Chapter 1: Apparition Through the Window
When I ask myself, "How much do I really know?" The answer coming back to me tastes insufficient. This happens far more often now that my life has turned inside-out in a manner that I had only dreamed of but, I never understood, nor would wish upon anyone. I feel the need to impart this adventure. I feel the need to pass on the dangers and the beauty of an all-to-objective reality as it collides with something beyond.
. . .
It all started with some high school shit in the park. Drinking and seeking.
"Where the fuck could she have thrown them?" I exclaimed with frustration in a deep voice and with a slight slur.
Paul voiced back in a drunken drawl "I 'on' know. That bish is erratic." Despite his frustration and lack of loquaciousness, he has always had a friendly, excitable, and somewhat deep tone. On this night it was more fluid with the effects of the alcohol. "We were 'round here!" He continued, pointing towards an electrical box, dirty and immutable.
The dark depths of the moonless night provided little help to our two-man search party. The cones of illumination from our phone lights were insufficient to find what we were hunting for. Shadows danced upon the grass beneath us as we stretched from one end of the park to the other. Our determination was as diamonds. The thought of losing the Polaroids we were looking for was far beyond what we could readily accept. Good memories are golden to those who know misery.
A white wall suddenly bathed us as I looked up at Paul. We had been searching for hours. The light shone upon us like the fluorescent glare of authority. My best friend slowly materialized into view against the wall of brightness. He was initially a shadow, pressed against the flooding radiance. He was slender but muscled, and he appeared even taller than the 6ft tall man that I knew him to be. He was a looming giant of a friend. What did that make me, also slender but standing even taller than 6 feet? A behemoth? A titan? A freak? We were stunned like deer in the headlights, prisoners in the grass we stood upon.
An old man's voice came bellowing through the air, "HEY, THIS PARK IS CLOSED!"
After a second Paul hollered back "Woaaaaaahhhh bro! We 's just lookin'!"
"We're trying to find something that we lost here earlier," I added. Our hands were held up in complacent submission, and it felt odd to me as I wouldn't have typically reacted that way. Perhaps it was the fog of alcohol.
The voice of the elder man became embodied as the apertures of our eyes coward against the beam assaulting our pupils. "The lost have no rights here, but nothing in the light is lost." He shakes his flashlight at us with implicit and mystical domination. "Come back tomorrow to find whatever it is you're looking for. I have no patience for impertinent children." He muttered the last part as he turned away.
The light recessed and a sense of relief became us. The stranger's silhouette behind the flashlight cast an elongated shadow trailing behind him. Its length extended far despite his dwarven stature. Paul's deep brown and pensive eyes with slight receding green hints of power and wisdom locked with mine. He would describe my blue crystalline eyes as caverns of knowledge now lost upon the living. As our bemusement and excitement and drunken feelings crossed through that connection, the man headed back towards his abode; nestled in the margins of the park.
"Hey, old man! But what does it meeeeaaaaaaaan?!" Paul called out to him, falling to his knees in a dramatic forlorn fashion.
The stranger paused his retreat. "What you seek is not lost. I'll be but a moment if it will quell your insufferable meddling." He ventured on, and we watched him leave slamming his door behind him.
"The fuck was that?" I asked, shocked.
"Fuck if I know but he told us to wait, right?" Paul answered and questioned back. We began walking toward the stranger's house.
"I guess… He sounds like some prophet from a fantasy novel."
"Or maybe out of a movie. We can make it what we want! We're in a weird movie with some sexy witches and a demon tryna' eat us."
"Okay, well… where the sexy witches at?"
"Pssst…." A sound broke through the darkness at us.
Gazing around with curious expressions we sought the source of the soft intrusion. Paul discovered it first. A second later when my search glided over him I noticed his slightly upturned face, the hint of a brown beard grew along his sharp, masculine jaw. He had the face of a noble warrior. I followed his vision. A slender leg protruded from an upstairs window of the stranger's home and found a perch upon an interlacing lattice that held vines against the wall. We stared mesmerized as the apparition climbed from the window.
Tight pajama boy-shorts caressed supple curvature and a visceral overflow of hair fell upon the precipice of her figure. The gentle light of the porch added a mysterious and seductive element to the shadows that cast along her body. The rest of her emerged gracefully through the wooden portal. She jumped down, but to us, it was almost as if she floated down with the whispers of the wind. She landed on the foundation of her black and white chucks gathering herself.
She raised her head. Her face manifested against the warm fluorescence from the porch. The light rolled upon her cheeks in the same way the seasons shift with the sun kissing the earth. Glacial blue eyes looking into, or at us, contrasted bright blonde locks descending in tides down to her hips. "I heard you boys are lost," she said.
"Not anymore" Paul breathed shyly but boldly with his heart in his lungs.
"Not quite, we're looking for something," I explained.
"I heard that as well, as I hear many things," she replied, contemplating us.
Paul and I broke our fixated view on her to look at each other, eyebrows raised as we released the pent-up breath contained in our lungs.
The door behind her began creaking open and as we turned back to her we discovered her not. She had vanished like the fleeting apparition she first emerged as. The strange man left his home cradling something in his left hand and closing the door behind him with his right. Closer up, and illuminated by the porch, we were able to define his features with more clarity. He turned to us, bright glacial eyes and a sullen brow set upon withering skin. His thin lips formed a scowl conveying a distaste for our presence.
"Abysmal night it is," he said gruffly, "perfect for those lost to find apocalypse." He paused, none of us spoke for a moment...
"So what did you mean earlier? Do you have our photos?" I inquired of him.
"Is something found on my property, and now in my hands something that you can lay claim to?"
"If a photo has my face on it, is it a picture of me and also my right to it?" I responded.
"Is it not the will of the universe to expose itself within the flicker of a moment?"
I had no answer and thought for a minute.
"And if a moment was captured by the lens of a man, does that moment not belong to mankind?" Paul cut in thoughtfully.
The old man grunted. He then opened his hands to reveal a stack of Polaroids.
We breathed.
"Bro! Woah! Yo! That's what we were lookin' for!" Paul redundantly stated.
I chuckled and reached for the photographs. The old man pulled the photographs into his chest before I could reach them.
"Will the exposure land true on thine eyes?" His own eyes met mine and seemed to convey something, but to me it was incomprehensible. He moved his hands back in my direction and I took the Polaroids tentatively. He left quickly. Departure, followed by a slammed door, and he had vanished. A wisp fled from our etheric future, and there we stood.
"So...that was a thing," I said dumbly.
"He's quite the engaging person" a whisper spoke behind us.
"Hey, is that ghost friendly?" Paul asks calmly as I turn around surprised.
"I have never known him to be otherwise" the woman stated.
"No, I mean you!?" Paul rebutted.
After regaining myself I asked, "So did you levitate here? Because I couldn't hear shit."
She wrapped an arm around each of our shoulders as she answered, "Listen harder."
Neither of us shied from the touch. Paul leans into her ear, "Three squared."
"Hush neophyte," she replied.
"Ye must be like the babes." Paul quoted esoterically.
"As you are" she responded, gliding a finger along his cheek and then pushed us meekly toward the house. She then put a finger to her lips and sped ahead of us, climbing the vines as we both admired her with more than innocence. After pulling herself gracefully through the wooden portal she motioned us up with a waving finger.
Paul lifted his brow at me and smirked, and we nodded at each other. Nothing could stop Paul, and I certainly had no intention of abandoning such a cordial invitation. He was almost through the second-story window before I even took a step upon the lattice. Halfway up I saw his head peering at me from inside the window.
"Diiiiiiiiiibs" he asserted down to me in a whisper.
Rolling my eyes, I emphasized a special finger to him before climbing through the window myself. The first thing I noticed was the aromas of lavender and rose permeating my senses. The vibrancy of the colors within left me blinking.
Sunset violet walls evolved upward into a starburst orange ceiling speckled, with pink lights that cast about the entire room. I spent a moment entranced by the rainbows refracted by the edges of her mirrors. Various plants hung spaced with intent in synchronistic patterns between mirrors against three of her four walls. Her bed sat along the fourth wall on the right. Inviting. Paul moved from the window to the bed where she sat on a cosmic comforter depicting visions of the Milky Way galaxy. She wore a short white shirt with cut sleeves exposing her arms up to her shoulders, and her belly held the reflection of a spectrum of color from the mirrors upon her tanned but fair skin. An emerald gem rested in the cradle of her navel and it was hard to tear my eyes from it. She looked up at me and I blushed, but she seemed not to notice as she turned toward Paul who boldly took a seat next to her on the bed. She waved me over, looking up into Paul's eyes.
"I would love to see the Polaroids my grandfather returned to you" she whispered
softly.
"Wouldn't you?" Paul teased.
"I mean, I would just as much as you would want to sit here with me" she answered coyly.
"You think you're that alluring?" I asked playfully.
"Am I not?" She feigned the hurt in her voice.
"You're the light of the fire of all the suns throughout the universe" Paul exaggerated, and we all chuckled but now it was her turn to blush.
I slowly extricated the Polaroids from my jacket pocket where I had them stashed, and handed the small stack to the woman.
"Wait!" Paul interrupted.
We both looked at him.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Alcyone, and what are your names?"
"I have many names, but my friends call me Paul," he answered.
"This is shit boy, and I'm dog shit, Loren," I said extravagantly while smirking at him. The alcohol had eased its effects but not completely vanished.
"I seem to have a new respect for shit," she said smiling. "It is a pleasure to meet you shit boy Paul and dog shit Loren," she said with more nobility than I have ever heard similar curses uttered.
"Just Paul is fine," he said with stifled laughter in his voice.
"I'm okay with just Loren too," I said smiling.
I cast my gaze down towards the photographs. It did mean a lot to look through these with her. They are some of our most precious memories, that we saved from times our families had been alive, and friends. A sense of nostalgia overcast my playfulness as I looked at the topmost Polaroid. It depicted the sun in the sky and both mine and Paul's family on one side of a large table in a garden. Paul and I were in the center and he was pulling my hair as I had his nose grasped between my middle and index fingers. We were around 6 years old, and loved to wrestle, as young boys do. To my side and behind on the right was my father just before he realized what we were doing.
He stood tall and strong with a clean-shaven face and short ginger locks on his dome. He wore a smile that was wider than the horizon, and wrinkles infused his deep blue eyes that spoke of a lengthy history of such smiles. My mom sat close to me, realizing first what was happening, and half turning towards us with her dirty blonde hair that just barely avoided covering the startled expression on her face. On Paul's side was his mother looking up lovingly toward his father with her arm around Paul's waist. Her auburn hair matched his father's eyes looking down lovingly, standing behind her transfixed in the heartfelt warmth she returned to them. He was tall and strong and you couldn't help but feel safe just from the immortal image of his presence. He had wavy brown hair and a scar on his right cheek going down from his temple to his up-turned lips profiled for the camera. I remember vaguely that the scar was the result of a self-sacrificing accident, but I don't recall much more than that. We were all happy, alive, and present.
Paul and I began pointing to various people, and objects in the photographs as we went through them one at a time. We commented on this event, or that vase Paul broke, or else that Game Boy I borrowed from Paul without asking, or these pets. To go much further into detail than that is too much for me at the moment, and putting this story into words is too important for me to be overwhelmed now.
As we perused the photographs we eventually arrived at one that wasn't in the stack originally. An anomaly in the matrix.