“You’re nothin’ but a fraud!” I hurled the accusation at the frail old man with the skill of a drunk baseball pitcher. “You prey on the weak-minded and gullible for your own profit! How dare you, sir! How dare you!”
My tirade of emotions slipped by him without comment or a raised eyebrow. He did not break eye contact with me, waiting for my 90 seconds of rage to subside.
My blood burned through my limbs like acid, drenching my muscles with a paralytic poison. But, I didn’t want to give the old fool the satisfaction of rising above my anger. I sucked in a couple deep breaths; I grabbed the nearest glass bottle from his wooden cart and pointed it at him with purposeful accusation. “How about this, huh? What’s in this? Corn syrup and MSG, with a sprinkle of cyanide?”
The elf sized Yoda-man curled a wrinkled lip, as if he found my sarcastic outrage adorable. I overcame the urge to slam the bottle into the ground with a triumphant touchdown. Instead, I ripped the lid off and sniffed hard at the contents. Nothing. I tilted the bottle and drizzled a black ooze onto the dusty path and expected a sizzle, a bubble or a steamy explosion. Nothing. It solidified into a perfect dome with the consistency of liquid mercury. I peered at the label of the purple bottle and couldn’t identify the language of the mysterious calligraphy. While staring at the bottle, a strange sensation grabbed my gut and squeezed it with a halting grip. I shoved the lid back into the bottle, threw the bottle onto the cart and stepped backward away from the black goo. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand, “What is that?”
The ancient of days broke his silence from within his cloak. “What do you think it is?”
I coughed. “Dunno, man. It’s like a parasite has taken over my stomach. What does it matter what I think?”
The little man peeled his hood back to reveal a mass of matted tumbleweed attached to the back of his head and a pointy nose stolen and reattached from a mutated rat. I shook the fog out of my eyes and his face seemed more human than not. But, the memory lingered. He bared a row of pointed teeth. “It’s all that matters.”
Now he chose to speak in riddles. My fight or flight mechanism changed directives and I resisted my urge to run away. Curiosity overcame logic and I demanded to know what the existence of this strange mini-person meant and his purpose. I stepped around the spilled elixir as if avoiding a dog turd and towered over the con artist with the intent to intimidate him with my size. Although a sixteen-year-old track runner didn’t necessarily offer a dominating presence, receiving a beating by my obsessive-compulsive sadistic father everyday had toughened my aversion to pain. I reached out and snatched a clump of his cloak, pulling his body upward; he stood on his tip toes. “Did you poison me?”
“Using your father’s tactics to bully me? I thought you believed you were above him.”
The force invading my gut exploded into fireworks. I staggered backward, flailing against an invisible assailant. I regained my footing and lasered my gaze on the rat-man; my jaw dropped and mind locked. “You don’t know me.” Not a question, though it vomited out like a question.
He smoothed out his cloak and expanded his toothy grin. Perfect razors. “You are easily distracted, son. How quick you are to abandon your purpose. How swift you are to blame, grow angry, accuse, and assume you perceive how the world works. Go away. You waste my time.”
He implanted the memory of my father into my mind, which of course, re-associated with my mother, the reason for my humility. I didn’t believe in this mumbo-jumbo issued by a fake charlatan. Still, out of options, desperate for a cure, I had sought out the one man I had ridiculed for months. But, his following of admirers had convinced me. The long list of people who swore with animated profanity that he had cured them, fixed them, helped them, and healed their ails. Persuaded, I followed the humble road, seeking the help I didn’t believe existed.
My mother, dying as I spoke, incurable cancer, in pain. I turned my back on everything I believed in, hoping for a miracle.
For a moment, the phantom ghost now inhabiting my stomach relaxed. I turned off my fixed mindset, and reimagined my growth mindset. What could I learn from this, this…
My mind hesitated to redefine the long list of derogative epithets I had devised for him.
This fellow human being.
I grunted. “You’re right, sir. I came here to help my mother, not to prove I’m a man. I interviewed dozens of your patients. I didn’t find a single person you turned away, nor did I find anyone who you failed to help. I anticipated your inability to help. What I didn’t expect: a refusal. How can I not conclude you’re a fraud? You mustn’t be willing to help because you know you cannot. Her cancer is incurable, and if your specific elixir doesn’t work, it’s bad publicity. You’d lose credibility in this town and you’d be forced to move along.”
The business owner extended a gnarled right hand. “Honesty. Now, there’s a place we can find accord.”
I shook his rough patchwork of scales, his fingers scratching my palm. I psychoanalyzed myself through the eyes of the ultimate observer and failed to conclude if my one-hundred-eighty rotation in perspective arose from my own bidding, or because of the spilled elixir I may or may not have inhaled. “So, am I correct about why you won’t help me?”
“You may call me, Tir. Will you offer yours?”
“Bair.” The name arrived from a great distance, as if I didn’t control my own speech anymore.
Tir lifted a towel from the edge of the cart and dusted his endless rows of eclectic bottles as he lectured me, “Bair. You believe I am ineffectual, yet you were moved to seek me out in a heroic effort to help your mother. Why?”
The priming of honesty drove my answer. “I guess, a potent mixture of desperation, hopelessness, and a desire to not give up, mixed with curiosity and the knowledge that even if I didn’t believe in your abilities, my mom might still cling to hope. The placebo effect has been documented to accomplish powerful things.”
Tir lifted and wiped the bottles, lifted and wiped, hypnotically. He shook his tumbleweed of hair and growled. “Interesting. You were angry with me for not giving you an elixir, because regardless of what you personally believed about me and my solutions, you hoped the placebo effect would prompt her to heal.”
“Yes, of course. Research shows the power of the mind to aid in healing the body. Though science doesn’t explain the details or intricacies of the process, the results are undeniable.”
As Tir stepped near a wagon wheel taller than himself, he stopped to remove debris stuck in the splintered wood. “You must overcome your pride. You must bring her to me; I will help her. I cannot give you a medication to deliver to her as it will be intercepted. That is what I tried to tell you earlier before you jumped to conclusions.”
I closed my eyes and clutched my forehead. “She is bedridden, she is dying, only has a few days of life, if I’m lucky. She cannot travel three miles. Are you not able to bring your wagon three miles to my house?”
Tir offered his familiar toothy grin. “This isn’t a negotiation. Is it easier to move a wagon weighing more than an elephant or your mother who is as light as a feather? You’re a smart, resourceful young man. If her cure is important to you, then you shall overcome the obstacle. Those are my terms.”
I shouldn’t have pushed it, but my curiosity mushroomed into addiction in moments of frustration. “What is it? Do you need to lay your hands on her? Do you need to sense her aura?”
Tir tossed the towel at me. “Here you go tall boy, dust the top bottles I cannot reach and I will answer your questions.”
Fifteen minutes later I flung the towel back at Tir, who appeared to be sleeping while standing straight. “Why do you need me to bring her to you?”
Tir lifted a gnarled forefinger and pointed at a weathered sign teetering over the wagon, blinking in and out of illumination. I read the word: Apothecary.
I blinked in reverse.
The sensation in my belly returned like Montezuma’s Revenge. I staggered backward, clutching my gut, praying for a release from the pain. An image of my father breaking a chair across my bare back surfaced to my consciousness. For a moment, for an eternity, for a slick second, I transported through time and my father staggered drunk over me, slobbering slurs and burning holes of disappointment through my soul.
I crashed into the dust and rolled around on the ground. I opened my eyes wide and cracked out a broken scream, “What happened!”
Tir shuffled as if his knees didn’t work. He bent over me and punctuated the moment with his gleaming white shark teeth. “How many more answers to your questions can you handle now?”
Tears leaked from the edges of my eyelids born from the mind-numbing pain. I only groaned.
Tir growled. “Bring me your mother, and I will save her.”
For a soft stretch of dripping seconds, my vision staggered, and the wagon, the bottles, the desert backdrop, the strange little creature calling himself Tir, shifted, changed, transformed into something my mind couldn’t process. Liquid mercury, bright white light, colors glowing, and a supreme knowledge, a dream wrapped inside intentionality, all beaming across time and space, flowing around and through me, transforming my fear into a furry little animal I cuddled with an attachment I’ve never known.
When I recovered, I walked the three miles home in a broken bubble of unbelief.
——————————-
One of my neighbors who had been personally healed by the mysterious Tir loaned me his horse and buggy. I constructed a makeshift suspension system to absorb the rough road and minimize the tortuous experience for my mother. I lifted her, a seventy-five-pound skeleton into the hammock, and paid a local driver to steer the horse. I stayed inside the carriage and held her hand, willing the carriage to avoid potholes or anything that might jar or overturn the ride.
When we arrived at the location where his mobile shop should have resided, instead I found a wooden sign attached to a stake driven with haste into the ground. I jumped out of the carriage and grabbed the blank sign and ripped it out the ground. I almost threw it away when my curious mind overrode my humiliation.
The sign didn’t weigh at all. Not even the weight of a feather. I brought the sign forward and examined it. No words, but I flipped it around. I placed the stake between my palms and spun the sign, faster and faster. Strange symbols leaped into the air, words from a language I didn’t recognize. And the image of the wagon appeared.
I learned where Tir would be found.
Again, a heavy sense of dread, an unholy sensation gripping my gut squeezed tighter as we approached his wagon. My mother slept, I held her hand, and the driver steered the horse as smooth as if we slid across ice.
Upon arrival, I jumped out of the carriage and confronted the eccentric apothecary. “She is here. I don’t know why you found it necessary to double the length of her journey. I would have paid you extra to remain put. Besides, what did you have to prove with your little sign trick? I’ve already displayed to you my desire to believe.”
Tir grabbed my shoulder with his amalgam of scales and flesh and opened his mouth wide to reveal his sharp teeth. “You ungrateful child; arrogant and foolhardy, my kindness didn’t extend to you at all, but to your mother. It isn’t her fault her child displays an assortment of bad behaviors absorbed and birthed into reality by a selfish father. I could easily ignore your pouty fear, adorned with a bully’s need to dominate, but you must learn faster than you have ever learned before. Knowledge is the birthplace of reality, and you my son, are as ignorant as the horse pretending to exist behind you. There are forces in this construct, born of such ignorance, full of power and relentlessness never dissolving during our existence, focused on one purpose. To keep you and others enslaved. Born of fear and working tirelessly against an abundant universe to keep true knowledge buried deep, I must live my existence in the shadows because I am only one being and cannot fight the tidal wave of ignorance. Your questions are tiresome and born of a force invited to disrupt me. Here. Look at this.” He thrust a yellow-tinted curved bottle into my hand.
I reached for the lid, but the scales intercepted me. “No, only look at it. Read the label. Do not drink.”
I peered at the strange words, both foreign and familiar at the same moment. They meant nothing to me. But, the strange, deep unsettling neurosis I had grown accustomed to experiencing around Tir took root at the base of my solar plexus and branched throughout my body in waves of circular emotions.
A powerful wind, born of gods, descended and blew a thick cloud of dust across my vision. Tir grabbed my arm and pulled me with a strength surpassing his size, shouting above the deafening roar, and pulled me around the back of the wagon. My heart flailed for my mother, imagining the force of the wind toppling her carriage.
“Here!” Tir shoved a large bottle, the size of a pickle jar, into my outstretched hands. “Let her read the words and don’t leave her side until she regains her strength. I wanted to tell you more, but I have been discovered again. Go! Your mother is in danger. Be a brave Bair, no matter what!”
I wanted to ask why I brought her here if that’s all she needed. I wanted to ask why he didn’t even look at her, or talk to her, or touch her with his hands.
But, he disappeared along with his wagon, and the dust storm threatened to knock me over. I planted my feet firmly into the ground, and though I couldn’t see the carriage, I could hear the wind hitting it hard and the neighing of the horse. Covering my eyes, while sand filled my nose and mouth, I pushed as hard as my strong legs could move me. The wind seemed to form hands and stretched with a death grip for my apothecary jar, but my resolve proved stronger than an unholy dust storm. I squeezed tight and willed myself to the carriage.
Inside, my mother groaned, a dull distant sound muted by the intense wind. I reinforced the thin tarp holding the dust back from engulfing the inside of the carriage. I dropped to my knees next to her hammock and placed the back of my hand against her forehead. Though the sweat and heat from her body alarmed me, she responded to my touch and moved into it like a purring cat. She hadn’t eaten for the last three days, only sipping on lukewarm water, and she puckered her lips looking for water. I lifted the eye dropper and wet her lips. This seemed to appease her for a moment.
“Mom,” I whispered, near her ear, above the screaming sound of wind. “I need you to open your eyes and read this.”
She moaned and muttered, “Read to me.”
I glanced at the words and once again my body filled with an experience difficult to verbalize. But, instead of the gut-wrenching pain centering inside my stomach, all my individual cells twisted inside-out, an electric charge pumping outward from the nucleus of each atom, the charge pulsating at a rate making a gigahertz crawling slower than a slug. My heart burned like a lightbulb plugged into a too powerful socket.
The sensation lasted an eternity, and encompassed within an endless infinity I witnessed the birth of the universe extending until its death.
I flipped inside out.
Reality slapped me across the face. I glanced back at my mother and blinked away the cosmos. I couldn’t read the words aloud to her since I didn’t discern the language and would need her to open her eyes. “Mom,” I whispered. “Please. I cannot explain to you the nature of this magic, whether it is a forgotten science, or a possible future one. But, you must summon the strength to open your eyes.”
A half smile crept across her face. I knew her smile too well. A stubborn refusal to accept the other person’s perspective. A grim, agree to disagree, type of condescension haunting the memories of my younger years. She believed it okay to let go. Her body exhausted from fighting, she wanted to say goodbye.
“Please, Mom! I could make you angry, and in your pure stubbornness you would fight to prove you’re right. But, I don’t want to fight you, I want you to fight death. Please, please. My last request. Open your eyes, it is not bright in here, and the sand is outside. There are ten words, it will take you three seconds.”
Her curled smile dropped to a thin line. For some reason, I could sense her love for me, the invisible umbilical cord connection of attachment flowing from myself to her. She desired to please and protect me. Even on the edge of death, she would not let her self-pity surpass her powerful desire to make her son happy.
Window shutters closed for too many years creaked open by tapping into the source of power required for creation, and I locked onto her bright blue eyes, filled with more life than her body possessed. Without wasting a second, I aligned the jar’s label with her gaze, hoping her eyes would focus and stay open long enough to discern their powerful intent.
The universe exploded in her eyes.
The blue swirled and churned and for a moment lasting her entire lifespan, her eyelids flipped open wide, a broken shutter, and a deep gasp emptied her lungs. She choked and gasped, her torso heaved upward by her energized limbs until she sat upright.
A hideous vision burned into my brain.
She opened her mouth a wide, and a black ooze vomited out her mouth, like the dam waters slowly pouring over the edge, and it flowed with the consistency of tar. Her torso heaved, as her throat retched, and blobs of black slime poured out of her mouth and nose. My brain screamed at me to pat her back, or lean her forward, but the eternal knowledge I now possessed also whispered to me to exercise patience, this process couldn’t be helped or stopped. I would have to wait for the poison to depart her body.
The black ooze covered her chest and arms, and flowed with purpose. It crawled across the carriage toward the apothecary jar I had placed on the floor next to her hammock. With the rusty lid shut tight, the black ooze seeped through the closed jar, inside of it, filling it with a substance my brain interpreted as her cancer, though I acknowledged it as an oversimplified explanation.
After a few minutes, the process seemed to approach a syrupy slowness, though it hadn’t finished; the unholy wind from outside exploded into the carriage.
I whipped my head around; the tarp ripped open, flapping and slapping, dust pouring inside, around a pattern. A shape, a dark humanesque shadow filled the entryway. My eyes couldn’t absorb the inside of the dust outline, but my mind grasped it as the antithesis of life. The representation of the enemy I accepted in theory.
It focused, intent on hurting my mother.
I stood there, a weak fleshly creature poised to protect my mother from a force I couldn’t explain, nor comprehend. It’s objective, clear. The dark space, a lapse of reality, a tear in the present approached me and grew, more powerful with each ominous step toward me. I spread my arms out wide like spreading a bird’s wings, and stood between the evil and my healing mother.
In an instant, it jumped upon me. The first blow landed across my face, a heavy anvil rocking the left side of my jaw. The pain seared through my head, though it failed to compare with what my father had done to me on numerous occasions. I stretched forward with my right hand and failed to grasp the invisible sand shadow. My hand pushed through the tear in space as if sliding my hand through honey.
It tried to shove me out of the way. But, I held my ground. I didn’t know how to fight a non-physical creature with the force of the dark universe behind it, but I would die trying to protect my mother.
I screamed at the top of my lungs, “You can’t have her!”
The human shape stopped moving and shivered.
Within the first moment, I didn’t fathom the power I possessed. Time halted. It slowed and split into infinity, sliced into eternal pockets.
The Apothecary.
His lessons burned clean. The power of the universe flowed through me. Our words, frozen fractions of energy, pockets of power, to communicate, enable, strengthen, overcome. Words lived beyond the minds of brains able to decipher. They were atoms of potential power, pieces of a universe stitched together by intention. I had the weapon I needed.
This hate, now pouring into my wagon willing a death upon my mother, would not succeed.
Time snapped back into place and I stood before my enemy, feet planted like two trees, and courage rising from inside of me; I yelled over the sound of the ripping wind, “You will not touch her! You will not hurt her! She is my mother, and no force in the universe will take her from me! Leave now!”
The energy holding the dark shape together, a three-dimensional outline of a human body waivered, and the wind sucked at the creature, grain by grain into the howling wind, screaming its defeat into the distance.
A moment later, a loud silence enveloped our wagon and it howled; I only heard the vibrating scream of my tinnitus in stereo.
My mother moaned.
I whipped my head around and dropped to my knee, holding my hand against her head. Her eyes opened wide and she smiled. She blinked once and tried to lift her torso. I prevented her and cautioned, “Be careful.”
She peered into my eyes, confused. “What happened? I’m thirsty.”
I choked at a sob and blinked back the tears forming in my eyes as I whispered, “You’re going to be fine.”
——————————–
Three days later, after sundown, I found another one of Tir’s wooden signs shoved in a hurry behind a weed near the steps of the front porch. I spun the sign, eager to locate the man who had saved my mother; I also wished to scold him on abandoning me to forces I still didn’t want to believe in, let alone truly understood. The sign delivered the message, subconsciously and confidently.
Tir couldn’t wait for me much longer.
I dropped the sign, ran inside to kiss my mother on the forehead, and grabbed the jar full of black tar. I sprinted to the outskirts of the south end of town and spotted the huge wagon partially hidden by large dilapidated salt cedar trees. Behind the wagon and trees, only endless desert spotted with thousands of dry bushes.
I ran around the corner of the trees and discovered Tir sitting on the dirt with his legs crossed. He seemed more rat-like now more than ever before.
Tir rotated his long snout toward me and bared his pointy teeth. “There is much to say in this finite slice; I will speak quick and to the point. I have failed you.”
I didn’t follow his sense of urgency. “You didn’t fail. She is healed! Here is your jar.” I pushed the weightless object in his direction, waiting for his satisfaction or approval.
He simply growled, “Set it on the wagon. Her healing came at great cost. I am dead. And you are now noticed.”
I set the jar on the wagon and dropped my left knee to the ground, holding on to the edge of wagon while I whispered, “Is that creature, or force or whatever it is, after you now? Can you hide from it?”
The old rat-man lifted his eyes, only a few inches from my face and I could discern death within his empty sockets, an endless vortex of black funnel cloud pulling inward to an empty cranium. “I’m already dead. I bent time to deliver this message to you, but this will be our last conversation until the great beyond.”
My stomach twisted into rotted knots; not because of any supernatural force, but the dread I experienced, discerning this last great gift he had given had cost him his life.
The rat creature seemed to read my thoughts. “Don’t pity me, I’ve outlived my number of chances and near misses. But, I’m not the only one who has paid a price. You are marked now. You cannot stay out in the open. You cannot stay with her. They will find her on the next occasion. They can only ‘see’ her when you are within her proximity. If you leave now, tonight, and choose a certain path, she will live out her full allotment of days. But, linger, even a few more hours, and she will not survive the next assault. They find it simple to outmaneuver us.”
Questions swirled through my mind, though I did not doubt the truth he spoke. “What path?”
The rat slipped his hand inside his cloak and removed an ancient book, leather bound and wrapped with string, much too large to have hidden easily in the folds of his outfit. He held it out to me with bony fingers. “You must take my place.”
I flinched and fell backward into the dirty sand. Strange how his outrageous demand didn’t surprise me, but arrived as if I had already experienced the path ahead. “No way! I admire your life, but what? Wander around, from town to town, curing people with magic potions and a power I don’t grasp, all the while hunted by some evil force intent on killing me? I must decline.” I loved my mother and did not intend to abandon her to take on the life of a strange traveling hermit.
“It is your wisest path. The only way to stay hidden, beneath the hidden particle wave. You are bobbing on the surface, beckoning them to come to finish the job. The first attack came from a scout, easily deflected. But soon, your life and her life, forfeit.”
I didn’t want to believe him. “Surely, there exist more choices beyond what you speak!”
“There usually is. Doesn’t make them better choices, only choices. You have the gift. You can adapt, this power is at your disposal. I’m not able to enumerate the blessings and benefits it bestows upon you. But, you are young. You don’t have the wisdom I have and look back upon a life worth living.”
An anger springing from fear enveloped my body, imagining a solitary, sad life. My world equaled my mother. I lived for her joy. To abandon her? Knowing how much she would miss me, hour by hour, day by day, for the rest of her life. Her loneliness and pain drenched my bones and sagged at my skin. “I don’t believe this gift mumbo jumbo! I’m a person, like everyone else. Don’t try to sell me on this ‘chosen one’ stuff, I’m no better and no different from anyone else.”
The rat coughed, a deep raspy echo from another dimension. “You have the gift because you choose to have it. It’s always your choice. The answers are in this book.” He dropped it onto the dirt, a simple, old archaic book full of words my mind absorbed but couldn’t explain in my native language.
I closed my eyes. I tried not to envision informing my still physically weak mother I would have to abandon her forever. But, a part of me acknowledged. A part of me believed. I had already seen too much. I knew the rat spoke truth. Whatever planet, whatever alternative he occupied, it arrived far beyond the knowledge I currently had and he had experience battling these forces. If he claimed they would find her, I wouldn’t dispute it.
He had given his life for helping my mother. A stranger. And how could her only son not to do the exact same?
The deep pain formed into tears; I wanted to bawl like a little baby, collapse into the fetal position and cry my emptiness away.
The rat lurched and clawed my shoulder. His empty eyes opened into eternity and he growled, “Now!”
I leap frogged over my pain, grabbed the book, and stood straight, a cascade downpour of dirty sand escaping my shorts and legs.
Tir disappeared.
I could sense a presence, a darkness hiding in the expanse of the desert, watching me, waiting for me to make my move. I took a few giant leaps forward and examined the front of the wagon. I pressed my fingers into a silver metal bar a foot wide across the front of the wagon. This thing didn’t roll on wheels. It moved.
An image shimmered in front of me, like the heat and sun from day creating a mirage in the desert. But, this image had substance, a reflection in the mirror of something there. I pointed at 3-D map and me and the wagon were now ‘there.’
The presence behind me melted away.
A cold wind bit at my exposed skin. A thin layer of snow layered the new landscape, mountains grabbing at the sky in the distance and a town with ripples of smoke billowing from homes in the distance.
I now stood hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from my mother.
I stroked the archaic book with my right hand, the rough exterior sending bursts of energy through my fingers. At the bottom of the cover, my digits caressed a name, a signature in familiar words I didn’t know yet. But, in an instant, Tir’s name bubbled to the surface of my consciousness. In conjunction with the word designating ‘brother’. A fleshly, related brother.
Tir was my brother.
But, how? In what time or universe? And then, the memories and emotions clicked. Why he had been so harsh with me and yet had sacrificed himself for my mother. My mother was also his mother. Maybe in another time he was me and I was him and the anger he breathed was anger at himself.
Infinite choice.
I would choose to see my mother again. I would see her for one last intersection. I would have my last goodbye. I would wait until the forces holding the universe captive inside darkness, our minds blinded by lies to hide the truth from exposing their true nature and intent, were following a cold trail I had left for them through the rips and tears of space and time. Then I would see her again. I would kiss her on the forehead, a final embrace.
Loneliness gripped me. I dropped my knees into the snow, the burning biting at my skin from a long distance. I had saved her at a cost I could not have anticipated in a hundred life times. Yet, my dead brother’s ghost whispered a cold comfort.
She was still alive. As was I.
And it was everything.
The End