The Altonevers (55 page)

Then realizing it's a thought, a
concept of the inconceivable, a construct of her own mind seeking
place in the natural patterns of incalculable chaos, she conceives
the ocean as being as small as a pond. Pondering what the ponds
surface would be like, and herself swimming just below it. Seeing
light shining through its softly ebbing waves as blissful glimpses
of her soul shining through the distortions of her subconscious,
and pouring into her conscious self. She hears no roaring rain, or
thoughts in her head at all, only feeling afloat, as though she's
been adrift in shapeless serenity forever. Her focus of the scene
in her mind falters when trying to peek above the ponds surface, to
where she perceives her soul is emanating from. As she loses her
concentration the calm pond she's immersed in reassumes the form of
a monstrous, chaotically churning ocean, whose violent surface
waves scramble the light of her soul from her conscious mind’s
sight.

Losing her inner vision in the blink
of an eye, and with a blink of her eye’s she’s back in roar of the
apparitious deluge. Watching the glowing phantoms of the storm
transmuting into whatever her mind manifests. For almost a minute
she's surrounded by a multitude of multi-sized echoes of herself
covering the ground and climbing the walls, appearing in every
conceivable place at once. Realizing that what she perceives though
her senses of the scene surrounding her, is the same as what she is
seeing in her mind's eye. That she's submersed in her mind outside
herself and believing that she can reign over her perception of
reality by her thought, she begins thinking and actualizing a
massive wave that spreads out from herself. Popping and fading the
pink and yellow reverberating echoes of herself in a cascade of
bubbles bursting away from where she stands. Creating a second wave
that clears the undulating grounds of all the tons water, then
levitating the five inches of rippling fluid flooding the square
six feet above her head. She peeks up to see the city lights as
phantasmagoria scattering through its surface.

Anna's mind is lost in the sight of a
sea of Central’s city lights shining through the sheet of clear
water elevated six feet above her head, bathing her dazed face in
the light like she’s watching a fireworks show at night. Her
subconscious resurfaces, transforming the scattering light of the
mercurial fluid above her into a malevolently smirking ebony
skinned voodoo priestess. She's wearing a small silvery crown with
a circle adorned by a U shape as its centerpiece. Smirking with
black painted pointy lips, while laughing through hysterical eyes.
Her flawless, fertile looking figure is barely clothed by long
black and white feathers. She's gripping a gleaming metal scepter
that’s melting in the palm of her raised left hand. Dripping a
silvery fluid down her arm and bare breast that flows down her body
and feathers to her feet. As it’s ornament is a pupil sized
obsidian orb that’s steaming into a mist of glimmering silver dust
sweeping over her shoulder. She's waving her free hand for Anna to
join her, with arms open leading a lively jazz parade of blowing
brass and persuasive drums playing to feel alive in cherishing the
life of the dead, not the death of a life. A funeral procession in
reverie around an obsidian casket stained with boiling blotches and
hand prints of the same silvery fluid dripping from the priestess’
palm. She shakes her scepter with a smirk of satisfaction and blows
a breath of silver smoke from her mouth toward the entranced
Anna.

“
Anna! Anna!” he shouts in
her ear, pulling her from the focus of her fantasy in front of her.
The wavering body of mercurial fluid falls faster than Anna can
catch it, dropping thousands of fluid tons with a sudden
thunderous, ground quaking roar. Then erupting from the ground as a
field of thousands of ten story back jets ejected from the center
of crashing liquid craters casting forceful fluid crowns and
chaotically colliding shock waves. She swipes instinctively trying
to catch the liquid collisions before they calm and settle into a
five inch mire of rippling ebullition riding the amplitude of the
undulating streets.

“
Yeah?” she
sighs.

“
Did you see that!?” he
shouts flustered, looking icily into her eyes, and putting her on
edge, unnerved by the thought of her being in the mercury stained
obsidian casket, blue skinned and unliving in oblivion, away from
him. Though she's vibrant, alive in the thought of her living a
life worth celebrating in death.

“
You saw that too?” she
asks excitedly.

“
Yeah, what was
that?”

“
I dunno,” she shrugs,
cupping her hands together to catch the falling rain, that in only
seconds flows over her fingers. She stares, seeing her reflection
rippling in its small water surface, then sipping and drinking it.
Dropping the rest down to watch it splash and crown and settle over
her feet. Taking another cupped handful and splashing her face with
it, then his. The glowing figures of phantasmagoria fade to faint
glimmers as though flashing through a drizzle instead of a deluge,
and dissipating to an afterlight languishing far behind
them.

Into the thick, as
thieves

Carelessly the two carry on
through the calming downpour, leaping from top to top over the
bottoms of the now only three foot undulations. The rainfall's roar
is lessening and the particle breeze's blowing is showing the winds
currents ebbing. They pass a crosswalk with a lone man in a
raincoat on the other side of the avenue. She can feel the man’s
eye’s leering intensely without seeing them under the shadow of his
officer’s hat. The two continue, and the unflinching man and his
leer disappear around the corner.
The
street lights are gas lamps filled with liquid flame suspended a
split second after exploding through the glass sphere of their
containment. The burst is then pulled from its top, to the top of
the next bursted bulb into a string of amber lit arches
illuminating the undulating surface of the avenue twenty feet
beneath them, and splashing under the leaping feet of the reveling
two.

They come to a broad smooth surfaced
circle where five avenues meet, encircled by the amber gas lamps
and arches. On the other side is a park, and stairs descending to
the underground stations of Central. Looking down the two can see
into a bottomless hole, suddenly struck by the vertigo of walking
on the ledge of skyscraper they tip toe forward. A hollow lunar
like globe whose blued reflection is an eighth of the roundabouts
size, stains the center of the circle like light spots a pupil. The
two are halfway across the breadth of the depthless black bottomed
circle when he looks over his shoulder to see a pair of red and
blue sirens far enough away to seem like shark fins swimming
through the undulating waves of the streets toward them.

“
What is it?” she
asks.

“
Nothing to worry about,”
he feigns a laugh, and looks back to the sirens and
sighs.

“
We have to keep going,” he
mumbles.

“
Your friends are here,
again. They’re always here,” she says.

“
No danger. Everywhere I go
they are they're pursuing, ever present as though they’re part of
me.”

“
You can never stop and
settle, never get away.”

“
No, they're unrelenting as
the rain. You’ll never be safe as long as you're with me,” he
says.

“
It’s not raining as hard
anymore.”

“
Yeah, but it still is, it
always is,” he says putting his hand out to catch a
drop.

“
Well I guess, you get what
you pay for,” she says smiling.

“
Ha, that’s one way to put
it,” he laughs. The two are clear of the sirens creeping up behind
them when reaching the other side, to the rows of trees and
overgrowth growing over a five foot granite wall. Their green
leaves are dripping like candle wax into small spires sinking onto
the sidewalk, and renewing to fall again. The two are ten feet from
the green lit barrier that wraps around the station stairs,
stepping reluctantly toward it, as though they're walking on
tightropes whose threads are snapping on by one. A swell of
weltering emotions rise with each step, each knowing they're that
much closer to their end together, to the parting of their
perspective paths. Each wanting to say something though only
awkwardly trading short glances and shifting eyes.

The hat’s of two badges
standing at the second landing of the station stairs and looking up
at them stop them in their tracks. He smiles for a second then
pulls her arm, but she's already striding alongside him, down the
sidewalk and through the entrance of a sprawling park of dripping
trees. Fleeing into fields of green hills of melting wax cleaved by
paths of pavement curving in many, if not most, directions.
Thinking they’re out of the woods by running into them, they relax
in leaving the city lights only showing through the park’s entrance
shrinking far behind them.
Feeling the
rushing of water, but no heat on their heels, they stop to peel the
last of the city light from the bark of the trees around them. The
rain is draining into waterfalls falling through holes in the
canopy high above them, and muting the roaring storm into a light
pitter patter beating against wind ruffled leaves. She looks
around, listening to the trickling sound of three inch streams
flowing over the paved paths and their feet. The underside of the
canopy is a shattered mirror of the green shapes of the melting
leaves below reflected above.

The park is empty but for the two and
the occasional horse of water rising from the flooded paths,
galloping along for a few seconds, then crashing back into the
clear flowing fluid. The moisture is steaming from their clothes
and skin as they continue through curving paths of pavement, over
and under overpasses under the calm of the canopy. Each quietly
reveling, not wanting to speak, neither wanting to disrupt the
moment shared between them in strolling along, side by side at ease
Until an inaudible shout breaks their static charged silence, from
one of many Ribbits leading packs of barking and howling hounds
hunting them by scent. The need to flee from death or lifetimes of
imprisonment is again shattering their neverlasting
peace.

“
Oh, shit the dogs!” he
yelps.

“
Dogs!? hunted like dogs!”
she shrieks.

“
That’s right bitch,” he
laughs, as does she. The two dart off the pedestrian paths, away
from the searchlights breaching the trees behind them. They
struggle to keep pace in scaling a steep hill of cooling green wax
that slow moving feet sink quickly into. Reaching the top and
disappearing into a patch of twigs and branches scratching against
her skin and snagging her damp clothes. Nearly stripping the gun
wrapped in her tattered scarf from her pocket, given to her by him,
that she has only the heart to use for her own protection and on
occasion his.
The two frantically scramble
as mice through a ramble of narrow trails that twist and break like
vines and branches. Weaving in and out of the mire of melting wax
pooling in the barely beaten paths they're stumbling, and slowly
sinking into. The dogs are nearing, already near enough for the two
to hear the hungry growl’s and chomping jowls leading the
searchlights shining through tangled branches, throwing grizzly
shadows toward their desperately fleeing feet.

Emerging from the mire
looking miserable, covered smudges of wax, tattered and scratched,
sweating, barely standing. Tripping and rolling onto a blue bricked
circle encircling a seven foot tall white marble fountain
overflowing from the dwindling downpour, overlooking a large pond
at the base of a steep slope past an asphalt path. The fountain
stands beneath a break in the canopy showing an open expanse of
churning constellations resting high above. The ceiling of Central
that's only visible to the naked eye when the particle sky is free
of the city’s fluorescently lit intrusions of mineral structures
whose effulgence overwhelms the senses of everything existing
between them.
It's tranquil, dead silent,
without the growling hounds or grunts holding searchlights to be
seen or heard anywhere around them. The two scoop from the fountain
to rinse their sweat saturated faces and filthy hands. She bends to
sip from the fountains still surface like a bird, and he pushes her
into the pool of crystal clear freshly fallen rainwater.
She stays under a second to long, long enough for
him think she may have hit her head and be under. He leans over for
a closer look at her curled up body just as she pounces from the
fountain with arms up, roaring like a lion with water flying from
her ferocious face. He jumps back actually scared for a second then
laughs.

“
I think you like to scare
me,” he says.

“
I like to see your face
surprised,” she answers.

“
Oh yeah.”

“
Yeah. It’s funny how your
eyebrows almost touch your hair line.”

“
I like to see you
smile.”

“
Oh yeah, then why’d you
lie?”

“
About what?”

“
Knowing the way
home.”

“
I knew the way, like I
said I did. We’re here ain’t we, and look how close.”