Page 45 of Phoenix Fire

When the nurse entered the room with some medication, Jenny noticed Myrena yawning. It was a good time for her to leave.

Jenny drove home with an odd serenity of mood. Despite all that was happening, she felt calm. She felt that her future with Jason was somehow secure and bright. She did not understand the mood but she gratefully accepted it.

Perhaps it was because of a little phrase which kept playing within her mind and softly dancing upon her soul. It was the phrase that her father had given her, a chant for the times in her life when she knew not where to go. There were times when the phrase got forgotten in the frenzied pace of living. She must remember not to forget.

She smiled and sang it out loudly: “Butterflies and Jellybeans … Butterflies and Jellybeans … Butterflies and Jellybeans ...”

Chapter Twenty-nine

He awoke with a start in darkness.

His mouth felt grainy and dry. He unconsciously wiped at his cheek and found tiny sand pebbles in dense clusters accumulated there. His head had obviously dropped from the makeshift blazer pillow during his sleep and had found the sandy floor of the desert.

Jason sat up slowly, his aching joints and muscles protesting with pain. Remembrance came with a brash and sudden jolt. His thirst for water was intense, his body dehydrated from the searing heat of the day and his previous alcohol consumption. His head throbbed wildly. His tongue was swollen, felt like an alien object, and wanted to stick to the roof of his parched mouth. His lips were cracked and stinging with pinpricks of pain with any facial grimace or movement, the tiny, dried blood fissures reopened with his wakening. He was nauseous, weak, and terribly disoriented.

He sat hunched with knees drawn up in the sand, surveying the desolate area around him. The high desert night was clear and bright with a fulsome moon and starry canopy.

There was a strange awareness within him, a sense of déj? vu, like he had somehow once before experienced all of this. The subtle sounds of air and animal movement had a surreal clarity. He was both sedated by this awareness and intuitively wary of it. It was strongly primal and elemental. Just on the edge of his consciousness he sensed an awesome and irrevocable truth, some inner adjustment or change, but he could not pull it to him to examine its possibilities. This persistent gauzy cognition gave Jason a nebulous comfort and hope. He tried hard to bring into sharper focus this illusory knowledge, but it faded as other crucial truths became known to him.

A coyote wail from somewhere nearby broke the relative quietness, soon followed by loud baying from a pack of Javelina. Jason was not too frightened by these sounds as he was in and around the desert all of his life. Still, the thought of an aroused rattlesnake or some other angered predator being in close proximity made him shudder.

It was not a cool night in the high desert. The air still carried the heat of the day. His craving for water had become an incessant thing, and the act of swallowing was made all the more difficult with the lack of saliva. Jason knew that he must not make his need for water an exclusive thought or he might drive himself crazy. Had he not already done that? Had he not 'driven' himself here in some catatonic mindset of madness. Oh, he knew there was the alcohol and there was subtle reminiscence that brought him here, forcing him to search for something in the cobwebs of family history; something that might offer succor, a speck of salvation for his tortured soul.

He rose unsteadily from the rough ground and shook out his wrinkled blazer. As he took tentative steps he put on the coat. He thought that he was walking south for there was a sweeping nimbus of light in one direction and shadowy swaths of black and gray in others. He suspected that the wide horizontal splay of light was the greater Phoenix metro area.

He walked toward the inexact center of the horizontal band of light, dodging cactus, mesquite, Palo Verde trees, and dipping arroyos. Along the way he picked up a fallen tree limb and used it as a guiding rod to spook any reptilian creatures that got too close. The night was projected in an eerie clarity, awesome in its breadth and beauty. There was another imprecise quality to the almost reverent space surrounding him, what he might imagine a walk on the moon would produce.

Try as he might to preclude the thought of water, his thirst was a growing, gnawing cinder in his throat. How could he have been so stupid? What had possessed him to drive to the high desert, to walk aimlessly and so far? He did not know the exact route that he had taken in his car. There was so much fog in his brain. He did not know the distance and directions that he had walked.

How far had he come from the valley? Forty miles? Fifty? More?

His car? He had no idea where it was. He would walk toward the distant lights.

Why had he come? Yes, somehow that was more important. Why?

He stumbled along, becoming aware that he was off center and more to the right of the band of light. He corrected his course, slowly moving on.

The lights on the southern horizon sustained him, kept him moving. He was sure it was the southern horizon. It must be the lights of Phoenix that drew him on.

Had he had any education about the stars and the moon? He could not remember. He had heard of the big and little dippers; heard names like Ursa Major, Minor, Pegasus, Orion; heard of planets like Venus, Jupiter, Pluto, Saturn. They were only words to him, beautiful words that could not help him. It was enough for him to know that these constellations, planets, stars, were up there in their celestial prominence. It had never occurred to him that their locations in that vast dark sky would ever have useful value for him.

He was bemused that he carried no fear with him. He was not afraid. Thirst, he carried. Yes, an incredible amount of thirst. With each step he felt the stinging, suppuration, throbbing lips, his parched throat and bloating tongue. There were cramping calf muscles, painfully tender feet, his entire body a mass of screaming neurons. There was all of that, but he was not afraid. He was slowly edging his way home.

Home, a wistful, compelling little word. Here, now, in this strange night land, the word had a meaning more special than he could express. Home had suddenly become more important than the last few days would have indicated.

There was something else that struck him. There were no black thoughts. His mind seemed more clear than it was lately. Were the black thoughts just taking a break? No, he thought not. Jenny came to him now like the light crossing in the southern sky. She sustained him. Her face, vivid in his mind like a haunting piece of music, her tresses falling softly on her shoulders, her lips slightly open in a caressing smile, her votive eyes the deeply drawing beacons of his salvation. He loved her. That was enough.

The sadness over Grandma Myrena's terminal cancer had constricted his soul, had choked his reason. No less grievous now, that sadness lay on his consciousness like a resolved truth. He would survive her passing. He loved her. That was enough.

Even the awful heartache of Carlton's death, of times and chances wasted like golden coins in a mountain cache, lay oddly relieved. He loved his brother. That was enough.

How strange and lucid this inner night vision! Was his mind betraying him with this new awakening? Was he simply in a survival mode where all else was secondary and temporarily on hold? He thought not. He was not afraid.

Now, with this amazing metamorphosis, this catharsis of soul, it was important that he live. His life had meaning beyond the scope of his desire to know its significance. That was the elemental truth he was finding here in this high desert cathedral of space. That was the strange essence of this night. Like a lifting malarial ague the strain and stress of black thought and death had left him. Except for the abiding thirst for water, his mind was clear of recent demons, clear like the lustrous quality of the evening sky.

What of this new essence? How? What? Why? Was it a high desert purgation of the soul? Was it a new thought that held so much promise? Or, was it the beginning of some awful delirium?

Jason grinned, despite the sting that came to his lips. He lifted his face to the full moon, the planets, and the quaking stars, and thought of the ludicrous spectacle he must be presenting to an omniscient deity.

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