“Hey? Hey!” Trevor said as he walked into the center of the hut. As he advanced the walls plastered in band posters misted away like the smoke that rose from the fire. “What? What is this?” He turned toward the corridor and it had all but disappeared. Cold sweat beaded on his body as he froze and looked at the bleak wooded wall and thatched roof that replaced the presumable avenue back to reality. Trevor had been high before, bit this was bordering the nightmarish.
His feet rocked on the unsure footing of a foreign world where his new size bumped into a series of hollowed bones that hung off of the thick branches that strengthened the roof.
The music of the bones rose the bartender out of his stupor who looked up at Trevor and grinned. “Welcome boy, welcome. Sit down, sit down, you’ll ruin my house! Don’t look so surprised at what you saw. You can’t go back that way.”
“It disappeared!” Trevor said still looking at the vanished corridor waiting for it to return. Then another oddity dawned on him. “And you can talk?” He looked over at the man, “I mean you can speak my language. Why didn’t you do that back at the bar?”
“I’m not speaking your language, boy, you’re speaking mine. Now, stop talking. Sit with me. Eat. You’ll be hungry.”
The bartender gestured to a spot near the fire and offered Trevor a clay bowl filled some kind of meat ground into bits and a jug filled with water. He hesitated with both, but the meat tasted like beef, roasted and spiced, even if a bit dry, while the water tasted, well, like water, but fresher. It tasted the way he needed water after a night of drinking or after a hard workout. The way he would stand guzzling down the trickle of water out of a fountain.
“Fill up, you’ll need it, you never know when you’ll have water again.”
“Yeah?” He didn’t think about the threat and took another deep gulp from the jug. “Who are you anyways? Where am I? What did you do to me?” Trevor looked around as he spoke. With the Zenith gone and far away, the small hut came into focus. The fire pit dominated the center while a bed roll lay near the doorway to the outside. He kept bumping into the bone windchimes that clanked together and filled the hut with a gasp of a primordial beat before fading out the door and into the wilderness.
“I am Isacagwi and you are far from home.” He chuckled, “Ah, so far that you might never return.” He reached down and moved some of the sticks in the fire to birth the flame again from the ash.
“What are you talking about? That doesn’t answer anything at all.”
Isacagwi leaned back and took some of the hash himself. “I heard you speaking to your friend. I would have ignored you if I didn’t see the desperation in your face when he spoke about the volcano and tapping into his primal side. I saw the yearning in your eyes. The way you kept asking about it. Every conversation came back to it. You would have given everything to trade places with him, eh? To have been on that mountain? To be wrapping an arm around your wife and pleasuring her into the morning? You want his story.” He drank from the jug and wiped his beard clean. “Pathetic. To want someone else’s story.”
Trevor sat listening to the bartender speak, though given Isacagwi’s robes and the way the fire danced in his eyes, bartender no longer seemed like the optimal way to identify him. Shaman seemed better and it fit with the whole vision quest feeling that Trevor felt was happening.
As to what Isacagwi actually said, it made Trevor’s stomach shrivel up inside. All his secrets laid bare in front of him.
“Do I lie? Have I illuminated who you are?”
“Well, yes, there is some truth to that. I don’t want his story. I don’t want his life.”
“You just feel that you are lacking those important parts. The things that make him whole are the things that make you empty.”
“I don’t need to be laid to feel full.”
Isacagwi laughed, “Precisely why you feel so empty. You think it’s as easy as finding a woman to traveling somewhere exotic. Ah, but even if you did, you’d ruin it. Come with me.” He stood. Trevor watched his bony legs shiver as he slapped the dust off of his knees and walked out of the hut, gesturing Trevor to follow. He did so though not before taking another handful of meat. Isacagwi was right, he was starvingly hungry.
Out in the sunlight, Trevor shielded his eyes from the high sun baring down with all its power onto the endless savanna. The sky was an electric blue without a cloud to be seen for miles. Great peaks rose up behind them that were mossed over with the thick greenery of jungles that sprawled out and then devolved into the sparse brush of the plains. Out there in the fields a few single trees rose from the ground to dot the landscape with much needed shade and a few pools of water. Even from a distance Trevor could see the dust rising up from the owners of these oases, herds of wild animals guarding the coolness with deadly jealousy.
Africa had never been on Trevor’s list of places to travel, now he had gotten the chance without having to pay for the airfare and this wasn’t even really Africa, was it?
“Incredible.” He said and took a few steps further away from the hut, feeling the heat turn the once cold sweat of shaken nerves into the hot sweat of wonder. It also brought his attention to the rags he still wore as clothes and his shoes that were too tight now. They came off in tatters from the softest pull and left him nearly naked, born again into this new world.
“You needed a change in perspective.”
Trevor laughed and crossed his arms beginning to enjoy himself from the sense of experience this as dream. “Oh, I’m sure and when I wake up on the floor of the bathroom, I’ll have a good story to share. My story, right?”
At that Isacagwi grabbed the back of his neck with surprising strength and pulled him down and with one of the carved bones that hung at his side cut a deep gash in Trevor’s arm. He tried to fight back, but the shaman was faster and stronger, throwing him down fully against the dust as his eyes flared red and he kicked dirt into Trevor’s face.
“You think I jest with you, boy, that this is just a dream? You are young, stupid, and naïve. You were destined to walk the earth like a blind man always coveting other’s lives and stories becoming nothing more than a decrepit husk in your old age. Only the wisdom that I can give you will save you and if you do not see the severity around you then you will never return home and die in this land of chaos.” He kicked more dirt and Trevor coughed, grasping around for Isacagwi’s legs. “You must start like a child. Unlearn all that you know or thought you knew.”
Trevor gasped, breathing through the dust caking the back of his throat and holding the gash in his arm as blood bubbled out of him onto the ground. “Alright, alright, stop, I’ll listen, I’ll listen.” The enjoyment was gone and the sense that this was just a bad drug-induced trip faded too. The cold sweat returned.
Isacagwi leaned on his knees the red anger of his eyes had dissipated. “I will kill you myself, boy, if you have no desire to thrive and give the power you have received to another who is more desperate to learn.”
“Fine,” Trevor grunted and squeezed tighter on the gash, trying to stop the flow of blood. “What do you want from me?”
“I want nothing from you,” Isacagwi said and offered his hand to lift Trevor off of the ground. “Be satisfied that I know more than you and that I have offered you the chance to rectify the curse of your mundaneness. You want this even if your brain does not know how to put the feelings into words. Come, let’s get you bandaged.”
They returned into the hut and Isacagwi took some animal skins, dipped in some reddish paste, to wrap around the wound. “Keep that around your arm for a few days and the cut will heal. Now you know that this is not a dream. And don’t lay down yet,” he said taking out threaded sinew, “I need to clothe you for your journey, it is no good for you to roam the world naked.”
“Journey? Where are we going?”
Isacagwi shook his head as he began to measure Trevor’s limbs and torso, “Not we, you, boy. I brought you here, the wisdom that I teach you will come with every step you take, but like a babe, you have to experience the world for yourself and grow. But I will prepare you as best I can, no sense in sending you out only to die. It is why I gave you your strength. It will help you with your first steps.”
The shaman took his measurements and offered another bowl of roasted meat, vegetables, and the jug of water as the sun began to redden in the sky. The baobab tree made strange thin shadows outside the hut as the light sank. For not having down much on this apparent day, though realizing that he was still on the clock from the Zenith, Trevor felt sleep spinning around him, wrapping him in a tight cocoon even as he stretched out luxuriously on the floor of the hut. It was now probably close to midnight or the early morning hours back home and he grinned at the idea of inter-dimensional jetlag.
Isacgawi left the water jug near Trevor and he drank as necessary. The fire’s crackling and the growing darkness outside hypnotized him as the tendrils of sleep finally wound around his face.
But it was not a soft drift into dreamless sleep where Trevor awoke rested and filled with vigor. Trevor passed the night between the senses of sleep and waking. The hut tore away from his vision as Isacagwi’s soft chanting as he sowed the animal skins together flooded Trevor’s mind.
The gash on his arm burned and throbbed as the medicine, or whatever Isacagwi soaked the skins in, flooded into Trevor’s bloodstream. Instead of the intense heat from his movement from his world into this wilderness the feeling of shuddering cold made him shake. All of his memory at once was wiped clean and he gaggled on the ground reduced to abject stupidity, clawing at the dirt, trying to remember even his name, where he was, and why he had arrived. With his mind empty the refilling occurred and the memories crashed against the walls of his brain. Worse yet, they were all of the bad memories of twenty-nine years of life. Trevor tried to cover his ears as he lay in his bed listening to his father coming home drunk yelling at his mother…
“You don’t do anything, Liz! I work all day! I take care of this family! All you do is sit on your fucking ass!”
On the other side of the closed-door Trevor could hear his mother sobbing. He felt his body moving toward the knob and opening the door into the dimmed light of the living room. His father was nowhere to be found, just a swirling cloud of red and black smoke over the ceiling that flashed with lightning and his mother sobbing wildly on the couch.
“Mom? Mom?” Trevor tried to say, but the words never came out. Her sobbing became quieter, strained, weak, as her body shriveled and yellowed. Strands of blonde hair, once vibrant and gold, withered to hardened wheat and fell to the ground as her eyes sank into her head and the crying stopped. She sat only as a husk of her former self with the storming cloud dissipating above.
“No! No! Please! Come back! Mom, come back, I need you!” Trevor ran towards her and then the floor opened up and he fell deep into the darkness, falling faster, deeper, as a phantasmagoria of neon faces hovered by him. With each one he fell through their mouths and they sapped his new strength and vitality, turning him small, thin, and frail as he fell.
“Have you ever listened to him talk? How can you stand the sound of his voice?”
“When are you going to do something with your life?”
“You ever just think you’re not going to amount to anything?”
“How are you not getting this? The technique is easy! Focus! Focus!”
“Disappointment!”
“Failure!”
“Years wasted! Good for nothing!”
“How can you be so selfish? Heartless? Don’t you give a damn about anyone other than yourself?
“You don’t know real struggle! Get lost!”
The sequence of faces; people who he knew, friends, bosses, teachers, trainers, relatives, continued at a quickening pace as the faces devolved into images of the grotesque. Their neon flesh melting away into skulls. But it was the last image that sent Trevor into frenzied panic. He stopped falling, caught in an invisible net as a pair of red eyes shimmered out from the darkness below. Isacagwi’s face began to approach him with something large directly behind his face. He crawled forward and Trevor saw the outline of a massive abdomen behind. His face squirmed as eyes bubbled out of his forehead and his jaw extended to make way for great pincers. Within moments Trevor was staring into the jaws of a massive spider.
The spider stared at him, focused all its energy, and then Trevor heard the padding of is legs as it charged toward him, shrieking out a death call as its pincers moved wildly. As the hairy beast came upon him, he finally woke up from the nightmare, sweating out as the first rays of sunlight broke through the thatched roof.
Isacagwi opened one eye and smiled, “You are awake. You slept poorly.”
Trevor panted from the dream and looked at the shaman, expecting to see the spider again. “I had bad dreams all night.”
“You did, but now all your fears have been laid out for you. Fear of failure. Fear of cowardice. Fear of acceptance. Fear of letting those who you love down.” He chuckled, “You have quite the journey ahead, boy, those are great fears and great mountains to climb. I hope you will survive. But, let’s focus on the present. Your clothes are finished.”
Isacagwi handed him a series of brown skins which fit tight over his chest and shoulders, a pair of leggings, and cloth shoes to tie around his feet. At the end of it, Trevor cut a figure of a man of the wilderness quite well. He figured that even if he was completely lost in the world, he wouldn’t give that impression on first sight.
More than just clothes, the shaman equipped him well. Isacagwi filled a hollowed gourd with water which would be enough for at least a day of travel, and a pouch of nuts, berries, and bits of meat from the night before. A primordial trail-mix if there ever was one.
The early morning went by quickly as Trevor prepared for his first steps out into this mysterious new world, but one question still pervaded his mind, but he didn’t have time to ask Isacagwi until they had stepped outside of the hut back into the beaming morning sunlight.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
Isacagwi grinned and stroked his beard as he took a few steps out away from the hut and opened his arms to embrace the far-reaching world. “Any where you wish to go, boy. This place where we are now is known to nearby peoples as a the Qengqa. The great split, the valley between the mountains. If you travel west, you will find yourself deep within the Qengqa. The land is rife with brigands and thieves who roam the mountains praying on the helpless. To the north are the Mountains of Gold. To the south is the great land of Jilajwe and the twin emperors who rule those lands where the people are fierce and the priests are mad. And to the east,” he said pointing out to the vast savanna. “Beyond the horizon, is the sea.”
Trevor nodded. When he was growing up, he always looked forward to the family vacations to the beach. He remembered them fondly after the sun set and he planted himself down in a chair and drank a bottle of wine to himself and watched the stars shoot across the sky the waves crashing against the shore providing a soft lullaby. Often, he awoke late into the night with a lifeguard, or more often a police officer, shining a light into his face telling him to go back home. The best times were when it was a beautiful young cop who sent him packing with a smile.
“The sea sounds like a good place to start.” Said Trevor as he hoisted up the gourd and the feeding pouch. “Hopefully the traveling isn’t too hard.”
“Not hard enough so that you perish, but not easy enough so that you learn nothing. And take this.” Said Isacagwi as he handed Trevor a staff with one of the ends sharped to a point. “It is not a great weapon, but it will do until you can find something with more power. Nature is fierce, but you must be fiercer.”
Trevor took the weapon and handled it as he did in his sword fighting classes. It wasn’t a long sword, but it could behave in a similar way to thrust against a foe. Though the classes were against opponents, in the wilderness were actual enemies, it made him hold the weapon in a whole different way. He remembered once when his instructor brought out a sharp sword instead of dulled training weapons. When the two blades struck and stuck together Trevor had jumped back. That was power. Like the first time he had ever fired a gun. Power that could kill someone. He felt the same holding the spear and looking out onto the horizon.
“You best be on your way, boy, if you leave too late you won’t cover any ground and the sun will be too hot to travel. Get out of here.”
“Well, thank you, Isacagwi, for the food, the water, and the weapon. I feel like we didn’t get to know each other.”
He laughed and waved his hand forward, “You will get to know me. I brought you here. Now, go, and we shall see if bringing you here was a good idea or not.”
The shaman gave him no more time to talk and turned around not answering any of Trevor’s further questions. Now completely ignored, Trevor set his mind back on the distant horizon and the sea that sat on the other side of the dry grassland and that was how he began. With one step that crushed the grass underneath this cloth foot the man reborn stepped out into the wilderness.
Once he cleared the first hill and was safely away, Isacagwi returned to his hut and as thunder rolled across the sky the hut vanished into the breeze.