Baked Scribe Flashback! Issue #16

The child was him.

It was the first revelation that had come to him upon waking in this place, if a place was what it could be called. The last memory he had before this was the sight of the median rushing up at him followed by the sound of glass breaking and tires squealing. Those sights and sounds had opened the door into an eternity of darkness from which he had awoken suspended amidst a mass of swirling gray clouds. They roiled around him in every direction he looked; side to side, up and even below where they obscured whatever it was that he was standing on. His stomach lurched at the sensation of walking through the middle of a cloud but he had the feeling that he had no choice but to take these steps.

Then the child had appeared.

Through the mist, he had approached and then stopped, looking up at Jacob with his hand held out patiently. Despite the gesture of invitation, he froze as he couldn’t shake the sensation of recognition, the feeling of familiarity. It had hit him all at once. There were so many pictures lying around their parents house, it would be hard not to recognize his own face even at such a young age. It was him in every way, greeting himself as a seven year old guide waiting to take him. Where exactly?

Jacob reached out and took the tiny hand in his. Instantly the clouds burst apart around him and a long hallway formed. It was like watching a film in reverse as the walls and ceiling rushed together to coalesce above, below and all around. To their left and right, doorways began to appear along the walls and his child companion stopped at each, clearly expecting him to look within.

In one room, he saw himself as a teenager, hunting for the first time with his uncle. He was reaching down to lift a bunny up out of a nest, looking around to see if anyone was watching before taking hold and twisting the head until the neck broke. The next room contained the college version of himself, in bed with the waitress from the restaurant he had met during his part time job. She sat atop him, taking him into her already even as she was removing her bra, moving onto him as she took his hands to place them onto her breasts. In another room he saw himself at ten, sitting in the funeral parlor for his grandfather’s funeral. In another he was accepting his high school diploma, watching himself and knowing that as he walked across that stage, all he was wondering was if anyone knew that he wasn’t wearing any clothes under the gown.

The tiny hand that once was his own gripped him suddenly and he saw that they had reached the end of the hallway. Jacob looked down into his own face and watched as the child that once was him slowly dissolved into open space. He looked up, now standing at the base of a staircase leading up into darkness. The world felt like it was wobbling around him as he took one unsteady step forward, as if drunk. The stairs felt solid underneath him though so he followed that first step by a second, and then a third.

As he ascended, he pondered the commonality of all those moments he had looked back on. How at the time they had seemed like trivial moments, stepping stones on the way to what his life really would be like when he had achieved what he wanted. Only years after would he look back on those experiences with nostalgia wishing more than anything else he could return to those moments so that he could really savor the sensation and experiences now gone forever. What was there really to be said about a life perpetually spent looking over one’s shoulder?

The room he stepped up into was an empty hospital room. There were no windows or doors; just equipment unused inside a sterile room. He turned to look over his shoulder and saw that the stairs were now gone. When he turned back he saw that a patient was now strapped down to the exam table, which was tilted up to an almost entirely upright position. Even with all of the blood and damage to the patient’s face, he could still recognize what he was looking at.

The patient on the bed was him, like looking into a distorted reflection. The version of himself on the bed looked like he had been badly beaten; with bruises, cuts and lacerations all over his body. As he stepped forward for a closer look, his mangled self opened his eyes and spoke to him softly.

“What you were is gone forever. What you will be is never known and what you are is not long for this world.”

Jacob shook his head, “I don’t understand what you mean.” He tried to ask for more but the injured version of himself had already drifted into a state of unawareness, looking blankly off into the open space of the room. A repetitive beeping had started to fill his head, starting slowly and now reaching a manically frantic pace. He felt sweat beading up on his forehead and neck and started looking around the room, convinced that whatever was happening around him, he would soon be expected to have a solution.

A solution for what? Being trapped inside of his own head? Trapped with no clear purpose or indication of intent? If these shades of himself were supposed to be functioning as guides of a sort, they had yet to explain to him what he was doing in this place or where they were taking him.

There was a deep vibration that he felt; not from the walls or the floor, but from within himself. He looked up and saw that the hospital bed was now gone, replaced by a simple wooden ladder, going up towards a ceiling that had now become impossibly hundreds of yards away, like the high vaulted rooftop of a stadium. He took hold of the rungs and began to climb, white knuckling as he was buffeted by increasingly powerful blasts of hot wind. The ladder swayed from side to side, and the muscles in his legs were tremoring, either from fear or fatigue.

The ground below him had long since vanished into a swirl of dense fog when his head ran up against something solid. He looked up but found that he was still staring up into open space with no sign of whatever barrier he had just encountered. His hand was shaking badly as he reached out and could definitely feel the solid surface. It gave slightly as he applied pressure, making him think about trap doors leading up into attics and crawl spaces. He pushed upwards and first heard a skree that could have been the sound of rusty hinges followed by a heavy sound that could have been a trap door falling open. Where blue sky had once been above him, there was now a portal leading into darkness amongst the clouds. Jacob climbed up and pulled himself through.

The ladder dissolved from under his grip and out of instinct, he grabbed out at thin air and screamed even after his brain had registered that he was now standing on solid ground. He was on the roof of a building of skyscraper height, looking out into gray horizons. An old man was standing by the ledge, gesturing for him to come over. The man looked familiar and Jacob couldn’t help but scrutinize him as he approached. Could this also be him? A version of himself that was yet to come?

The man gestured towards a coin operated set of binoculars mounted into the stone ledge and handed Jacob a brilliantly gilded golden token. Jacob inserted the coin and peered through the eye holes.

The world was engulfed in flames.

Everywhere he looked, all there was to see were towering plumes of smoke and flame; waves of heat he could feel even from such a great distance. He pulled back and looked at the geriatric reflection of himself but the only response he got was a shrug and a turn to gaze off into the horizon.

“I don’t understand!” Jacob yelled again. His older self pointed at the binoculars and handed him another coin. He looked again but this time saw an expanse of the most beautiful valley he had ever laid eyes on; grass so green and waters so blue that it almost hurt to look upon them. He could see fish in the lake, birds in the trees, deer in the field.

Then, like a photo negative exposed to heat, the image in front of him started to curl in from the edges, blistered and begin to burn until again he was looking out upon a maelstrom of fire

Three versions of himself he had seen. His past, his present and this. "Is that supposed to be my future?" Jacob asked, "Is that what you've been showing me? Some kind of a warning?"

He looked up and saw now all three versions of himself staring back at him, the child, the injured accident victim and the senior citizen. As they stared him down, their hands came up slowly to take hold of each other and in one last flash of blinding light he was suddenly looking at himself; a perfect mirror image of himself at that moment.

Again, the sound of hospital monitors filled his head. He could also hear the sound of distant chatter; the operating room? He wanted out, out from these mental shackles and back into the life he did not realize until now how much he wanted. The past he could never return to, his expectations of what his life should be and his fears of what was yet to come; they all needed to be left behind so that he could truly live his life within each moment.

It takes rising up above things to be able to look down and take perspective. He stepped up onto the ledge in a sudden moment of inspiration and looked down into the billowing storm clouds below. Sometimes moving on required an active dramatic severance. Jacob stepped off the edge.

Hot screaming air rushed past him as he fell, headfirst into a swirling mass were no light entered. Then, after an eternity of a moment he found himself rushing down into a luminescent ocean of stars and light that grew only brighter.

His eyes snapped open in time for him to jerk the steering wheel and apply the brakes. He pulled to the left and was able to get the car stopped as the truck barreled past him, nearly clipping him in the process. A few more seconds and he would have planted the front end of his car into that median.

Jacob shook his head and looked into the rear view mirror, scanning traffic for an opening and smiling ever so slightly; either from the elation over still being alive or from the ever elusive understanding of what really was and was not important to him in the one life he had been lucky enough to be blessed with. He resumed his path, spirit renewed in the foundry of second chances.

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