Hi Friends,
I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve offered anything more than a weekly installment of “Departures,” especially for those of you who aren’t reading the novel, but I’ve been transitioning back into a demanding day job that consumes most of my time and nearly all of my energy.
Every once in a while I have this incredible feeling of delivering something onto the page that is much greater than all the scribblings that came before. I feel that way about this chapter. It speaks to a belief that I hold sacred, especially in these tumultuous times of such division and hatred. As of this writing, the U.S. election is two days away and so much hangs in the balance. Regardless of the outcome, I pray that we can all remember we’re better than the people that get paid handsomely to represent us in government.
Be kind to each this week. It’s going to be a rough one. Even if you haven’t been following the previous chapters of this story, I hope you’ll give this one a listen. I think it’s something special.
Peace & Music,
Ben
“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild and June have settled into their new home and face the challenges that come with learning to live together. Wild, who was mostly raised by nannies has no experience with making a home and June is losing her patience with him. She doesn’t understand why he’s distant and distracted. He struggles to be present when all he can think about is how little time they have left together.
The taste of the bitter brew was a warning as sure as the iridescent orange markings on a poison dart frog. The muddy flavor, like burnt licorice or the darkest chocolate that crosses the line from pleasurable to medicinal is not something you forget, and as Wild lay on the palette in the darkness of the maloca, the taste bloomed like an oleander in his mind.
The human body has a physical response to danger or what it perceives as danger. Standing at the edge of a cliff, stepping into traffic on a busy street, or fingering the trigger of a pistol, there’s a crawling sensation beneath the skin like a trillion tiny insects undulating. The mouth goes dry, the bowels loosen, the face flushes with blood, and the heart begins to race. Stepping into harm’s way willfully is something only humans do. Wild’s mind flashed through the catalog of his transgressions, the many times he had flirted with hurling himself beyond the point of no return and the times when he actually had. The first time he touched June. The first time she clung to him hungrily, insisting he come inside her. The weight of a gun in his hand. The taste of Ayahuasca was the barrier you had to push through to get to the other side. But it wasn’t a simple door you opened. It was a narrow tunnel you had to crawl through on your belly.
Wild’s fear and apprehension was soon overwhelmed by his physical discomfort as he disappeared beneath the rapidly rising waterline of nausea that threatened to drown him. After an indeterminate amount of time fighting to stay above the nausea, Diego appeared by his side holding a two-liter bottle filled with cassava milk in one hand and a tiny stick like a rod of incense with a glowing ember at the tip.
“You need to purge, my friend. I can help you. Drink this”
Wild sat up and took the bottle from him. He began to drink the murky liquid but had to stop, as the starchy sweetness was overwhelming. Diego touched the bottom of the bottle, insisting that he keep drinking. It took a few minutes, but Wild got most of it down and felt as though he had drunk most of the Amazon River.
“Okay, now, remove your shirt. This will burn for just a second, but I promise it will help you.”
Wild did as instructed and Diego bent over his shoulder with the burning stick to sear a tiny hole in his skin. The pain made Wild suck a blade of air through his teeth. From a small glass bottle Diego pulled an eyedropper filled with liquid.
“What’s that,” Wild asked.
“It’s poison, but don’t worry. Just a little help from the frog will make the discomfort go away quicker. Okay?”
Wild nodded and Diego carefully administered a single drop of the liquid into the wound on Wild’s shoulder. Within less than a minute, Wild was vomiting into a bucket with such force and fury he felt he might see his stomach floating there when he finished. Diego didn’t leave his side. After three purging waves, Wild’s body relaxed, and heavy as a sandbag, he collapsed back onto the palette. When he closed his eyes, he was no longer even aware of his body. He had made his way through the tunnel into a darkened room that felt massive, almost infinite until a tiny box of light appeared as if a door opened to a single mailbox in a bank of thousands. Other doors began to open at random in quick succession, each emitting a shaft of light, pure and radiant like a laser until all were open and the matrix of illumination was blinding in its brilliance.
Wild was no longer an observer of the light but a part of it. It penetrated him, obliterating him into a trillion particles like dust floating in a beam of sunlight. The light began to fade and pulse like a rainbow of embers breathing in and out. Somewhere the sound of an ancient voice began chanting in a meandering warble of words but not words. Wild understood it was the voice of the old guide because he appeared there in silhouette before the matrix which had extruded into a three-dimensional labyrinth of neon geometry. The shaman began to speak in Wild’s mind, the meaning of the words somehow taking shape within the gibberish of the chanting as a face appears in the field of noise in a stereogram.
You have returned. After all these years, you have returned. Like a child, you took something that did not belong to you. What have you learned?
What? I didn’t… I… don’t know. So much death.
You have learned nothing. There is no death. There is only transition from one state to another and back again.
Wild was suddenly pulled into the labyrinth, riding along a cyan rail of light so fast that everything blurred into stillness.
I’m scared. I don’t want to be here. This was a mistake.
There are no mistakes. There is only the journey you chose.
I didn’t choose this. I never asked for any of this. Why? Why me?
Everything stopped suddenly. The rushing sound in his ears he hadn’t realized was there went silent and Wild was a child seated at a desk in a cubicle-sized office, gray and windowless. His father’s ruddy face loomed over him. His eyes were bloodshot, his breath laced with nicotine and whisky. But it wasn’t his father, it was his grandfather. No, older still. His clothes were not the charcoal Brooks Brothers suit, but a colonial period waistcoat. The hair, not a high and tight crew cut, but shoulder-length gray locks. In one of the man’s meaty fists was the woven leather handle of a bullwhip, stained crimson from the beatings it had administered.
You have been derelict in your duties, son. Shirking your responsibility. Don’t you look away. You are my line. The family business is your business, bought and paid for.
No, no no no no no.
Yes. We are the masters of this earthly domain. We rule because we are chosen. You are chosen. You will pick up the mantle of your legacy and stop being an embarrassment to me.
The roaring returned in Wild’s ears and an anger and hatred flashed through his entire being with the all-consuming force of a nuclear blast. When it passed, the walls of the office were gone, the Thorne patriarch was gone, and Wild was standing in a tunnel of trees, their leaves shimmering and effervescent as sunlight filtered through them casting everything in chlorophyl hues that waved and danced hypnotically. The chanting returned but this time the voice soared in a high, whispery refrain that felt like cool water. As Wild began to float along the path through the tunnel, moving in and out of shadowy pools, the shape of someone appeared in the distance. He felt her before he could make out the shape of her face, the auburn glow of her hair. June.
Wild wept with the abandon of an injured child as she held him to her. He could smell the familiar scent of her that words couldn’t describe. Enfolded in her arms, he disappeared into her, became her. He saw himself or what he understood to be himself and he was filled with sadness and pity looking at the broken man, so ravaged by grief and loss.
Wild, my love, you’re still holding on so tight. You have to let go. You can’t control life. You can only accept the gift of it and surrender to it.
I miss you, God, I miss you.
I’m here. I’ve always been here but you’re missing the point.
Wild couldn’t respond because he was no longer there, nor was June or his father or grandfather or the patriarch. There was only the ever-expanding geometry of which he was no more or less than a particle, flowing through the arteries of light transmitted in all directions. There was no beginning or end or even a concept of such things, so complete was the feeling of connectedness and completeness. He tried to resist the inevitable dissolution. Particles of Wilder Emerson Thorne IV clustered, festering like an infected wound that burned with the fever of attachment until a stronger force like the current of the Amazon would gently move between them and disperse them once again into the flow.
Hours passed in this state and at some point, Wild opened his eyes and he was staring up at a sky filled with stars. His bare feet beneath him, toes flexing and gripping the rich, dark soil, he felt grounded even as the stars above smeared into light trails. He realized each of his hands was being held tenderly, one by Millie and the other by Raina who seemed to be singing.
“Are you okay?” Millie asked. “Wild, are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, hearing his voice as though it were someone else's. “Yes, I think so. Are you okay?”
“Yes, we’re fine. We’ve just been worried about you.”
“You should drink some water,” Raina said.
He turned to her slowly as if moving under water and looked down at their joined hands. He was returning into the collection of matter that was a weary sixty-eight-year-old man who had traveled a long way to find answers for which he knew none existed. He shouldn’t be touching her. The old alarm surged through the fog in his brain, and he started to recoil but Raina’s hand held fast. He shook his head, fighting the intrusive thought but there was no point. December 22, 2082. He let out a long sighing breath that carried both gratitude and disappointment.
“What is it?” Raina asked.
“Nothing, I’m still just a little swimmy. Thank you,” he said.
He drank from the bottle she offered, and the cool water dribbled down into his beard.
“You scared us back there,” Millie said. “I thought you were going to die.”
“I’m fine, sugar.”
“It didn’t help, did it?”
“You mean did it fix me? No, but I feel… lighter somehow. How long have I been out of it? Feels like forever.”
“It’s nearly morning,” Raina said. “Gael spent a long time with you. He seemed very concerned but you’re better now. You don’t remember us bringing you outside?”
“No, I don’t. How are you doing? How was your trip?” he asked.
“It was… peaceful. Nothing dramatic and revelatory, just a feeling of connectedness. Mine was short though, especially compared to you. Maybe my expectations were too high.”
Wild nodded slowly. The sky was beginning to lighten and he suddenly felt very tired. The three of them appeared to be alone outside the ceremonial maloca. It was quiet except for some early bird song.
“Everyone else has gone back to their beds,” Millie said. “We should probably do the same. Raina, you go ahead. We’ll catch up.”
Millie didn’t let go of his hand. They stood in silence for a moment after Raina left and Wild began to settle back into the familiar rooms of his brain, both relieved and disappointed that all the old furniture sat where it had always been.
“I’m sorry I dragged you all the way here,” she said. “I hoped maybe something magic would happen.”
“Who’s to say it didn’t?”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel better, I think. I got to be with June. I got to be outside of me and I got to peek behind the curtain. It was… scary but so much more than I can really explain right now. None of this matters.”
“None of what matters?”
“Any of the things I worry about. Death is not the end of the story. I guess that’s what I mean. I’ve spent most of my goddamned life worrying about it. Thinking I had to somehow wrestle it to the ground. But I don’t.”
“But you still have the visions, don’t you? I just saw you, with Raina just now.”
“Yeah, that didn’t change. But I don’t feel so afraid anymore. Like you and me and everyone else, she’s gonna die when it’s her time. Spoiler alert, she’ll be a very old woman. Even if that wasn’t the case though, it’s okay because…”
He paused and thought of the feeling of rushing through the network of geometry that was all things, the feeling of belonging to something so much more substantial than a single life or the actions of a single life.
“Because what?” Millie asked, turning to face him.
“Because we’re all part of the same thing whether we're here, or we’re gone. I know it sounds airy fairy, but the ayahuasca, it’s powerful medicine. You have to experience it for yourself.”
She nodded and they began to walk slowly, following the path, now more dimly lit, the footlight’s small store of the sun’s energy nearly depleted. Wild felt himself dimming too. Nothing had changed. What had he expected? The symmetry of a storybook fairy tale? A draught of a magical potion and the curse would be lifted? A small part of him had believed it could be so simple.
Still, there was some new energy moving inside him, however subtle. He could feel it stirring, folding into his consciousness, and he welcomed the transformation.
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If you’re enjoying “Departures,” chances are you will also like my two previously published novels. I’ve made the first two episodes of each free for you to preview. If you prefer reading the old fashioned way, you’re in luck because “The Memory of My Shadow” is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook anywhere you purchase books. I give you all the details in this announcement post.
In 2052, Magdalena, a brilliant programmer invents a device for telepathic communication with AI, seeking to decode the mind of her twin, the shooter in a school massacre she alone survived, but when she resurrects his consciousness, she unleashes a malevolence that could destroy her. Fans of the movie “Ex Machina” will love this story.
In the reality show competition for Houze, a revolutionary eco-home, six contestants face a winner-takes-all challenge. Beneath the surface of sustainability, altruism battles greed, turning a hopeful vision into a life and death struggle. Fans of “Nine Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty will love this story.
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