The Other Side of Nowhere (6 page)

He got up to look for Gale.

He went up the stairs, first to the bedroom, then the guestroom, and finally back downstairs and into the kitchen. He looked everywhere, all the while feeling as if he had just missed her—like she had just left the room—and so he continued, over and over again, searching continuously without a trace. 

After a short while, he gave up and proceeded back into the living room, thinking that if he stayed in one spot long enough, his wife might walk by. 

But she never did.

He began to watch the television again. It was still the news, except this time they were covering a car accident. The headline read
Auto Accident at 45
th
and Main.

But Johnny ignored it.

He walked over to the nearby fireplace and took one of the pictures of the two of them. It was an old photograph—about seven years ago—with Gale sitting on a chair and Johnny standing behind her. She was wearing a dark green dress, her long red hair flowing down over her shoulders like a cloud. And her face—

What the hell?
He thought. 
What’s wrong with her face?

It was smudged, distorted, faded. He threw the picture into the sofa—it bounced and shattered onto the ground—and he quickly found another. 

This one had been taken only a year ago, but his wife’s face was exactly the same as the last. Frantically, he looked through them all, tossing them back until at last there were no others left.  This couldn’t be right. Why were all the pictures smudged?
Someone must have done this
, he thought.

He sat again on the sofa, rubbing his forehead so hard it burned.

He looked at the television again. The headline had changed again. This time, when he looked at the words on the muted screen, his eyes widened, and a sudden rush of disbelief rolled over his entire body. The headline read:
Gale Abram Dies of Cancer. She was thirty-four.

He didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t do anything at all. He just sat there, staring at the words. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. Gale was here somewhere, and any minute she’d walk through the front door, back from the market or the church, complaining about how bad the traffic was and wondering all the time what Johnny was up too. And the second she got there, they would hug and kiss and laugh and cry. And she would smile that smile of hers, that wonderful and beautiful smi—

That smile,
he thought, and tried to remember it. It was right on the edge of his mind, but he couldn’t bring it back. It was gone, lost somehow, like he misplaced it.

Oh God!
he thought.
I can’t remember anymore!

He continued to watch the news broadcast in hopes of seeing her face, but they never showed it.  They went through interviews with her friends and some doctors, and finally concluded with a glimpse of her funeral. A lot of people were there, including her parents, friends, sister, extended family, and even some people Johnny didn’t recognize. 

The tears began to gush uncontrollably, unstoppably, and for the first time since he could remember, Johnny wept for his dead wife—wept so hard his cheeks began to hurt, so red with grief that he felt the warmth of the blood like a fire below his skin—wept and screamed and raged and breathed and loved—wept until he cried out with everlasting joy, of acceptance, of understanding, of something so entirely new to him that it shook his mind in a such a way that only those who have transcended can truly understand—he wept, determined and resolved, his mind transfixed and certain—he wept, and wept, and wept, until, at last—

Johnny Abram moved again.

The Door

It was quiet along the road of the great Void.  For an eternity, there had been silence there—there had been peace.  Its peculiar majesty had not been seen or felt by mortal men since the days of the last Buddha, but time, like so many other things, is irrelevant. The Door will wait forever for the chosen few for as long as men draw life from beyond its arch.

There was a rustle of sound, soft and feeble—a movement of a sort, and at first it appeared to be nothing at all, but the all-seeing Void knew better, for the strange visitor from the Other Side had stirred.

Johnny Abram moved.  It started out small—his right appendix finger curved once with every ounce of force that he could muster, bending like a steel bar—but soon he managed to move a second finger, and another, until finally it was a hand, a foot, an arm, a leg, a neck, a waste, and then, at last, Johnny took a step.

Back again, he moved before the Door. His heart raced with what he had just seen—the dream, vivid with the thought of his dead wife, echoed in his mind like the sound of thunder in an empty room. He had accepted it at last—after all this time of false and lonely solace, Johnny had awakened into grace.

The Door was once again before him, its archway strong and wide. Johnny knew it held his answers—that beyond the oak there was a truth so valuable that to touch it would mean sheer and absolute elation—a joy as pronounced as life itself. He did not know how he knew this, but nonetheless, he could feel its truth encapsulating him. All he had to do was reach out and take it.

He took another step. The Void shook. The sky’s once tranquil demeanor became an outburst as the clouds rose fast, and lightning and thunder broke out against the silent hills of barren earth. The sand returned the shocks of light with their own objective bolts until everything around the Door raged in protest against this new, defiant soul. 

Johnny continued pressing on towards his goal. The Door was just before him, and for the first time it did not feel so out of reach. For the first time since he had been there, within the confines of this place, he believed that he could do it—open the Door. He needed only to reach out—reach out and press his fingers to its wood, to its celestial bark of divine malevolence. 

His fingers rose. He did not know what would happen once he touched it—once the Door was open—but the truth was embedded in him like a shard of glass: that the answer he so desperately sought to know, that he so earnestly longed to understand, would be realized, and he would be free of all of it.

He touched it.

MARVELOUS AND WONDERFUL IT CAME!

Images, thoughts, patterns, answers, questions, emotions, years, decades, centuries, millennia, gods, mortals, death, life, and the Universe, itself, collided into one simple piece of majestic delight known throughout Existence as Man, and for a single and infinite moment of reality, Johnny Abram was Creation.

He was Jeremy Jones from South Dakota, raised at 4300 Bently Dr. 12301, father of seven, brother, cousin, uncle, and grandfather, born September 16
th
1943 at 1:33 A.M., dead on November 25
th
2005 at 3:13 P.M. from pulmonary failure.

He was Lu Mei Gou of the Han Dynasty, brought up in a noble home, a devout follower of the old faith, a mother of fourteen, grandmother to forty-one, and great-grandmother to eighty-four servants of the Empire. 

He was Sirius A, the brightest Star in all of Earth’s sky, made entirely of plasma, carbon and oxygen, fusing hydrogen for nearly all its life, born approximately 13.7 billion years before man could read or write.

He was the rock. He was the tree. He was the wind. He was all the empty space between. He was everything that ever was, and all that came to be. He was a single molecule. He was everything.

Forever he was, and then not at all, for suddenly it all came down, back inside that feeble shell, and just as quickly as it had happened, he was mortal and small and with a mind so finite that he could scarcely comprehend the light within the Door. 

He stood atop the threshold of it, within the archway, the blinding light of The Other Place before him. 

Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with joy, bursts of laughter and happy tears of love enveloping his smiling cheeks. He reached out toward The Place—toward the Light of Eternity—toward whatever it was that had caused him to feel this way—

And he heard a voice.

Johnny.
Johnny, wake up.

That voice. It was so distantly familiar, like the dream of mortality, like being born, and it called to him. That voice. It rang throughout his body like a rope around his waist, tugging his mind towards it.

Johnny. Johnny, wake up.

He took a step back. That voice. It was like a song within his mind, a symphony of words, and it called to him. Oh, how it called to him.

Johnny. Johnny, wake up.

Another step back, and he stood once more before the goliath Door inside the everlasting desert.

Johnny. Johnny, wake up.

He was floating now, backwards, like a hooked fish. And before long he was back inside the desert Void, the wondrous fanatical lights of the thundering sky raging all around him, until, at last, it stopped.

Johnny.

He felt himself lift up, and up, and up, and away from the place, back to something so ancient that he didn’t recognize it. Back to flesh and bone and blood and brain and heart and life.

Johnny, wake up!

A Hospital in Georgia

Johnny Abram woke up.

Immediately, he turned to the side of the hospital bed and vomited. The chunks of pink sludge gushed out of him, and he felt the pain of every piece.

“Whoa, John! Easy there, man!”  cried a familiar voice from his left. “Nurse!  We got an emergency here!”

A woman rushed in, saw the mess, and called for assistance. Before he knew it, Johnny was surrounded by hospital staffers, frantically running back and forth between rooms, touching machines, knobs, needles, and bags of cold liquid intended for his veins. 

“You don’t look so good, Johnny,” said the same voice from before. “Have yourself a hard night out?”

Johnny looked and saw a man sitting near the window. It was El, wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt with the words “NAVY” written in black letters across the front.  His chair was turned around so that his hands could rest over the back, and he stared at Johnny with a gaping mouth. 

“El,” muttered Johnny as best he could.  “El, what happened?”

“You had a run in with a ’82 pick-up—took a beating. You should see the other guy.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s fine. Front of the car took most of the damage, but you got hit in the side. You know you been out of it for almost three days? They said you might not wake up, man. Pretty scary.”

“Three days?” He said, rubbing his eyes. “When did you get here?”

“About eight hours after they brought you in, but they wouldn’t let me see you until you were done getting stitched up.”

“You mean you’ve been here this whole time?”  Asked Johnny.

“Been trying my best to be here whenever you woke back up. I figured if you heard me bitching at you, you might snap out of it.” He looked at the floor. “Susie’s been real worried, you know. She was crying up a storm over all this. First Gale, and then you? Said she wasn’t sure she could take it.”

“I’m sorry, El,” he muttered. 

“Dammit, Johnny,” El snapped. “Why you always gotta go apologizing for?  Ain’t like you meant to get hit by the damn thing.”

“Did you come here all the way from Clearwater?”

El nodded. “Yeah, but don’t you go worrying about that. You got me down as your emergency contact, so they called me right away. Got my ass in the truck and started driving as soon as the wife let me.”

“Sir,” said a nurse, which had been standing by while the two had been talking.  “I need to give you some medication. It’s going to put you to sleep for a few more hours. Okay?”

“Alright,” Johnny agreed, and laid his head back against the pillow. 

“Rest easy,” said El. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Johnny looked at his friend, sitting in the chair, jokingly waving
goodbye
to him and half-smiling, and Johnny smiled, himself, glad to be back and feeling almost relieved by it. But as the medication took its hold, his eyes grew heavy and the world faded into thought, surrounding him in dreams. 

He dreamed an imagination. He dreamed fiercely. He dreamed of images and wonders that his eyes had never seen: of Lu Mei Gou and the Han Dynasty; of Jeremy Jones from South Dakota; of a rock; of a single blade of grass in the backyard of his grandmother’s house; of a desert road without end; of stars; of being born and bathed in light so beautiful that it could bring a grown man to tears.

And, finally, as the images dissipated and he suddenly found himself alone, he saw what appeared to be a door, standing alone in the dark.

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