Fiction
Fantasy
“It’s like those astronauts you told us about,” a man said. “You’re going up.”
Yes, Leo supposed, like Armstrong and Aldrin and the rest. Only there’s no spaceship, no room for passengers, and no place for the friends, confidants, and companions he’d made in all the years since his arrival.
You got to go to the Lonesome Valley/you got to go there by yourself...
He shook the old song from his head. Yes. Alone. But I shouldn’t complain—look at everything Christ had to go through before he could finally, mercifully release his spirit. I’ve gotten to waste peacefully away from old age, body wearing thin and now, at last, about to kick off and release me altogether. Leaving them here...
“You go,” said Sam, “and we stay.” Twentyish, he was, like most of them, actually pouting.
Leo propped himself up on stick-thin elbows—the sun of this place, somehow, seemed to have shriveled him even as it nourished these Never-People, as he had come to call them.
“Now see here.” He’d said this for perhaps the thousandth time, and he would say it a thousand more times if need be. “Don’t ever think dying is a good thing. Christ wept at the sight of it, knowing Lazarus had gone to heaven and everything. He brought him back. It’s not natural, it’s ugly, it’s...”
He trailed off. How could he really explain it?
Someone broke the silence. “Will we see your soul fly up?”
“No, I doubt that.”
“Will angels come down to get you?”
“Um...kind of doubt that, too.”
“Maybe you’ll ride a flaming chariot, like Elijah!” They fairly jumped with excitement over that, all these grown-ups who never got too grown-up, inside or out.
The tall men and women, really boys and girls in bodies that should have long since turned to dust, quieted. One man toed the grass with his foot. Wore their hearts out in plain sight, these people; no trials or blows had taught them to do otherwise.
For a while Leo had fretted: how were these people to dispose of his remains? While still able to work, he’d helped them dig a five-foot-deep maw in the earth. They loved it, and shouted even while tearing out the ground with tree branches; it was all a game to them. Even now, seeing no one age over the years but himself, he still could never quite believe they were “immortal.” But only the leaves and vines they sewed expertly into clothes (no shoes ever needed) wore out; even after what must have been decades, their bodies retained the reasonable youth of the twenty-something.
He explained it with great patience. “Now after it happens, you just wrap me up in my blanket and lie me down in there and cover me up, and don’t be timid about it.”
“How will you breathe down there?”
Oh, sheesh! “I won’t really be down there, not my soul. It’s like your treehouses. You live inside them, but they’re not really you. It’s just time for me to move out of my house and go to my new one in heaven.”
“It’s ‘old,’” a yellow-haired woman said, her finger in her mouth, using a word he’d taught them.
“Yes.” He nodded.
The man who had pouted spoke up. “But if he meant for us to be there with him, why don’t we ever move out?”
Leo had in fact wondered about this for years. And for years he had, of course, dismissed their innocent claims that no one ever stopped moving or breathing, no idea what “dead” was, after he’d noticed there seemed to be no senior citizens, no shrines, and no mounds or markers like graves. The closest thing was the apples or oranges that fell out of trees, lying too long in the short fairway-grass and rotting.
Thank God I had no wife, no family counting on me.
Every hour of every day he relived the moment of his arrival. Tuesday morning, October the twenty-second, walking in a downtown park on his lunch break. Partly cloudy weather, autumn chill. He checked his wristwatch and saw that it was 10:37 a.m., almost time to return to his job. He looked back up and stopped in his tracks—everything was different. It was as if his Creator had frozen him in suspended animation, rearranged the park into a forest clearing warmed by hazy sunshine, then woke him up again. The grass was greener. The trees were towering oaks now and a brook gurgled off to his left.
He rubbed his eyes, glanced all around, stared. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again. Everything remained the same. He even pinched himself. When the people showed up—their clothes, woven and assembled from leaves, made them look like that jolly green giant in the frozen food section—he was in tears, staggering here and there trying to retrace his steps, babbling this isn’t happening, isn’t happening, it can’t be happening.
They found him quite a curiosity, flocking to him, touching and examining him from every angle, asking over and over where he came from. When he finally managed a coherent answer, they ran all over the area themselves trying to find whatever invisible celestial switch he had inadvertently tripped. But no one ever found it, nor did any other strangers turn up, neither before Leo or in all the years since.
Now he could chuckle a little about it. Maybe, he thought, I became a missionary after all. He had decided upon that calling in the ninth grade, chattered about it all through high school, but then he dropped out of college and...well...just sort of ended up in customer service.
The Never-People took care of him in the early days, when he sat numb with shock and burst into fits of rage every morning when he woke up and it hit him anew what had happened.
Time passed. The sun seemed to shine a little closer here, and it never rained—instead the solar light shone through a layer of thick moisture that seemed to completely cloak the earth, and a mist rose up from the ground each morning to water everything. And the people, however young they were at heart, towered above him, every one of them at least six-foot-five by his estimate. This wooded Green Mansions country seemed curiously free of nettles or poison ivy or anything that stung, bit or brought sickness. Leo saw no snakes, either, which made him wonder about this place’s origins, how it may have split off from the Earth he called home; but he had no way of ever knowing for sure.
Everyone marveled at the graying and thinning of his hair—that alone amazed them to no end, and they kept wanting to touch and examine it—then the wrinkles, the thinning of his frame. “Why, you’re like a plant that dries up in the sun,” one of them had said with the innocence they never seemed to lose even as their lives stretched into untold spans. I am not believing that any of these people lived when Christ, or at least George Washington, walked the Earth. Entropy did exist here, yet everyone seemed immune from it.
When he arrived he was wearing his black patent leather shoes with black socks, gray khakis, and blue cotton shirt, and carried his billfold with two twenties, a five, and three singles, as well as a quarter, two dimes, and a penny. Finally, his house keys—no car keys, he rode the bus everywhere—and in his shirt pocket, his small green Gideon New Testament. After all these years it had worn out, the pages coming loose.
The Never-People believed everything he said with the eagerness of those who never had to grow up, even his claims about where he came from. To them it was a grand secret they’d now been let in on. Some of them still visited the point of his entry, walking around the grass, trying to connect with that other world. Thank God no one ever succeeded. And they might have fought wars over the items in his pocket, had that been their nature. But they contented themselves with asking him over and over to show them his money and his jingling keys, and feeling his peculiar footwear and strange garments.
So Leo wondered, as he often had over the years: my Creator. Did he really send me here? But he must have. These people even spoke his language. Had they spoken German, some poor fellow from Berlin might have stumbled onto this place instead, or from Tokyo if Japanese. But why? Missionaries saved people, but although he’d taught these bright-eyed youngsters about the One who made them and wove this Eden around them, there seemed precious little they needed to be saved from. Most even nodded when he first presented the concept to them; they had the instinctive understanding of a great Creator. They knew about God, if they didn’t exactly know him.
Now John hunkered down beside the bed of woven grass and leaves they had made for Leo in the shade of an oak. John’s real name was difficult to pronounce, like most of the names, so Leo made up monikers that they grabbed like prizes and happily repeated. But John, only a trace of fuzz on his chin—no one ever needed a shave, either—did not look so happy now.
“You’re really going off to where you can see Jesus, talk to him.”
Leo shifted on his green bed. “You can talk to him whenever you like.”
“It’s not the same, though.” Vanessa bent down beside him. “I mean, you’ll be able to see him, be right there with him.”
“And then you’ll live forever like us, right?”
“Better yet, with Jesus!” blurted Sue.
Leo gazed at her. He might have gotten married here—that concept was well-known and understood—but the women saw him as more an interesting curiosity than a possible mate. And he did not want a wife to have to watch him wither away while she remained young herself, and finally lose him altogether. Of all the things he’d had to adjust to, that was the hardest by far to take, and he’d had many a talk with his Creator about it. But now he wondered about something.
There were things from his Gideon Bible that he hadn’t told them. Really, just one important thing. He’d always meant to, but it was hard to explain, much like the idea of his own passing. But now that he was about to depart, everyone kept asking: Why can’t we come, too? Why can’t we ever be with him ourselves? Is he not happy with us?
And at first he’d thought, Look, just be glad he’s given you such a beautiful untroubled world to live forever in, and left it at that. But the more they voiced it, the more he saw their eyes and darkening expressions, he wondered—and the possible reason for everything, perhaps his whole life, began to come clear.
He propped himself up on his elbows again, just a little, for fear they might snap. “Everyone,” he called out. “Could everyone come here?”
Actually most of them were here already, some of the mothers cradling babies in their arms. Children grew quickly and left for other parts of this world; one of his regrets was that he’d never really set out to explore or map this place. New communities must spring up all the time all around this globe. Was it all the garden? Were there mountains, deserts, oceans? He wished now that he’d found out. —Never mind that now, time was running short. He felt it with every breath he sucked in. His lungs hurt.
Everyone leaned in, as they always did, to listen. Unless it was late and they were ready for sleep, or hungry and running off to pick from the orange, apple, and pear trees, or raspberry bushes, they always wanted to hear what he had to say; in all these years, they’d never completely lost their excitement over this new stranger. If he could play them some delightful song from his old life—he would have given his right arm to hear “Yellow Submarine” or “Carry On Wayward Son” again, as well as “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” thundered out by his church congregation led by Pastor Botton—he truly wondered if they would ever grow tired of it the way people in his world did.
“You know the last chapter of the book? I never really told you about it.”
They pricked up their ears. “There’s more?”
It was just that tribulations, antichrist-monsters, and blood flooding up as high as horse’s bridles, didn’t mix with these fair people. Over and over he’d tried to tell them. The crucifixion story had been bad enough! But they weren’t even miffed at him for his omission, just excited—Wow, more to the story! Great! Tell us please.
He swallowed. Even that came with difficulty now. “It’s not all pretty, but...well, the point is, Jesus isn’t staying in heaven. He created the earth, all of it, this part of it too.” He paused. “He’s coming to live in it himself.”
A great hush.
“He’s coming here?”
John spoke this like it might happen this afternoon and they’d better hurry up and get ready, set everything in order, roll out the red carpet. Well, how did Leo know it wouldn’t happen? He chuckled to himself and nodded.
Wide eyes, all around; he could sense the quickening of their ever-young hearts. “Wow.” “He’s really coming here!” “Like you did!”
“Yes, but unlike me he won’t die. In fact he’ll make it all new, a new Earth and a new heaven too, and he’ll live here forever and be a father to everyone.”
“Yes, oh, yes!” They jumped up; some of them actually danced. They might break into a celebration right there, as whenever a man and woman announced their marriage.
“But you go to him first,” another man said. “When you do, could you give him a message from us?”
“Yes, tell him we love him!”
“We’re ready anytime he wants to come!”
“And, you know, making a whole new Earth sounds like a lot of trouble, he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to, just as long as he lives here with us!”
Yes. Every sad expression had been erased, every pair of eyes glittered now, and Leo knew: This was it. Yes, this was it, he’d lived his whole time here without ever saying it and almost missed his chance. He lay back and let out a deep, relieved sigh.
They gave him many messages, more than he could possibly remember, but he smiled and soaked in their youthful merriment and knew it didn’t matter. The time had come; he knew it; he could feel his systems quietly shutting down, his body giving out, his heart giving a final quiet thump and then going still. He shut his eyes, and his last thought was: Now I can go and be immortal too.
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Copyright 2010, Douglas Kolacki. All rights reserved. Douglas Kolacki began writing while in Italy with the Navy. His story credits include The Sword Review, DKA, Dreams & Visions and Weird Tales. He now lives in San Diego, California.
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