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.”
