, she waited with the ageless patience of the stars
themselves.

BrightRedLight, on the other hand, never spent more than a
nanosecond in the same spot.  He felt it imperative to explore every micron of
his domain.  Curiously, however, he had never been attracted to the extreme
north.  He did not know that the magnetic alignment of the Earth was such that
he was naturally inclined to guide himself away from that region.  Nor did he
know that that was about to change.

Suddenly, after millennia of dormancy, the sun awoke.  A
great shudder ripped through the bowels of the gaseous orb, sending magnetic
ripples and highly charged particles scattering at tremendous speeds in every
direction.  Eight minutes later (but what is time, anyway, to beings with no
timepieces?), the charged particles tore into the fragile, expectant Earth,
changing the nature of its electromagnetic composition.  A magnetic storm
ravaged the tiny globe.

At the north axial pole stood a complex, ancient edifice. 
It appeared to be a chaotic jumble of indefinable substance, yet there was a
subtle symmetry not readily apparent upon casual observation (and who was there
to observe?).  At the very heart of the structure rested a dais, and on that
dais reposed a stone.  The stone had no definable color, yet seemed to emit the
entire spectrum, from sluggish radio waves through the highly exited gamma
rays, and beyond in each direction.  The stone had been emitting at a
relatively steady, calm rate, but the storm from the sun that slammed into it caused
it to refocus and release more energy than it had since before the continents
held their present shape.  This sent waves of energy far into the atmosphere,
and beyond, following the lines of magnetic force.  This in turn caused a
display of what would have been called, if there had been any humans present to
witness it, the most awesome, terrifying, and spectacular aurora the Earth had
ever produced.

The display did not go unnoticed.  Both BrightRedLight and
DarkBlueLight, in their respective hemispheres, sensed a change in the
elemental composition of the planet and atmosphere.  They were now somehow
strangely drawn to the source of that disturbance, which happened to be the
edifice at the top of the world, a region that neither had explored before.  They
heeded the call, and zipped at lightspeed toward the magnetic beacon.  As they
approached from their respective sides, they sensed a more subtle, yet somehow
more fascinating change in the energy density; they discovered each other. 
They halted their advances, not in fear (for they did not possess what humans
would recognize as emotions), but immobilized by a completely new set of
stimuli, of which they had no categories of comprehension to be able to
assimilate.  They advanced slowly toward each other (at a tenth the speed of
light), fascinated by the new experiences that the presence of one caused upon
the other.  They met and halted at the exact point of terminus, where permanent
night and day intersected.  The intricate interplay of energy was intense,
amplified by the power of the magnetic storm.

Without warning, they instinctively abandoned themselves to
an intricate interplay and interweaving of energies, which could only be
described as a ‘dance.’  They shot straight up together, to the crackling
ionosphere which they could not penetrate, then slowly drifted back down, gracefully
intertwining their strands of light, creating new colors, energies, and
sensations that the Earth had not felt since the trilobites were young.  They
weaved back and forth, becoming so intermingled that they were each barely
distinguishable.  Yet they were still separate, and felt an ancient yearning
that is as old as time, yet as fresh as each new being that encounters it.

The storm flashed, and each knew what was required for final
union.  They shot away from each other, into their respective zones, as far as
the equator.  They then summoned as much energy as each had at its disposal,
and hurled themselves with all their being at the stone in the middle of the
complex structure.  They entered the stone at the exact same instant, and were
caught in a veritable maelstrom of energy.  They whirled about inside the stone
for several nanoseconds, but to beings who had no perception of time, it might
as well have been an eternity.  Then, without warning, a renewed, fused beam of
pure power emanated from the stone and shot straight out from the north pole of
the Earth, crashing through the ionosphere as if it were non-existent, casting
rays of the entire spectrum in every conceivable direction.  The new being,
possessing still the unique consciousnesses and qualities of the two former
entities, yet now unified and combined, sharing every facet of their mutual
existence, soared upward and outward, deep into space.  Their journey had begun. 
They were one.  They knew where the Belonging Place was.  They were going home.