{This is chapter 15 of my serialized, illustrated novel. You can read previous chapters here. For the curious, here is a synopsis of chapters 1-11: Sarah, 16, lives in Manhattan decades after an event that depopulated the city. Two other young people, Joe and Carmen, arrive from up the Hudson. Together, the three explore the city, hunting ducks and turtles in Central Park, wondering about the spiritualists in Radio City Music Hall, and becoming quick friends. They spend an evening with Terence, an illiterate librarian, who fills them in on all that has happened, and where they might want to go in search of Sarah’s parents, who have disappeared.}
I was startled by Tara knocking on the window of my Volvo the next morning. I exhaled my smoke and stubbed out the cigarette.
“Hey Tara! Look,” I said, pointing to a fat red fox that scoped us from the edge of a nearby stoop. “It’s giving us a funny look.”
“Good omen,” Tara said.
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I want you to come to my compound to do some work before you leave for the wall,” she said.
“Work? What do you need help with?”
“I mean spiritual work,” she said. “Preparation for your journey.”
She said it would be important for my future, but she wouldn't say how. She could tell I didn’t want to go, but she knew I would.
We walked through Chelsea into the West Village, and then east along 10th Street past Sixth Avenue into the center. Someone had built a compact wooden shelter, a rectangle with holes cut out, and put it at the top of a stoop. I could see rabbits poking their heads out of the holes. Pets for food.
“They used to call this ‘The Gold Coast,’” she said. “All the rich Internet people lived here.”
The townhouses along the sidewalk were huge, five, sometimes six stories tall. In front were oak trees as fat as oil barrels, with leaves rising high.
I looked up towards the canopy of one and felt my soul rising into the shimmering leaves. It was the true world up there. The real place. The center. I’d always felt that, even as a child. The treetops were where God lived.
“I remember you once said you were going to live here when you grew up and had a family,” she said.
“A family? Wow. I don’t remember that,” I said.
“When you were little you and I used to take long walks so I could show you about the trees, and the animals, and we used to talk about that a lot. You wanted three kids. Not four. Not two. It had to be three.”
This made me chuckle, as at this moment I couldn't imagine ever having any.
We crossed Fifth Avenue and the houses got smaller. In the East Village, the blocks were more run down – even the weed trees and puffball bushes grew wilder, many robins and starlings flying about. It was funny. That’s how the city was back in the day – the posh people in the village, the workers over East. At least according to Terence. There was more light over here, too, lower buildings, fewer big trees.
“Listen,” Tara said, stopping in front of her compound. It was an unusual building with a door opening into a small courtyard – the anteroom to a garden, or a graveyard, I couldn’t tell. I’d always loved visiting her.
I stopped and cocked my ear toward whatever sound was going to come in. Nothing but the sounds of the empty city. Nothing.
“I can’t hear anything,” I said. “What did you bring me here for?”
“Sorry -- I mean look,” she said, pointing into the yard.
I peeked through the slightly open door and saw 7 or 8 people sitting in a circle. Then I heard a sound. A murmuring, a kind of crazy murmuring, in English, I thought, but it was hard to say. The circle shook and shuddered each person in turn, like one quivering organism. Mostly women. All dressed in various shades of purple, like eggplants in a garden. Most sat cross-legged, though one bent her legs to the side, and another directed hers out front. Some of them bowed towards their laps. I was mesmerized.
“Do you see that?” Tara asked.
I wasn’t sure what she meant. It was hard to say what, exactly, was meant to be holding my attention so profoundly.
“Energy,” she said. “Do you see the energy flowing out of them?”
I felt what she meant. The air around the group was different. You could see it. It was just air, but there was something solid about it, like water floating. Plus, it was just a feeling. Something was happening.
“I think I can,” I said.
She said it was a good energy, nothing harmful about it, and nothing to be scared of. But I wasn’t scared, and I told her so.
She nodded as if she knew a secret, the way people do when they are just being tolerant of you. In fact, she said, it was something that could protect me.
From what? I wondered.
“These people gather energy for me. Their murmurs drive energy into me so that I can push it back out to people in need.”
She motioned for me to follow her quietly through the door and into the leafy courtyard, where we sat on a black wooden bench attached to the wall. The murmuring mumblers took no notice of us. I felt a buzzing in my ears like hundreds of bees, and my body lit up with feeling, as if I was absorbing all the energy I could see moving around the women.
“It’s more green now, isn’t it,” Tara said.
Sure enough, the English ivy growing up the courtyard’s brick wall was brighter now, fuller, and the tree leaves seemed thickish and dripping with color. All the while it seemed the sun penetrated everywhere, even the shady spots, with a viscous golden light. “That’s from all their murmuring,” She said it illuminated the space.
She touched my hand and motioned for me to follow her towards a door that opened onto a dark interior. Weird. We crossed the courtyard, passing within ten feet of the murmurers, who didn’t register our presence.
Inside the door a woman, also dressed in white, led us into a library where a young man sat, a flickery gold cloth wrapped around his head, a large sapphire-like jewel sewn onto the front. His eyes were circled in kohl and I swear there was henna around his lips. He was all of 13 years old, at the most. He smiled open-mouthed when we entered, revealing a tongue piercing, and shook Tara’s hand.
“Sarah, this is Sam -- he helps me.”
He took my hand between his two hot palms. So strange, this hand shaking -- I’d been raised to never do it, or a virus might jump into my body. His eyes were sparkly. His teeth were white. So young. I had no idea what was going on.
“Welcome,” he said.
“Let’s sit,” Tara said, indicating some cushions.
I sat, my legs crossed long in front of me. We were silent. I looked at him as he looked towards the floor. I felt the same energy surrounding us that I’d felt outside with the meditators in the courtyard. The energy swirled around the boy. A minute or two passed in silence, or so it seemed. It was a silence with a lot of movement, the buzzing of bees in my ears, air currents, puffs around me. It almost made me dizzy.
“Let’s feel this for a moment,” Tara said.
This was familiar energy. I remember seeing it first in the fireplace when I was a kid. I can still picture the blue and orange fire that to my young eyes seemed as intense as a volcano. Those black chunks of burned wood were energy from the past, I knew, sun energy that had been stored in the wood through photosynthesis. And it amazed me how we could take that stored energy, that potential energy, and turn it into heat.
I read that any physicists would tell you there was a finite amount of energy in the universe. Not that I’d ever met a physicist. But still. They said it was here at the beginning, and I guess it would be here at the end. You can’t create more and you can’t make any of it disappear. The amount never changes. It just moves on. For instance, when you burn a piece of wood in a campfire, you’re releasing energy that was previously in the tree. And that tree, in turn, was storing energy from the sun, and the earth that fed its roots, and the water that fell on its leaves. And when you burn the wood you convert it to heat energy, in the form of flames, some of which is absorbed by your body, to warm you, and some of which goes up into the air. The finite amount of energy in the universe is always on the move, from here to there. In a sense, you never waste energy. You just don’t convert it well. I really didn’t want to be here, waiting for this dude to share his mystical boysplaining.
I gave Tara a what the hell look. She smiled and said, ‘There is a reason I brought us together.”
Suddenly everything came into sharp focus. The boy’s lips looked cold. His bright blue eyes seemed clear and distant. Suddenly, his face appeared to vibrate. Seriously, vibrate. Like one of the paintings by Hilma af Klint up at the Met. A wonder no one had stolen all of those. It was almost like they’d been protected. So much else had been robbed, but Picasso, Monet, Hilma and a few others were still there. Sacred objects, untouchable. In fact, for a moment, I felt them here, not their paintings but the artists’ spirits. That kind of shook me up. I turned my focus hard on Rajif.
“ I was told to give you a message,” Rajif said.
“Who told you?”
“The elders.”
“The who?”
“Wise people from another dimension.”
Ok, I thought. Who was I to argue with that? I’d learned to accept that there was a lot I didn’t know. A lot of BS, too. It didn’t mean I needed to believe him. Elders. Wow. Sam described a dream of his that I was in. In the dream I was on a quest. I was looking for something my heart had misplaced.
“Wait,” I said. “You dreamed of me?”
“Yes.”
“But you’ve never met me.”
“I know,” he said.
Tara put her hand on my shoulder to quiet me.
He said in the dream I was walking through the snowy woods with two others. I was very tired, but super-alert, wearing rugged clothes that had been ripped and marked from traveling through the woods.
“You face a wolf,” he said. “And you are disillusioned in the end. But your path is right. The path with brambles and falling leaves and dirt and rocks and everything that makes the countryside difficult for city people. But that is the path towards the truth”
“And?” I asked.
“And that is the path you should take in your life,” he said. “If you walk you will meet a wise hermit, someone who will guide you to the next step. You are getting ready to leave, right?”
“How did you know?”
“Tara told me.”
Soon, we left, and the baby prophet went off to juggle or pray or whatever it is that prophets do.
Tara wished me well on my journey and I walked back to the neighborhood alone.
Later that night I snuck into the backyard and climbed the fire escape to my old room. Ah, I thought, looking around at my things, the lovely molding, what a great room. I stuffed a few things in my bag by candlelight, said goodbye to the beautiful room where I’d been so happy, and stepped out into the stairwell and went downstairs. As I closed the front door of the building I heard someone calling softly from behind me. I froze on the stoop.
“Sarah,” my aunt called from the doorway.
I stopped and looked at her.
“Sarah, good luck!” she said. “Remember that I love you.”
I smiled. I couldn’t go back. I was in charge of my own life now. My life. That felt like love to me. Let’s go, I thought.
{Read previous chapters here.}