8

John had wanted to wait until the weekend so that the normal Magnetic Resonance Imager business of patient traffic wouldn’t get in the way of my big send-off. I myself didn’t really much care whether I disrupted any schedules or not as long as I got after my Abby going as soon as possible. Nevertheless, he had to remain so didn’t feel like subjecting himself to getting caught doing anything weird, especially when it came to his occupation. He would be meeting me down at the big magnet place for about ten on Saturday morning and that was that. I didn’t know whether I needed him or not, otherwise I might have just climbed into the thing myself, without his even knowing it. But out of respect for him I decided to do it his way. This gave me some time to while away. About two days.

I wondered what, if anything, might I make the best use of during my stay here that might have some relevance to the layers to come. Actually, I couldn’t think of a single thing. Perhaps, I finally wondered, it might gain me some insight to visit the Abby here. It might help me deal with whatever atrocious versions I might encounter later on. Not that the one here was all that bad, I thought. Certainly not because she would have considered abortion. This freedom of choice was her right here. Just because I didn’t agree with it didn’t mean it was her fault. After all, it was the society that permitted it. I tried to submerge any negative feelings for her with these rationalizations.

The first thing I did was look up her aunt. I had remembered the name from what Abby had told me. I hadn’t actually been out to her place; it was Abby who had come and gone from there several times to get things and so on. I had never joined her on these trips, as I knew her aunt had this cult leader thing against me. I found her name, Marilou Moores, in the phone book. I recognized the street, because it was in a subdivision where all of the streets were named after gemstones. Topaz Street was in West Lakeshore, an area on the lakefront off of Robert E. Lee Boulevard. I figured I had better call first instead of surprising them. Besides, I didn’t fancy driving on the right for a whole half hour of what time I had left here, especially in a borrowed car, if the door were to be slammed in my face on the front end.

I figured Abby would be there in spite of the fact that her aunt had rejected her upon discharge from the hospital earlier: relatives rally to help each other with medical predicaments. Her aunt should help her with pregnancy. Or I guess with an abortion, too, if it were to turn out that way.

I called. Her Aunt Marilou answered.

“Hello,” I said to her, “this is Rocky.” She hung up.

I called again. She answered again, saying hello more cautiously.

“Hello,” once more from me. She hung up again. I gave up trying the telephone, and I certainly was right not to want to drive there and have to deal with the woman.

It was a Thursday morning in the second week of July. Pensacola, about three hours away, was just as hot, but it had a beach. I hoped that this Abby might frequent the beach there like the former one did. If so, I could confront her without her aunt. And even if this Abby wasn’t there, at least I could unwind with my ice chest and boombox. I just hoped that I still liked the music on my tapes.

Since Abby had taken her car when she split, I tried to convince John that I needed to borrow his. He informed me that he needed his transportation for his work, as he often gets called out in the middle of the night for emergencies. But he smoothed it out for me to borrow Ava’s—actually, her late husband’s. It had sat inert since his death, Ava using her own sensible sedan to cart around Les. And so with very little time wasted, I was on the road to Florida with a satchel of tuna sandwiches provided by Ava.

The only car I find more luxurious than the little Mercedes convertible is a cab because it comes with a driver. I was content to suffer the few hours with this red two-seater, though, because I looked so good in it. The late Ralph Ebe had only put eight thousand miles on it, so I felt it was my duty to finish up its breaking in. It was my duty to the Mercedes-Benz company. Until I hit the Florida state line, of course. Some things never change, like the aerial speed traps in that state. Luckily, I drove uneventfully the whole route, being careful to observe all signs, which at times in a slider’s career can be confusing.

By the time I hit Pensacola my hair was streaked back straight, as I had gone the whole way with the top down. There’s not much on this stretch of I-10, not even a lot of fast food, so I just rocked out the whole way to vaguely familiar songs on the stereo and drank colas from my heavy metal ice chest. I stopped at my favorite beach spot, the spot I had been to so many times before. I knew it was a long shot, but I looked for Abby’s Volvo wagon. No luck. Then again, I could easily have missed it, because it was crowded here, even though it was a weekday. I parked parallel to the Gulf and walked the beach a way with my necessary equipment until I found the perfect place for my beach towel. I unfolded it out and then let the wind off of the Gulf cast it out straight as I lowered my hands to rest it onto the sand. I ate the sandwiches which, I was relieved, did not involve rye bread. There were three of them, but I had no trouble finishing them as I was very hungry. Next, the ice chest consummated its mission providing me my can of beer as the chaser to my sandwiches. My boombox, because it was so heavy it sat so securely on my ice chest as I had carried it, was now dug into the sand next to me, rendering an acceptable blare. And so with belly full, throat quenched, and music on, I lay down on my back and loosened my sunglasses so that they rested lightly on the bridge of my nose. This position would have made them comfortable on my face for hours had they not been kicked off by someone’s bare foot, the sprayed sand stinging me in addition to the pound of the heel.

Between the time of my attack and the realization that I’d been attacked was a split-second of goofiness. Stunned, I sprang upright to a sitting position during this split-second. Then I saw my assailant. It was Abby, of course. Who else would attack me on this planet? And it was her kick, of course. And it was my face, of course!

“What’d you do that for?” I shouted at her.

“Because you’re a piece of shit, that’s why!” she shouted back. “You walk off from that scan like you don’t even know me. You got me pregnant, and you knew it. And you just walked off—knowing I was pregnant by you, you son of a bitch. You couldn’t have cared less.”

“Actually, Abby, I—”

“No ‘actually,’” she interrupted. “The way I said it is the only ‘actually’ that actually happened.” And then she began kicking sand on my chest, as that was the highest she could reach with me sitting up. This frustrated her, so she picked up my boombox. This was no mean feat, as its old vintage guaranteed it to be a very heavy burden—the gaudy chrome and steel structure-with-handle that promised to pervert any delicate music that dared tweet or woof. The speakers on it were so large and powerful that occasionally I had trouble with their magnets partially erasing the very tapes I would play. Targeting me with it, she let it fly.

Luckily, it didn’t hit me, because it really could have caused me serious injury. But it hit close. I saw the whole bunch of big batteries bouncing out of it as it somersaulted away. With this she stormed off. I called for her, but she ignored me.

“Wait,” I called out, “come back. Please. The whole reason I came out here was in hopes of finding you. Please stop.” She didn’t. By now, my eyes were stinging from the sand in them, so I couldn’t even follow her if I had wanted. I rushed instead to a pipe at the beach entrance which pointed up to provide a shower. I flooded my eyes to wash them out. By the time I was sighted again, she was out of sight.

I drove back to New Orleans that same day, my mission a failure. How much could I have gained from a rapport with her, anyway, I wondered. To hell with her, I thought. I aimed my borrowed car due west to my apartment and did it in less than the three hours.

When I had returned home, I watched television all the next day. I watched about Israelis hating Arabs, about Arabs hating Israelis. I saw how Iraq had used chemical weapons during an insane war with Iran, and how Iran proudly professed its hate for America. I saw how South Africa treated its majority race, and how ghettos bred hate as group-think for the people socially jailed there. I saw all of these things and wished that the Earth could just stop spinning suddenly, shaking all of the people right off of it, including, I might add, the Abby here.

I saw hints of what had happened in Cambodia years earlier, as well as what had happened in China recently when Democracy reared her beautiful head. And I saw the idiot newscasters include little human interest vignettes, often called “The Lighter Side” of the news or other such folly, as if that could balance the horrors that stained this world. I saw all of this, and I decided that if all of the people would not oblige me by falling off, then I’d do the next best thing and try to leave it myself, if only temporarily.

So that Friday night I decided to try to leave my body again. I remembered how both confused and exhilarated I was at my first possible success the night of Ralph’s demise.

Success? Maybe it was just a dream. Let’s face it, I had had a lot of bad feelings falling off to sleep that night. But it sure felt like it with the floating, the perspective, and the thud when I had returned via my one-point psychic landing, thanks to the telephone.

I chose the oak bedroom. Normally I would have followed protocol and chosen the French provincial for this, since out-of-body experiences fell into the “whimsy” category. But I was dead serious this time. I was going to do it in the “manly” room. I was definitely going to do it.

I lay in bed, serially relaxing my body parts, building up my alpha waves, yet leaving enough volition to urge myself up; and while all of this foreplay took place, I awaited that magical time between wakefulness and sleep from where I had hoped to lift off.

Houston, we have lift-off, I thought to myself after realizing my position—about three feet above my sleeping body.

And this time, it was my own experience!

I went up, up, farther up...striving for the highest places. The higher I went the clearer the perspective. I was ascending in a straight vertical path, never drifting even an inch. To do so, I intuitively realized, would have been sliding, and no thank you.

But I could see the different realities, the different layers back and forth, each with its own airspace straight up, fanning out from the tight Rocky-shaped shaft in which I continued to rise. I saw thousands of these layers in all directions, except that I could feel two major trends.

Off one way was distasteful, increasingly so layer after layer. And I could see my Abby! Thousands, perhaps a million layers down. And she was in a nasty place indeed. On the surface, it seemed quite regular, but in the psyche of the species it was really foul. She was O.K. She was suffering, but she was O.K. And I could see her in an obstetrician’s office, and they could hear the heartbeat. So my son was O.K., too! Son? My God, why did I say that? And the bastard was trying to talk her into an abortion. And she suffered through his reprimands.

Well, I was ready to slide right then! Forget the magnet—I had a way to get right to her with pinpoint accuracy. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Why the hell not? I tried, but I was as tight in my Rocky-shaped shaft as a cookie in a tin. And I saw all of the Abbys down the line toward her layer. And they were all having abortions. And the ones past her layer were doing that also, or worse—Holy Shit! I knew where that direction was heading. I couldn’t quite see the end, but it was there off in the distance; and I got the waves—the wind—from there. I knew then where it all ended in this terrible direction.

At this point I felt death imminent. I looked straight down at my resting body—light years down, it seemed, and saw no reason for alarm.

As I looked back up I caught “the wind” from the apparent end point, and those suicidal feelings began again. Homicidal, too. Anybody or anything, I felt, could push me that far. And I hated myself. God knows why, but God had nothing to do with this. Actually, I felt less of His presence the more I gazed down the line.

I saw the perspective. If I were a true exister, then I saw the true perspective, and I knew your world, reader, the world I was in presently, was about a third of the way toward that terrible end from some midpoint that separates two extremes. And that terrible end, millions of layers down, conjured up in me the destructive emotions that caused the most primitive and oldest area of my brain to predominate—that is, that reptilian remnant we have spent millennia evolving grey matter and convolutions around just to overrule.

There is a certain consummation in feelings that are suicidal and/or homicidal (What’s the difference?). It’s a martyrdom that self-defines fulfillment in a void. Such fulfillment in a void has no competition.

And I was getting angry, too, in that wind; so angry that I was feeling the panic that results from anger without action. I could see all of the versions of me down that direction. My simplest realized faults I saw develop and progressively get blown out of proportion in those persons that were me. My aristocratic tastes here went on to distort into incredible scorn for all that was not to my liking and then on to twist and warp into hatred for all that was not me. Disregard for the certainly non-existent feelings of inanimate objects blurred to include total non-recognition of the feelings of living things: first, the lower animals; then higher up to include all men, women, and children, too; and somewhere off in the distance, toward that most terrible end, probably near that terrible end (possibly at that terrible end), was the soulless vacuum of non-feeling, non-caring for myself. This meant, of course, the ultimate scorn: non-caring for God. I looked back down and wanted to kill the holy body that slept below me. Would that have been murder or suicide, and who cared?

I willed myself heavier. I sucked in mass through pure creation fueled by need. I needed to kill my body below me so that I could survive in this void and feel its fulfillment. I felt the gravity pulling on me as I succeeded in adding weight. The conflicting good will that had originally propped me up began buckling under the pressure. Soon I would reach critical mass and plummet, fists of hate cutting through the distances like hydrofoils, aimed at my open brain that offered itself to whatever wanted in. It was a sitting duck, my brain was, open so as to allow my spirit leave from its entrapment of thought. Open—and vulnerable.

But before my platform of reason popped from the weight of the rage, before I started to race down to something terrible and profitless, I caught another wind. And this wind, like salt poured into a beer, foamed out of me instantly the reptilian’s call for primitive self-awareness and self-statement via the cause and effect of destruction.

I saw in the other direction. Way before where I had graduated with honors. Way before I had originally been born unslid into a doctor’s hands. I recognized most of the layers I had spent any length of time in, as well as saw the ones farther up I had been unlucky enough to have been deprived of. I saw the world of my real parents. I saw the incidental ripples of differences among worlds that had started my mother smoking and my father drinking. I saw quite clearly, because I strained to, the random automobile traffic patterns of the different worlds—the patterns that progressively interweaved into the latticework that coalesced to doom my father to his alcohol-related death as well as the patterns in layers before that would have spared him.

My mother smokes nervously, one cigarette after another goes into her remaining lung as Father weaves conspicuously in his green Riviera. “Slow down,” she says. “Be careful,” she warns.

“Leave me alone!” he shouts at her. “Do you want to do the driving?”

“You’re going too fast,” she tells him.

“Watch this,” he offers, and he accelerates defiantly. She fumbles to buckle her seat belt, but he reaches over with his right hand to interfere, taking her prudence as an insult. She fights back, using her nails.

“Damn you!” he blasts directly at her, and she winces at the smell of old liquor on his breath.

“Please let me!” she begs, and in all of the excitement she starts hacking because of her bronchitis, rendering her helpless in this coughing fit. A car horn Dopplers away past them, making him swerve back with attention. Once the corrective action is established, he attacks the release button on the restraint she has now had the opportunity to engage. She finally casts him off successfully by burning him with her cigarette.

“Stop!” I shouted at them. “Stop it now! You’re the last parents I ever had! Please!”

The impact is off-centered, explosions of shattered clear glass and fragmented red tail light plastic flying away in arcs behind the spinning car. The deathly twirl of the automobile is instantly jammed inert by the next impact, and their bodies are limp and flapping and snapped and flung, springing from the vehicle sloppily, catching the knocks of intervening edges of dash, window frame, and solid oak tree.

I cast my head away, unable to tolerate anymore. When I looked back, my focus stopped some distance short of that terrible layer, where I saw their car stopping obediently at the red light. They hold hands devoutly, and the light turns green to shepherd them safely home.

I rested.

I saw the girls that were Ana/Ava/Abby before I had ever met her. I saw how I met her in those better worlds. And I saw our lives together in those layers, too.

And looking that way, I became light as a feather. Looking that way, the reptile in me fried a scaly death. I had been foolish to seek him out for so long. It was good riddance. I strained to see an endpoint but failed: I was too far over on the wrong side of midline. But I could tell that it was good.

As suicidally murderous as I had felt, I now descended without so much as an attitude problem. On the way down, I cast one last furtive glance into the direction my Abby had been pushed. I saw my final glimpse of her. I saw that she was, unfortunately, still travelling, catapulted choicelessly by the magnet. I knew that worlds were getting worse for her and looked forward to the idea of a rescue. I passed over martyrdom, for I was ready for heroism.

I slept until eight the next morning and found myself rolling out of a bed of French provincial. I didn’t know why. It was just this joke my apartment kept playing on me. I shaved and showered, dressed, and got my ass down to Dr. Landry’s hospital for some coercive magnetism.