The Rift (4 page)

But that which is artifice occupies a precarious position in the world of nature. Artificial things, particularly those on the scale and complexity of the space shuttle, or of the levee system of the Mississippi, are manufactured at great cost, and must be maintained with great vigilance. Their existence is dependent on the continuation of the conditions under which they were designed. The space shuttle
Challenger
was destroyed when one of its systems was unable to react with sufficient flexibility to an unseasonable frost.

The levee system, on the other hand, was built with the understanding that two things would remain constant. It was understood that flood waters would not rise much higher than they had in the past, and that the land on which the levees were built would not move of its own accord. If either of these constants were removed, the levee system would not be able to prevent nature from returning to the highly artificial landscape which the levees were built to preserve.

The first of these constants was violated regularly. The epic flood of 1927 made obsolete the entire levee system, which was reengineered, the levees being built higher, wider, and with greater sophistication. The flood of 1993 again sent water to a record crest right at the juncture of the Mississippi and the Missouri, and briefly threatened to make St. Louis an island. The inevitable result was a greater commitment to reinforced levees.

The second constant, the requirement that the earth not move, had not been tested.

Though such a test, as history showed, was inevitable.

INLYNE: I’M JUST BUMMIN CUZ I GOT NOPLACE TO SK8.

DOOD S: I’M ALMOST THE ONLY AGGRESSIVE SK8R HERE.

Where
, Jason typed,
is here
?

He was almost holding his breath. Assuming that Dood S was female, which was likely if the online handle was intended to be pronounced “dudess,” Jason might have found himself a potential girlfriend. So far Jason discovered that he and Dood S were the same age. They agreed on bands, on skate brands, and on the study of history (“sux”). They were both reasonably advanced skaters. They could royale and soyale, they could backside and backslide, they could miszou, they could phishbrain and Frank Sinatra. They were both working on perfecting various alley oop maneuvers, but Dood S was making more progress because she, or possibly he, had a place to skate.

The answer flashed on the screen.

DOOD S: SHELBY MONTANA

INLYNE: BUMMER

Jason’s answer was heartfelt.

DOOD S: WHERE RU?

INLYNE: CABELLS MOUND MISSOURI

DOOD S: WHERE IS THAT?

Good question, Jason thought.

Between Sikeston and Osceola
, he typed, feeling sorry for himself. If he were feeling better about living here, he might have mentioned St. Louis and Memphis.

DOOD S: HAHAHA LOL I’M SORRY

INLYNE: ME 2

Jason heard the door slam downstairs. His mom must be home.

RU a girl
? he typed. Flirtation was fairly useless if they lived a thousand miles away from each other, but what the hell. He was lonely. It never hurt to stay in practice.

DOOD S: CAN’T U TELL?

Your pixels look female to me
is what Jason wanted to type, but he couldn’t quite remember how to spell “pixel,” so he typed,
I think you are a girl
.

DOOD S: IM 85 AND A PEDDOFILE HAHAHAHA LOL. WANT TO MEET ME IN THE PARK LITTLE BOY?

INLYNE: VERY FUNNY.

This was not lightening Jason’s mood. He heard his mother’s footsteps on the front stair, and turned as she passed by the door. She was wearing jeans and a tank top. Her cheeks glowed, and there was a sheen of sweat on her chest and throat.

“Hi,” Jason said. “Have fun?”

“It was exhilarating!” she said. “I really felt actualized this time! I could feel the energies rising from the mound!”

“Great,” Jason said.

Catherine Adams was tall and trim and blonde. One of Jason’s friends had once described her as a babe, which had startled him. He hadn’t thought of his mother in those terms. But once it was pointed out to him, he had realized to his surprise that she was, indeed, an attractive woman. At least compared to the mothers of most of his friends.

Catherine walked into the room, her drum balanced on her hip. “Talking to your friends?” Her voice was husky from chanting.

“Yes.” He turned and saw Dood S’s last statement.

DONT MIND MY JOKES HAHAHAHA IM TOKING AS IM TYPING

Jason looked at the screen and concluded that this really wasn’t his day. Catherine looked over his shoulder at the screen and he could hear a frown enter her voice. “Is this anyone
I
know?”

“No,” Jason said. He was tempted to say,
He’s a pedophile in Montana,
but instead said, “Someone I just met. Some little town in Montana. Don’t worry, she’s not going to sell me any grass.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Catherine said. There was an ominous degree of chill finality in her tone.

“Right,” Jason said.

*

About 8 o’clock, a fifth shock was felt; this was almost as violent as the first, accompanied with the usual noise, it lasted about half a minute: this morning was very hazy and unusually warm for the season, the houses and fences appeared covered with a white frost, but on examination it was found to be vapour, not possessing the chilling cold of frost: indeed the moon was enshrouded in awful gloom.

Louisiana Gazette
(St. Louis) Saturday, December 21,1811

Supper was
not
a good experience. Jason ate chicken soup left over from the weekend and day-old homemade bread while his mother quizzed him on the temptations of the Internet. “You spend too much time online,” she said.

“My
friends
are online,” Jason said. “It’s cheaper than calling them long distance.”

“You need to make new friends here,” Catherine said. “Not hang out with druggies on your computer.”

“I can’t get high online,” Jason pointed out. He could feel anger biting off his words. “I was just waiting in the chat room for Abie and Colin. I can’t ask everyone in the chat room whether they do drugs before I talk to them.”

“Drugs are a black hole of negativity,” Catherine said. “I don’t want you around that scene.”

“I’m not into drugs!” Jason found himself nearly shouting. “I couldn’t skate if I took drugs, and all I want to do is skate!”

“What’s on the Web that’s so wonderful?” Catherine demanded, her own anger flaring. “Drugs and porn and
advertising.
Nothing but commercialism and materialism—”

“Talk!” Jason waved his hands. “Conversation! Information! My
friends
are online!”

“You need to make friends here,” she said. “We live in Missouri now.”

“I don’t
need
to make friends here! I’ve already
got
friends! And the second I can get back to them, I will!”

She looked at him from across the table. The anger faded from her expression. She looked at him sadly.

“You can’t go back to California,” she said. “You know why.”

“I know, all right,” Jason said.

Concern filled her eyes. “If you go back to California,” she said, “you’ll die.”

Jason looked at the framed photograph of Queen Nepher-Ankh-Hotep that sat on the side table between two sprays of Aunt Lucy’s irises. The Egyptian queen looked back at him with serene kohl-rimmed eyes.

“So I hear,” he said.

*

Back in 1975, an Oregon housewife named Jennifer McCullum was informed by a vision that in a previous life she had been Queen of Egypt. So benevolent and spiritual had been her reign that she had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the Earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.

In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.

Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.

Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.

Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business.

And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.

“Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain
crazy!”

“How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to
help
people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”

Actualized.
There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like
actualized
or
negative thoughtform
or
color vibration,
and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?

They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant,
You have to stay here and like it.

“And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said.
“Lots
of people have received catastrophe revelations. They
all
agree that California is going to be destroyed.”

“So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her.
“Dad
is going to be killed?”

His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they
do
die, it’s because they
chose
it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”

Jason could feel his brain de-focusing under this onslaught— he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios— but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.

“What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had
slavery
here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.

It had rained.

Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, shoes filled with rainwater, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.

“I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.

“I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”

“We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online— I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”

Jason was aghast. “An hour!”

“One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”

“I don’t
want
to know anyone here!”

“There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”

“How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”

“You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”

“
I don’t radiate hostility
!” Jason shouted.

“You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway—”

“I am
not interested
!
I am
not interested at all
!
One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.

His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”

Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even
looked
like a prison.

And now he was in a prison cell, on the second floor of his house.

And the worse thing about
this
cell, he realized, was that he had turned the key on himself. He had to get out of here somehow.

As he paced, his eye lighted on the telephone, and he stopped in his tracks.

Ah,
he thought.
Dad.

*

“Well,” Jason said, “I'm bummed. I sort of had a fight with Mom.”