Chapter 7

Loxy and Keera arrived out seemingly nowhere. The laughter was contagious enough that they brightened, even though I was clearly sore, and my arms crossed.

“What’s funny?”

Lester’s laughing fit reignited to the initial intensity, and so he could only get a few syllables out at a time. “Fuc… king.. noob!”

Alish tried. “Should have seen his face…”

“My piss!” Lester yelled.

Keera faked sad. “OMG, we missed his first toilet tree ass licking?!”

“And orange and orange,” Lester said.

Loxy sat down next to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “Jon, it’s a fairly common ritual here at Safe Haven.”

“So, is the orange really made from piss?” I asked.

Lester and Alish brought it back down to heavy breathing. “That was so worth ten yoga sessions,” Lester shared with Alish, as he held his rib cage.

“Oh, Jon, oranges are made with water, not piss. And water is water. The same water you drink today, a million years ago a dinosaur waddled through it. And that same water has been in and out of maybe a million people, into streams, into earth, into oceans, into sky and clouds and rain and back into you and, hell, you and I exchanged water last night.”

“You taste better,” I mumbled, still a little sore.

“I tasted like…?” Loxy prompted.

“Kind of like…” I turned and tried to vomit again.

Keera joined Lester and Alish as they had laughter induced epileptic fits. Loxy crossed her arms, not happy at all.

“You didn’t seem to mind last night,” Loxy snapped.

“I bet we all sleep quiet tonight!” Lester said, slapping the ground.

I escalated the gagging, faced Loxy so she could see me give the universal sign for choking, and then I went limp in her hands. She cried out, as she eased me to the ground.

“Jon? Jon!” Loxy said, laying me out.

Lester, Alish, and Keera stopped laughing and sat up to watch the drama unfold.

“Jon!” Loxy yelled. “Breathe, damn it!”

She hit my chest and then blew air into my mouth.

“What’s wrong?” Alish asked.

“I think it’s a psychosomatic reaction,” Loxy said. “He must really believe you poisoned him!”

“I didn’t poison him!” Lester complained.

“No, you just made him think he drank your piss!” Loxy snapped, pushing at my chest.

“Well, do something!” Alish said. “You’re supposed to be this great healer.”

“I’m trying!” Loxy said, tears in her eyes. “Don’t leave me, Jon.” Loxy put her lips over my mouth to blow air, but couldn’t contain her hidden mirth further and began to laugh.

“He’s dead and you’re laughing?!” Lester asked.

I began to laugh, but mostly because having Loxy laughing while her lips were own mine was fairly ticklish. Keera figured it out and started laughing. Lester and Alish seemed a bit cross.

“No,” Lester said. “You guys can’t have so good a rapport that you can create a joke on the fly. And his reaction to the toilet tree’s tongue and my piss orange was too good to be faked, so it’s not like you plotted to turn our joke on us…”

“Lester, get used to it. Jon and I are a team,” Loxy said.

Lester stood up and took his cane. “I have to get to class.” He ambled away.

Alish sighed. “It was still the best laugh in a long time,” she said. She bowed to me. “Good day, Sir. I must get to class as well.”

Keera grabbed the orange and followed after Alish, leaving me alone with Loxy.

“You caught on fast,” I told her.

“I can read you,” Loxy said.

“I feel like…”

“You have known me for a million years,” Loxy said.

“How did you know?” I began…

“That you would say that?” Loxy asked.

“Are we soul mates?” I asked.

Loxy laughed. “There is no such thing as soul mates, not the way you’re saying it. All souls are perfectly sacred and all are match-able and all pairings produce something unique. All couplings create their own harmonic field. It just so happens, we are just one note short of a major chord. That’s all.”

I nodded as if I understood, but I didn’t have a clue. I just knew she was right, we were right. We were so right, I wasn’t worried in the slightest that it would end. Technically, saying that meant that our ending had crossed my mind, but I had quickly dismissed it as ludicrous.

“I am kind of mad that I threw up the orange,” I admitted, frowning. “I was hungry, and I shouldn’t have let Lester get to me.”

“It’s okay,” Loxy said.

“I have never known true hunger. But the first woman I was with, she was from a third world country. Interestingly, they would see re-runs of Sesame Street, a kids program, and she would watch the show. There are episodes where the kids make arts and craft using food, like rice that’s been colored and glued to paper. Or macaroni art. Or when they carve pumpkins and threw the inside away just to put a candle in it. She would cry and ask her mom, ‘don’t they know we’re starving here?’ The first time she told me that, I actually cried.”

“Like last night?” Loxy asked.

I thought about it. “Actually, yes,” I answered, considering my tears, and comparing it to the past. “She had such an innocence about her. Even as an adult, I frequently saw a child who just wanted to play, and I was just a grumpy, stoic old man. A Lester want to be.”

“Oh, you’re so not Lester,” Loxy said.

“I’m not now,” I agreed.

“You loved her,” Loxy observed.

“Of course I did,” I said.

“Wow. That sounded like anger,” Loxy pointed out.

I didn’t respond. My statement did sound defensive. Why would I be defensive? One doesn’t have to justify love.

“You have an expectation,” Loxy said, fishing for what lurked underneath. “Oh, you’re experiencing failure.”

Fresh tears were evidence that she had struck a chord, but I was diving into anger over how easily I was moved to tears around her. This was not how I saw myself. I was not sentimental or easily moved.

“Just speak it,” Loxy instructed me.

“Speak what? Sadness? Anger?! Yes, I failed. She was the first. She was supposed to be the last. I was supposed to love her and protect her forever and every relationship after her took me further away from that ideal and I can’t ever go back…”

Wow. I said it.

“Wow,” Loxy said. “What kind of fairy tales do they feed you in that world?”

“Same as yours?”

“Hardly,” Loxy said. “19th century people never married for love. They married to procreate and pass on the family name. The men often had paramours, but even that was just gratification, not love.” Loxy positioned herself closer to me. She put her head on my shoulder, took my right hand in both of hers. “It seems to me, people aren’t things to be saved or collected, but rather people are to be experienced and served. Experiencing, serving, always has a beginning, a middle, and an end, kind of like a story. Like waves, experiences rise and fall, begin and end. The choice as I see it is that we can chose to thread these experiences with love, or with despair. I choose love.”

“You are a better soul than I,” I whispered.

“No. There is no better. There is no worse. All souls are sacred. Everything that exist is soul. We are all equally interdependent. Without the souls of trees, there could be no air to breathe, or oranges to eat. Without the souls of stars, there could be no trees. Without the souls of stones and earths, nowhere for us to rest from this endless fall of day and night.”

“I think I love you,” I said.

“I think you think too much,” Loxy said, kissing me. “Now, come on. I’m going to show you how to get to your first class.”

“I don’t have a schedule yet,” I said.

“There’s no schedule,” Loxy said.

“How do I know where I am supposed to be?”

“Wherever you go, whenever you are, it is always the right place. Same with class, you just go. It will always be the right class, the one you needed to move forwards,” Loxy explained. “You just have to have faith. Come on.”

We stood up and walked towards the campus. As we walked, Loxy pointed out details so that if I needed to, I could find my way back to the rose. She explained how being mindful to details one needed to be here, as one could find themselves lost fairy quickly. She pointed out a pub that her group frequents, a coffee shop next to a water fountain, and told me after class she would meet me there. It seemed fairly easy to navigate, and so I didn’t heed her warning about details. I was too busy memorizing the sound of her voice and the contours of her face, telling myself if I remember nothing else, I want to remember her and this moment, with her holding my arm. There were others walking in our midst, but they were a blur. I did imagine for a moment that I must have looked like an old fool to the other pedestrians, doting on a girl clearly half my age.

“Maybe we will take you to the Bazaar this weekend. Unless you want to go hang out on the town square. They have live music in the park on Thursday, near the museum,” Loxy said.

Loxy brought us to our destination and got in front of me. I felt quite stupid looking at her, because my brain was just empty. All I could say, which I have said, and probably will continue to say, is I was struck by her genuine kindness. She had no agenda. I felt no pressing urge to be anywhere else or to do anything. I have read about moments like these, but never experienced it. No matter where I was or who I was with, I was always thinking about that next place to be, or that next person to see. I would go as far as to say, that was a survival skill at work, helping me get through the monotony of pushing millions of ton of freight through 30 years of life. You just can’t do that, or sit on the conveyor belt and scan passing packages so they fall in the right bin, without having an extraordinary ability to tune out of life and into imagination.

“Do you miss anyone?” Loxy asked.

“Uh?” I asked. “Oh! No. I am between people. Actually, people tend to annoy me. I prefer my alone time. Every now and then, I get overwhelmed with a profound sense of loneliness, but it doesn’t matter if I am with someone or not, I am still sadly afflicted. It’s taken me to the brink a couple times, but I have always found, if I just hang on, it dissipates, and I continue to function.”

“Pets?”

“Just the squirrels and pigeons I feed,” I said.

“Do you miss anything?”

“Maybe I haven’t been gone long enough, yet,” I offered, wondering what she was looking for. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I started a new class this morning and, synchronicity, I met another American. I’d say she was in her twenties, and she was quite out of sort, as if she were an addict and needed a fix. I inquired, as I couldn’t help but sense her distress, and she said that she really wanted to check her F.B. messages, but she couldn’t find her cell phone anywhere. What’s a cell phone?”

I bit my lip to hide my amusement. It was odd how I kept rediscovering that there were some peculiarities about her knowledge. Mostly, Loxy displayed a wealth of knowledge, way beyond mine, and then, she was missing elements, like the cell phone or Wizard of Oz references, that were just surprising.

“A cell phone,” I explained, pausing to locate the right words. I chose not to dumb it down. “Is a technology based on electronics and computers that communicates with other compatible technologies that enables anyone that has a cell phone to talk to anyone else who has a cell phone. Smart phones are cell phones that not only allow people to talk to each other, but they can see images of each other, stills or video feed, as well as access data from a virtual place called the web, or the net, which is like an invisible library of light in the clouds.”

Loxy’s eyes were big. “Really?” she asked. She gave me that sideways glance, and playful squinting of eyes. “Are you fucking with me?”

“I am not,” I assured her.

“Do you have a cell phone?” Loxy asked.

“I didn’t bring it with me, apparently, but yes, I own one,” I said. “Pretty much everyone has one these days, and even if they don’t, they can get access to one pretty easily.”

“And you could speak to anyone?” Loxy asked.

“Anyone in the world, as clear as you and I are speaking now, regardless of distance,” I said.

She pushed my shoulder. “Really?!”

“Yes,” I said.

“So, you could call the Queen of England and ask her how her day was going?” Loxy asked.

I mused thoughtfully. “Absolutely, it is possible for me to call up the Queen of England,” I said.

“Did you ever?’ Loxy asked.

“I have never called the Queen of England,” I said.

Loxy seemed puzzled. “You have a device that would enable to you communicate with anyone in the world, and you never spoke to the Queen of England?”

“I’m fairly sure if I even tried, I would likely be locked up for questioning,” I said.

“You’re not allowed to talk to the Queen?” Loxy asked.

“Well, there are billions of people on the planet and we can’t all talk to the Queen, now, can we? There are protocols, and there are priorities, and I don’t have priority, and I have certainly not passed the protocols,” I explained.

“Have you spoken to anyone important?” Loxy asked, hopeful.

“I have not,” I answered.

“You have a device that would permit you to speak to anyone in the world, but you’ve never spoken to anyone important?” Loxy said.

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

Loxy teared up. “I find that so sad.”

I hugged her, but wanted to laugh. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know yet,” Loxy said.

“Loxy,” I said, I titled her chin up so I was certain our eyes were meeting. “In many ways, most the people in my country have had better lives, more material wealth, than anyone in the world presently, and historically. My people live better lives than the richest kings five hundred years ago. We have better medicines. We have access to healthier foods, few people go hungry, though surprisingly many are malnourished. We are inundated by so much entertainment and so much technology that the quality of families and friendships have diminished. My country has more loneliness and more depression than any other nation on Earth and from any time previously. These cell phones could have brought us closer together, but have actually driven us further apart.”

“I thought the future of Earth would be better,” Loxy said.

“And it will be,” I assured her.

“But, humanity’s future sounds so bleak from where I was when I was there,” Loxy said.

I hugged her tight and kissed her. “We are not done yet.”

Loxy stepped back, hands akimbo. “We just had a role reversal! You brought me back.”

“Umm, you didn’t go that far,” I pointed out. “And, you still have stronger wings than I.”

“You’re going to be an amazing magician,” Loxy predicted. “Now get to class.”

“Yes, Mam! “ I said, going in the direction she pointed. I hesitated, staring at the door. I turned back to her.

“What’s wrong?” Loxy asked.

“Is it going to be like Orientation?” I asked.

“Nothing in the world is like Orientation,” Loxy said. “Go on. It’ll be fun.”