Oracle--Solar Wind Page 7

  By this point, Ret was certain he needed glasses. He shut his eyes and put his hands over them, hoping a few hours of rest would fix his vision problems. But, even with his eyes closed, he could still see the rays—well, sort of. Of course, he couldn’t really see anything, but he could sense things rushing by him at incredibly high speeds. They were like vibrations or tiny, tiny waves, whizzing all around him. And the more he concentrated on them, the more he felt like he was moving with them. He grew a little dizzy and got a little scared. It was like coming under a trance or falling into the twilight zone. For a moment, he thought he was upside-down. He escaped by opening his eyes.

  Ret was sure of it now: he was losing his mind. Everywhere he looked, he could see random rays of light. When the bus entered long stretches of rural countryside, the number of beams decreased, but whenever the bus passed through more populated areas, they increased in volume. The thing that convinced Ret he was going insane was the fact that no one else seemed to notice what he was seeing.

  Eventually, the bus reached the end of its line, this time in New York City. Ret let all of his fellow riders get off the bus before him; unlike him, they seemed to have things to do and places to go. He watched as they gathered just outside the bus to pose for pictures with the famous Manhattan skyline as the backdrop. For Ret, however, the iconic sight was a nightmarish scene. To his utter bewilderment, the entire metropolitan area looked like it was putting on a laser light show of colossal proportions. There were beams and streams and gleams of light literally all over the place. They were bouncing off buildings, rippling across rivers, and cruising between clouds. Every shade of the rainbow was represented, some colors more prevalent than others. It seemed the metropolis was receiving just as many signals as it was sending. Beams large and small were coming from every angle, even down from the sky above. There was not a single space in the air that was not being filled by this strange phenomenon.

  And then something dreadful happened: Ret felt an all-too-familiar numbness in the palm of his hand. He knew exactly what it was the moment he felt it. It was a scar. Ret refused to look at it. Instead, he clenched his fist as tightly as he could, hoping to suffocate the scar until it went away. But the harder he squeezed, the deeper it throbbed. In anger, he slammed his fist against the bus window. The window shattered, and the whole bus shook. The driver glanced back at his one remaining passenger. Ret waved his hand to repair the glass, then hurried off the bus.

  The Oracle was turning out to be a lot like a bad reputation: Ret just couldn’t seem to get away from it. In the last few weeks, he had traveled some two-thousand miles throughout the eastern United States without any kind of itinerary. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going, nor did anyone know where he had been. And yet, somehow, the Oracle had found him. It knew where he was. It wouldn’t leave him alone. Didn’t it know he was trying to get away from it? Couldn’t it take a hint?

  Perhaps a subconscious decision made by his empty stomach, Ret ventured into the Big Apple. Manhattan was such a busy, noisy place. Ret marveled at the hordes of diverse people walking the streets, each and every one of them appearing to have something urgent to do. His aimlessness was such a contrast to their purposefulness. “Where is everybody going?” he wondered as pedestrian after pedestrian buzzed by him. He was moseying along at a much slower pace than the flow of the crowd, and he was almost sorry whenever he realized he was slowing someone down—someone who obviously had something much more important to do. More than once, Ret craned his neck to look upward at the seemingly endless skyscrapers, wondering if, in the grand scheme of things, the transactions and redactions that occurred on the other side of their concrete walls really mattered much. Ret came to the conclusion that even if these people could see the waves and rays that he could see all around them, they likely would be too preoccupied with other, more important things to even notice them. It seemed the city was in the business of busyness—and whether that busyness was real or imagined, well, Ret probably wasn’t educated enough to tell.

  Ret tried to flee the din of downtown by seeking out a bench in Central Park. He loved a good bench, a simple place to sit and think while the hosts of mankind walked by. Now that he was going to be a normal person, he wondered what he ought to think about: getting a job? going to school? finding a place to live? what to do this weekend? But no matter how diligently he tried to focus on his new life, he just couldn’t concentrate. Voices kept interrupting his thoughts. They were the voices of children laughing, dogs barking, and adults talking. Ret would look around, expecting to find a person behind him or a baby beside him, but no one was ever there. He stopped thinking about himself and instead turned his attention to a pair of kids, playing about a hundred yards to his left. They were throwing a Frisbee, and Ret could clearly hear every word they were saying to each other. He could see the vibrations leaving their mouths and moving through the air. One by one, Ret listened in on the dialogues being spoken all over the park, their sounds carried on the wind. From his remote location on that stationary bench, he could hear every word being said and every conversation being held in the entire park.

  Ret plugged his ears. “That’ll stop it,” he reasoned. But then he heard static—not in his ears but in his mind. As he tried to shake it off, the static started to make noises like the tuning of a radio to a specific channel, and as he sifted through the static, he began to pick up those channels. He heard music and sports talk, commercials and news—all as if he was a human radio.

  “What in the world is going on?” he mused with dread, all but certain the Oracle was to blame. He figured he ought to at least look at his scar, which had been throbbing for hours. Mostly against his will, he pried open his left fist, fully expecting to see the image of an antenna that was acting like a lightning rod, picking up everything in the airwaves. And there, in the middle of the palm and to the right of the moai man, was a new scar indeed. It was an empty circle with two straight lines protruding from its edges. One of the lines was coming out from the very bottom of the circle, pointing down, with a sort of pennant or triangular flag at its end. The other line was coming out from the right curve of the circle, but instead of having a pennant at its end, there were four bars or barbs. These four barbs were parallel to each other, equal in length, and all pointing straight down. Together, this line and its four barbs looked like a comb that had a handle and four teeth.

  As with all previous scars, Ret had no idea what this new one meant. He could probably argue it had some relation to the beams of light and waves of sounds he was now seeing, but that was just a guess. Perhaps it really was an antenna. But, frankly, he didn’t really want to waste any more of his time or energy trying to figure it out.

  Just then, a Frisbee landed on the grass near Ret’s feet. It belonged to the kids who were playing a little ways off to his left. Ret picked it up and turned to give it to the boy who came to retrieve it.

  “Here you go, Jimmy,” Ret told him. The boy stood still in shock for a moment, alarmed that a total stranger knew his name, before running off.

  When the Frisbee had left his hand, Ret noticed how the new scar looked a bit different. The line with the four barbs had moved from the right side of the circle to the top, while everything else had stayed the same. Still watching the scar, Ret returned to his original seat on the bench, and, sure enough, the line with the four barbs moved back to the right side of the circle.

  Now, a developing scar was nothing new to Ret; the Nile lotus scar had come piece by piece, literally line upon line. But a changing scar was an entirely new concept. He swiveled to his left and back repeatedly, and each time the line with four barbs mimicked his movement. Then he started walking around Central Park. If he walked straight, the line stayed still, but if he turned, the line turned with him. Even the slightest bend in the road registered on the scar.

  At length, Ret realized the scar was acting as a sort of compass. It didn’t have a needle that always pointed north like a normal compass, but the
line with the barbs always pointed whichever way he happened to be facing at the moment. If Ret turned west, the barbed lined swung over to the left (or west) side of the circle. If he turned east, it moved to the right (or east) side. The line with the pennant, however, never moved. It pointed constantly to the south (which Ret figured out when he turned south and saw the barbed line overlap the line with the pennant).

  It would be a few more days before Ret gleaned the meaning of the scar’s barbs. By accident, he became part of the crew of a sightseeing tour whose shorthanded director, a rough and tough northeasterner, saw Ret passing by and called on his strength to help handle all of the luggage. In exchange, Ret asked if he could join the outing, which consisted entirely of Chinese tourists. And so, Ret’s travels continued. The tour bus hit all the tourist hotspots from New York to Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. As Ret traveled around the region, he periodically observed his scar. He noticed how the number of barbs on the moving line seemed proportional to the number of waves and rays in the air. In the big cities, there were four barbs. In the suburbs, there were three. In the rural areas, there were two or sometimes just one. The barbs seemed to be a means of measuring the activity in the airwaves. The line with the pennant, however, never changed.

  By the end of the tour, Ret was convinced the Chinese travelers had taken more pictures of him than of the actual sights. It was as though they had never seen an American before. Ret would laugh to himself, thinking, “You should have seen what I used to look like.” And it was true: his hair was now more dirty blond than golden yellow, his blue eyes more deep than bright. His skin was fully tanned (and then some), and he hadn’t shaved in weeks.

  One day, while walking the streets of Baltimore, Ret found a beat up, old bicycle out by the trash in an alley. As his flip-flops were wearing thin, he reckoned he could benefit from a set of wheels. The bike had no chain, which worked fine for Ret since he didn’t plan on doing much pedaling anyway. He simply turned the wheel’s metal spokes with his mind. He tried to keep away from the big cities, as they were literally a headache for him. Besides the beams he could see and the waves he could hear, Ret involuntarily picked up all kinds of television shows and satellite communications. In midair, he could read emails and text messages, see photographs and webpages, even overhear telephone calls—any and all content that was being shared wirelessly. This was not by choice, of course. He wasn’t trying to spy or pry. If there was a way to turn it off, he would have done so a long time ago. He couldn’t help it if a beam of light or a ray of energy or a wave of sound bumped into him, which was happening multiple times each second. The truth was, these sorts of things had always been around him, and everyone else for that matter; the only difference now was he could see them all.

  Now that he knew something of the scar’s workings, Ret reasoned his best bet at getting it to leave him alone was to settle down someplace that was in the middle of nowhere. The more he withdrew from the rest of the world, the fewer waves he would see in the air. The more he isolated himself from people, the less his scar would be agitated. While most people were searching for the good reception provided by four bars, Ret wanted no bars. But where exactly was the middle of nowhere?

  The answer came to him in a New Jersey rail yard: Canada. There was a Canadian train on the tracks there, unloading a shipment of lumber. It was perfect: Ret would head far into the north. It was obvious that the scar wanted Ret to go south because the line with the pennant was ever pointing in that direction. So, as if to spite the scar, Ret would wend his way in exactly the opposite direction. That would teach it.

  Ret climbed aboard one of the empty boxcars. The train headed northwest, weaving in between some of the Great Lakes as it crossed the international border into Canada. Ret kept track of neither the day nor the time, but he could tell it was the height of the summer season because the sun’s path stretched far into the north. The daylight lasted long, and the scenery was beautiful. He kept the boxcar’s sliding door ajar just wide enough for him to sit on the edge of the floor and watch the landscape go rushing by. With each click of the wheels along the tracks, Ret could see fewer rays in the air, feel the scar waning in strength, and knew he was inching ever closer to his new life.

  With less of man’s waves crowding the skies, Ret began to see more of Mother Nature’s. He had eyes to see the different wavelengths of sunlight, separating visible light into the colors of the rainbow. He could see the grass and trees absorbing all of these colors but reflecting green. There were heat waves and infrared waves. And then there was the wind moving through it all—not so much disrupting it as merely passing through it. It reminded Ret of some mornings back home when he used to watch the wind blow away the low clouds that had rolled in from the sea overnight, except now he could see the wind as though it was the clouds. It swirled and billowed, rushed and died, filling gaps and flowing wherever it could. It was energy moving through the infinitesimal bits of gaseous matter called air.

  It was about the time he saw a “Welcome to Saskatchewan” sign when Ret began to feel lonely—really lonely. Many days had passed. He didn’t know where Saskatchewan was, but it sure sounded like a middle-of-nowhere place. And it looked like one, too: hours would go by without seeing any sign of human civilization, and when he did see something, it was usually just an old, dilapidated barn. Ret was getting anxious for the train to stop, thinking it had taken him far enough. But it kept chugging north.

  And so, Ret was left alone with only his thoughts to keep him company, a dangerously depressing set of circumstances. There he was in a dusty old boxcar, riding a train that was speeding toward the northern edge of the earth. Perhaps the onset of delirium, he began to hear a voice in his head, saying:

  “What are you doing? You used to have a good life, remember? Pauline loves you as her own son. She took you in—fed you and clothed you—with the precious little she had. Ana adores you. You were the brother she never had. Paige prays for you every morning and night; you couldn’t find someone more loyal, except for her father. Mr. Coy has been nothing but helpful to you—a true friend without whose help you would still be researching triangles. Ret, these people are the salt of the earth. They have made great sacrifices. Some even died.”

  “Why can’t I be the one who dies? I’d love to put an end to this misery right now. How nice would that be? What an easy out!”

  “That may be so for you. But the path of life, if followed right, is designed to lead us to assignments that will stretch our souls, not shrivel them. Some are asked to die for the cause of truth. But most others, including you, are asked to live for it. Ivan and Alana, Conrad and Lydia, the peoples of Sunken Earth and Fire Island—these are they who gave their death. The rest of you have survived to give your life. And, in some ways, asking for one’s life is to demand more than asking for one’s death.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It’s naturally not an easy thing to live each day with your private will in subjection to a nobler, harder one. Think of a mother’s sleepless nights, a father’s evaporating paycheck, or those saintly souls who give day after day of their lives in behalf of a handicapped child or aging parent. It’s common for us to think of our time on this earth as ‘my life’ and not as a life that was given to you for a special purpose. Is a child not asked from his infancy what he wants to be when he grows up?—never mind what the world might need him to be instead.”

  “What do you want from me? I filled the Oracle halfway, didn’t I? It wasn’t my dream job, but I kept at it for a while. Now it’s time for me to live my own life. What if I want to be a doctor or a teacher? Won’t that help to ‘cure the world’? With the powers I have, I could be the world’s greatest geologist or blacksmith or engineer—the possibilities are endless. Why do I have to keep doing this Oracle stuff? I don’t want to look back on my life and realize I wasted it—realize I could have been something but turned out to be nothing. Besides, this whole thing has become too dangerous. I had to call it qu
its, to protect the ones I care about.”

  “Was Sunken Earth not dangerous? Why didn’t you quit after that? And now that you’re far from your loved ones, why aren’t you resuming the quest for elements? Search your heart, Ret. You didn’t leave to save your friends’ lives; you left to save your own life—not to prevent your death, but to save your remaining 70 or so years from being totally swallowed up by a will other than your own. The Oracle intends to ask you to put everything you have and are on the table—this you know. With each element, it has been asking for more and more and still more of you. But now you’re not sure if you’re willing to give it your all. You’re holding something back, Ret. What is it?”

  “Fine, do you want to know what it is? Here it is: I’m expected to cure this world, but I don’t know how to do it, and I’m not sure I can do it. I mean, if it was only up to me, then I could do it. But it’s not only up to me; it’s up to us—all of us. Yes, there are so many problems in this world that need to be fixed, but it’s not the problems that are the real problem. The problems are merely symptoms; they’re not the underlying illness that’s causing the problems. Why can’t people see this? They just mow over the weeds without getting down to the root of the problem. The real problem is not what makes the headlines. No, the real problem is us. All of our troubles are merely outgrowths from the evil desires in our hearts. Greed, tyranny, vanity, laziness—these and so many other ills are symptoms of sick hearts. If we cure our own hearts, then the world will cure itself. But how am I supposed to cure someone else’s heart? That’s a choice that each individual person has to make for himself. And it looks to me like most people don’t even care. So that’s why I’m giving up—not because I’m selfish, not because I’m afraid—no, because I don’t know how to do it, and even though the world desperately needs it, I don’t think it really wants it anyway. Look: I’ve collected three elements, and what do I get for it? A world that hates me for it.”