Fading Light
Chapter One of "Blurred Edges"
The first part of Absaraka’s narrative

"I could always kill you. Right here, right now. And no one would ever know…"

"Please…Raphael…"

"Don’t say another word. You hear me? Not one. Because I have something I need to tell you. This is something I only can tell you once." He ran his smooth hand under my chin in that way he always did when he was on the verge of another round of "sarcasm."

"Now, then. What was that you wrote in that poem ‘Face to Face’? You remember it. You obsessed over every word as you wrote it. You could probably recite it without looking it up. Your words. I quote. ‘If there’s a way to meet you, in your realm, then let me rest no more until it’s found.’ You remember writing that." It wasn’t a question.

All I could do was nod. I wrote that, all right. And I damn straight meant it, too. At least, at the time I did…

"Well, then, get ready to rest. Because something’s happening. Soon you won’t be dreaming about me anymore. One of us will get to cross over to be with the other."

"What do you mean…?" I could feel the dream-blood draining from my face.

"Look…I can’t explain this to you without going into lots of cosmic mumbo jumbo that you wouldn’t understand if I sat here and yakked at you nonstop for a week. We don’t have a week. All we have is tonight. This moment. Right now. Listen up, and listen good."

He came closer to me, and placed his hands on my shoulders. "We live in two separate dimensions. But there’s something you need to know about what keeps us apart. See, every so often, the boundaries between certain dimensions grow weak. There are infinite dimensions, and so there’re a limitless number of combinations of the weaknesses. But the weaknesses can be predicted if you know what you’re doing. I made it my business to find out."

He leaned his head in closer. "Right now, one of the weaknesses is on the border between your world and mine. It’s not going to sit there forever, and by the time it comes back, you’ll have been dead for a century or so. So you have to decide—now."

"Decide…?"

"I knew this moment would come. Planned for it. Prepared for it. Rehearsed what I’d say. But now it’s here and my script just flew out the window. Listen! The edge between your world and mine is blurred. Either of us could jump to the other side. And there isn’t much time to decide."

He took a few steps back. "Here’s the decision. You can either come over to my side—become a part of my world—or you can have me, my brothers, Splinter, and April come over to your side. Whoever crosses over has to find the other guy. So if you come over here, you’d have to get to New York and find me. Trust me, I’d make sure you did." A wicked gleam flashes in his eyes. "Or, you could have us come over to America 2000. I’d have to convince April to get us a place in Baltimore, and then I’d have to find you. And if I can sniff out Foot ninjas from across Manhattan, I could find you really easy in a hick town like Baltimore."

"If you come over here, that would mean that you’d die--in your world. But you could be reborn in mine—and be immortal. Think of it—us. Together. Forever. Nothing could ever take us away from each other. Ever. That’s what you said you wanted, isn’t it?"

"But I don’t want to…you know…just die…"

"You wouldn’t die. You’d just be changing dimensions and leaving behind your current body. I mean, let’s be honest—if you did die in your sleep tonight, how many people would show up at your funeral? Your old man, maybe a local friend or two, some people from your church…and that’s it. You wouldn’t be missed."

Sad thing is, he was right. I’ve always been a bit of a—a sociable loner, if that makes any sense. I can talk to almost anyone about almost anything. Sports are my favorite subject, and basketball, my passion—particularly when the Utah Jazz are in the thick of a playoff chase. (I could really start a long-winded rant about how much of a pain in the ass it is, being a Jazz fan in Baltimore, but that’s another story.) So if you can talk hoops, you instantly have some common ground with old ‘Raka. (Unless you’re a Los Angeles Fakers fan—I swear, talk about the NBA’s All-Headcase team…) But sports isn’t all I know—I can talk a bit about current events, I know the broadcasting racket inside and out, I love talking about angels, and I can even drop in a few quotes from Shakespeare every now and then. And all that probably adds up very quickly to one answer: "Absaraka has no life." Sure, I can talk to you until we’re both talked out—but the number of times in the past few years someone’s called me up and said, "Hey, ‘Raka, you feel like heading over to [insert name of any exciting place here] for a while and [insert fun diversion here] this Saturday?"…well, let’s just say I could probably count the number of times that’s happened on one hand. With fingers (note the plural) left over.

Now throw in my recently-acquired job. I’m a telemarketer, full-time, for a major communications provider with an office just up the bus line from where I live. I’ve just started out, and I’m not meeting my sales goals at all—the past two weeks, I was hitting something like 30% of what they wanted me to sell. You need 70% or better to earn so much as a dime in commission money, so I’ve given the company a half-dozen new customers without earning so much as a wooden nickel for myself. Throw in the constant abuse I get on the phone—hey, Miss Manners thinks it’s perfectly acceptable etiquette to be rude to telemarketers—and the fact that I’ve been in the office for 50 or 60 hours a week of said abuse this month, and you can see why I have, at present, neither time nor inclination to pursue a relationship. I get home Monday through Thursday, my schedule runs like this:

1. Check snail mail—usually containing nothing for me except bills, bank statements, perhaps a magazine or two that would like me to subscribe. Oh, yeah—TV Guide comes on Tuesdays. Can’t forget that.
2. Change clothes into jeans and a polo shirt. I can only take so much of dress slacks and ties. If I ever find out what individual invented neckties, I’m going to find his (or her) grave and use it as a toilet.
3. Boot up computer to check email—this is probably the highlight of my weeknights.
4. Nuke a small frozen entrée (small so that I don’t gain fifty pounds on the large portions.)
5. Depending on the night of the week, slouch on the couch and watch some poor schmuck from East Rear End, Iowa, lose his shirt on that Regis Philbin quiz show.
6. If the muse strikes, work on some creative project involving words. I cannot draw, paint, sketch, sculpt, engrave, sew, or do anything creative that involves manual dexterity. Stick figures give me trouble. But I can play video games without any trouble. Go figure.
7. Go to bed sometime around quarter of ten, set my alarm for 5:15 AM the next day, and get ready for another day in the ratrace.

What’s the point of me telling you all this? I have absolutely no life outside my office right now, and the few people I tend to talk with on breaks are nobody’s idea of close friends. So, no friends in the office, where I spend half my waking hours each week, plus no weeknight activities, multiplied by working overtime on Saturdays, raised to the power of "most of my friends are on-line"—Raph was probably dead on (excuse the pun) when he basically told me my funeral wouldn’t attract a crowd of flies if you covered my casket with molasses.

But back to what I dreamt that fateful night…

"Raph…look. I wasn’t meant to be in your world, don’t you understand? I was meant to be here—"

"Where your best friends are people you haven’t met, your job is going nowhere, your degree was a waste of your time, and hardly anyone knows you even exist? The hell kind of an existence is that? Sounds like a recipe for misery to me. Come on…you’d love it where I am. Forever young…anything can happen…adventures around every corner…and you’re telling me you want to stay where you are, working overtime in a cube farm, where nobody even cares about you?"

"Look…it’s not the best life. I’ll grant you that. But it’s the only life I’ve ever known, don’t you understand?"

Raph bowed his head for a moment, and seemed to consider. "Then you’re not coming over to my world?"

"No, I’m not. And that’s final."

Raph gave me a look that I’d never seen on his face in twelve years—disappointment, mixed with anger, mixed with a sense of finality. "Then I’ll see you in your world. It won’t happen right away, but you will have enough warning so you’ll know when to be on the lookout for me. I’m going to find you. And when I do, we have a date with destiny."

"What do you m—"

I don’t remember much more about that dream, only vague images. Two fields of stars, funneling together and giving off pulses of light…a meadow with red flowers in it…a hedge maze of some kind that I was lost in…and no more.

I woke the next morning at quarter after five, right on time, as my wristwatch—oh, faithful pile of silicon!—gently beeped at me to remind me that the office was waiting. I swear, I need more sleep…ten-plus hours in the office, every day, on seven hours, max, of sleep…I only just started, and I’m already burning out. I swear, it’s jobs like this that make those dot-com job finder sites so profitable. But the pay isn’t bad, so I guess I can burn myself out for another month or so…while I get acquainted with a box of Zantac…and leave the office every day feeling like I’ve just been elbowed in the head by Karl Malone. Or perhaps I can look into some of the spam that my AOL account generates. (You never know—someone might not be lying when they tell you that you can pull in a better income…)

With a groan, I turned on the light, rolled out of bed, grabbed my skivvies and headed for my old man’s room to get him out of the rack.

My dad’s the best—he usually spots me a ride to the office, which saves me $1.35 a day in bus fare. Multiply that by 20-odd workdays in a month and you’re looking at $27 I’m not handing over to the MTA, Baltimore’s public transportation monopoly. And that’s a good thing—I usually have to give myself more time to wait for the bus to work than it would take for me to walk there. I had to do that once—after a noreaster dumped a foot of snow on Baltimore one Tuesday, MTA decided to run a Saturday schedule. Which meant serious service cutbacks on the only bus line that comes out to my neighborhood. I had to put on my trenchcoat (liner in, thank you), gloves, Kyle hat, and Eskimo boots, then walk for an hour, on icy streets, in minus-double-digit wind chills to make it to work on time. It took me about an hour to quit shivering.

Anyway, after waking up my dad, I headed into the shower. I took off my watch and yesterday’s unmentionables, then hopped into the tub and slid the glass door shut. The warm water was a good wake-up, and I took my time (as I usually do) to make sure I was more than half-awake. Shampoo, soap, yadda yadda yadda, followed by a quick dry-off, and I was ready to go. I stepped back out into "my" portion of the three-room network that forms my apartment’s peculiar bathroom set-up. It’s something I’ve never seen before I moved here—my bathroom is just off the hall, and my dad’s is connected to his room. The two rooms meet at a common bath-shower room that’s rather cramped and which has no ventilation. (Which forces us to have to open the window to air it out, even in January when it’s colder than an IRS auditor’s smile.)

I stepped over to my sink and started filling the thing so I could start shaving. The only facial hair I allow myself is a mustache, which I wear so I won’t look like a high school kid. True story: at 21, I once got carded for an R-rated movie. Never again, I told myself, and proceeded to add some upper lip hair. I’m now 26, but I still keep the ‘stache for a couple of reasons. First, I’m used to how I look with it. Second, my upper lip isn’t used to having to face a bare blade every day. Third, I’m still worried that I’d get carded if for some ungodly reason I decided to take a trip down to "The Block." (More on that at some later time—if you’ve ever been to Baltimore, though, you should be nodding your head in recognition.)

The sink filled, I grabbed my can of Edge and pushed the button for a bit of shaving gel. I put the can down, and then, for God only knows what reason, looked back down at the green gel on my hand.

I shook my head for a second, snapped back to where I was, and looked at my face in the mirror. Whatever that was that had just happened, I had no idea, but I wasn’t going to let it affect me at the office. I lathered up and proceeded to finish shaving.

I headed back into my room and started getting dressed. Dress slacks…French blue dress shirt…tie…black socks…OK, got everything. I walked back over to the "entranceway", so to speak, of my room. What it is, is a medium-sized patch of floor that I try to keep as clean as I can, in order that I won’t get groused out by my old man about how I can’t keep my room clean and all that fun stuff. As I pulled my trousers on, my eyes darted instinctively to the top of my bookcase, where I keep my giant Turtles figures

I snapped back with a start. Man, what the hell is wrong with me this morning? One crazy dream and I’m all of a sudden getting paranoid delusional. I close my eyes for a second and tell myself it was only a dream. Raphael doesn’t exist,

I tell myself. He’s not going to suddenly show up in Baltimore

and kill me. All it was, was a dream. Nothing more.

Shut the hell up, whatever you are. I have a job I have to do.

Thank you.

I finished dressing without further incident, even getting my tie done up right the first time.

Next stop: the kitchen. I usually don’t eat breakfast at home; all I do is down a 12-ounce can of Diet Mountain Dew. No sugar in that, true, but lots of caffeine, so by the time I finish chug-a-lugging the thing, I’m semi-officially 100% awake. I plopped down on the couch and checked The Weather Channel for the forecast—gloomy, overcast, 30% chance of snow by late afternoon. Happy, happy, joy, joy, I’ll have to catch the bus home in the snow. Gotta wear my boots.

It’s going to be cold coming home, they say. The standing joke among college students who take the MTA is that the amount of minutes spent waiting for the bus in winter is inversely proportional to the number of degrees on the thermometer. Or, to the rest of the riders who never went to college, "The colder it is, the longer you wait." In summer, the amount of time waiting for a bus is jointly proportional to the temperature and the humidity. Also, the odds of the air conditioning being broke on that bus increase exponentially as the wait for the same gets longer. This is why regular MTA passengers joke that MTA really means "Making Transportation Annoying."

My can of Dew down my gullet, I head back to the can to brush my teeth and run the mouthwash through my chops. It’s a no-name antiseptic mouthwash—a generic Listerine send-up—and it makes me smell like a hospital for hours after I use it. But it keeps my teeth clean, so I use it.

I grab my ID badge and go pester my old man that it’s time to go. We head out to the car, hop in, and turn up the heated seats. Man, it’s cold out today.

We tune in to WBAL, 1090-AM, as per our morning custom—neither of us likes music radio during drive time. It’s about 6:25—right after the sports segment and just before the bottom-of-the-hour news break. Dave Durian, the morning guy, is talking with someone whose name I didn’t catch about recent staff shakeups over at WJZ TV. Word on the street is that Denise Koch, one of the evening anchors, may be headed for a larger market. The gossip person says he’s heard that "a female reporter from up in New York" may be in line for Koch’s job.

"Wait a minute…New York? Why would a reporter from New York settle for a job in Baltimore?" wonders Dave Durian.

The gossip guy is a bit flummoxed by the question. "Apparently, word is this reporter wanted to take a few steps back to reconsider the direction of her career. It would give JZ some credibility in the evening news battles, that’s for sure. You know, big-shot reporterette from the top market in the country coming down to Charm City to grace us with her talent and experience and all that."

"Any word on who this reporter is?"

"None right now, Dave. Don’t know what station she’s from either, but it looks like Baltimore might have some top-of-the-line talent in the evening news wars."

"And you heard it here first, right here on WBAL." The station positioning ID rolls, and then Dave introduces the news guy, Chuck Jackson. Nothing really spectacular for Chuck to talk about this morning—it’s a slow news day. The rest of the ride to my office is taken up by the 6:30 news. We get to the building just as the end-of-the-cast commercials roll, and I jump out of the car and walk across the street as my old man heads for the interstate to get downtown.

This can’t be happening. Not this fast. It was just a dream…

I have no idea where these thoughts are coming from. God, I’m losing my mind. I’ve been working at the office too damn much. And now here I am, back for another 8 hours of verbal abuse by all the people I’m trying to save some money for. Why the hell did I take this job, anyway?

I walk through the lobby, flash my badge at security, then get in the elevator up to the third floor. I head for the sales floor, get to my cubicle, change into my work shoes, then head down to the break room to grab something out of the machines. I don’t want to fight the crowd at the tiny little hole in the wall that passes for the company deli. Waiting fifteen minutes for one toasted bagel isn’t my idea of a productive pre-shift today. So I’ll just grab one from the machine and eat it raw. A bit gross, but then, I’ll have it eaten so I can get back to my cubicle and take a quick power doze. God, I need sleep. Last night was a bad night

as far as sleep was concerned. I grab my bagel, scarf it in silence, then head back up to my cubicle. Nobody else is here yet. Good. I can get some rest. Now, if they’d just quit playing music over the PA system before the shift starts, I’d be able to nap in peace.

I pull my chair up to the large column that’s right behind my cubicle. When I sit on the right side of this, nobody knows I’m here, and I can get a good quick catnap in before the shift starts. I back my chair up to the column, sit down, close my eyes, and just try to think about nothing.

Suddenly—and this takes a lot longer to describe than it did to experience—I could feel a presence…strong…masculine…dangerous…closing in…

I sit bold upright, open my eyes, and look around. No one in the office besides me. I decide I’d better abandon the catnap and listen to a CD or two before my next-cubicle neighbor comes in and grabs the radio.

I pick up the radio from the desk across from mine—it shouldn’t be there, it belongs to our bay—and plug in an Adiemus CD called "Songs of Sanctuary." I need a dose of this before the day starts. I punch up the song called "Amate Adea" and just let the melody take me away. Miriam Stockley’s angelic voice rises and falls, blending with Mary Carewe’s, singing line after intertwined line of the most gorgeous music I have in my bag this morning. Whew—I needed that.

7 AM. An hour before pre-shift begins. I need to organize my notes.

I open one of the notebooks I carry, thinking it’s my sales technique book. But it isn’t—it’s my doodle book, where I write down all sorts of random stuff whenever I get a chance. Song lyrics, perhaps a haiku or two here or there, ideas for my next story, whatever I need to write for fun, it’s in there. I flip over a few pages, and come upon an older poem of mine called "Face to Face"

which I think I’ll reprint here. I don’t know what else to say about this, so I’ll just reprint it and call it the end of this entry.