16

2011 NANO Part 16

    Rebecca wakes up to the sound of Wilson humming tunelessly to herself.  Her memories come back to her in a large junmmble but one thing she is absolutely sure about is the fact that she is both still in the jungle near the waterfall, and that the last thing she remembers is Wilson slitting his throat.  He turns towards her and she can see the mark.  He did it.  His neck bears a jagged white scar that now seems to be fading.  She bets that in a day or two it will be gone completely. 
    He smiles at her awkwardly, “Hey there Rebecca how are you doing?  Are you okay?”
    Her answer of, “I am just fine” dies on her lips when she realizes that she is absolutely starving and she is sore all over as if she’d been lying on her back for a very long time.  Exparamentally she gets up and starts flexing her muscles doing her best to shake the stiffness from her bones, “Jesus now that you mention it I am starving.  It feels like I haven’t eaten in days”
    “Two days to be exact”
    Her eyes grow wide, “Wait what!  What could you possibly be talking about!  The last thing I remember seeing is you opening your own throat and then all the sudden you are telling me that it is two days latter!  Why am I still in the jungle?  Shouldn’t you have gotten help or something like that?  What the hell is going on.  You’re a jerk”
    Wilson scratches his bald head, “Yeah I deserve some of that.  I wouldn’t say I am a jerk but whatever.  See I’d forgotten that you are who you are.  A normal person would of seen what they saw and it would have been okay.  You?  You gave into the forces of the jungle.  Remember the dancing around the fire?  Well that is you taking part in a ceremony as old as the things that put the ceremony there.  Not only that but you have so much energy about you that you are more or less a one woman orgy.  Normally to generate the amount of energy you did I would need 12 people all doing the nasty.  You?  You did it all by yourself.  Jesus woman!  I swear if it were you who strode into the jungle that one day instead of me the whole world would look much different now because it would be all yours.”
    She smiles at that, “Okay then thanks I guess.  So now that we have established what happened to me mind explaining your new scar?”
    He looks more than a little crestfallen.  Absently he pokes at the fire he’s built for what she presumes to be, her benefit.  Wilson doesn’t seem like the person who needs or wants a fire.  He looks like he is weighing things out in his head so she waits respectfully.  After a moment he answers, “It is hard to explain.  There are places you can only get to if you know where to look and you have the key to get there.  See I’d been planning on just using the boar to peek behind the veil of things, but then, well you know, I just got caught up.  I figured why just peek behind the veil of things when I could go behind it myself and investigate what’s there.”
    She looks confused, “Alright lets skip over the veil of things conversation and have that another day.  I am pretty sure it would just make my head hurt.  So are you connected with your great snake god thing?”
    Wilson nods, “Oh yes if I wasn’t then I would be lying dead on the altar slumped over the body of that pig we are about to eat.  It would be no good for anyone.”
    “So you decided that it is either the way of the snake or no way at all?”
    He smiles sadly, “As I was stalking that boar naked through the jungle I realized that, this, the naked part, the knife, the jungle, that is all me.  That is something I can do with or without the great snake.  That is how I found the cult in the first place and it is also the thing that made them take me in.  Then I learned about the snake I took it for myself and in its own strange way it took me in and I offered it the world and everything in it.  It didn’t work but god damnit I tried and as good as I am I am just not the same without the snake and I don’t want to keep on going if it withdrawing itself from my life.  So yeah why not.  I might as well give it all a shot and it either works out or you all have one less person to try and end the world”  He stops to gage her reaction, however, she is looking with greater interest at the boar roasting on its spit over the fire.  He smiles and cuts her off a piece.  He then turns to cut her off a bigger piece because he can tell by the way she is voraciously attacking it that the first piece isn’t going to last much longer under her ferocious appitite.
    In between her devouring she asks, “I dunno suicide?  Its never been my cup of tea.”
    Wilson looks back into the fire pensively.  It is a bit before he answers, “I don’t think I am immortal.  I mean Jared, Alexander, John, and maybe a couple of others, they aren’t going to die.  Or at the very least they aren’t going to die any time soon.  These guys are gonna be around long after I am gone.  I mean sure I could go get Jerimia to make me a longevity syrum or something like that.  I know he could whip that sort of thing up in his lab in no time flat.  But, I don’t know.  I’m alright with not being around forever.  Since it will happen sooner or later I figure it doen’t matter when”
    Rebecca looks skeptical.  She’s familiar with suicide.  It is a side effect of the way she does buisnees.  One kiss and all the sudden men or women can’t live without her and then they don’t.  It is pretty simple and while some of them always felt the need to make terrible messes on her carpets or tapistries she never thought to much about it.  If she didn’t have everything she needed they would fail in their attempt because she would make sure of it.  Otherwise why keep them around, right?  Wilson is different though.  She isn’t sure how really.  After all there isn’t anything she can really use him for and lets face it, if he wasn’t around she wouldn’t be sitting in the dirt eating pig like some savage.  She’d be in her house receiving a massage while beautiful people fed her grapes.  He’s a world shaker though, there isn’t anyone just like him on the entire planet and to her that seems like it is worth saving, like a diamond, or a particularly interesting piece of music that people would occationally compose for her, “I don’t really agree Wilson.  It does matter.  At the very least people look up to you and who would arrange the chairs at the meetings”.
    He smiles, “Yeah but you know eventually I will grow older, weaken, get infirm, and I might die in bed unless one of light bringers decides they still hold a grudge and they are going to finish me in my golden years.  I don’t want to go out like that.  So I figure this is a good a way as any.”
    “Yeah but-”
    “Let me put it another way.  Jerimia can make me a potion.  Alexander can cast me a spell.  If I have immortality at my finger tips but I choose not to take it how is that any different than ending my life at anytime I choose?”
    He had her there.  She never really thought about the nature of mortality before.  Most of the people around her loved her more than their own lives.  She’d seen to that.  Most people seem to place so little value on their own natural life span and now here she is trying to convince someone else that he should value his natural life span.  The whole thing seems strange and she isn’t sure that she likes it.  She smiles to herself.  She supposes that part of this is John’s influence.  It is strange.  They seem to get so little done at the meetings and their interviening weeks are filled with back sliding, adventures, and now semi suicide attempts.  The idea that she is actually changing as a result of the group always seemed ludicrous to her.  Yet here she is, in a jungle, covered by sweat and bugs, her cloths are unsalvageable.  She knows she will have to throw them out as soon as she gets back and she can’t wait to be in something comfortable, decadant, and most of all somewhere not hot.  She looks over at Wilson who is contemplatively picking at a piece of meat and he isn’t even sweating.  His ponderous stomach rests between his thick legs and as she sees him nearly naked she realizes just how utterly unattractive she finds him.  Yet at the same him he is also incredibly compelling.  Even though the jungle is all around him he doesn’t look like he is in his element at the moment.  He looks as if he is back in the city far away reading reports, trapped behind a desk, wishing for something to happen, regretting the fact that his great snake didn’t devour everything thus turning off every light without saying goodnight.  She could understand it a little better.  The need to end as opposed to rule.  She never understood it before but now she gets it.  The enders they all had lives to loose, “Hey Wilson, how come you wanted to end it all.  Not your life but all of everything ever.”
    Wilson laughs a bit and lets out a smile, “I was a squarjohn most of my life did you know that?”
    She shakes her head, “Well wait I guess I knew that kinda.  I mean you mention it from time to time.  It is just so hard to imagine you know?”
    “Yeah it is.  The thought of it is kinda mindboggling now but I went to a job I hated.  I worked 9 to 5.  I had a wife who I loved when I first met her but whom I had grown to hate.  I kept my job that I hated instead of doing something that I wanted because I had a wife to take care of and she would get upset if I just left and did my own thing.  My co-workers were dull banal petty little people who love sitcoms and crappy movies.  I swear to god they would come up with stupid little things to complain about so that they could feel less bored at work.  There are times where I wanted to do the same thing.  To just give into the happy little world that these people lived in even though it is small and more than a little pathetic.”
    She smiles, “My dear it sounds dreadful”
    “What is worse is that I would spend 40 hours of my life in an office doing ‘office work’ but I wouldn’t really accomplish anything. On my days off when I wasn’t suffering from brain death due to my job I could get tremendous amounts of work done and it wouldn’t even take 8 hours to do it.  I could look back upon my day and feel proud of everything I got done.  It felt good to actually do things.  At work I just moved papers around and filled things in.  So there I am surrounded by other people who also fill things in and move papers around and other than their familes and sitcoms that is all they need or want out of life.  I mean god some of these people’s biggest thrills in life is sneaking internet pornography after their wives go to bed.  So many people around me were just, so very empty.  They still are.  You can see it.  That is part of why people end up drawn to you.  You fill the big, gaping, horrible void in their lives with something exotic that they don’t have to work for.  Then when you turn your atension elsewhere they can’t live with out it.  Them ending their own lives because they can’t live without you or me ending all of their lives because they don’t know any better it doesn’t make a difference.  In the end their lives aren’t worth living and we might as well go feed an ancient intellegnce that is older than the big bang itself than worrying over Jimmy’s soccer match or something like that.  Then there is all the social problems like the poor, land mines, pollution, the fact that we destroy the jungle even though it would provide us with everything if only we knew how to ask, I mean as a race we haven’t done very well and I gotta say I am rather ashamed of my human heritage sometimes.  When I strode into the jungle all those years ago it was to do what I just did last night.  It was to die.  But I learned to survive.  I thrived.  I felt wild and free.  Then when I found the snake cult and learned what exactly they were all about, and how their magic is real and that not only I could do it to but I am good at it.  Better than good I am the best.  Hell yeah I wanted to end it all.  Cause let‘s face it, even if I ruled everything I wouldn‘t be able to fix it.  I can‘t make robots like Jerimia or cast spells like Alexander, or make everyone love me like you.  I can commune with an ancient entity and I tried to get it to feed here and I did some serous shit to make it happen.  I don‘t feel bad about it.  Believe me.  But there is no way I am going back to being a square john.  I’d die first”
    “Well that is quite a little speech you gave there Mr. Wilson.  Alright I get it now you don’t have to justify yourself to me after all.  It is just that, you know we are supposed to care about life and each other and all of that and I am not sure where your mortality fits into all of that”
    He nods, “Well that’s cool.  Thanks for trying.  Inscidently I went far beyond the veil.  Very far.  Almost to the edge of everything.  What ever the great snake is warning me about is still going on.  It is bad and we need to worry.  Something is blocking its vibrations and I have no idea what the hell could do that.  I am one of the only people left on the earth who can even understand what they are.  So if you are done we should go back”
    She wants nothing more than to go back.  She is sweating and that is intolerable.  Then she looks at him for a moment longer before answering, “In a bit.”
    Wilson smiles the relief on his face is more than apparent.  She smiles back thrilled in the knowalge that she is doing the right thing,.