Chapter 2
We came in the silent morning. A
team of explorers drove through the blue desert, in a car not unlike a moon
buggy. They left tire tracks in the desert sand, like twin snakes, race through the
dunes, zigzagging in the morning heat.
We got out of the buggy for samples
- of the sand, of the small button cacti and of the austere trees. It was
strange out here, like an alien landscape. The whole place was still and
tranquil unlike anything that had been here before.
Over the radio, an old scientist’s
voice comes through with a hiss-and-crackle of a radio transmission moving
through vast tracts of time and space. “We
are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's
forever,” he says.
When you’re traveling away from me
at half the speed of light, the light waves (or particles or whatever holy form
they’re manifesting) that come off your back are distorted and shifted toward
the red end of the spectrum. As you race away, you appear red, the color of
going, leaving, racing away half as fast as light can
tell.
But when you’re traveling towards
me at half the speed of light, the light waves (or church songs or radio waves
or whatever holy form they’re manifesting) come off your face are distorted and
shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum. As you race towards me, you
appear blue, the color of coming, approaching, imminent, there you are at the
doorstep blue and smiling.
A voice in the distance says, “In order to make an apple pie
from scratch, you must first create
the universe.”
I stand atop the tallest dune in
the new blue desert, and look at the city of Stamford.
The skyline isn’t terribly impressive - a few tall buildings, one which might
be considered a skyscraper to hicks and outlanders, but we’re in Connecticut,
there are few of those here. Incidentally, a thought passes through my head,
drifting like tumbleweed. In Europe, everything is
centuries old. You’re constantly passing castles and taverns built in the
1400s, and all sorts of regalia and paraphernalia from the Crusades and
what-have-you. But here in the states, everything is, at best, 400 years old.
Very little has survived from history. It’s a nation of new things, fresh and
infantile. Stuff changes perhaps overnight. I feel like 400 years from now, the
same monuments and halfway houses and historical curios will still exist from
the 1600s, but very little will survive from the present. Will they preserve
ancient antiquated drive-throughs? Will they ever
hang a sign that says “Ye Olde Historical Mobil
Mart”?
The voice on the radio said, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”
And up there, on the top of the
dune, the team beckoned me back into the buggy so we can press on, making new
discoveries and trying to unravel the enigma of the desert. I was lost in
thought though, this is a significant moment. I’m not sure why, but I felt like
I was moving at half the speed of light through the strange blue land,
approaching the escape velocity for time, the sacred metronome.
I turn around, the wind blowing by
me, through me, and I see the city of Stamford.
The whole city is shifted red, the rosy aura of a city in regress.
The city is red shifted and the
desert is blue shifted. The city is leaving and the desert is coming in.
Like a dream, I can hear my crimson
childhood self playing on a seesaw, on the other end of the plank is an azure
version of myself, older and more knowledgeable but by no means wiser and
calmer. They giggle as they trade places in the air, an incontrovertible mirage
in the desert morning.
The other scientists are looking
around as well. Their press to move forward has temporarily halted as they
examine their surroundings. Dr. DePinto looks under a
flat shaped rock and sees a small marionette band playing underneath. The girl
with castanets winks at him, flashing a bit of her calf as she swishes her
skirt and turns away. “Interesting readings,” says DePinto.
Further along the trail, we see a coyote
chasing a jack-rabbit into a hidey-hole.
A bird has hollowed out a cactus
and made a home in there. This is a symbiotic relationship - the cactus can
hold more water in an empty space than it can in its squishy interior membrane.
And the bird gets to live inside a cool, moist well in the midst of the arid
desert heat. Both the bird and the cactus are enriched by the other’s
existence.
“Michael,” I say, but it comes out
slurred as if I am drunk. “Have you ever read Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos?”
“Yeah,” he says over the hum of the
buggy’s electric motor. “When I was in high school.
It’s one of the books that got me interested in science.”
“Carl Sagan
is over there, reading it out loud,” I say, pointing to the image of a young
Carl Sagan, looking towards the sky and narrating in
wonder.
If we long to believe that the stars rise
and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us
a disservice in deflating our conceits?
“That’s not from Cosmos,”
said DePinto. “Pale Blue Dot, maybe? We pulled
the buggy aside and listened to the professor speak, from the heart.
“It is of interest to note that while some
dolphins are reported to have learned English (up to fifty words used in
correct context) no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. Science is a way of thinking much more than it
is a body of knowledge. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and
religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.”
“Deep nonsense,”
said Dr. Santamaria, chewing the words as he spoke
them. Then, “I’d like to think there is an obvious difference between the two.”
Carl Sagan, who had died in 1996, an atheist to his death bed, shifted
his weight. He pointed. “Somewhere,
something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“Look at us,” said Dr. Pinta, “we’re grown
men turning over rocks in the desert.”
Sagan went on, “The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile,
merely indifferent. A
scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands
where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization.
They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew
about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the
names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They
wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.”
I felt a heavy pull in my gut. The
sand was blowing away from under my feet. The desert was getting to me. I was
feeling such strange things in the sun-delirium. It was like a fever, a but not altogether a nightmare. The world was spinning,
faster, faster, as day turned into night, and then into day again. We walked
forward at half pace, but seemed to make incredible progress. The stars
overhead seemed to drift a little as I squinted at them.
My power of recall was poor. I knew
that I knew things, but as the mirage-madness crept into my forebrain, I was
unable to dredge up information. Basic facts about myself,
such as my age, or where I went to school, seemed just out of memory’s reach.
Had I eaten some strange poisonous desert flower? Or was I dying of thirst? I
looked over my shoulder at Stamford,
but it was fading into the distance as we walked. It’s
red hue burned as it regressed, red shifted, running away from us. I watched as
it crumbled, aged, fell into a pale red dot in the distance. The desert was blue
and rushing towards us, but everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I
palmed a small pebble and threw it as far as I could. It soared up and fell at
half speed, leaving a crater in the sand in slow motion.
DePinto put
a hand on my shoulder. I snapped to focus. He was mouthing something to me. If
he was actually talking, no noise was getting through his space helmet. He
pantomimed coughing, and I saw his breath fog up on the helmet’s faceplate. DePinto made a motion like he was twisting a faucet.
That must be it! I looked down at
my air gauge - of course! I was only getting half oxygen. The madness was my
brain, asphyxiated, pounding on the glass faceplate of my sensory-motor cortex.
The sensory motor cortex is a
narrow chunk of brain, but 95% of what we know about the world comes from that
layer of neurons. They’re racked tight like a triangle of pool-balls, the cue
is a beam of white light setting up a shot through your eyeball, causing those billiards to go ricocheting and bouncing and spinning
around the brain. They form a cloud and the cloud forms a shape, and then the
shape in your eye is in your mind, is in your mind’s eye.
Each one of those spheres is a
particle with electrons having their own square-dance in invisible instants,
and the barn or dance hall or discotheque is a cloud roughly the shape of
eternity. The electrons are probably in there, but you can’t see them. You can
hear their music, rhythmic old-country fiddle tunes, but you can never really
touch them. They don’t live in an instant, electrons,
they live under a curve. You can’t touch them because they’re never there to
touch, they’re only ghosts. Everything we interact with and do has to do with
the square dances of these invisible ghosts which are probably in orbit around
some cyclonic little galaxy which no camera can see.
The
next morning I ponder these things, these little demons called electrons,
hidden behind Oz’s curtain, which is embroidered with the appealing title, “the
Uncertainty Principle”.
And
though this is all very absurd, we all go about our daily lives rationally, in
the face of this ubiquitous imaginary universe. It makes no sense to the
senses. Well we try to stay rational. But with so much irrationality, so much
that defies explanation, it’s hard sometimes to keep a straight face.
Yesterday, we saw the Carl Sagan, or his electron
ghost, reciting wisdom amongst the dunes.
“It’s a
freaking blue desert,” said Dr. Santamaria, the edge of tension rising. “It appeared
overnight and no one batted an eye. Comparatively, is my suggestion so absurd?”
“Dr. Santamaria,” I said, the teeth of my mind’s cogs bared as I
spoke, “How could we possibly have been walking at half the speed of light?”
Dr. Santamaria looked at me darkly.
In the
background, Carl Sagan is giving an appropriately
timed lecture about how as you approach the speed of light, time seems to
accelerate. While your journey to the Oort cloud may
have only taken a few months, hundreds of years will have passed on earth.
“Here,”
said DePinto. “It’s a newspaper I found while you
were delirious.” I scratched my head. DePinto tossed
the paper on my lap. The headline read “STICKS AND STONES”. The date was Februrary 1st, 2182. I stared at the print with
wide eyes. Words were stuck in my throat. I turned over the newspaper in my
hands. The newsprint was yellow, dry, cracked. I had no doubts about the
authenticity. If this was a forgery, it was a perfect forgery. If this was
madness, it was a convincing madness.
As we
talked, the sky dimmed. The moon was sliding in front of the sun, a perfect
solar eclipse, and everything became midnight
dark.
The
next morning, we packed up our gear, took another reading off the instruments,
and headed back towards Stamford.
The city slowly grew, from the point in the distance, into a city in egress. It
was still red shifted though, even as we approached it, as if even as we drew
nearer, it was racing away from us.
The
highway was packed with cars, but they were just shells, empty save for
nauseating skeletons baking in the desert heat. We passed silent car after car,
a macabre parade of the dead, seeming to march backwards as we passed them. At
first, we held hankerchiefs over our mouths to
protect us from the smell, but we slowly realized that there was no smell.
Anything moist that would stink had been sun-baked off long ago, toasted inside
the car ovens.
“Why do
you think the windows are all rolled up?” DePinto
asked, taking the handkerchief off his mouth.
“They
had the air-conditioning on,” said Dr. Santamaria
with a smile. “And they baked alive inside their mobile green houses.” He
chuckled flippantly, and I glared at him.
The
city of Stamford was ruined. Some
of buildings looked like they had ivy growing up them, covering and strangling
them, before they were scorched light brown and dead by the white desert sun.
The roads were packed, jammed in space and time.
“Standstill traffic on Atlantic
street,” DePinto said with half a grin.
“Yeah, nothing new here,” quipped Dr.
Santamaria. It seemed like everyone had died at the
same moment, and the scene hadn’t been touched since then.
“Someone has touched it,” said DePinto, “The sun.”
I was startled, confused. “Just a
second ago, that part about everyone dying at the same moment - did I say that
out loud? Or did I just think it?”
The group fell into mutual silence.
Eventually, DePinto
said, “I’m not sure.”
In the distance, I could hear a
voice on a megaphone. At this range, I couldn’t make out what the voice was
saying. Everything echoed off the glass walls of the Stamford
canyons.
Atlantic street becomes Bedford
street, and next to a huge, odd looking Presbyterian church, the twin
Avalon-Bedford apartment buildings tower above the surrounding cityscape. On
the top of the building closest to the road, a blonde guy in red pants is
shouting into a megaphone.
“-and on that note, I begin
presentation number five thousand twenty three hundred and fifty five of
Fabio’s book on tape, Viking. In case you missed it the last five
thousand times, I’ll refresh you. It’s about a time traveling movie star who
becomes a Viking.” The guy seemed to be enjoying himself, cackling into the
megaphone. He sat next to large speakers, poised precariously on the edge of
the building. The speakers rumbled with a fanfare, and the book-on-tape began
to play again. Time and heat had distorted the cassette tape, and the
narrator’s voice had an odd pitch - slow and stretched out of shape.
“Hey!” I shouted, but the guy
couldn’t hear my voice over the roar of Fabio’s romance novel.
“Let’s go up,” said Dr. Santamaria. DePinto and I nodded.
We climbed the stairs of the
apartment building one by one, by the end huffing and puffing in the stale
summer air.
“We’re gonna
scare the crap out of this guy,” said Dr. DePinto as
we round floor 10. It’s true. The poor kid probably hasn’t seen a living being
in a long time. How did he survive? How long has he been here?
We paused on the twelfth floor to
catch our breath. “There’s something else we should consider,” said Dr. Santamaria. “Something that’s been gnawing at me, but I
haven’t wanted to say it.”
“If I were you,” said
DePinto,
shooting Santamaria a hard glance, “I would keep my damn
mouth shut.” Santamaria nodded slowly.
DePinto
was a hard scientist, and I believed him. Santamaria
was often brash, and didn’t always think things through. I wondered
nevertheless what he was about to say. I trusted DePinto
in this situation, but the sharp, heavy tone the good doctor used darkened my
mood a bit. Something was wrong, really wrong, and neither of them were letting on. Frankly, the sooner we could get back home,
to Stamford, the better. I was
getting sick of this weird place. The future of Stamford
was eerie, vacant, as if Death himself had enjoyed his stay here, and then
left, leaving it empty, like a school house in the summer time. We were out of
phase.
The stairwell was dark. The door at
the top of the stairs had white sunlight pouring out from under it. Santamaria flung the door open, a rectangle of white light.
A cool wind blew through us, ruffling our clothes. As my eyes adjusted to the
sun, I could see the rooftop. The survivor sat on the edge of the precipice,
next to those two huge speakers, which were busy describing Fabio’s muscles
rippling as he lifted the Viking maiden out of the icy water.
He turned around slowly. The guy
was blonde, with long hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore baggy red pants
that rippled with the wind, and a tight red t-shirt with a yellow star in the
middle. The guy raised a hand at us, waiving casually, noncommittally, as if
long expected friends had just shown up.
“I’m Dr. Tony DePinto,”
said one of my companions, taking a step forward. If this was really the year
2182, we might be like aliens to this poor kid. “
“Byron,” said the guy, standing up
to shake DePinto’s hand. Then, Dr. Santamaria’s and mine.
“Byron,” said Dr. Santamaria, “what happened here? When we left Stamford,
it was the year 2005. We went into the blue desert,” he said, pointing to the
surreal wasteland looming at the edge of the city, “and we came out here.”
Byron pulled the elastic band out
of his ponytail and ran his fingers through his hair. “There’s no story to
tell,” he said.
“What do you mean?” said Dr. DePaulo, “How did the city become like this? What happened in the last hundred and eighty years?”
Byron dusted off his pants and sat
back down on the ledge. He looked towards the desert as he spoke,
“The events of your life, of
history, take place in a chronological order that lend themselves
well to storytelling. I can vividly recount many episodes from life - my first
day in high school, my first college classes, the grind of my first real job,
and so on.
“Those are easy, because the point
of view is consistent. A personal narrative. But look
at more complex events in history - an objective narrative doesn’t come so easily.
The Revolutionary War, for example,” Byron continued, not looking at any of us
as he lectured, “the English tell that story in an
entirely different voice. To them, the word rebel
doesn’t have the same heroic tone. Consider how we Yankees hear the word
Rebel in the context of the civil war. It doesn’t have the heroic undertone,
the iconoclast who challenges the yolk of dominant society. Now try to impose
those confederate word associations on the Revolutionary war. In the English
voice, the story completely changes. Maybe, for example, George Washington was
an immortal villain instead of an epic war hero. Maybe the Bill of Rights is an
insulting, petty document. I’m not English; I couldn’t tell you how they tell the story of the war. But
that’s not the point.
Byron turned towards us. “So I ask
you, what really happened? Was Washington
really a hero? or
a villain?”
“That’s completely relative,” said DePinto. “It depends on who you ask. The English would
report one thing, the Americans the other.”
“So what conclusion can we draw?”
responded Byron. “That he is neither hero or villain?
That he’s both?”
Dr. DePinto
paused, then said “I would conclude that his heroism
or villainy exists in perception, not
in reality. George Washington’s heroism or villainy exists in a social reality,
not a physical one. As such, it is mutable, malleable, transient.”
Byron nodded to himself, seeming to
enjoy Dr. DePinto’s answer. “Okay. I agree with you,
incidentally, but that merits a follow-up question. If all the people who remember
George Washington and his story and his legacy, suddenly die - if all the
people who have a one dollar bill just keel over and croak…
Byron smirked “Is George Washington
still a hero?”
Another pause.
“Yes,” said Santamaria,
“Just because no one remembers him, it doesn’t mean his actions disappeared.
It’s not like he suddenly stopped affecting history just because there’s no one
around to tell his story.”
“Fair enough,” said Byron, seeming
to enjoy the discussion. “But which is he then, in this world where no one
remembers him - a hero or a villain?” Byron hit stop on the tape player, halting Fabio’s masterpiece in mid
sentence.
“But all that,” Byron said, “is
just a tangent.”
“You still haven’t answered any
questions,” said Santamaria, sounding mildly annoyed.
“Why is the city ruined? What happened to everybody? There are a thousand
people in cars on the street, all of the sudden dead.”
“I don’t have a narrative to
explain how things happened,” said Byron, “which is what I was getting to. I
couldn’t tell you. There isn’t a story.”
“You mean you don’t know the story,” corrected DePinto. “The story still exists, whether or not you know
it. Something took place.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Byron. “A
story is made up of a rational series of events, connected to one another by
causality. Cause and effect. One and
the other. The events that took place were not rational or logical. Or
at least, I can’t make any sense of them.”
“Explain,” said DePinto.
“All the schools got out for the
summer and no one came back,” said Byron. “
“All the schools got out for the summer and no one came back,” said Byron. “One kid I knew started celebrating his birthdays in reverse. There was a storm. There’s a long part I don’t remember. We had a huge party at the end of everything.”
“You’re not making any sense,” said Dr. DeNino, sounding frustrated.
“It’s not like one thing led to another led to another which caused the city to fall into ruin and everyone to move out or die. It’s not like there’s some neat explanation like economic depression, nuclear holocaust, or citywide evacuation. Random things happen. Then other things happen, not necessarily as a result.”
“The only thing I can say for certain,” said Byron slowly, “is that it started when the blue desert appeared.”
“Our original goal, in 2005,” said Dr. Pinto, “was to go out into the blue desert and figure it out. To figure out why it showed up.”
“Did you notice,” said Byron, “that when the blue desert appeared, no one seemed to notice? I mean, people talked about it, people thought it was weird, but its not like this giant arid wasteland appeared overnight and things went topsy-turvy flipso-reversi. Things went on just the way they used to.”
“It reminds me of when my sister drowned,” said DeNino. “and I went to school the next day.”
“Yeah,” said Pinto, “People reacted, but I thought they’d react more. I expected people get out of Stamford. I definitely thought the sudden appearance of a blue desert would make headlines.”
“The whole thing was like that,” said Byron, “the city dying, time passing, everything all absurd and without explanation. Without any explanation, the events just fell into the background noise.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, another example,” Byron smiled, “Late at night, usually between three and four in the morning, I used to wake up in the middle of the night having heard a plane landing. It was pretty loud, and it sounded like it was pretty close to my window. But there was no airport anywhere near my apartment. I could think of no explanation whatsoever for the distinct sound of an airplane landing.”
“So what did I do?” asked Byron rhetorically, “I ignored it. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Every waking day, we are exposed to hundreds, thousands of bits of information with no salient connection to a prior chain of events. Like there’s this guy who used to live in Stamford, and he walked around everywhere wearing a crazy looking crown. I once saw him casting a spell on a telephone pole. I don’t know what his deal was. I assume he has some backstory, but I wasn’t about to approach him and investigate - en route from point A to point B, there were always more important things to do than approach people and question them about their shtick. No one really has the time to investigate the typical weirdness that permeates their day.”
“You’re saying we’re not going to find an explanation for the blue desert,” said Pinto, frustrated. Byron nodded slowly.
“This absurdity shtick is really pissing me off,” snapped Dr. DeNino, “Nothing is making any sense,” his brow was furrowed, his arms crossed in front of him. “But that’s not how things work - there is a logical causal relationship between events. There is a natural, rational explanation for this desert, whether or not we know what it is.”
“You came here looking for an explanation, the basis for a narrative of some sort.” said Byron, sounding bored, “I’ll give you a narrative, but you won’t be satisfied. You’ll wish I hadn’t said it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said DeNino. The two men stared each other down, locked in an invisible battle of wills. Byron stood up and walked towards DeNino. The burly doctor crossed his arms “There’s something you’re not telling us,” he said.
Byron’s grin was Cheshire, “The bad news? Or the good news?”
Dr. DeNino put his hands in his pockets. “Let’s hear the bad news first.”
Byron paused, languishing like a good orator in their rapt attention. “the two of you are never going back to your original Stamford. All that time between that Stamford and this one has passed and is gone forever. But don’t have bad feelings, you won’t even miss your loved ones, because you can’t really remember who they are.”
Dr. DeNino opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it, confused. Dr. Pinto’s eyes were wide, were terrified.
“The good news is that you two are dreams,” said Byron, “My dreams. You do not exist except for in memory and imagination.”
Dr. DeNino shook his head dismissively, “Nonsense. I am clearly not a dream. If I pinch myself, it hurts. Dreams only last fifteen or twenty seconds and we’ve been in this desert for hours.”
“Years,” corrected Pinto.
“You’re not dreeeaming,” sang Byron, “you’re a dreeeam.”
“What about him?” said Dr. Pinto, pointing at me. “You said that DeNino and I are dreams, what about him?”
“He’s gonna wake up soon,” said Byron, waving at me slightly. I nodded.
Byron asked me, “Do you remember who these two Virgils are?”
I nodded, my head in a fog.
“I think Dr. Pinto was my advisor in college,” I said. “And …I think Dr. DeNino was my pediatrician.”
“Are you feeling more lucid now?” asked Byron.
“Yeah,” I said, “this is a really strange dream. I can’t tell what parts are real and what parts I made up.”
I paused, “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. None of this can be real, right? This is just a dream. The city wasn’t destroyed.”
“This could be a prophecy,” warned Byron. “Do not dismiss the reality of this dream, or any dream. I think you will eventually come to think of it as an important dream meeting. I am an older version of you. I’m you, almost two hundred years in your future.” I squinted at the dream sun. The dream wind blew through me, filling me with its breath.
“I have been here for a very long time. Alone and isolated in Stamford. In an attempt to avert my fate, I sent the Doctors to fetch you, and bring you to me.”
“They were distracted,” I said, “They thought they were looking for something. Some search for reason.”
Byron chuckled. “Even in memory, they’re still they’re scientists.” He smiled, looking at the docile illusions of the two doctors. “I wonder what adventures they took you on before they decided to research the blue desert.”
I smiled. We had been going on some crazy science adventures recently.
“Enjoy the adventures now,” Byron said sadly, “you won’t be able to remember them in the morning.”
“How do I survive for this long?” I asked my double, gesturing to the wasteland of a city spreading out around us.
The desert looked like an impossibly huge ocean, its stony cornflower waves frozen in time.
“I cannot tell you that,” Byron said dramatically, “that fruit grows on the branches of the tree of knowledge of life and death.” Byron chuckled to himself. “That is to say, it would be against the rules to tell you.”
“The desert,” I said. “What’s the desert? Is it just a part of this dream?”
“This desert is outside of your dreams. It is real.”
I squinted at the image of myself, who was apparently a hundred and eighty years older than me.
“Are dreams real?” I countered, trying to gauge what my future self meant. Byron let out a snarky giggle and said nothing.
“There’s a reason you’re having this dream,” he said. “There’s a reason I’m having a lucid dream of the past.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “This is not definitely your future. This is just one eigenstate. This future has a forty percent chance of happening. To me, it has one hundred percent certainty because it’s the past, but only forty percent of your future selves end up here.”
“Jeez,” I said, looking around the wasteland.
“I know. But listen, don’t think of it as a forty percent chance that you’ll end up here,” he warned. “It’s not that simple. That’s a little worse than a coin flip, which is still not bad betting odds. Forty percent probability of this happening to you means that forty percent of the future versions of yourself end up here. We’re miserable. We hate it. The other sixty percent have somehow averted crisis, and probably end up dying of natural causes in some vastly different branch of reality. But forty percent of your soul will be trapped here, dead but living.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to decrease the chance that this happens. The more you decrease it in the present, less of your possible futures are trapped here.”
“And how do I do that?”
“That’s the trick. The rub. That’s the tough part. But its also the important part. First, you’ve got to figure out where this blue desert came from, and learn more about it. Then you’ve got to become its shaman.”
“Its shaman?” I asked, squinting at the Dream me. He did seem to look older and wiser. But maybe that was just a trick of the light.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to be weird. It’s going to be dangerous. And you’re going to have to do a lot of very odd things. But this dream is coming to an end soon. I cannot tell you about them anyway - I remember trying to learn about them on my own, with limited success.”
I felt my body rising, a lifting force pulling me off the ground. I looked down and saw my sneakers lift off the rooftop. I looked at Byron, the older version of myself. He looked torn, conflicted, like he had something he wanted to say, but couldn’t.
“What is it?” I asked as I floated away.
As Byron became a small red-clad ant on the rooftop below, I could barely hear his words. He shouted through cupped hands.
“The river Lethe, don’t drink the water!”
In silence, I drifted away into the sky, out of dream, out of memory.