Eric--Part Twenty-Eight

Splog # 133

Twenty-Eight

   Eric watched the deer in wonder as it cavorted around the clearing. It gave a graceful leap over his knapsack, then ran up to the fountain and bent its head over the water. The man watched the deer at the fountain and then looked at the two animals somewhere over Eric's head. The deer looked at the man and stood motionless. All sounds of movement had ceased and the man looked as though he was holding his breath. Slowly he let out a whistle on three descending notes. Then he began to raise his arms an inch at a time, one pointing to the deer and one pointing over Eric's head. He let out another whistle on two ascending notes with his arms still gradually rising from his sides. The man took in a breath. He closed his eyes. He began a whistle that, while rising in volume, remained at one pitch. His arms seemed to coordinate with the loudness of the shrill sound issuing from his lips. The deer looked tense, as if about to burst into motion. The arms and the whistle both moved towards some climax that seemed imminent. Eric felt as if he too was ready to burst from his imprisonment. When it seemed impossible that the whistle could get any louder, the man's arms shot suddenly up over his head. Eric saw just the barest inkling of the deer's motion before an explosion of light flooded the clearing and in the glare it became impossible to see anything. His senses of sight and hearing were both so completely overloaded that it was as if they'd been cut off with a switch. In the darkness and silence he was actually experiencing the extremity of light and sound. Then he felt movement. It seemed that he was falling. He heard, as if from a far distance, a splash and then another. Shortly, there was a plop and then another of those. He was reminded of the drops falling from nowhere to the basin at the top of the marble chair. But the plops weren't repeated and, besides the two splashes, all else was silence.

   Eric floated in this nothingness for a period of time that seemed to have no duration. It was neither long nor short. He was simply there, somewhere, without time or space or sensation. It was sort of nice. Restful. He felt free, no longer confined as he had been. He wondered how long he'd been imprisoned but then realized that it didn't matter as time had ceased to exist. For some reason, he thought of the songs he had heard earlier outside of the white building that was now only ashes and a mysterious door. He couldn't remember any of the words but there was something in the memory of standing and listening to the people chanting and moving in rhythm that seemed somehow linked to whatever he was experiencing (or not experiencing) in this moment that was actually both more and less than a moment.

   "We're pulsing with our might" Eric couldn't tell if, in his mind, he was hearing the words sung or seeing them printed across the sky by stars. "Clarity is in the mind" It was strangely like a combination of seeing and hearing, but not completely either one. "For here we take our stand" He decided not to think about it and just let himself experience the words. "Life must take a chance and learn" Then the sensation - "colors" - of the words - "water" - began to fade - "music" - from his being - "rose" - and a dfferent sensation began to suffuse his body. It was a pleasant coolness on his skin. And as it enveloped him, he began to hear a soft sound of gentle laughter and to see a pale brightness bloom in his vision. As sight and sound slowly crystalized, he felt he was returning to the realm of time and location. It was like waking from sleep but more intense. He felt as though he were coming alive after a period of being in a coma. And then, with another burst of sound and light, he again felt the vertigo of a fall from a great height.

   A moment later he found himself completely underwater and, after a brief panic, he thrust his head above the surface. He shook it to get the water out of his eyes and ears and nose. As his vision became free of liquid, he found himself sitting in a fountain, the very one he had stopped at in the night with Bev and Nol. He was leaning back as his hands rested on the bottom and he sat up so he could rub the moisture from his face. He looked up to see the strange stone menagerie rising above him. Sensing a presence not far from him, he turned his head to find the man with the fiddle sitting not far away, also in the water.