Lotus

Part 1

Copyright © 2014 by Lazlo Ferran

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Lazlo Ferran at lazloferran@gmail.com

Cover:

Graphics: Pixel Studio Banjaluka

Purple lotus flower photo: morguefile.com/creative/pjhudson

Blacklotus abstract: morguefile.com/creative/quicksandala

The lotus is seen as the symbol for enlightenment, purity or rebirth in Buddhism and eternity in Hinduism.

I was a very brave man. I died. In a trench near Verdun, my sticky limbs became the mud, left behind by the victorious and the living. Mud and rust. Funny how reality so quickly becomes fossilised, becomes history. The detritus of war; tank hulks, rotting flesh and spent cartridges. Mud and rust.

My name is Robert Lath; at least it was, a long, long time ago. But then, it seems to me, time only exists as a chronology in our memories. Even there, it’s distorted by emotion and intensity. It becomes hard to judge just how long it is since something happened, like being in the dark.

I had been in darkness when He first came to me and offered me The Choice.

***

For an eternity, my own internal voice had been my only world. I spoke and I listened but I could touch nothing. I wasn’t even aware, at first, that I had a body. I only thought about mud and rust and told myself tales of my childhood and life in the trenches. Then it occurred to me that since I could think, I might still have a body. Try as I might, I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t move until one day, and I use the term ‘day’ lightly and in its most abstract form, I felt something brush my cheek. I became aware for the first time that I still had a cheek, whereupon I could move my nose and then my mouth. It was a hop, skip and a jump, metaphorically speaking, to locate my shoulder, my hand, and finally move a finger. I felt again the touch on my cheek of something cool, like a whisper.

It must be a draft from somewhere.

I knew I must be in some kind of space I still couldn’t see. As far as I could tell, I sat on a staircase about four feet wide. To my right, I could feel a vertical wall and to my left a vertical drop. From the abyss came the dank, foul smelling draft which had touched my cheek. I dared not move. After what seemed many more months, or years, I wondered why I had no need for food or water.

Never mind. This must be some strange dream. I will wake in a minute.

Then I heard the voice and, a moment later, saw the face.

A gruff, throat-clearing preceded a glowing eminence, which moved swiftly to a point a few feet in front of my feet and resolved into a human face. The feature of the face seemed to shift and merge and, try as I might, I couldn’t form a clear impression of it. It told me something, offered me a choice and then vanished. I still can’t picture the face. What it offered, I did eventually recall but more of that later.

***

I started to crawl up the steps. I didn’t want to go down; the inky blackness had a malevolence about it which smacked of a staircase to Hell. Indeed, if the staircase did go down and down for something approaching forever, as the dank and foul upward draft promised, then where else could it go but Hell? It seemed faithless, and sacrilegious to even contemplate going down. So I started to crawl upwards. I crawled up those stone steps, unyielding and yet not cold to the touch, for many days or weeks. How could I tell for how long I crawled; I seemed not to need food or water any more. Not once did I feel the desperate struggle of any insect under the palm of my hand or the touch of anything other than stone. I was completely alone. I dare not stand for fear of falling. I had never been frightened of heights, suffered any of the subtleties of vertigo, but here I felt afraid of falling. It seemed as I had been musing, for the millionth time, how I might have come to be here when my head hit something solid. A ceiling. I felt it with my hands and sure enough, I could climb no further. Neither could I feel any crack or marking in the horizontal surface above me. My questioning thoughts turned in earnest to, ‘Where am I?’

I remembered a TV programme once about an ancient well in Cairo, so deep that, decrepit as it had become now, I mean at the time the programme had been made, one could no longer reach the water. Indeed, the presenter, dressed in nonchalant T-shirt and denims, dropped a stone from the lowest, safe step, into the abyss and counted to ten before we heard a distant, ‘Plunk.’

“More than a thousand years old, perhaps two thousand,” he said, in respectful tones that echoed.

Could these stairs be the stairs in Cairo?

But then again, what is TV? And in what time had that programme been made? For that matter, what is a programme? Is it just something from my imagination? I am filled with so many memories of times with no ‘TV’ and no ‘programmes,’ just as vivid and real, that I have to question what is reality and what is my imagination.

***