The Odd At Ease

To put it plainly, there is no easy way to tell you this.

I am not here to only detail what happened to us. This more directly applies to you now, others like you, and our potentially shared futures. This is the origin story about the reason for the destination; the coordinates to an exact location. It is a map, and if it evokes a response from you, it is also a correspondence course.

This is preparation for humankind’s final analysis.

And, with respect to honoring the urgency of this message, the explanations I give throughout will serve the most important points by getting decisively to them.

Though my human existence lasted more than a century, I’ve only ever had one dream.

That isn’t to say I’ve had a single, recurring dream; I dreamed one time, about one thing, and afterwards I never dreamed again.

In fact, shortly after I woke up, I died.

That established, I am not otherwise unacquainted with dreams. I’m more familiar with dreams than most despite my limited personal experience with them, because historically, to the extent that I’ve had any relationship with dreams at all, it has been as a kind of composer and conductor thereof. I’ve both administered and beheld a number of dreams remotely while veiled in an imperceptible cognitive solitude. I’ve looked on as these transpired within the consciousnesses of people I’ve studied from both near and far.

Having never been a human child, though, dreaming proved to be something to which I was otherwise immune, with the exception of the one.

The only dream I ever had occurred to me for what turned out to be a specific reason, and it happened in an inherited body I waited patiently to wear, even if only for a time.

As I lay in bed alone in the simple home I shared with my mother, my son, and his pregnant wife, I first observed the opacity of the sunless, red sky at dawn from behind closed eyelids. The off-colored stain seemed to cling to the air itself, not unlike the way oil would coat a canvas.

Secondly, I noticed that we were airborne, adrift in our home as it hovered in the bloodshot heavens, hung upon nothing, gently floating above the sea, with each of us there in the house under a sort of group sedation. I knew we were not simply asleep. Even so, in the dream I could see all, everywhere, and as my consciousness floated free and untethered from my assumed body, I suddenly found myself displaced, standing alone at the bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, off the coast of the land in which I lived: The Kingdom of the Asante. Merchants and slave traders called our land the Gold Coast of Africa. Today, that nation is called Ghana.

An immense sound, like every Asante talking drum, all yelling in unison intensified, filled, and pulsed throughout my entire body, emanating from within and without, penetrating everywhere, and as I watched, eyes now open to the point of painful dilation, a ship floated above from which bodies fell slowly downward toward me. I looked on, frozen in stillness as the first corpse descended, ghostlike; one body was followed by another, then another, then dozens; all unfamiliar and dressed in clothing from what I now know is the 21st century.

Then I began to spot the faces of familiar strangers that I knew I had seen before. And then I saw my most recognizable friends and neighbors; the good-natured produce merchant from the market; the young boy who worked at the bake shop just outside the market; the old blind woman who wore gold dust in her hair and on her clothes as she walked alone on the main road, carrying what looked like her body weight in a basket of unidentifiable bundles on her head, a walking stick in her hand.

I knew these particular people all in the same way. These were the people in and around my village whom I had watched and whose souls I had contemplated in my time spent learning about people in general.

Then I saw one body fall faster than the others, as if weighted down. As it landed face up at my feet, which were still planted in the sand as if the sand were cement, I observed that the body belonged to Akisi—my son. My lungs felt scorched as I screamed in silence and searing bubbles of blood surged forth from my throat where there should have been sound. I remained locked in place, unable to move, unable to look away.

Only then did I recognize the sound of the drums yelling in unison—the talking drums—as my own pounding heartbeat.

I was abruptly awakened at the sound of thunder so near me that I may as well have been inside the clouds from which it clapped. Instead, I found myself still far below them in a position of living cargo, still on the very ship I had been taken aboard only hours before.

There is little else other than a ship that is more unambiguously a manifestation of man’s compulsion to pursue, conquer, and own something beyond what he already has.

What is a ship other than a vehicle for the outworking of your will, for manifesting your destiny in the face of nature’s opposition to it? If you possess a ship, for you it holds a certain promise of ascension from your present state to one greater, because wherever it is you envision yourself, you can map out a route to it and go there.

Depending on who you are and what you want, the insatiable desire to explore the bounds of where you can go with your vision may itself become your destiny. The fact that you can, very well may emerge as the most compelling reason for why you should.

If you possess a ship, you can make a well-known name for yourself and create wealth for generations, if that is what you want. But the more diminishing the potential for return on your investment—time being as fleeting as it is in the course of a human lifespan—the greater the risk involved, and the more creative the kinds of currency traded.

All that said, if you do not possess the ship, but instead find that the ship has you in its possession, against your will and amid circumstances over which you have no control, that very same ship represents distinctly other things to you.

This thought occurred to me as I lay chained to the inside of a ship I did not possess.

I listened to the sound of soft wailing as it mixed uneasily with the hoarse, urgent whispers of fervent prayer and mournful song. The stench of human filth, sickness, and death filled the space left in the air between the sounds. I was aware that the disfiguring “OS” mark left by the fresh brand on my cheek still ached, but it was dulled by my focus, which was trained on my purpose.

I fixed my gaze upon the floorboards of the deck above me while my thoughts continued to move about, still free and untethered from the body which contained my consciousness for the time being. I existed in the form of a time-bound being at that point in time. The body I bore was in bondage, bound for the Caribbean within the full-bellied beast bearing the name of HMS Farrin.

Still, my thoughts were on another trajectory entirely, and I, being who I am, was never far behind them.

My full name is unimportant. The one to which I answered at the time was quite a bit longer than Ananka, so we’ll just keep it there for the sake of simplicity, considering all there is to say to you now.

Prior to my predicament, I had invisibly observed the Asante people since before they were even known as such. In time I revealed myself—or a representation thereof—to them. And, in the course of living among them in human form, I learned much from them and came to love many of them.

My love was what gave me pause, because were it not for that, I would have evaded abduction and abandoned the husk of the human woman whose body I wore. It was a familiar and acceptable interface for the people who had chosen me. I chose them back as I lived and worked as a healer among them.

I sat in silence from the moment of my abduction to my having been taken aboard the ship, because I was busily moving among my loved ones on a level that you would best understand as telepathy. I was preparing their minds for the trip ahead—or better yet, the diversion from the charted course, which as it would turn out, wouldn’t be so much a relocation, as a de-location of sorts.

If you want to know the truth, it will be much easier to imagine what happened then, and will happen again soon if—from the beginning, right now—we think of time and space as having soft spots and secret doors. And the first ones through which we must pass to go anywhere are the exits at the borders between our bodies and minds.

Let’s say those soft spots and secret doors can be walked through freely. But you have to know where to look and how hard—or softly—to push. And if you pass through these openings in a group, everyone must remember to link arms tightly, so to speak, and to move about with synchronized steps.

I have always known this. As I moved among the minds of the ones I had come to love, along with the unlucky strangers in our midst, I shared this information with them all for the first time, then, as I am with you right now.

Sadly, for some of them, it was already too late to receive this insight. One man had resisted capture with a fight so vicious he was made an example of by the slave traders. Beaten within a thin film of his life, he was left to die, which he did, broken and limp in shackles alongside his family and neighbors. In the violence, a slaver had lost an eye, and more than an eye was taken back as retribution. The rank odor of futility still lingered as an advisement that anyone else with any fight left in them might want to save their energy if they hoped to survive.

So, that is what I did, although for the sake of something other than my own survival. I knew that having my assumed body ripped away from my carefully adapted consciousness would harm me in no way other than to disallow me to help anyone without killing everyone. As such, I chose in the moment to kill no one. Instead, I saved my energy and focused it on the preparations at hand.