Page 48 of Phoenix Fire

Jason's caked lips felt like tiny twin blimps of viscous throbbing. The soles of his feet were raw and bleeding from burst blisters. His socks were sticking to the raw spots, sending fierce stinging sensations up his legs with each step or foot movement. His calves and thighs were tender with a constant ache. His head felt hot and hollow. There was an incessant buzz emanating from deep within and vexing his ears with its gnat-like persistence. His entire body was in physical agony, yet there were moments when dull numbness settled in his limbs.

It was his mind that concerned him most.

His mind brought back uninvited, forgotten minutiae of old books and movies:

An image of a cowboy staggering across a screen of limitless desert sand, out of canteen water, becoming delirious with thirst and a bloated tongue, imagining green oases and shading palms, his lips cracked and bleeding … the cowboy, barefoot, shirt in tatters from his own frenzied tearing and ripping, falling to the hot sand, crazily clawing at the soft burning grains, digging for water … the cowboy, finally bereft of any hope, head turned upward in one last maniacal laugh and scream for pity, falling face down in the soft sand of death and forgetfulness …

Jason's mind was making sport of him, mocking him with an open throttle of fast moving sequences of remembrance. His mind, his nemesis, took him in one direction and then another, playing, toying, teasing. His foolish, foolish mind!

He shook his head and shrieked a plaintive 'no!' out into the hot haze of space. His hand protecting and shading his eyes, he glanced upward to determine the position of the sun. He stood as straight as he could with arms outstretched and parallel to the ground, slowly turning on his own axis. When his turning had the sun setting on his right side, he determined that he was facing south.

He looked for some distant spot on the southern horizon and found what he thought was a clump of boulders. He would walk toward that point.

The whirr in his head and ears picked up in decibel and intensity as he walked. He limped along toward the boulders, forcing all of his thoughts at that spot. At that spot he would find Jenny, and Jenny would forgive him for being so stupid. Jenny would take him to Grandma Myrena, and his Grandma would forgive, too.

Jenny, sweet Jenny, her face came to him from the distant boulders. Out of the shimmering haze her face came, features sharply defined: hair billowing out in slow languorous, rhythmic sweeps; her eyes beckoning with a gentle gleam; her full, perfectly curved lips partly open and calling softly his name over and over, with promises of love eternal.

With crusty lips he smiled at her ethereal presence and was reminded with sharp biting clarity that he could still feel physical pain. He shuffled on, eyes vacant, locked on the distant boulders … on to Jenny and his hope for salvation!

What had brought him to these defining moments in time and place? Was this the ultimate test for his life? Was it Carlton's death that had brought him here? Was it the fact of Grandma Myrena's terminal cancer? Was it his perceived breach of faith and loyalty by Jenny? Was it all of these things? On he stumbled, toward his misty goal.

The process of thought that had led him here seemed now adolescent and foolish, and, yet, he had to be here. It was somehow ordained that he be here, that he face himself in a way he would never have considered. A simple truth was rendered unto him. Not so much a truth perhaps as it was a revelation of something already known but forgotten or ignored.

His life had a continuity of purpose and value beyond the normal activity of daily existence. Not accepting or acknowledging death was a selfish and unnatural act. His denial of this natural process was an affront to the Creator. His living was a gift of dimensional joy and should be revered and enjoyed but it was but a speck upon the universal scheme of things. His selfish mutterings and reactions to death was only an aberrant and wasted chink in his continuity.

So, he had to think less selfishly and had to give more of himself, understanding the larger truth that his being and demise were small but significant links in the great metaphysical whole. He must be happy in the mortal time and space given to him. He must be happy in the thought of his immortal link.

His thirst was a delirium. No manner of thought could dispel the awful thirst. The pain came swooning in heavy, torturous waves. And the pain went, mercifully pausing in a numb limbo, enabling him to move onward toward the boulders. But the pain could not outdo the agony of his thirst.

Then, in another flash of clarity, he realized that he had no urge for body evacuations of any kind. That inane acknowledgment somehow amused him. A laugh began but lodged in his throat, causing him to wildly gag and suck at the hot air around him, wanting desperately to swallow and breathe in the same instant. The moment passed, and he felt again the inner dips and sways of depleted energy. His head was heavy and bloated like a dense and foggy cave chamber. His mind was used up. He could no longer believe what it offered him.

The boulders became hazy, like a gray mist descending. Jason's image of Jenny was fading like a jerky, silent, picture on a television screen. His stiff gait slowed while he stood staring with barely opened eyes at the wavy boulders. The boulders were moving within the haze. His eyes were playing with him. With a remote awareness he felt the sun pressing its relentless heat upon his back. The nudge of another truth came slowly and dramatically to him. He was following a delusive cluster of stationary, monsoonal clouds. Those clouds, those boulders of his mind, were now moving off to his left on the low horizon. He was walking in the wrong direction.

For how long, he could not know.

His chin dropped to his chest and a small ludicrous smile of surrender came to his face. The pain of his body found its limbo place. He was numb and he was struggling to go on, his trembling arms half raised in supplication, reaching tenuously for some remaining will, some vestige of purpose. He dropped on his knees to the grainy earth. The smile of capitulation still in place, he swayed forward and backward, fighting an inner struggle, giving, taking, finally lurching sideways onto the sand.

Another image came, fuzzy and imprecise. It was Jenny's face, her beautiful, glorious face, merging into another image: a man, under the hammer of an uncaring sun, slowly, serenely, yielding to the sandy peace.

Chapter Thirty-two

Grandma Myrena awoke with a startled gasp, her body soaked in perspiration.

Something sharp, not pain, had awakened her, a warning prod with bright, silent, flashing spurts like lightning diffusing through a far off cumulus cloud cluster. It was not so much a dream but an interruption to her sleep.

Within the quiet cloud cluster of flashing had come the tranquil face of Carlton, his lips moving without words or sound. In sleep she had strained to hear the words that his lips were trying to form but she could not. Then, Carlton's face had slowly altered with each silent quake of light, like a computer screen morphing altered images for identification. Carlton's face became Jason's face.

Grandma Myrena saw Jason's beatific countenance quaking with the light, then changing to a plaintive mien of sorrow and pain. There was something familiar about the desert backdrop in the dream, flaring out in all directions around Jason's pulsing image. In her sleep she had moaned in distress, reaching with feeble hands to caress Jason's tortured brow. His face was awash with a hot gritty sheen and he wanted to speak. His lips opened and closed without sound, like a phonograph needle stuck in a record's groove. The lips in rote movement had become the warning prods and Myrena had awakened.

She pushed the afghan away from her flushed and sweaty body, her breathing rapid and raspy. She was wide-eyed and more alert than she was in years.

She was a pragmatic woman, not given to delusional thinking. She had always been a clear headed, focused, in charge type of person. She had throughout her life put little stock in people who professed paranormal abilities. She was not a naysayer or dogmatist on the subject but she did have a healthy skepticism. There was a certain rigidity in the way she had lived her life, but she had never consciously closed her mind to beliefs of others which were contrary to her own. Add to this the fact that she seldom dreamed and Myrena's perplexity was easily understood.

She sat up in the large, comfortable recliner and tried to concentrate on slowing her breathing. She felt both dazed and somehow enlightened She knew with some awkward certainty that the dream was not just an idle meaningless aberration. Through a misty dimension that she could not comprehend she was sent a message. It was not clear from whom the message had come, from Carlton, from Jason, from God?

She was in a displaced dither, alone and becoming anxious. She knew not only that a message was sent to her but that she needed to act upon that message. She forced herself again to take slow, measured intakes of air. She needed to calmly assess the dream. There was something niggling at the edge of her consciousness, persistent, trying to get through. It was something about the dream. It was something in the dream, niggling at her.

She closed her eyes tightly, put her fingers to her temples and applied pressure. She dropped her chin onto her bosom, hoping, praying, for some extrasensory revelation, some subliminal elucidation. The message had come from so far or so close, certainly from a dimension or plane of which she was not familiar. Surely there had to be more to prompt her action. Surely such an incredible mind event could not be merely coincidental or an elaborate tour de force by a capricious God. There must be gist to the message.

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