After another hour of walking around almost aimlessly, Julian demanded to take a rest. He had been silent for most of the hour. But now he sulked, which made perfect sense. Here Tipi was walking around with a simple goal in mind. He had to take the boy down into the valley so he could find his parents with the authorities. He could have asked the stone balancer to call the police. He should have done something like that when they were at the restaurant at the top of the skiing slope in the first place. But he had done none of that.
They. rested at the entrance of a small cave just off the path. It was now well into the afternoon, and if he were to make a plan, this would be the right moment to make one. They sat down and within minutes Julian had fallen asleep on Tipi's lap. He gently put him on the ground and stretched his legs again. The cave overlooked a deep valley. He climbed a rock hung over a deep cliff. He could hear water down below. Tipi closed his eyes. This is what loneliness feels like. You are on a mountaintop and with any step you could plummet to your death. Like being the top stone of the rock balancing pile, you know you will fall eventually if you wait. But you will also fall if you move. You connect only to the rest of the world trough the tip of your toes. There are so many choices, and yet there are not. You are frozen in time and space. But with every passing second, the route back becomes harder and harder.
The edge effect, the interface at which interesting matters happen, is now reduced to a singular point where nothing can happen anymore. Somehow, this train of thought triggered a memory. It was a recollection from before the toe stumping. Tipi did not know exactly when or where it was exactly, but he had been walking on a mountain of sort. The stones were not really rocks like here in the Alps. They were black and crunched like glass. His clothes and bare legs were black too. Then he had met a geologist student. He took him on a small hike which ended on climbing a steep hill. This hill turned out to be.a crater of an active volcano. He had looked down into the smoking pit and the air within greeted him with the most putrid sulfuric smell. It surprised him so much that he had almost passed out and fallen into the damned pit then and there. But he didn't. The student took him around the crater. The rim was extremely narrow. On one side there was the fiery pit, on the other side an almost equally deep drop down the glassy rocks. It would have been okay if the wind had not suddenly picked up. Tipi remembers ducking down to the ground to cling himself onto this ridge of life with death on either side. That's all Tipi could remember.
He walked back to Julian who was still fast asleep with a loud snore unbefitting of a boy his age. After devouring one of the remaining lunches he collected a heap of leaves and branches and sat on it to meditate. But the intensity of the last few days, the exertion from the hike with an untrained body and the relentless demand in his tummy for more blood to help the digestion of the second Schnitzel on a kaiser, caused him to doze off within seconds after closing his eyes.
"You're piercing the event horizon, you are remembering again," the familiar voice in his dream said. It came from the female figure standing behind him, when he was looking out on a rainy street. "Try to find me, dough-boy," she said. Tipi turned around but saw only another part of the wet and empty street. "I'm always behind you, no matter how you turn, " she giggled. But Tipi was not giving up, not even if it was just a dream. He found a shopping window and searched for his reflection and that of the woman behind her. He startled to see that both were not there.
"Sorry, dear chap, physics don't work that way in dreamland. But you're awake now. In your dream at least." Rain poured down on the dreamy asphalt. "You still don't remember me, do you?"
"I don't," Tipi said.
"There was a time that we were on the flattest and lowliest piece of land in the middle of the ocean and we both looked at a mountain which was not there. I mean, it was there but nobody could see it but us. And now, you are on an actual mountain and you have no clue, you are just not seeing it."
"See what?"
"That's the thing," the voice said. "I can not tell you to see something that you cannot see."
"Then make me see." A name rose up from a dark place in Tipi's mind. "Ka-, Kalisa? Is that your name?"
"Hurrah!" Kalisa said. "I knew your brain would resettle in old patterns and kick me into your memories again."
The downpour of the rain resembled that of a monsoon now. Its noise drowned out the words of Kalisa. "Shit," Kalisa said. She started to yell in Tipi's right ear. "Wake up, you got to move!" She shoved Tipi in the back.
Tipi gasped for air when he woke up. It had become murkier, but it wasn't fully night yet. He looked for Julian but the place he had been sleeping was empty. Tipi stood up and saw a dark shadow on the rock overhanging the cliff. He shuffled step by step towards the edge.
Tipi pulled himself together a ran up to the rock. Julian spread his arms when his toes reached the end of the rock. Then he slowly let himself fall forward. And Julian fell, right in the captive arms of Tipi who had taken two tremendous leaps towards the edge of the rock and had thrown his arms around Julians waist just in time.
Both sobbed on their way down the rock. "What the hell were you doing?"
"I.. why does living hurt so much?" Julian said. "I want it to stop. If I can't make it stop, I'd rather not be there."
"No, no, no, don't say that. Jesus Christ, you scared the shit out of me."
He took Julian back to the cave entrance, sat down and hugged the boy in the most comforting way he thought possible. But Tipi also knew that he could not make such feelings disappear just like that. After a huge long sigh, Julian looked up.
"Who's that?" he said.
"Who?"
Julian pulled away one arm from the warm embrace and pointed to the inside of the cave. From the darkness within, a shape emerged. Crows were cawing in the background. The shape stretched out its arms while Julian tightened his grip on Julian.
"No," Tipi said. "It can't be. It's, it's... "
The figure emerged fully from the cave into the dim light of dusk.
"Julian, this is Kalisa," Tipi said.
YOU ARE READING
Mountain Qualia
General FictionTipi is a grand master guru who has recently lost his gift of enlightenment by stumping his big toe and now has to cope with not living in the present anymore. **** When his followers set him back on a path of reclaiming his position on his mountai...
