The Spark

365 Days of Creativity

day one hundred

“Take my hand.”

“Where are we going?”

“Take my hand and I'll show you.”

“But holding hands makes me sweat.”

“All the best things in life do.”

Mystery. The blistering history betwixt him and I was all of one half hour and twenty two seconds long. His name tag said Mister E, but I knew better than to fall for that one.

“Mister E?”

“Yes.”

“Really? Mister E? And what, you have a cat called Miss Tick?”

“No.”

“Oh, because a cat's not mystical enough.”

“No, because that would be a ridiculous name for a cat.”

And so it went when Mystery walked up to my booth on the sweltering shores of Pontianak. It was the bi-annual TUT, the Trans-Universal Travel convention, and I was there handing out brochures about the newest ESP heightener. How they used to have steroids for muscles, we had them for minds. The conventions were always packed full with wizard-wannabes, Joe Blows who couldn't keep their mundane little fingers out of the interstellar honey pot. And 'Mister E' here was no less a scoffing skeptic than I was disgusted by him.

“If you're not going to check out the product, you're gonna have to walk away.”

“I don't need your product.”

“Sure sure, because you've got all the multi-dimensional intelligence you need, right?”

“I have enough.”

“Then why don't you go set up your own booth on space jumping and leave me in peace?”

“You don't seem in peace.”

“How so?”

“You look warm.”

“Well we're dead set on the equator here, it's hard not to be a bit melty.”

“I'm fine.”

He didn't look fine. Mystery looked like the definition of a psychopath. Like a coked-up werewolf. Long black hair, eyes bright as a punch to the face, bulking shoulders ready to burst through his linen shirt. He was right though, not one drop of sweat on the bastard.

“You're used to the climate.”

“I just arrived from Norway.”

“Oh.”

You should know, the only reason I'm here right now is because my brother got himself arrested. On Europa of all places. No one gets arrested on Europa. It's the most laid back of all the available planets. There's nothing to do but surf and dive there for god's sake. A planet full of water, and he breaks the only law; don't feed the Krakens. In their right mind, no human would attempt this. But my brother having the rightest mind there is, will refuse not to use it to it's full potential.

Now, he is a creative genius. A new-new-new age artist. Ever since space-time was fully navigable by us humans, the really gifted ones have started exploring all over our universe. And where there's new material, there's a million artists trying to make it their own. Meet the New Wave of Avant Garde Impressionism. Meet Jean Luc Warhol. This is William S Banksy. My brother won't answer to anything but We. He says it forces people to include themselves in their judgements of him. 'We are so inane.' 'We just aren't normal.' 'We have NO talent whatsoever.' And so on and so forth. You can imagine what kind of shit he comes up with. This time it was to feed the Krakens different barrels of food dye and film their rainbow coloured ink trails throughout Europa. With a planet covered in water, he figured he'd get a good two, three days of footage that he could loop at the next TIFF, (Terra Interplanetary Film Festival; Terra being another livable planet only the most right minded could reach) but his tentacle-painting was cut short when he was arrested. Indonesia lets in anyone, except Kraken Violators apparently, thus, here I am, selling his shit steroids to fund his next project.

And I get to deal with psychos like Mister Mystery E over here. Not very impressed.

“If you want to stay cool, why don't you just let your mind do it for you?”

He meant magic. I can't do magic. I shake my head.

“What, your drugs don't work?”

“To build a fire, you have to have sticks to work with.”

Mystery nodded wisely.

Idiot.

“You can set fire to almost anything, all you need is a spark.”

“Great, thanks.” I shuffle some brochures around uselessly.

“I can give you that.”

I didn't see him as dangerous before, but now his eyes seemed brighter in a hungry way.

“How?”

“Come with me”

“To where?”

“Take my hand.”

“Where are we going?”

“Take my hand and I'll show you.”

“But holding hands makes me sweat.”

“All the best things in life do.”

And so here we are. Mystery and me. Me and Mister E. This beast of a man is about to take my sweaty hand and show me a spark somewhere in space. This is what my life has become. Following random men through wormholes. Welcome to 2013/1006/6781/All Time and Space that has Ever Existed. We can access everything now. Well, the chosen ones can. You and I are just here for the ride.

Wind. Walls of blowing air thicker than possible. Dazzling lights flash by in watercolour blurs. Inter-dimensional travel is like being the light fractured through a prism to make every hue human eyes can capture. You are blown apart into compounds of original skin; Iron, Carbon, Calcium, Nitrogen, a big bundle of vibrating Star Stuff. You can taste the sounds and hear the sights. Just on the verge of forgetting how it was supposed to look, my body slammed back into shape. 

“Mystery?! Somethings's wrong.”

“What?”

“I can't see anything!”

“I know.”

“What did you do? Where are we?”

“Erebus.”

“Great, where is that?”

“Seven hundred and fifty light years from Earth.”

“I could just be locked up in a basement, for all I can see.”

“Erebus is the darkest planet known to man. You're not blind, you're just not looking.”

“I am looking.”

“With what?”

“My eyes, obviously.”

“That's not going to work here, obviously.”

“Dick.” I shook my head. The ground didn't feel like ground, more of a dense fog. As though we were walking on cotton balls. Standing on this alien planet, we weren't freezing, burning, rotting or suffocating. I've heard how they do this, the wizards. (Let's face it, Mystery was no wannabe.) They have the brain-power to reconstruct the molecules of the universe. All that Carbon and Calcium from earlier? If you rearrange it and force it to vibrate at a different rate, it can basically become anything. 
This kind of atom-manipulation is how we aren't dead. With Mystery constantly sorting out the fibres of space we can go to un-inhabitable planets and travel at speeds of light and see in the dark and keep ourselves cool in the desert. Correction, he can do this stuff, I'm just a hitchhiker, a shadow, a ghost. I'm a vagabond girl in his mind-made world.

If you can't tell, I was starting to feel a bit useless.

I rubbed my eyes and stared into nothing.

“The widest eyes won't help you.”

“Neither will you!”

“You haven't asked.”

“Will. You. Help. Me,” It wasn't a question, it was a threat.

“Sure thing. Close your eyes.”

“They could be closed already.”

“But they aren't, I can see.”

“You're infuriating.”

“Close them.”

“Ok, now what.”

“Now, you sit.”

I lower myself cross-legged, “Like this?”

Silence.

“Uhm?”

“Oh, I nodded.” He laughs.

“Funny,”

“Close your-

“Eyes, yeah I know, I got that part.”

“You sure are cocky for someone who doesn't even know where they are. I was going to say, close your ears and open your mind.”

“Right, right. Open my mind. Close my ears. Then how can I hear you?”

No response.

“Mystery?"

Still nothing.

“If you're nodding again that doesn't even make sense.”

I'm talking to no one.

“Alright then, the hard way we go.”

Can you start something cold turkey?

Just like that, close your ears, open your mind. Breathe in, breathe out. Think about nothing. Keep your mind totally empty. Don't think about Mystery watching you in the dark. Don't think about We in his restrictive laser cuffs. Don't think about why this planet is so black. If Mystery is that powerful, couldn't he have just rearranged me a light? There's probably shit-all to see out here anyways. Out here in space. Where there's no one around, not just for miles but for years. That's a whole other level of loneliness. And if you've been left here, then it's just you and this small pocket of jimmied-up oxygen that will last who-knows-how-long. Completely abandoned on Erebus. In the stomach of the God of Darkness. Sitting on a compressed cloud, closing your ears and opening your mind. Breathe in, breathe out.

Breathe in.

You know the next part.

Breathe out.

Don't

think,

just

breathe

.

.

.

Slowly, you feel not so forgotten. You seem a bit lighter. Little pinpricks of weight are being lifted off of your head. Shard by shard, crystals are appearing in the blackness, like the remnants of a dream shattered by waking. There's a glimmer here and a shine there, and you don't move for fear of losing them. Eyes still closed, you realize you're not alone. In fact, you're surrounded by tiny gems of glowing light. Fairy dust across the sky. And there it is, the Milky Way, a lifetime away but you can see it in your mind's eye. Sitting here on Erebus, I can see a trillion stars with my eyes closed. It's beautiful, breathtaking, I would give my breath to look at it forever. To feel the energy of the Universe, to know the unlimited potential in each vibrating molecule. This is what humans were meant to do. This is what the rest of our brains were built for. This is raw, awesome, magic.

When I open my eyes, I can see everything.

Mystery is there, and he smiles,

“There's the spark.”