Walter Williams - The Rift

In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.

Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.

Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.

Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business.

And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.

“Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”

“How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”

Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?

They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.

“And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”

“So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”

His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”

Jason could feel his brain de-focusing under this onslaught- he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios- but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.

“What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had slavery here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.

It had rained.

Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, shoes filled with rainwater, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.

“I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.

“I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”

“We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online- I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”

Jason was aghast. “An hour!”

“One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”

“I don’t want to know anyone here!”

“There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”

“How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”

“You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”

“ I don’t radiate hostility !” Jason shouted.

“You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway-”

“I am not interested ! I am not interested at all ! One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.

His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”

Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even looked like a prison.

And now he was in a prison cell, on the second floor of his house.

And the worse thing about this cell, he realized, was that he had turned the key on himself. He had to get out of here somehow.

As he paced, his eye lighted on the telephone, and he stopped in his tracks.

Ah, he thought. Dad.

*

“Well,” Jason said, “I'm bummed. I sort of had a fight with Mom.”

“Have you apologized?” said Frank Adams.

This was not the initial response that Jason had hoped for. “Let me tell you what it was about,” he said.

“Okay.” Frank sounded agreeable enough, but over the phone connection Jason could hear his father's pen scratching. The pen was a Mont Blanc, and had a very distinctive sound, one loud enough to hear over a good phone connection. Frank was working late at the office, which was normal, and Jason had called him there.

“Mom says I have to restrict my Internet access to one hour per day. But the Internet is where all my friends hang out.”

“Okay.”

“Well,” Jason said, “that's it.”

“That's what the whole fight was about?”

“There was a lot more about karma, and how yours sucks so bad you're going to get washed out to sea along with my friends, but keeping me offline is what it all came down to.”

“Uh-huh.” There was a pause while the pen scratched some more. Then the pen stopped, and Frank Adams's voice brightened, as if he decided he may as well pay attention, “It wasn't about your grades or anything?” he asked.

“No. My grades are up.” The Cabells Mound school was less demanding than the academy he'd been attending in California. Also far more boring- but that, he'd discovered, applied to the Swampeast generally and not just to school.

“So if it's not interfering with your schoolwork, why is she restricting your Internet access?”

Jason's dad was very concerned with grades and education, not for themselves exactly, but because they led to success later on. Frank was big on hard work, dedication, and the rewards the two would bring. Jason's mom, by contrast, thought of this goal-oriented behavior as “worshiping false, non-integrative values.”

“She wants me to spend more time doing stuff here. But there's nothing to do here, so-”

“She wants you to try to make friends in Missouri.”

Jason could not understand how his parents knew these things about each other. Were they telepathic or something?