Mark Tufo - The End Has Come and Gone

“I appreciate that man, but I still don’t want it.”

“Oh hell, it’s that whole germ-a-phobe thing isn’t it? We’re family, germs don’t count.”

I smiled wanly. I begged to differ.

“I haven’t drunk from this since I made the mix.”

“Since when do germs have a shelf life?” I asked him.

“You just take this canteen, let me get something to drink out of so I can have a little.”

He handed the canteen to me which I accepted gingerly. Then he began to scour the area we were in, finally grabbing an old Coke bottle that was laying on its side. Dirt and possibly a small nest of dead bugs were on the inside and he scraped a small cobweb off the opening.

“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified beyond measure.

“Make-shift cup,” he replied smiling.

“You can’t be serious?” I asked, finding myself backing up unwittingly.

“The more germs the merrier,” he said still smiling.

“Are you kidding me? Get away from me with that thing.”

“Yes I’m serious, the more germs you introduce into your body the better it can cope with them. Sanitizing wipes are horrible for people.”

“Bite your tongue! Are you the Anti-Christ?”

He wasn’t messing with me. This wasn’t the whole big brother teasing his younger brother with the spit-and-roll-up procedure. He grabbed the canteen from me and filled that bottle almost to the top. He didn’t wash it out first, he just gulped it down, added protein and all. My stomach was roiling for the next eight hours. Every time I thought about what he did I thought I was going to heave. Gary on the other hand was as right as rain, so which of us has it right?

“I miss Glenn,” Gary said to me pretty much out of the blue one night. We were about three hundred miles from the Maine border, and we were both homesick.

Glenn is/was our brother. The order went Ron, Gary, Glenn, Lyndsey and myself. I hadn’t seen Glenn in years, but the pain of his loss was still acute.

“Me too,” I told Gary noncommittally.

Gary looked at me askew. I think he caught more meaning in my answer than I had intended to give away.

“Do you think we should look for him while we’re down here?” Gary asked, scrutinizing my face.

“We could, I guess.”

“Alright, what gives?” Gary asked, standing up and coming over to me.

“Glenn’s passed,” I told him.

“I thought so, but you seem to know for sure. How?”

“Listen, you might think I’m nuts if I tell you.”

“I might, but you can tell me anyway.”

“Great, all right. I don’t know if you know about this or not, or even if you believe in this sort of thing, but I can astral project.” I stopped right there, looking at Gary for any indications that he was going to get me some heavy medication. When he sat back down, I took that as a sign that he wanted me to continue.

“Astral projection, that’s where you float out of your body, right?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. From what I’ve done and read there are two types of projections. The first is on the astral plane which has nothing to do with the world we live in, and the second is the ability to travel within our own world. I usually can’t control it, and the night I found out about Glenn was no different. I had gone to sleep relatively early because I was pulling a late night shift on the ladders.”

“The ladders?” Gary asked.

“Yeah, it was an early form of torture when I still lived at Little Turtle.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, my legs cramp up every time I think of them. They were just crude guard towers we used to watch the walls at Little Turtle.”

“Gotcha.”

“So I’m lying in bed and as soon as I fell asleep I found myself in our old home on Cefalo Road.”

“Really? Are you kidding me? What was it like?”

“To be honest, it was awesome,” I told him, and it was. I hadn’t been back to my childhood home, well, since my childhood.

“Was anyone there?” he asked.

“Not at first,” I told him. I have never encountered anyone on my path when I am on the earthly planes, it just doesn’t work that way for me. “The house was exactly as it had been when we were kids. I ‘appeared’ in Lyndsey’s room on her bed. The same white bed with flowers she had when we were growing up.” My sister’s room was at the top of the stairwell and my parents’ room was further to the left. To the immediate right was my brother Ron’s room, and then there was an ell and then mine, Gary, and Glenn’s room and then a bathroom.

“You’re freaking me out,” Gary said.

“Yeah, well, consider it payback for your stories.”

“Was it day or night?” Gary asked.

“It’s always a sort of twilight when I’m on these planes. Light enough to see but would probably be pretty difficult to read by. And that’s another thing I need to make clear, when I’m on these journeys the great abundance of what ‘leaves’ my body is saturated in ‘feeling’ and ‘instinct;’ higher reasoning does not tend to make the transfer. I went on a ‘trip’ once and could not figure out how to work a doorknob.”

“What did you do?” Gary asked fascinated.

“I went through it.”

“Oh,” Gary said cupping his chin with his hand. “That’s possible?”

“I’m basically a living ghost, so yeah.”

“That’s kind of scary when you describe it that way. Can you get trapped outside your body, like maybe not be able to find your way home?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve read some stuff that says it could be possible, but damn near almost everything else says it’s completely impossible.”

“Still, that would be pretty scary. It’d be like you were in a coma, only your spirit is wandering around the world aimlessly.”

“Great, one more thing to worry about. Can I go on?”

Now it was his turn to motion me on.

“So I’m in our house and I’m thrilled. I loved that place, I never really got over that we moved away. I got up off of Lyndsey’s bed and went downstairs, took a quick look in the kitchen and then went into the great room and from there into our playroom.”

“Remember how we used to put Pledge on our socks and play hockey there?” Gary asked fondly.

“I remember up until the point that you broke Mom’s lamp with your hockey stick and then threw me under the bus for it.”

“You were younger, she wouldn’t hit you as hard. I taught you a valuable lesson that day.”

“What, not to trust anyone?”

“No, how to take one for the team.”

“Great. So anyway, I’m down in the playroom and there was no broken lamp, at least that I could see, and I started to sense someone else was in the house.”

“You said you don’t encounter other people.”

“I don’t.”

“Who was it?”

“It was Mom.”

“Was she there about the lamp?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see her, I could only sense that she was there. I could ‘feel’ her presence in her bedroom.”

“Did she know you were there?”

I thought about that for a second, “No, I really get the impression that she had no idea whatsoever that I was there. So now I’m sitting on the floor in the playroom. I’ve got my back resting on the cellar door and I’m just looking around. I can tell that Mom is just sitting on her bed. She hadn’t moved, she’s just waiting.”

“Waiting for Glenn.”

I nodded. “After a few more minutes I began to sense his presence. He had not yet made it into the house. It was kind of like he got lost and Mom was there to lead him home.”