Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
Why am I so afraid of this man? I thought.
He was in his thirties or forties, with a lean build, long hair, and salt-and-pepper stubble. He wore a tattered denim jacket and jeans, looking as if he'd just come off one of these farms. His nose was thin and pointed to match his face. Most striking were his eyes, they seemed to be gazing far away, even when he was looking right at me. And they were dark. Really dark.
I glanced at the road behind him. "You didn't secure the backpack?" I asked, hiding my panic with a shaky, nervous voice.
Tonor shrugged. "Could be it." He tilted his head to one side in a curious manner, distracted, then turned on his heel and faced the way he'd come. In the shadows a few more strained expressions crossed his face. He looked like he was either going to cry or shit himself.
Then he turned back to me with a friendly smile. "Is this what it's like all the time for you? I'd almost forgotten."
Before I could even process his question, he started humming. Not a melody, but just a single long drawn-out note. It was a nasal sound, and he kept his lips pursed shut, only opening them every so often to take a few deep breaths.
Even on the phone this weirdo was never this weird.
He swung the backpack off his shoulder, knelt on the ground, and opened it. I noticed he'd brought a different bag than usual. Not a ratty bookbag – more of a rucksack. It looked hand-sewn, patched together with old discarded fabrics. Maybe that's why it had fallen over. I wondered what had happened to the usual backpack.
He pulled a couple of bottles of light beer out of the rucksack's depths. "I found these in a bugout shelter last week," he said. "You have a bottle opener?"
I reached in my pocket, then remembered that the bottle opener was still attached to the car keys, which were still connected to the car. I went back to pull the keys out, cutting the engine but leaving the headlights on. I opened both beers, handing one to him.
"Thanks," he said. "Figured I'd bring these beers to someone who'd appreciate them more than me."
I clinked my bottle to his. "Cheers," I said.
"Cheers," he replied. He seemed amused.
Tonor took a small sip from his beer as I went ahead and finished about half of mine. When he swallowed, a grimace crossed his face. He looked at the bottle curiously. "That's, uh… something."
"You haven't had beer in a while, huh?" I said.
"I don't drink anymore."
"Really."
"Nobody I know consumes alcohol," he said, wiping his lips with a sleeve. "We don't need to."
I laughed. "You don't need to? How the hell do you get through the day?"
Tonor took another sip. He made less of a face this time as the liquid went down his throat, then sheepishly let loose a tiny belch. "It's a long story."
"Well," I shrugged. "What else you got in the bag?"
"More beer," he said matter-of-factly. "Actually…" he looked at the bottle in his hand. "This stuff's growing on me."
Tonor walked over to my car's hood and leaned against it, looking back towards the city from where I'd come. "I was going to ask you the same question, actually. How you get through it." He gestured towards the city. "On the inside, I mean."
Was this a serious question, or just a bad joke?
I treated it like a bad joke. "Beer," I said, then downed another quarter of my bottle.
He chuckled.
"Why'd you cross?" I asked. Directly.
The pained look appeared on his face again. He took another delicate sip. A breeze picked up some dust from the exposed edges of the road. I heard to the roar of an airplane overhead and listened to the buzzing and chirping of nighttime insects.
"I wanted to see what it was like," he said. "Without the voices."
He placed the bottle of beer down on the hood. It started sliding. He snatched it up and placed it on the ground at his feet instead. He crossed his arms, protecting himself from what was gradually becoming a cold night.
"Voices." I said. "What voices?"
He drew a deep breath, glancing back at his own car.
"Uhhh… telepathic signals," he said.
I rolled my eyes, and made sure he saw it. "Telepathic signals?"
He stood up straight from his lean on the hood. Some dust had collected on his hands, and he brushed it off on his jeans.
"You don't hear them," he said ominously. "Everyone in the world hears them, except you and your friends in the dead zone."
"Sorry, what?" I asked, indignantly. "What dead zone?"
"That's what we call it. Your city and its surroundings. Within the bounds of your enclave, no signals can reach. You are cut off from the Great Vision."
He pronounced Great Vision like that, with capital letters. Then another sip from his beer while I stared at him, eyebrows raised, confused and a little pissed off.
"You're confused," he said, frowning. "And probably a little pissed off at me."
I snickered. "Yeah, um, a bit of both."
He sighed heavily. "I suppose you would be. Well, it's… it's hard to explain."
He kicked the dirt at his feet and began pacing slowly, back and forth, across the headlights' beams.
"Around thirty years ago, every person on Earth became telepathically linked. Suddenly and quite violently. As if a pipe that was clogged with shit was suddenly evacuated, and all the data from a sixth sense just came flooding in. We were able to read each other's minds, so to speak, communicate non-verbally with each other.
"It wasn't pleasant at all. It was utterly overwhelming, all these sensations, all this new sensory data. It was too much for our… weakened brains to handle. Pretty much everyone went insane. It was ugly and chaotic for a long time. Wars broke out across the world.
"I remember my own parents going half-mad, my dad filled with the rage of millions, my mother burdened by centuries of ancestral grief. They couldn't handle all the envy, the hatred, and the uncertainty scattered across the world around them."
He looked up at the sky. "But they also weren't ready to handle the love, and the beauty, and the magical complexity of the earth and heavens. And it was that part of it, that gave us the ability to be at peace with these new senses, and eventually control its flow. We accepted that other people had complex relationships with us… judgements, opinions, egotistical problems that they were hiding from each other for generations. Just like we had for them.
"Our compassion for fellow human beings, and for our struggles, increased a hundred thousand fold. It created this massive wave of healing and love across the world. Everyone became truly human to everyone else. Inequality began to disappear, taboos began to evaporate… it was a remarkable shift. Of course, there was still poverty, violence, conflict, but a lot more of us were okay, and we could deal with that in time, once we could communicate. Barriers of ego were broken."
He spoke with a wistful air. I just stood staring at him, slack-jawed.
"After a few years of this," he continued, "we collectively realized that it wasn't just each other we were reading, but non-humans as well. Not animals or plants, necessarily, but…" He cleared his throat. "There were… entities in our perception that hadn't been there before, or at least we hadn't perceived them before. Not in this way anyway, with this amount of clarity. Something like spirits, like the old angels and devils.
"We had to learn to communicate with those spirits too, figuring out which ones were benevolent and worth keeping around, and which ones were not there in the interest of humanity, and thus worthy of shunning and…" He scratched the back of his neck. "...I guess the word is exorcism. And since we thought collectively and were able to communicate instantly on a massive scale, it was little work driving out the bad, and allowing the good to prosper in its place.
"Now humankind lives in a state of more or less equanimity with itself, and with nature, and with the heavens. It is still difficult of course. Our bodies and minds are still not used to it, after millennia of atrophy. But we, all together, are helping each other learn. In a way, we are all one body now, one mind.
"Except for you, in the dead zone." He turned to face me, gesturing toward the city, and I saw a single tear roll down his cheek. "We have forgotten about you."
His voice cracked.