I remember one moment many years ago, when I finally seemed to understood something beyond the normal day to day stupidities of life and see something bigger.
It took a little bit of time for it to sink in, and what seemed to be sinking in was just a little too crazy, a bit too goofy and just way too bizarre - and all I could do was just wonder if it was all just madness anyways, and hope for some peace and quiet, or some inner calmness that´would let me just get on to the next moment of that madness.
But I hadn’t been in the best of shape, either mentally or physically.
I had been on this crazy roller-coaster of a road trip for a few days, until I remember standing in a room in some old folks’ home, tapping the white tiles with my right foot, feeling the floor through the sole of my shoe and wondering if I was awake or if I was just in some weird dream about being in an old folks’ home, staring down at some old guy who was supposedly in a coma but who had been talking, and was talking to me, and telling me all sorts of crazy shit that I would never have thought I’d ever hear, never mind hear from some old man, never mind some old man who was for all practical purposes dead to the world but who I’d been hearing talk as clear as day anyway, and but both of us talking as naturally as if I was talking to anyone on any normal day.
Normal?, I remember wondering. Where did all that go?
No, this wasn’t the Christmas Day I had mentioned – it was already a long time past that – but it was a day when some things began coming together, so I figure it’s as good of a place to start as any…
Standing there, I vaguely gauged that I was still somewhere in north-western Nebraska, or possibly just across the border into Wyoming, or South Dakota. Or maybe we were in Oregon already, I really didn’t know and at some level, didn’t really care to know.
It was just craziness, but hey, par for the course, I thought.
I was dead tired. I felt like an old worn-out sack of pure emptiness, like some walking void - but I have to admit that even at that moment, for all my dead tiredness, there was still something I was feeling that was keeping me going - keeping me staying awake, trying to stay alert. It was like I knew that something was going to happen. My brain was buzzing, with a sense that I was alive, more alive than I had been in a long, long time, but there was also some kind of strange sense of things were starting to get way too weird and on towards dangerous, something I couldn’t really pin down but that had a strange, intriguing sense to it, like so many hints of possibilities of patterns that nevertheless seemed like they were being systematically stripped of any simple sense
Can this all really be true?, I thought, and that town Jalaine – some… place… that people had mentioned - different people, different times, it was like having some sort of tantalizing taste of a strange exotic spice there on everything I ate, like some crazy fragrance in every breath I breathed...
Jalaine? I thought. I mean really – and you know what? I honestly didn’t even want to - or even really care to - know about that place, never mind ever get there.
As if I actually had a choice.
Is there ever really a choice? Maybe I was just wondering too much, worrying too much. Where was that old laid back ‘go with flow whatever happens happens and take it to its fullest potential’ attitude that got me into all of this mess in the first place?
Jeez I was tired…
My mind drifted to a moment just a few days before – when I had been staring down a cue ball on a pool table in an Idaho bar, lining up a shot that I’d actually never ended up taking.
If I had actually taken that shot, would things be any different? I thought.
Could it be that that this whole mad adventure, that had led me to that place to be standing here now like some idiot – could it all somehow have been averted?
With one shot, one clean punch, the crack of the cue ball hitting the eight and sending it to heaven, a moment’s distraction – that’s all I needed. A different moment in time…
But no, it doesn’t work that way does it; none of it could have ever been any different.
Everything that had happened had been as inevitable as that one day when I would drive down that one street in that one town…
It was like I was being pulled by some crazy momentum that had snatched me away from what I have to admit had been a pretty haphazard easy-going world – to be taken up in all that madness, becoming just one more part of it, moment by strange moment - like moving through layers upon layers of some secret I’ve been let in on but that I just couldn’t get any sense of – like I’d most likely never be able to make any sense of why I was there in that room with that old man – a man in a coma who I’d been talking to for over a half hour? Is that nuts or what?
There was a voice inside my head laughed and I thought... I had a giddy sense of goofiness well up inside me and I smiled and I felt somehow refreshed.
I took a deep, easeful breath and looked around - it was a very white room in a very well-lit rest home.
I stared down into that old man’s eyes - eyes that didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t give any sense of recalling or acknowledging or submitting to any assumption that most of us have, that eyes had originally been designed for sight…
But there was something deep within their stillness that gave me some sense of movement, as if they were travelling, as if they had somehow been able to move out beyond everything visible, out past what I could only imagine to be a distance of thousands of miles - of so many more images, memories, dreams, plans and potential than I would ever be able to realize with my own eyes.
Is that what this is all about? I thought, what I can realize with my own eyes?
I thought of the cue ball. There had been that same dull, milky, sickly sheen of surface that I now saw on this man’s eyes. So different from Aarla’s eyes…
Ah, yes… Aarla.
How can I explain Aarla?
Well, to try putting it simply, she was a woman I’d met only a few days back, and we ended up travelling together. Sometimes it's like that - you find that you're going the same way so why not help each other out a bit, right?
But actually, it wasn't so simple; it was hardly so simple... What I would give for that sort of simplicity with that woman...
But it could never have been possible. It wasn't how she was. She was strange. Mysterious. Beautiful... Seemingly everything but simple....
Actually, it seemed like every breathing moment during those last few days with this woman had been like walking down into a thousand levels of depth of not knowing what the hell was happening...
And it wasn't just me - it was as if all the people we met had all moved within a world that she had seemed to create and build upon and maintain around her. Like she had this accumulative effect like gravity that sucked everything into her and shot it all back out into our own world of seeing and feeling and existing. Was such a thing even possible?
It had been Aarla who drove us to the old folks’ home. She’d taken a turn off the interstate, drove down a street that faded beyond the usual exit-sprung gas stations, fast food chains and convenience stores and on into the emergence of a space that had all those typical elements of a typical small town: church, pizza place, liquor store, 7-11, something like a bookstore, a bar, a diner or what was maybe some kind of small family-run Italian restaurant kind of place.
I sat in the passenger seat of the van, looking out at a world that could for all practical purposes just be something that I was imagining – maybe I had just fallen asleep and was dreaming of a town like any town - maybe like Jalaine ...
And I was imagining us driving right through, right down the main street in the center of town - park, get out, call it the end of the story.
Wouldn’t that be nice.
But then Aarla said “we’re close” and we came out at the other end of town, around a bend, she made a quick right turn down a driveway and ended up parking in the parking lot at the rest home.
We both got out and we went inside. There was a nurse there and Aarla went over to her and said something that I couldn’t quite hear and I heard the nurse say, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, he wants to see him,” Aarla said and they both turned to look at me and I gave my best “she knows best” look and tried not to show my confusion, and somehow Aarla slipped by me to head back outside, the nurse said something I once again didn’t actually hear, and then she turned and started walking and there I was alone with her, following her and I didn’t try to look back. The nurse went down one corridor, turned left, walked a few more steps and then stopped at a door.
She opened it for me and I went in.
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