28.
Yesterday began the same as today and tomorrow. Messny experienced the surge of time pass through him and out into space leaving him disconnected.
Well – sometimes it is nice to be disconnected. But this was the modern age. You have to get to places on time and do not have a great deal of time to spend disconnected – pleasantly floating through space and time. There were places to go and things to do. It was exasperating. Somehow he knew that this one was going to be time-consuming. He just knew it. He never managed to get back at the same time. It was extremely frustrating. He quietly exuded a number of prime expletives.
‘I should have laid off the meditation last night,’ Messny thought to himself. ‘I’ve been overdoing it lately.’ He was annoyed with himself. ‘Just when I need to be organised – this happens!’ He began thinking through the implications. ‘She’ll kill me if I’m late for supper again today!’
Messny tried hard to pull himself back together. He deliberately ignored all the wonderful illuminating details that were laid out before him and tried extremely hard to concentrate on the more mundane. He could not allow himself to be seduced by all this Nirvana.
‘Hell,’ he muttered. ‘Women can be hard to live with.’
Just because they had been slaving away for hours over the proverbial stove trying to cook up something nice they expected you to be there on the dot. When they find that you haven’t arrived they get exceptionally peeved. Most unreasonable.
Instead of sitting down for a meal here he was gallivanting around infinity. It was going to mean another row. He wasn’t up for it. He could not afford the aggravation. He’d likely say something and end up spending another lifetime or two in purgatory.
No. It was no good. He simply had to get himself back before things kicked off. It was simple really. All he had to do was to remember exactly where he had been when it had happened. From that he could work out the approximate time and plonk himself back. He had to get it right. He had no desire to go through the horrors of watching himself disappear. It would be even worse if he got it a tad bit wrong and came back a little bit earlier. He’d have to spend days avoiding himself in order to prevent the precipitation of some cosmic calamity. It was all subliminal. That was probably why his subconscious always chose to come back later meaning that he was always late.
He began to relax. After all, he was an old hand at this. He knew what he was doing. It was merely a question of materialising himself back at the correct coordinates. It was not too difficult. He’d done it a thousand times and a few times he’d managed it perfectly. Admittedly that did mean that he got it wrong a lot more than he ever got it right – but who’s counting? Besides – what’s a few hundred miles or weeks between friends? With all the practice he had been getting he was certain that he could improve on the averages.
‘Now, where was I exactly?’ he pondered. ‘Hmmm. Halfway down Elm Street if I remember correctly.’ He thought some more. ‘It was about seven thirty as I recall. I was hurrying along so as not to be late. That’s when it happened.’
Now that he had pinpointed both time and space he was halfway there. That was when he became a little overconfident and allowed his guard down. Floating around in the white light of ecstasy never becomes too tedious. It was so pleasant bathing in truth and eternity. In fact it was absolutely orgasmically wonderful – perhaps even better than that. The revelations keep coming at you and exploding with joyous enlightenment. It never became wearisome. And after all, he was only human. While he was here he might just grab ten minutes or so – to soak up a few wonders – to set him up for the night. He owed it to Janey to be in a good mood, didn’t he? Besides, he was here now wasn’t he? It couldn’t do any harm, could it? He could actually spend as long as he wanted and still be back for the meal on time. He might even get back early! What harm could it do?
Messny let himself go. Just for a few minutes. Janey deserved it. There was no harm. He knew where he was and he was sure that he could get back OK. Waste not want not.
The trouble was that he spent much longer than he had intended. Once you allowed yourself to weave in and out between all time and knowledge it became difficult to retain a sense of urgency. Blending with forever and knowing everything to much deeper levels than you ever imagined was much more enticing than anyone could envisage. It also became much harder to remember to get back when you were in the midst of blazing suns and caressing energies – when you are part of everything.
But there again, in the midst of blending it was possible to pick up the odd fleeting thought:
‘For heaven’s sake, don’t be late for tea!’
Sometimes it didn’t help. It was easier to ignore it. If you did allow you to react there was a whole rigmarole to go through. First you have to remember whilst in the midst of supreme ecstasy that it was one of your own thoughts. Then you had to remember what the mundanities, such as ‘Heavens’ and ‘Tea’, actually mean. It all takes a lot of deciphering at that level. There is a tendency to ignore it, though occasionally it is sufficient to startle you into realising that you have to break away from all the delightful attentions of the universe, collect all the fragments of your mind, forget the pleasures of knowledge and reconstitute your energies. That’s not as easy as it sounds. They lie scattered throughout the substance of the flux in a perfect amalgam. First you have to tease them out and then keep them all together in a heap while you collect every last fragment. Then you have to double check. It wouldn’t do to leave something behind or gather up some portion that wasn’t yours. It’s a chore.
After all that’s done you have to remember who you were and where it was that you wanted to be. Doing all that in the midst of such a magnitude of distractions was likely to play havoc with your energy patterns. It was so easy to put pay to a few billion star systems or even the odd galaxy in the process.
Somehow Messny made a huge effort and was able to extract himself successfully without causing too much of a disaster anywhere. He reconstituted himself and set about remembering the time and place. Then all he had to do was pick out the exact energy patterns that corresponded to that exact location out of all the infinite possibilities. There was only one pattern that corresponded to that particular point in time and space and it often took a bit of finding. Messny had to hunt through the universe to track it down.
He was improving. He did not arrive back in the wrong era or find himself stranded in the middle of the ocean. He did not find himself in the vacuum of space or the centre of a star. He was on the right planet in exactly the right place and the time wasn’t bad either. He was proud of himself – particularly as he had achieved all that without the help of his mind. That’s not as bad as it sounds. The mind would only have got in the way, and besides, when you have the advantage of infinite knowledge and all time and space it is not quite as hard as it might sound. The difficult part was to prevent himself from drifting off back into the flow. That was so easily done. It was only the thought of Janey’s hysterionics that gave him the impetus.
With a Herculean effort he pulled himself back together, froze time at the right instant and identified the pattern that was Elm Street – though that did not exist as a real, solid image at this level of existence.
Messny plonked himself, slightly disorientated, back into the street before he changed his mind. He had the satisfaction of just glimpsing his own disappearance as he arrived so there was nothing too scary. It was an almost perfect landing.
One does not shrug off an experience of that magnitude in a few minutes and Messny wandered off home with his mind singing and churning at a rate of knots which caused him to nearly get run over crossing the road.
By the time he reached home he had become quite wistful and found himself wanting to return.
‘If I hadn’t been late so much recently,’ he mused, ‘I could have stayed for an eternity or two and even if I got back a little late it wouldn’t have really mattered too much.’
Messny wandered down the road on autopilot having a disgruntled internal argument with himself. ‘If I hadn’t been in such a hurry I could have stayed around a lot longer – what difference did it make? I could have learnt something important.’
He crossed the road after checking the time. He was early for a change.
He was beginning to get really peeved with himself at his impetuosity. He felt that he had returned too early. ‘Why on Earth was I in such a hurry?’ He kept asking himself. ‘There was no reason to terminate that quickly. It didn’t make any difference to when I got back.’
He walked up the path and opened the door. He called out. There was no reply. The place was empty. There was no delicious smell of cooking.
There was a note on the kitchen table.
Mes,
Sorry love, popped out with Rach,
Won’t be back til late.
Sorry – you’ll have to cook your own dinner.
Love
Janey xx