Michael Bunker - WICK

“And… Heave!”

Sometimes in life, the narrative steps sideways. It simply takes a step to the left or the right. Whichever way you want to imagine it. Like when you close your left eye and you see a slightly different world than when you close you right eye. Time shifts, in inches. The world becomes different… but only slightly different.

Veronica lifted with all her might. She leaned into the branch and lifted from her knees, from her loins, from her heart. Stephen stood at the back bumper with his mother. He shifted his feet in the sludge and tried to find solid footing from which to push. He leaned his shoulder into the bumper and gave it his all. Calvin jerked his body forward slightly in the bucket seat, as if that would help with the momentum, and gave the truck a little gas.

It caught, just slightly. The truck rocked back just a bit, and Veronica lifted again, getting her shoulder under the branch. Calvin heard the whine and felt the blessed pull of forward momentum. Stephen slipped in the sludge once the tires caught, and in Calvin’s excitement at applying pressure to the gas pedal, the truck lurched forward and pulled up into the track from the night before.

The truck was on the roadway before Calvin saw the two military vehicles bearing down upon him with frightening speed. He was out of the truck before the men with guns had stopped their vehicles and spread out along the roadside. Stephen and Veronica came up out of the ditch and saw the men standing there and looked at Calvin and he looked at them. The soldiers raised their guns. Calvin stepped into the middle of the road and did a little hop, raising one hand in the air and reaching into his back pocket for something.

A piece of paper.

The guards aimed their guns, and Calvin came out of his little hop, caught himself and stood up taller and held both his hands high in the air. The white paper in one hand, now unfolded, spilled out of his fist like a flag of surrender. He offered it to the guards, and one of them made a little motion toward him, as if to accept it.

“It’s OKAY. It’s OKAY,” Calvin said, with his hands still raised above his head. The men with the guns pointed at him, and then tensed, and then relaxed with Calvin’s next words.

“I’m with Jonathan Wall.”

The gun barrels dropped toward the ground in unison.

The stream of life sometimes gathers its force and pushes into the present with an amazing burst of energy. Like a bomb. Or like something plunging off of a cliff. There was a traveler once who had such an experience. His name was Clay Richter. He went for a walk in the country, and stepped off the edge of the earth. He had a strange encounter with an alien force. Not the outer space kind of alien, but the surreal and perfect kind of alien, a mirrored self in a way, a shadowed self. Clay had that strange encounter with this alien self… thisother… and it changed him. He’d had this strange encounter at precisely the moment in time when a revolution was sparked. He’d found a friend in the midst of his trial, an equal, a man named Volkhov. That meeting had changed him.

At this very moment, on a small patch of farmland in south central Pennsylvania, the world of Clay was gathering. These were people whom this traveler happened to meet on his journey. Clay Richter was no more, but in one way or another he was a part of the lives of these people who were now being drawn together.

It is not what you’d expect though. They did not know him in great detail. They knew him not exhaustively . They knew him as you might know the shoreline if you were floating downstream on a summer day. He’d been one of the many details in their lives, waving from the shore.

For example, as Clive and Red Beard sat in the drawing room waiting, they did not know that they each knew Clay.

Veronica and Stephen, who at that very moment were on their way down the drive of the farm complex, still amazed at this boy, Calvin, who had just saved them again… Veronica and Stephen did not know the men waiting in the house, and they could not know that those men knew Clay. And Calvin, of course, did not know Clay. He did, however, share in some ways his memory. And there was something else. Calvin was in Pennsylvania, having been sent on this adventure by Jonathan Wall. The writings of Jonathan Wall had played a large part in setting Clay off on his journey.

All of the people converging on this farmhouse shared Clay, in some ways, but only through memory and circumstance. As a result, when they meet, they will not discuss him, at least not directly. Though they will be poorer for it, they will discuss him, if at all, in terms so vague that they will not be able to make him out. They will tell stories of a friend, with whom they had once shared an apple, or a guy who had a real appreciation for Johnny Cash, or a guy who wrote these beautiful poems. But they will not speak of him. Not truly. They will not call him by his name.

And perhaps that is unimportant, after all, what is in a name? Would these friends of Clay not remember him just as tenderly, just as accurately, if they referred to him as Ned Ludd? Or Mr. Fugitive? The stories would probably all ring just as true for all these people.

No, the reason these people will not know Clay, will not recognize him even when they meet others who know him, is because they do not see him entire. They are like the blind men inspecting the elephant. One touches the belly and thinks he has found a wall, while another touches a leg and thinks he has a tree. Separately, none of them know exactly what they are dealing with.

So it is in the life of a man. There are things his fellows did know about him, but there were many other things they did not know. For example, they did not know, because they could not know, what had happened to the traveler. There was another man heading their way who had that piece of the puzzle. They did not know that Clay had been transformed by his contact with that other world, how he had met Volkhov as an equal. Nor did they know, because they could not know, that the traveler named Clay had a backpack that had traveled on without him. They did not know that the backpack, too, was on a journey.

Perhaps they can’t be blamed, these friends of Clay, for their not knowing. And as they sit down in the drawing room together, where they will wait for… What? Gauguin? Godot? The set of boots and the backpack now trekking across the forest?

No. Now, as they sat in the drawing room and waited, they couldn’t be held responsible for not knowing Clay better. They had each reached out to him on their brief sojourn with him, but he was a difficult man to know. You could prod him for answers, but he’d always take his time in getting you the answers. He was patient that way. You could ask him to hurry it up, but he’d just say “No.”

Natasha and Lang huddled together in the kitchen as gunfire ripped through the building in waves, like music, or the ocean crashing against the beach in thunderous intervals. They held on to one another like one would hold on to a flotation device or a buoy if one was drowning in the violent ocean crashing around them.

At irregular intervals, Natasha would pop up and fire a round from the 9-millimeter pistol, but she was running out of ammunition. She looked Lang in the eyes with a look of pure affection, and then she jumped to her feet again and fired through the open window, expending the two final rounds that remained in the clip. She slumped back down next to Lang and looked at him again, still smiling.

“You’re something else,” he said.

“So are you, Lang.”

“Well… we’re something else then.” He reached over with his right hand and clasped her hand in his. He gave the hand a light squeeze, and neither of them was anxious to let go.