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The pain of never holding my son again left
a gaping emptiness of longing, I was lost. As Nate, I relived the betrayal of
my mother from that time and knew Helna’s complete rage as she suffered away in
a crowded dungeon. The anger flowed through the modern me. Helna needed revenge,
and I wanted to give it to her. I had to destroy the person who caused the
agony. It was a consuming narcotic; I was ready to kill her.

What I saw next would take a year to retell
in enough detail so that one could begin to understand the layers of emotions
and drama that led to the third betrayal. I lived it all that night, suffering
as if it had happened to Nate today in Ashland, Oregon, rather than to Erich in
the Harz Mountain region in Germany during the peak of Nazi power. Prior to the
war, I had lived in Halberstadt and fell in love with Rachel, a beautiful
Jewish girl. Neither family approved, but we stole moments and were planning to
marry. The rise of the Nazis changed all that, and, within the turmoil of the
SS rounding up our friends, we managed to escape to the mountains with twelve
of her relatives, including her eight-year-old brother and ten-year-old sister.

My late grandfather had once had a small
cabin deep in the forest high above the Bode Gorge in the Harz Mountains. I’d
only been there once as a young boy but had his handwritten map and after more
than a week in the wilderness found it. He had spoken of a woman, Marlene, who
lived in the village, eight miles from his cabin, and my mother said she could
be trusted. She turned out to be our lifeline, selling us several chickens and
a goat, and occasionally sending her fifteen-year-old daughter with flour and
grains. That, along with hunting and gathering in the forest, kept us alive. A
small stream, two miles away, supplied water. The treks were long and we
couldn’t do it in the winter, but then there was plenty of snow to melt. We
were able to build a second room onto the cabin so it wasn’t quite so crowded.

We lived that way for seventeen months
before the SS discovered us, led by Marlene’s daughter, who I now know as
Amparo. I never found out why she betrayed us. Everything quickly disintegrated
into horrors. Rachel’s father was beaten to death, and I had to watch Rachel
and her sister raped before we left the woods. Three days without food ended at
Dachau. It would take more than two years for all of us to slowly die as part
of one of the worst nightmares in human history.

It wasn’t like watching a movie of these
lifetimes. I actually relived them in full 3D suffering. It would be impossible
for me as Nate to ever get the sadistic guards from the death camp out of my
mind. The things I witnessed in the Italian medieval prison would have been
enough to steal the beauty from my life. But then Amparo sent me to Dachau, and
I would never again, in any lifetime, be able to enjoy a peaceful existence
without being haunted by those images.

Amparo would have to die. How could anyone
cause such misery? And she certainly couldn’t be trusted. She had probably
already contacted Lightyear. They could be waiting outside, or maybe they’d
just come in and shoot me. But didn’t she like me to have long tortuous deaths?
A simple bullet wouldn’t do--better to dream up a nice slow painful way to go.
Surely the folks at Lightyear could handle that.

I did not want to open my eyes because if I
did I may have never stopped crying, and I needed to decide the best way to
murder the old lady next to me. Her hand was still in mine and my disgust made
me want to squeeze so tight her bones would snap.

“Please look at me.” It was the voice of
the peasant sailor who’d gotten me tossed into the Mediterranean.

My eyes flew open, and I ripped my hand
away. It wasn’t until I jumped to my feet, ready to defend myself and ready to
fight, that I saw him on his knees before me. He caught my eyes in his, and I
experienced his life. It had all been lived in fear. Everyone he ever loved--his
parents, siblings, a woman, children, and friends--had been murdered by
invading Romans, all, except Ignacio. Amparo mentioned him in our first meeting
at the Laundromat, the one also affected by our karmic crisis. He had been the
other guy on the boat who corroborated Amparo’s story and was his only
remaining friend. Ignacio was about to take responsibility before Amparo
thought to blame me.

He looked at me so full of regret and agony
that I knew his soul had carried the heavy burden for two millennia. It wasn’t
a decision made by Nathan Ryder but rather by my soul.

“I forgive you,” I told him. Instantly, a
release occurred making me lighter and freer. So great was the high that when I
next heard the voice of Helna’s mother, I welcomed her.

The peasant morphed into her as I watched.
Remaining on her knees she looked up into my face so lovingly that I must have
appeared not as Nate but as Helna. Her life before I was born played between
our gaze, and again I witnessed our experience together as mother and daughter.
This time I was seeing all the sacrifices and missing parts from her point of
view. Next came her time in prison, not much different from my own, but she
lacked youth and rage to carry her through. In the end, there was no excuse for
turning me over to the Church; they had just worn her down. The act of
surrendering your child to end your own pain is not natural, and it had
distorted every life she had lived since.

“You are forgiven,” I whispered. The surge
of joy in me was immediate, powerful, and transformative--my thoughts were
clearer and my whole being calmer.

Then she became Marlene’s daughter, who was
sixteen by the time she brought the SS to exterminate us. When she found my
eyes, her face displayed pure terror. She had no idea what she had done until it
was too late. It would take many more years before she learned the whole truth
of what consequences had resulted from her actions. She was merely trying to
impress a young German soldier she had a crush on stationed near her village.
She thought we would be sent home to work in some kind of internment camp until
the war was over. Her mother was the first to explain what she had really done,
but it would take eight more years before the full repercussions became known.
Consumed by unbearable guilt, she had taken her own life at twenty-four.

Even then, forgiving her would have been
out of the question without the first two forgivenesses. I looked at her for a
long time, trying to see past the atrocities of Dachau, and although those
ghosts would never release their grip on me, I fought through my conflicts.
Taking her hands, I raised her up never losing eye contact until tears flowed.

“I forgive you,” I said, hugging her tight.
Instantly ecstatic euphoria overtook me, and we both started laughing. Then she
was Amparo again.

“Thank you,” she said through tears. There
was something different about her appearance. She was healthier, younger,
happier.

We didn’t share many more words, as I was
suddenly completely fatigued and needed sleep. She sat in the chair next to me
and found a blanket somewhere. I slept as peacefully as I could remember; forgiveness
was a deep, soft, comforting place.

32

Wednesday, September 24

At 5:30 a.m., my phone rang. “Hello Mr.
Ryder, this is your wake-up call.” Kyle snickered. “We hope you enjoyed your
stay at the Shakespearean Inn and Campground.” I quickly rearranged my
backstage bed and removed any trace. I had to get out before the first workers
arrived, but waited until the last moment. Outside worried me. I was excited about
getting Dustin, but something about the day ahead made me uneasy. In fact, the
future in general was beginning to feel claustrophobic.

It was a typical brisk late September
morning in Ashland, heading fast toward warm. Clouds didn’t exist, and the sun
seemed to know its annual three-month battle with fog was still six weeks away.
Rounding a corner, on the ten-minute walk from the theater to the Station, I almost
tripped over one of the town’s rare homeless. With dirty hair matted in dreads
and clothes worn and soiled, the bearded man looked ancient but, if cleaned up
and shaved, was probably only fifty.

“Watch it, kid.”

“Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“Yeah, pretend we’re not here, the
invisible, scavenging downtrodden. Look the other way--you may catch leprosy,”
he said with a glare. “You high and mighty people can’t abide by the scourge of
us lost and forgotten souls. Careful, I might touch you!”

“Maybe other people are afraid of you or
want to pretend you don’t exist. I just think you’ve got an attitude problem.”

He laughed so hard, for a minute I thought
he might die coughing. About to leave, I waited to make sure he lived through
the spasm.

“I wasn’t always like this,” he said.

“Of course not. No one is born that
filthy.”

He laughed again, this time rolling over.

I started to walk away.

“Hey, could you spare a few thousand
dollars?” he called.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“How about more then? I could really use a
million. I need to buy a house,” he cackled. “I’m homeless, remember? You know
that fancy neighborhood above the boulevard? I’d like a house there. It would
make those uptight people
very
nervous. I’d have my hobo friends over,
and we’d dress like this and live out on the lawn. Never even go in the house.”
He was hooting now.

I handed him a five-dollar bill. “Well,
start saving.”

“Hey, what do you know? Kid’s funny
and
has a heart. See, here’s the thing.” He produced a wooden match from somewhere
and struck it with his tooth. “This money isn’t even real.” He lit the five-dollar
bill.

I reached for it, but he swung it away. “I
guess you’re not eating today then, or drinking,” I added under my breath.

“Why, because that money’s gone? It wasn’t
real in the first place. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat. And if I’m thirsty, I’ll
drink!”

“Hard to do without money.”

“Money, why are you so obsessed with it?” He
fanned five-dollar bills, hundreds of them.

“Where did you steal that?”

“People give it to me.”

“So you can burn it?”

“It’s mine. I can do what I want with it.
Want yours back?”

“No.” I started to walk away again.

“Good because
yours
is just a pile
of ashes.” He lit the others.

I thought of stomping on the pile. It was
probably more than a thousand dollars; he was obviously out of his mind.
Instead of leaving, I watched it burn. “Were you rich once?”

“I’ve been everything once,” he hesitated.
“But none of it really matters. Nothing matters but this moment. People get
weighed down with money and all that it buys. Stuff, everyone has so much
stuff. It ends up ruling them. A man with possessions is not free.”

“A warm dry house with a roof over your
head and food in the kitchen can be nice.”

“Then why did you sleep in the theater? It
has no roof.”

“How’d you know that?”

“It’s easy to see where people have been.
Once you’re not mired in the muck of the material world, everything is
apparent.”

“Who are you?”

“My friends call me Crowd.”

“Funny name for a guy who doesn’t like
people.”

“Who said I don’t? I like them. I just
don’t want to be around any. I feel sorry for them.”

“Why?”

“Because the unseen world is all around us.
It’s where everything really happens, where everything originates. But
ninety-nine percent don’t see it. All they see is TV and Walmart.”

“Sure sounds like you don’t like them.”

“People passing by me every day think I’m
dirt. For all they know, I’m a Pulitzer Prize
-
winning writer, a Nobel
Laureate or someone’s grandfather, but they don’t know because they never bother
to stop. Busy, busy, busy! What if talking to me could solve all their
problems? Answer all their questions?” He kicked at the ashes of the money. “When
someone goes into a shop, a bank, or a restaurant, clean, nicely dressed people
serve them, but they’re still indifferent or even rude, downright mean to their
servers. And the thing is they have no idea what is going on in the clerk’s
life or the teller’s or the waiter’s. For all they know, that morning the clerk
found out her father had a stroke, or the teller discovered his wife was
leaving him, or the waiter is waiting for test results on whether he lives or
dies. Maybe one of them lost a child a few weeks earlier. No one knows; no one
cares. How did this happen that strangers got so strange?”

“Am I supposed to be able to answer that?”

“It’s a shame you have so much to do. What
with all the older generations screwing everything up so bad. The youth, as
always, is our only hope.” He held a hand up offering me a five-dollar bill
again.

I shook my head.

“I’ll see you again sometime,” he said,
grinning. “Think about what I said. Ask, seek, think. One day you may need to
understand people better. Teenagers don’t know everything; they just think they
do. The difference is they’re more open than the grown-up sheep.”