I've Gotta Get Message To You

Prologue

1987

From above it was a picture of a Madonna holding her child, clad in nothing but the slow swirl of red that spread through the water, surrounded by the stark-white tiled, dimly lit bathroom. The high window above the tub protected them from the turbulent wind outside and a door opened into a dark bedroom. A small chair was beside the tub, on it, a hairdryer and a radio that kept the room calm with its music, on the floor was a pail of wet towels. The drip-drip of the tap wasn't the slightest bit annoying to her; in fact it soothed her nerves. She felt her hands, folded between her chest and the spot where her mother's heart was.

The water, together with the steady beat of her mother's heart, felt like home. She was in and out of consciousness as she had stopped crying a few moments earlier. The mother had started to cry immediately after. She couldn't see anything of course--she wasn't old enough to have functioning eyes--but she had her mother's eyes and straight black hair. The mother was suffering from what people would later describe as post-partum depression.

From the bathtub, the mother could see the clock by the bathroom door read 2:35 in the morning. It had been exactly 16 minutes since she was flushed out of the mother's system and into the awaiting water. The radio outside the bathroom suddenly interrupted the steady stream of music by a man giving a news report in the vernacular.

"Super typhoon Sisang is expected to landfall in a few hours... Fishermen are advised by the coastguard to stay home and away from seaports. Civilians are advised to keep out of the streets as the winds may reach up to 200km/h later today. This is one of the highest speeds we have seen in a decade."

"That's right Ted and we hope everyone has prepared their safety supplies such as canned goods, flashlights and radios. Stay tuned for more live updates and stay safe everyone. We will be back in a few moments," a female announcer replied.

The mother could hear the winds outside grow more turbulent. The mother felt her heart only sink further. She was beautiful, the mother thought, unlike anything she has seen before. Her father was not allowed to come home for this moment, in another country, he wasn't aware that the mother had already given birth. The mother told him about the pregnancy a number of weeks in, sense of time blurred and suspect. It had been a gruelling nine months and an even more gruelling year before that, after the father left for work and the mother was sent into an emotional train wreck. Wrapped in loneliness, the mother reached for the hairdryer on the stool beside the tub.

The mother held it above her knees, just a hand's-breadth over the water when thunder struck a tree outside the window, making her jump and let go. Her eyes showed the shock and regret the split second the live dryer hit the water and sent 383 volts of electricity to both her and her newborn daughter.

1949

It was two minutes past three in the morning and Barbara was a foot and a half in her grave as she burst through the emergency room doors on a wheelchair, barely conscious. She was about to give birth to twins, and she felt it even before her doctor confirmed it to the family. The nurses transferred her to a hospital bed, readying her for delivery, when she lost consciousness altogether.

There were only two people more in the emergency room apart from Barbara, her mother, and Hugh. They were asked questions by the nurse and were escorted to the delivery room a few doors down the hall of the Jane Crookall Maternity Home, after Barbara nodded to her and motioned that she had indeed been in labour for the past two hours already.

"Barbara, can you hear me?" Hugh, her husband, held onto her hand as he put on a mask and a hair cover. Leslie and Barry were at home with their grandparents. Barbara was already very weak when she fell asleep at about one in the morning and went into labour a few moments later. She could barely whisper to Hugh what she was feeling, and to add to that, he was already snoring away. It was Barry who woke up in the middle of the night out of a nightmare about hot tea and went to seek solace in his mother's arms. Instead, he shook his father awake to motion to his distraught mother.

"Doctor, the patient is unresponsive," the nurse opened Barbara's shirt and started pumping on her chest. "Performing compressions now," she said. Barbara was strapped to an IV as the nurse tried to resuscitate her. The room was cosy and felt more like a room in a grand mum's house rather than a w. Four people stood over Barbara; Hugh desperately wanting her to crush his hand the same way she did the first time he became a father; a nun readied the bed for delivery, another nurse was performing CPR on her, and a doctor was checking for her vital signs.

"She's going into arrest! Ready the defibrillator, we're about to lose her!" the doctor said as she found out that Barbara's pulse had stopped. The nurse stopped the compressions as they brought in an oxygen mask and the equipment to keep her alive. The doctor prepared the charges while the nurse spread a gel on her chest.

"Clear." The doctor said as the nurse afterward held Barbara's wrist to check for a pulse. At the split second after 3:06am, Barbara Mary Gibb was shocked for the second time by a set of pads to her chest that sent 400 volts of electricity into her system.

XXXX

In a rip in the fabric of time and space, a set of two distinct yet same pulls of energy of consciousness gravitated towards each other. They had no face, of course, but they had many faces. They had no memories, of course, but they had all their memories. It wasn't that he aged right before her eyes, or that she grew younger as he stroked what he felt to be a wisp of her hair. It was "feeling" memories, and "seeing" sensations, a synaesthesia outside of senses and matter. It didn't make sense and yet it made perfect sense. It was rather that they morphed from one thing to another like pulsating lights until they formed the semblance of faces that both will recognize for the rest of their lives.

This rip in the fabric of time and space is reserved for souls that do not have a logical place in time and space. They were mistakes that had no place whatsoever in history and yet as they found each other--as "they" as an entity became a "one," after finding each other at the very start instead of spending their lives looking for each other--they dared to defy everything the gods have stood for. It was what the gods feared. A being greater than the sum of its parts that could overthrow even time and space itself.

1987

After that split second, which may have only lasted a blink of an eye, the mother opened her eyes to see that the dryer was still in her hands. The baby in her arms emanated what 383 volts of electricity would feel like as the warmth of affection, and in the mother's lifetime, she would not know what a second ago, feel what it was like to be electrocuted.

She placed the dryer back on the stool and unplugged it with her free hand. She felt the warmth from her baby displace onto her and dispel any more thoughts of suicide.

"Gaea Luz," the mother said, holding her closer and making her way out of the tub, "My little Gel."

The mother set her down, asleep in her makeshift crib on the bed and picked up the phone and dialled a foreign number.

1949

Barbara opened her eyes as everyone sighed in relief. Her strength gradually came back, even if she didn't know that it was one of her boys inside her responsible for it. Barbara regained the strength to push Robin Hugh Gibb into the world and Maurice Gibb 35 minutes later.

Robin did not exude the same warmth and energy that the baby, born 40 years into the future, had given to her worn mother. Instead, it had been kept inside of him as the love around him was enough to keep that piece of time intact. He and his soon-to-be-very-busy-parents would find out what that would be like soon enough.

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