Chapter 30

“Warren, come here. Let me see you,” a sickly voice from the hospital bed in front of him called. His brain was still trying to figure out how he knew the man in front of him was his grandfather, but his feet found the command simple enough and obeyed. “Ah you look good!” he raised a shaky arm and patted Warren’s shoulder. “Got some muscle to you, now. Have you been lifting?”
“For soccer,” Warren answered automatically, although that world had become nothing in the words that fell from his tongue.
“And how’s that going?”
“I’m not sure if I’ll stay with the team next fall.”
“Found too many other things to do, eh? I understand.” The man tried to breathe deep, but wound up triggering a nasty-sounding cough. Once he subsided, he found Warren’s eyes again. “Same thing happened to me when I was your age.”
“I don’t think so Grandpa. Not quite like this.”
The high elder smiled. “Actually, almost precisely. Tell me Warren, do you dream of corkscrewing pendulums often?” Warren’s eyebrows separated, splitting his brow, high and low. “I have been. And until you arrived, I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what it meant.”
“Listen Grandpa, that’s nice, but…”
“Don’t ask your questions just yet. Besides, you should know better.” And just that moment, a whole host of other questions rushed into his consciousness. Warren did his best to ignore them, but this faint allusion to Livingstone riled them up like a lab puppy chasing a flock of geese. “Wouldn’t you know it, a gang of thieves attacked my father’s store there in Illinois one winter eve when I was home alone. By God’s grace, I escaped and, after I had waited and waited for my parents to come back home, set to wandering where I would, looking to make my own way in the world.”
Warren sat watching his grandfather, dumbstruck.
“Long, long, long story short, I set here in this very room, listening to my grandfather tell a similar tale of how he had been abducted from his father’s cabin while the man was out collecting a few traps.”
It took every ounce of willpower Warren had not to interrupt him.
“And what he told me that day is the same thing I’m going to tell you right now: Warren you are part of a larger cycle than even I understand. You must become the next High Elder Anazao; you were meant to be here, you were drawn here for this purpose. You sensed this, didn’t you?”
Now that Warren had a chance to answer, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. The man before him was as truly his grandfather as the one that had died the previous November, in a fit of hacking and coughing when the results of the presidential election were revealed on the evening news. And not just the mannerisms and the light in his eyes, but sense of overwhelming love and care (and a bit of expectation) he had always felt next to his grandfather told him that the man whom cancer had killed was the very same as the one talking to him now. And though the question burned within him, he couldn’t ask it.
“I guess. I just feel…so…” Warren floundered, looking down at his feet.
“Thrown?” the high elder volunteered.
“Yeah.”
The loving eyes of his Grandfather pulled his gaze to meet them. “If it at all comforts you, I did meet my avatar, the me you knew in your childhood. That was an odd conversation; I really hope you don’t meet yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have to answer that question, but I will. Warren, the reason my parents didn’t come back, is not because they left me, it was because I left them. I was given another path, a journey in which they were not involved. But just because I took one, didn’t mean I left the other. Just because you hopped in the Jeep with Oscar, doesn’t mean you left your house. Warren, the only reason you are alive is because my avatar went with my parents. And the only reason you will meet your grandson here one day is because your other self didn’t notice Oscar in the garage. Whether that’s because you went kayaking with your brother, or had received a raid invite on Warcraft, whatever. There is another you that does not have to explain leaving a burnt house with a delusional hob to dead family members. There is another Warren Spicks who might go out for soccer again next fall. A Warren who will fall on his face (probably literally) for a beautiful girl and their son will one day face a separation from his family and journey to meet you, perhaps a week or two before your last.
“It was for this reason that I mentioned dreaming about corkscrewing pendulums—a spiraling oscillation. The thing is circular, but it doesn’t hit every time, just every other. Who knows why this thing was set in motion, but I do know there is a powerful reason behind it.”
“What’s that?”
“Hope, Warren. It is hope. I am privileged to serve the Keeper as the handle to his beaming torch of hope; when I pass, you too will begin to understand. But it is the duty of the high elder to be the seat of this hope for all of mankind.”
Warren suddenly felt a little smaller in the room, a sense of grandeur filled the frail old man on the bed, and the sun seemed to shine a bit brighter through the windows. “Warren my son, come to me.”
Warren closed the small gap between himself and the side of the bed. “This will seem like the most foolish thing you’ve done in your life. To date. Even more so than losing Sofi. But don’t worry, that trumps this. Come closer.”
It seemed fairly obvious that the old man knew that he was fading—but Warren noticed that his grandfather had begun to glow. The high elder motioned him in with his hand, and Warren leaned over, almost touching his grandfather’s nose with his own. The steady eyes gazing into his own asked him to promise. Warren nodded slightly, without blinking.
“When I go,” the high elder rasped between short breaths, “let it in. I guarantee you…you won’t want to. It will seem…ridiculous. But Warren!” A wrinkled hand grasped his own. “You must. You have come…so far to get here…you have sacrificed…so much.”
The light seemed to be fading from his grandfather’s eyes, and Warren clung to every mysterious word.
“Let it in, Warren,” the high elder, “even if you feel…like you’re dying…let it in.”
And with that, High Elder Anazao leaned back into his pillow, exhaled his spirit, and died. But before Warren could think anything, he noticed that the fading light in his grandfather’s face seemed to be moving out his nose. And before he had time to form a question, a softly glowing wasp crawled out of the nasal cavity of the High Elder Anazao. The creature stretched its wings weakly, shivered, and brought them to a flapping life. Warren gazed at the wasp in wonder as it took to the air, then took a step back when it began to hover his way.
But he couldn’t look away from the bug. It’s black fractured eyes mesmerized him and the last words of the High Elder Anazao echoed in his memory like a fascinating and frightening peal of thunder ricocheting down a mountain valley: let it in. Warren shook his head, but couldn’t tear his gaze from the wasp’s.
This was so wrong. Had he been deceived? What sort of imposter had been masquerading as his grandfather? This leach just wanted a new host—perhaps a compatible host, and had probably arranged the whole sequence of events to bring him here. He ought to backhand that wasp against the wall and crush it underfoot. Perhaps then he could get Sofi back. Perhaps then they could find a nice quiet history together, away from the Mar, the Surfside Ping Pong Club or whatever this was, away from demons and harpies and wasps and tokleks and lions and tigers and hyenas and whatever else was out there. This was the most absurd notion he’d ever thought about. It was ridiculous!
“Of course it’s ridiculous. But let it in.” Warren froze. That familiar voice behind him sounded as calm and relaxed as if he were on a midnight bus to Kansas. Or, for that matter, right in the middle of a firefight, surrounded, and running low on ammunition. Warren turned to find a pale-faced and dead-serious Livingstone in the doorway.
“Are you serious?” Warren asked, and shuddered when the wasp landed on his shoulder.
“Never more so,” Livingstone said with eyes that might have beheld a nightmare. “Let it in. Now.”
“You have no idea what you’re asking of me. I can’t.”
Livingstone’s jaw tightened. “You must; you absolutely must,” he said through clenched teeth. “If ever you were to trust me, trust me now; if ever you were to obey your grandfather’s request, obey this one. Let it in.”
“But this is stupid! It’s complete foolishness. Let a wasp in my nose? Are you mad?”
“You’ve asked those same questions before you did similar actions. Now, get on with it. Let it in.”
The smileless Livingstone bothered Warren. Everything about this seemed wrong. Why was it always he who had to face choices like this on the spot? He didn’t want this. He never did ask for it. What had changed a week ago? What had sent him skipping down this path, hardly able to orient himself to one circumstance before being flung to the next. He did feel thrown. And with that thought came another. He was here. He certainly could have been anywhere. He might even be somewhere else, too. But he was here. And he faced a choice between two options: he could swat the wasp on his shoulder and be done with it, or he could turn to the wasp, nod, and…Warren shivered. He couldn’t imagine it. It was too weird. Too other from anything he had even experienced in the past week.
“You have about fifteen seconds to decide,” Livingstone informed Warren in a tone of voice he had never heard from the hobo: anxious.
“What?”
“Twelve now.”
Warren turned to the wasp. A wave of desperation crashed over him. This was crazy; totally absurd. Images flashed through Warren’s mind; his parents at the dinner table, his brother in a kayak, Sofi at the coffee-shop table, Ali gnawing on Old Fred’s finger, his grandfather eagerly relaying his last words, now Livingstone standing in a cold sweat. Could he trust that all of this had hope behind it? Was it hope that told the story, or a deceptive fate hurdling him to his demise? How had it all come down to this little bug on his shoulder?
“Five.”
Questions or not, could he trust? He didn’t have the mettle to trust. He didn’t, Warren told himself; he couldn’t. Then like the flashing bolt of lightning she had seemed to him in Manitou Springs, Sofi appeared in his mind’s eye. “You took a chance on me,” she whispered.
And so on a pleasant Thursday afternoon at approximately 2:35:04 pm Eastern Standard Time in a beach-house on the eastern Florida coastline, Warren Spicks, grandson of S. Ogden Spicks, spun north, held out his hand for a dying wasp, and promptly stopped thinking. The creature inched onto the palm of Warren’s hand and started to glow with a faint, golden light. After pulling his hand nearly to his lips, Warren closed his eyes, tilted his nose into the air, and began to inhale.
When Warren resumed his thought process, he wasn’t sure whether he was horrified at what he had just experienced or if he had imagined the whole thing. He didn’t distinctly remember anything after inhaling, only that he had had made his decision, and that he knew that the wasp knew he had. He had, for half a second thought he had felt the pain of sharp legs in his sinuses and the urge to sneeze..but like failed sneeze, faded with just a little irritation that he hadn’t sneezed.
Livingstone looked as if a hydrogen bomb had just been defused at his feet, and came up to Warren, searching for something deep in his eyes. Warren could tell when he found it; the hobo’s eyes glanced all around his face, then he nodded. “You alright, Watson?”
“Yeah, I think so. Don’t feel much different.”
“Mm. That so. Well, I for one, am glad you decided the way you did.”
“Why’s that?” Warren asked.
“Because I’ll never have to answer any of your dumb questions ever again.”