Exodus

Chapter IV: Hysteresis

There's something about coming back empty handed that breaks a man's spirit, something so palpable, so viscerally disappointing, about going back the same way you came with not a thing more to show for it. Such running in search of puzzle pieces only to find you've missed a few along the way when you finally begin to lay them out. Another thing about walking back is that it takes longer, and what better way to make something long go by faster, than with the telling of a story. A story that I suspect is soon to be revised, for better, or for worse. "You ever seen a ghost Gary?" I ask him casually, prompting a chuckle. "Honestly, I'm not sure, feels like I have, but it wasn't a white sheet, that's for sure" i step over a piece of twisted metal. "That's because that's not what they actually look like" I tell him, gathering his attention. "We always look for a person, a monster, something physical and human, or the lack thereof, but in reality, ghosts aren't that simple, they can be a person sure, but they can be a sound, like a bang, a sight, like a coin or an envelope, even a scent, like oil, but my ghost? My ghost is a whistle" he drops his dogtag that he's been fiddling with, and finally, I have him. "My momma, she was a lady of the night back in Boston, before she met my dad and left us with all her money, I told cane this earlier." I was 4 at the time, my stepmom had just met dad, it had been a while after mom passed away, almost 4 years to the date actually. she "serviced" him, and as he walked away, she got jumped by a couple of teens, dad went all Superman for her and. Well, the rest is history, anyways, i grew up in a quieter area of Boston, in an apartment far above the street, there was one summer when they were building a new floor onto it, and I nearly got squashed by a falling beam! Wasn't my favorite place I lived growing up, but than again, we were always moving, I never liked to stay in one place for too long anyways. We actually moved to Minnesota not too long after that. I wasn't really used to automobiles yet. Well, one day, I had a doctors appointment. A Scarlett fever shot if I recall correctly, my dad had lost grandma to it back in the day and made sure I didn't follow suit. Well, as we walked along the street, I saw a shiny penny smack dab in the middle of the roadway. A very shiny penny, a 1917 P mint wheaty to be exact one of those things that toddlers just can't resist exploring. So I did.pa was busy getting out some change for a trolley ride, and didn't see me toddle into the road. Neither did the great big model T that was roarin down it. Now you'd think I'd have heard a honk, but no. I heard a whistle. A common, simple whistle. And in that instant, right as I was about to be turned into paste, time itself slowed down for me. I was so close to picking up that penny, and I would've too had pa not thrown himself into me and flung us out of the way as it came sliding to a stop about 30 feet ahead of where I had just been standing. Pa was irate of course, but more so, he was confused. He's a smart man, and he knew there was no damn way he should have been able to save me in time, it's as if god had let it slide, had blown a whistle, and stopped time for me to hear it and get back to safety. "And your CERTAIN it wasn't the car horn? Maybe it was a steam whistle" Gary interjects, pulling me out of my thoughts. "No, maybe, by some coincidence, it was the first time" his brows furrow. "But certainly not the second" the second time it happened I was 17, just 2 years ago from now actually" i begin. I had moved well away from the life and city bustle of New York by then, had lived in sota for almost 7 years, and seen my fair share of odd nightmares during that time. Things changed, I changed. I didn't dilly dally as much as I used to, seemed to get a chip in my shoulder that I had become desperate to run away from. I had left some friends in New York of course, and I missed them. Well one day, Ray Schumacher, a good friend of mine from school, invited me and his friend on a hike up to the ariondacks to hunt for rabbits that week, and of course, I was giddy to go. The first half of the hike was uneventful, ray almost tagged a rabbit with his Winchester, but missed due to the snap of a tree limb that fell on his head unceremoniously and scared it off. about halfway through, his buddy had to pee, and so did will. There's an allure to the woods, a mystery that draws you into it, away from the main path, away from safety. But this time? It was the opposite, as placed neatly, almost as if on purpose, in the middle of the dusty trail, out in the middle of the deep woods, was that shiny penny. The same. Exact. One. A 1917 P mint wheaty. It was as if I was a child again, the allure of it beckoning me, drawing my attention as if it were the only thing in the entire world at that moment. And as I kneeled down to pick it up, I saw the black bear 10 feet down from me, on its hind legs, slobbering viciously, infected with a clear cut, harrowing case of rabies. And that's when it began to charge me. And the all too familiar sound of one single, long, high pitch note from a whistle replaced the chirping birds of the forest. Time slowed like molasses dripping from a jar, each bound it took bringing it one step closer to me, and each shuffle backwards I took not being nearly enough to escape it. And as came back full force, so did the shotgun blast rip through the bears skull, as it fell to the ground, and slid towards me, landing still just inches from my feet.
"Now, a whistle in the center of a bustling metropolis? That's to be expected, pretty easily explainable, but in the middle of the boonies in upstate New York, miles from the nearest settlement? If you ask me, that ain't no whistle Gary, that's a ghost" he is quiet for a minute, clearly thinking about it, before he blows me off with a chuckle. "Horseshit" he says, "you're just making up fables" i roll my eyes. "I swear on it, and you know what else? One of these days, I just KNOW I'm gonna hear it again, maybe just one last time". Gary ponders it, pouring over all the details, all the little things that he considers, a true skeptic if I've ever seen one, a man who just claimed to have thought to have seen a ghost, and yet, for some reason, is reluctant to accept its possibility. Well, what better question than to ask a skeptic than: "do you believe in ghosts?" A barley perceivable shift in cadence pulls at Gary's face for a moment, as if by asking such a question, I'd flipped a switch that he hasn't turned on in quite a while, and now that he has, it's a bit of a shock to the system to process. "Not really" he states, obviously setting up the context for the full story behind his convictions. "I don't think your all too far off the mark with your own little theories to be honest with you" he concedes. "They aren't some parlor trick, or some ethereal mist draped in white linen with cutout eyes, not that kinda trick, but they are a trick of sorts I suspect" Not a parlor trick no, a real trick, a dangerous trick" he elaborates confidently, "a trick we play on ourselves when we allow our minds to slip the the haywire" his enlightenment helps to seperate me from the maelstrom around us for a grateful, solemn moment. "Ghosts aren't people, at least not the souls of dead ones, they are something much more intangible, manifestations of our woes, the apparitions of our regrets, and the parts of our brains that loose themselves between order and chaos within the currents of the river of time" I pick up quickly on the pause he takes here, looking over to him just in time to catch him gazing at something invisible besides us in the water. He snaps back, on his own, as if this isn't the first time he's experienced this before. "peoples brains are the center of themselves, a steam tank that keeps us running along steadily upon times river, housed safely in a sturdy boat that separates itself from the threatening cold water of the river that desperately licks at it from the other side of our skull" he metaphorically puts the conundrum, "But like a boiler, it's fragile behind its hull, a firewall of flesh and bone, which must be regularly stoked, carefully operated with consistency and precision, so as not to overheat it by pushing it too hard" he explains to me as he seems to consider it himself, even now. "but sometimes we let the cold river water into the boiler, wether that be of a collision with the shoal, or a grounding of our own volition, and it ruptures, it ruptures the safe iron walls of its tank and punches a hole in its hull of bone to rush into all the cold water, cold, harsh, cruel water that extinguishes that luminary, fragile flame and plunges us into the chaotic blindness of darkness, and that's where those ghosts of ghosts find us most accessible, now that we've been opened up to the river" I stay silent for a moment, allowing his sentiments to steep, slowly turning into an eager question. "How does the river get into us?" Gary takes a labored sigh, a suggestion that he speaks from experience. "there's many things that may tear open our brains to the current, to let it mix with our sanity and our reason, to cause it all to escape in a plume of steam as it's choked out and replaced with the maelstrom of anarchy, one might find it to flood them with the return a dreary old memory, escaped from its incarceration in the river of time to suck us back downstream, sometimes it happens when we weigh the boat down with our troubles and our turmoils that we collect along our voyage, until the boat sinks and the river  rises to meet its unbattened hatches. and sometimes, sometimes it's just the way it is, sometimes the coal is damp to begin with, sometimes the waterreeds, the vines have constricted and strangled the propeller blades long before they ever started spinning, anchoring our little mind to the ripping tides of the ocean, the sucking currents of the river, from the start, as they were always meant to bring the boiler to a bang, so that it might finally be allowed to break away from the illumination it's comforted and conformed to, to break us with the revelation that time is not really here nor there, to instead show us the chaos of the darkness in between time and reason, so that it might show us in reality how rather stagnant times river truly is, the question that i still hasn't quite come to answer though, is how to get the river back flowing again, how to corral the ghosts back into their pens, how to put a patch in the hull, the dent, in the skull, how to stop the tide and current from working together to founder our little boats, how to restore ourselves from Insanity." He takes a last pause amongst the silence, before almost reluctantly adding one last line. "Sometimes, to be truthful, I wonder if you can truly ever escape it at all"