Chapter One
“As the first snowflake settled, it whispered secrets of a winter tale waiting to unfold.”
“Actually this starts in summer, I must tell you this quickly because my part in this story comes later, I have to be there. Let’s start here, on the worst day of our lives, my little brother turned eighteen.”
“He also arrived home from Kansas City’s biggest water park, ‘Oceans of Fun’, to see our parents’ house engulfed in flame. His friends dropped him off at the end of the block because of the firetrucks, they didn’t know his house was burning. My name is Wilson by the way, Jesse’s older brother.”
“There were a lot of trucks, the firemen did their best to stop Jesse from running into the burning house to save our mom and dad. Even the ambulance people got involved in the scuffle.”
“Mom and Dad’s cars were in the driveway, no one could tell him our parents survived. I got there and found him in the back of a police car, they threw him in there so he couldn’t try getting into the house again. On his hands were big white bandages from trying to rescue our parents. He didn’t cry one time, not once. Not in front of the cops, not in front of the ambulance people and not in front of me.”
“In his wet bathing suit and towel I brought him home and was going to apply to adopt him, but the lawyers told us that wasn’t necessary because he was eighteen. In his bathing suit he fell asleep on my couch, we threw blankets on top of him. My wife didn’t mind wet couch cushions.”
“The next morning, I turned on the TV and made breakfast and sent the kids to a babysitter.”
“As I was making calls for funeral arrangements, Jesse woke up on the couch to the movie, “127 Hours”, you probably remember that movie, it was the one starring James Franco, about the guy who had to chop off his own arm in that Utah cave to survive. By the time I was bringing Jesse bacon and eggs, the movie was finished, and he had made up his mind. He was going to the desert.”
“Jesse learned the guy in the movie’s name was Aron Ralston. Of all the times to pick a role model, my little brother picked the day after our parent’s died.”
“So, we buried them. There was life insurance, and the plot of land was sold. Weeks later I came home and my little brother was gone. No note, no goodbye, nothing. I found out later he hiked all the trails Aron Ralston had. Jesse even sent me pictures of himself from the Bluejohn Canyon in Utah the day he hiked it. And since I saw a smile on his face, I wasn’t too worried, I was happy he found something.”
“The last message I got from Jesse, he sounded excited, “Hey Wilson, I’m hiking The River Mountains Loop Trail today, it’s 34 miles long but I’ll make it. I…..” (Jesse had a hard time saying I love you; I was grateful he tried) I’ll talk to you later.”
“And that was the last time I heard from him, I’ll end up turning my phone over to the police. I would come to find out The River Mountains Loop Trail was in Nevada. Jesse had been spending his inheritance on hiking, which was fine, the money helped his grief. But that message was it. The police would never find his body, or his backpack or any trace of him.
I almost forgot, on my lower back is a kidney scar. When Jesse was sixteen, he donated one of his kidneys to me because I had kidney failure, he saved my life. It’s because of this I was able to witness time change around me. I gotta go, I’ll see you in a while, lets join Jesse, he’s on the phone with me now at the head of The River Mountains Loop Trail.”
“Hey Wilson, I’m hiking The River Mountains Loop Trail today, it’s 34 miles long but I’ll make it. I…..I will talk to you later.” Jesse closed his flip phone and put it in his pocket. He doesn’t like smart phones because the internet’s too distracting. Unconsciously he itched his lower back where his scar was from when he gave his older brother one of his kidneys. The scar didn’t itch anymore but he scratched it anyway.
He had plenty of water with him, he wore a Camel Back filled with ice cold water. He had oranges and a book of local plant life he could eat. His idol, Aron Ralston was a survivor, why shouldn’t he be?
The night before he started his walk Jesse slept in his car. He was happy, at least as happy as an eighteen-year-old who just lost his parents could be. He was a little stressed, but whining wasn’t going to get him anywhere, he started walking.
He wore hiking boots, Subzero water bottles hung from his backpack. The sun was shining, he was looking forward to conquering another trail. Far down inside his heart, he was ignoring his parents’ death, plain and simple. If he didn’t think about his mom and dad, making breakfast on Saturday mornings. Or how his mom wrapped his birthday presents with Sunday comic’s newspaper. Or how his dad had been putting off cleaning the garage for a year. Or how his mom had to chase the neighbor’s cat from under her car every morning. She didn’t understand why the cat wanted under there. Jesse’s dad had said, “Just back the car out, it’ll run away.”
A tear almost crept onto his face. With the fresh morning air and the clear Nevada sunshine, for just a minute he looked like a regular kid.
Jesse quickly squashed both parents and pushed their memory down, as far as he could as his eyes started to water, he blinked the pain away and started thinking about his hike, and sometimes Aron Ralston. Jesse didn’t think he could chop off his own arm but what did he know. I wish I was Aron Ralston, he thought.
Within a minute he forgot about his parents and focused on his hike. He was planning on hiking halfway, then camp somewhere for the night.
The first thing he noticed on the trail was how many bikers there were. There was a line down the middle of the path and even though Jesse wanted to be alone, almost constantly he heard people from behind, “Coming up on your left.” He was grateful for the warning but quickly grew tired of people. His progress was so stunted by bikers he only made it fifteen or so miles that day, not even half of the thirty-four he needed to complete his hike.
During the sunset, which he did think looked beautiful, out of frustration he decided to ditch the trail and head to the top of a hill to camp for the night. He could see other people had been there, it wasn’t the highest hill he could’ve climbed, but it would be the last for him, in Nevada anyway.
Jesse got to his summit and turned to view Lake Mead, but his anger at the bikers ruined it. He found a rock to sit on but didn’t take off his pack. Instead, he took off his shoe and rubbed his bare foot. Looking below, he could see he started small avalanches of rocks cascading to the path at the foot of the hill. Let the bikers deal with loose rocks, he thought.
As he put his sock and shoe back on, he heard something behind him, a cough. Not a coyote cough or a bird cough, it was human, and it was almost silent. Jesse turned around so fast he almost fell. There was a rock wall behind him, and nothing else. With the sun setting on his last day in the present, Jesse walked up to the rock wall and put his palm on it. There was still heat from the sun but it was cooling. He ran his hand along the rock face and found not far from where he first touched the wall, his hand disappeared into solid rock.
Jerking his hand away, he held it up and clenched a fist before accepting that his hand was fine. Using his left hand this time, he reached out and touched the rock with his left index finger. It slowly disappeared up to the knuckle. Then he heard the cough again. His first thought was of Star Trek, Hologram projector?
He felt with both hands inside the rock that wasn’t there, but looked like it was. His hands disappeared into the rock every time, and it didn’t interrupt the image of the rock when he did so. In most of the science fiction shows he watched, when you interrupted the hologram image, it would render the rest of it into static or code. His hands didn’t interrupt anything. But a loose measurement of the opening told him there was room for him to enter. An unseen opening.
Jesse did looked around for some of those damned bikers, but for the first time all day they became like cops, he thought, Never around when you need them.
Taking off his backpack and using what was left of the sunlight, he turned sideways and entered shoulder first. If he had kept his backpack on he would’ve gotten stuck. As the sun continued to set, the crickets got louder, in the distance a coyote or wolf howled, he didn’t know which.
Jesse didn’t know how hot he was until he felt the coolness of the cave. His shirt wasn’t soaked through, but he had been sweating. For some reason he smelled grapes. He kept sniffing the air when someone said, “You said this cave was clear.”
It was dark, but Jesse’s eyes were young, they adapted quickly. He set his pack down, looked around and asked, “Is someone there?”
Once again, the mysterious voice said, “Two-hundred and fifty years, you said this cave was clear.” Followed by a coughing fit. The cave was very small. As Jesse walked forward he saw something he didn’t understand. There was a bubble, a giant bubble, the same kind you would see in your bubble bath. It had that bubble shine to it. The bubble had a big chair in the middle, one of those big chairs you’d expect a hunter to have sitting in front of his fireplace, strong and solid. And there was an old-looking suitcase on the floor, like one of those old leather satchels.
Jesse was so taken by the sight of the bubble, he wanted to touch it. He didn’t realize he had passed someone sitting on the floor. He also forgot someone had been talking.
When he approached it, he stuck his right index finger into the shine. It treated his finger exactly how a real bubble would. When he pulled his finger away the bubble lightly pulled at it until it snapped back and became whole. Jesse did this three or four times before he heard movement behind him.
Turning around he saw a blond-haired guy standing there. It was the type of blond hair women paid billions of dollars a year for. A bright natural blond. The guy himself was no taller than Jesse, but he was skinny, a weird kind of skinny, like he was sick. Above the blond guy’s head, in both hands was a gold brick, at least that’s what it looked like to Jesse.
The guy brought the gold brick down on Jesse’s face and it connected with the bridge of his nose. If the blond-haired guy hadn’t been so weak, he might’ve killed him. There was a cracking noise and Jesse fell backwards. Because it wasn’t the hardest hit, Jesse didn’t fall down, he did however, stumble backwards into the bubble and fell on the Hunter’s Chair.
Through the bubble and the pain of his possibly broken nose, Jesse saw the sick and skinny blond guy reach his hands out and scream, “NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO” before he disappeared. His hands had been in the bubble in the beginning, but when he was able to pull them out, he was gone in a blip.
There will be a commercial far in the future, a computer program for displaying your memories:
ATTENTION: Ladies and Gentlemen, do you want to recollect something from your past? Do you want to see your loved ones standing in front of you using only your memories? How about pets? Is there a little dog you would give anything to see again? How about a forgotten summer’s day? First love?
Well, with our newest addition to the Microsoft family, you can do all of that and more. Just attach these components to any chair and sit. Our super smart engineers will even amplify any song that links with your memory.
There is a lot more to that commercial, but Jesse was heading the other way, so it no longer applies to him. He was very alarmed when the blond-haired guy vanished. But he was so distracted when his mother appeared in that cave in Nevada that he sat back down. And of all the songs that could’ve started playing, it was John Mayer’s ‘Love on the Weekend’. It had been playing in the background last Christmas and he never noticed it. As the blood from his nose started flowing over his lips and to his shirt, Jesse watched his mother dancing while decorating their Christmas tree.
Behind his mother on the couch was Jesse’s dad reading the newspaper, the TV was muted. But his mother was the center of attention as she hung ornaments on the tree.
Jesse remembered this from last Christmas, he had been doing homework while his mom took care of the tree. Just a harmless memory, one that was so valuable to him he never realized it. It was then that all the sorrow of his parents’ death came gushing up to the front of his mind, Jesse burst out crying. He cried so uncontrollably that he couldn’t contain himself. When he tried to stand to join his mother, the image of her and his father started to fade, so he sat down and wept.
You know what? We’re going to leave Jesse alone for a little bit while we exit the cave. He needs some privacy.
Outside the sky is one color, not night or day but a mixture of both. The clouds are racing past us, returning from whence they came. The path that Jesse had been walking disappeared and was replaced by desert. Las Vegas lights vanished and the desert took everything back. The roads leading up to where Jesse had parked his car were deconstructed in a flash and were gone. Mount Rushmore was deconstructed and returned to its original mountain form. The Golden Gate Bridge was taken apart and gone.
With his journey complete, Jesse saw the bubble pop itself and his parents disappear. He fell out of the Hunter’s Chair. He had trouble blinking, he was so dry. Looking down at his arms they looked like an old man’s arms. Like a pink, dried out raisin his hands were gnarled and wrinkled; he couldn’t open his fists. With his mouth completely dried out, Jesse tried to crawl to where he had set his backpack down to get his water, but instead he fell flat on his face and finished the job the blond-haired guy started on his nose. It cracked when he fell, face first into the dirt of the cave. His blood mixed with the dirt.
With blurry eyes, Jesse half saw the old suitcase unfold itself. Then he felt his pants being pulled down and needles enter his butt cheeks. It did sting but he barely felt it, Jesse assumed he was dying as his lights went out. He wondered if this was how Aron Ralston felt.
Some time passed, Jesse opened his eyes to cloudy sky. There was a man’s back, but it was staticky. Jesse felt like he was being dragged. He asked if he could speak to John Mayer. A giant grape slice was shoved in his mouth, he fell asleep sucking on it.
More time passed, his head was being lifted so he could see something. It looked like San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. This time a watermelon chunk was pushed into Jesse’s mouth. Jesse deliriously said, “The Golden Gate Bridge smacked my mother.”
When Jesse and his older brother Wilson were little boys, they were babysat by their grandmother. Jesse loved being with her because she didn’t put a limit on the number of cookies he could eat. And she loved peanut butter. She would cook almost everything with it. In every cupboard she had jars of Skippy, Peter Pan, Reese’s, etc. Jesse’s favorite memories of her were dipping giant peanut butter cookies lined with sugar into big glasses of cold milk.
Sometimes, during autumn afternoons with their grandmother, Jesse and his big brother Wilson would nap on her front porch couch, bellies full of peanut butter cookies. She had a rocking chair that she’d rock back and forth on. It created a soothing sound that creaked and cracked, both Jesse and Wilson fell asleep fast. And their grandmother didn’t stop when she fell asleep either, she just kept on rocking. The wood would creak, and they would sleep as yellow leaves drifted to the ground.
