Stations of the Heart Chapter 17: New Perspectives

Jed stepped back and looked upon the place he had lived his entire life, the place he had existed contently before being stolen away to the eccentric forest and abandoned in the desert wasteland. This was the place Jed was trying to return to all this time. Wasn’t it? As Jed looked at the walls of his hometown he felt something he hadn’t expected to feel upon finding his home: ambivalence. He didn’t know if this was the place he had wanted to return to after all. So much had happened since he had been there last, he had changed so much. There were new desires and cravings that now dinned deep inside of him that being in his hometown could not fulfill. Jed had never looked upon his hometown from the outside, but still, there was something different about it. The pale and insufficient light from the three crescent moons was cast down on the structures of the town and gave it an atmosphere of foreboding emptiness, as though the streets and homes inside were inhabited only by ghosts.

He continued to gaze at the walls of the town while Nashper and Railnia were stoic in silence, one of the rare times the duo were not bickering. Jed turned and looked at the giant tortuous. Nashper with his big, perfect orb, black eyes. Were they his mentor? Were they his tormentor? Jed wondered. On one hand they deserted him in his times of need and danger, but on the other, they had ultimately delivered him back to where he supposedly wanted to go. Mentor or tormentor? Jed was still unsure but he supposed that it did not matter anymore, his journey was over. Likewise Jed was unsure as to whether he should thank or curse the enigmatic turtle. He decided to make one final attempt to communicate with Nashper and Railnia. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth, “Where will you go now?” but it was no use, the words came out in an incomprehensible chorus. Jed was now completely unable to say anything that wasn’t in song-speak.

“Once again my dear boy, I’m afraid you’ve lost me. But I suppose it is of no consequence anyhow, this seems like a natural point to part ways. I don’t know what this place is but you seem to have some kind of connection to it so we’ll leave you to settle accounts.” Nashper replied. The something began to happen to the tortuous’ shell. The designs on it became animated and started to flow and shift. Jed could make out faint colors on the shell blending into one another and crawling back and forth. The curved, flowing design that adorned the turtle’s shell completely rearranged itself into a new pattern but with a similar aesthetic. Then something even more surprising happened: Railnia began walking forward in the direction the three of them had come from. Railnia was now the front-facing head and Nashper the stern. They were walking the other way, back into the desert, Jed noticed.

“Forward movement!” Railnia called out with a hearty laugh.

Nashper with black, lifeless eyes still locked on Jed’s commented, “Indeed, forward movement is all that exists.” as he was now backing away from Jed. Jed watched as they slowly moved away and was yet again filled with ambivalence; sad to see them go but glad to be rid of their perplexing influence. As he watched them fade in the distance he realized that that part of his life was now over and it was time for him to go home. What else could he do? “Good luck getting over that wall.” he heard Nashper call out.

“No blue light?” he could hear Railnia ask.

“He’s not an idiot.” Nashper replied.

“That’s not what I meant at all. Once again you are confusing the…” Railnia’s voice drifted out of range and they disappeared over a dark desert dune. Jed turned back, looked at the enormous wall surrounding his hometown and realized he had no idea how he planned to get over it. He had been too caught up with finding his home that he had yet to give any thought as to how he would get into it. The surface of the wall was smoothly planed, no doubt the work of sand-laced wind, so there was nothing in the way of footholds. Climbing it was out of the question. ‘No blue light’ Jed thought, ‘What could Railnia have meant by that?’ Jed began to walk along the perimeter of his town, searching the wall for any clues as to how to get in. He walked for hours but the wall yielded nothing. It was the same the whole way around. Jed grew frustrated and impatient. ‘Have I come all this way to find my hometown only to be forever sealed outside of it?’ he wondered achingly to himself. He sat down with his back against the impenetrable wall that threatened to rob Jed of his very sanity. He hung his head downward and stared at nothing in particular but the ground. It was a course mixture of sand and soil, but soon Jed noticed something more pertinent about the inconspicuous earth beneath him. There was a faint reddish hue to it. He had seen that exact hue somewhere else before, he was sure of it. It quickly came to him. He looked up at the now emaciated moons and saw that the color of the red crescent moon was the same as the ground beneath him. Indeed, Jed realized it was the very light of the red moon that was coloring the ground. There was a red moon, a silver moon, and a blue moon. ‘Maybe…’ Jed had an intimation and immediately sprang back to his feet and began walking the perimeter of the wall again. He upped his gait into a jog, all the while observing the ground below him. Still red. He continued his trot for some time until he came to a hopeful point. He stopped. It was a point where the ground reflected not red light, but silver. Jed advanced his output to a full-on sprint but even after what seemed to be a full hour, the ground was still awash in silver moonlight. Jed’s lungs were pinching, his muscles cramping, and his aching body pleaded for him to stop but his mind was much too anxious and it overrode the desires of his body which, in that moment, Jed decided was subject and slave to the mind. Then Jed’s hopes were affirmed and his discipline was rewarded. The silvery ground gave way to a blanched, blueish hue. Jed finally stopped, bent over, resting his palms on his knees and panted furiously. His head swooned and he nearly passed out but he revived his tapped resources by gulping down the rest of the water in his canteen. It was all gone now and Jed had placed everything he had on this one bet. If it did not work, he would surely die outside the walls of his hometown without any water. After regaining his composure and reigning in his frantic breathing, Jed reached into the makeshift pouch hanging from his belt and pulled out one of the last two raising tree seeds he had inside. The blue coloring projecting onto the ground was indeed sallow but its hue was close enough to that of the raising tree seed that it gave Jed an idea. Indeed, the idea that would spell success or certain death for Jed. “No blue light?” Railnia had asked. Well Jed found blue light, ‘And it better yield some good results.’ Jed thought. He knelt down and with his hands, dug a hole in the sandy dirt where it reflected the blue light of the moon. It got to be several inches deep and Jed stopped. He sighed, held the raising tree seed over the freshly dug crater, and in a low voice he sung-spoke, “Please Iparel, take me home.” The he dropped the blue marble-like seed into the hole he dug and proceeded to cover it up with the displaced dirt. Jed stood back up and waited but nothing happened. He had hoped that a great big tree would come rising up from beneath the ground and that he would climb it clear over the wall, but several minutes passed and nothing of the sort happened. In fact, nothing was happening at all. No noise, no rumbling ground beneath Jed’s feet, and certainly no sign of an enormous life-saving tree. Jed was staring at the patch of earth that he had disturbed, imploring it with his mind to yield what he had counted on so desperately, but no matter how hard he stared or how much he psychically pleaded, the ground did nothing. Jed collapsed to his knees next to the planted seed and banged on the ground with his fist. Pummeling the ground, he became energized with desperation, trying to beat some sense out of a cold indifferent earth that would one moment, follow the laws of logic and reason, and then the very next, confound Jed’s mind to the brink of madness. Nothing made sense and just when Jed thought he had a handle on the workings of the outside world, it proved just how little he really comprehended. It did so now at such a pivotal and deciding moment.

Jed knelt with his face to the floor like a zealot bowing in the presence of his god. But worship was not what prompted Jed into his current bodily position, it was despair and exhaustion. Without the life-sustaining water from the well just on the other side of the damnable, dooming wall, Jed would bake in merciless sun that was well on its way, dried up and dead. Jed thought of Railnia’s words, “no blue light,” ‘Just more nonsense’ he dejectedly concluded. He thought of the seed that had failed him. The seed that he planted in the ground that did not grow. The seeds that he procured for the sake of the beautiful and benign Iparel. The seeds he would never be able to give to her. In this moment he wanted to be there in that meadow with Iparel. He wanted to be there and not locked out of his own home with no hope of getting in. He remembered his brief time in the meadow with Iparel and realized it was the only time in the forest or the desert that he felt happy. He had felt happy there in the meadow with Iparel. He remembered the little tune she played on her rounded flute that caused the light-bugs to dance and a new tree spring forth from the ground. That tune was vague in his mind. The long arm of pertinent and demanding occurrences had since pulled a thin veil over the notes. But Jed focused hard, he had not recalled the tune since Iparel herself played it in the meadow but there was no way Jed could have completely forgotten it. As he lay face-down on the ground the melody was slowly coming back to him. All of his cognitive faculties were now commissioned with unearthing the structure of Iparel’s melody from the musty recesses of his memory. It was coming back. The memory traveled from his brain to his lips and he hummed the opening notes of the tune in confirmation. For the first time, the fact that Jed could only use song-speak actually became a benefit and the song came forth from his lips in perfect translation. His recollection yielded more of Iparel’s tune and his tongue and lips transcribed it into audible sounds. As he sang, jed felt the vibration he had come to know so well in the outside world. It was weak beneath his body but Jed repeated the notes of Iparel’s song over and over again with more intensity, pronunciation, and volume until the timid vibration grew to a tumultuous quaking. Jed now unleashed the full capacity of his song-speaking abilities and belted out the tune in high volume to the night sky. The walls of the town themselves shook with reverberations of the forest tune and the ground was rent by the powerful upward thrust of a mighty evergreen tree. Jed quickly grabbed hold of one of its hearty boughs and was elevated higher and higher until the height of the tree surpassed the height of the wall by several feet. The song brought the seed to fruition and yielded a, tall, straight, life saving tree for Jed. Jed, who was now perched in the upper canopy of the great tree, took a minute to admire it. It was the most beautiful tree he had ever seen. A beautiful gift from Iparel. While grasping on to the sturdy bough, Jed lowered himself and dangled his legs down toward the narrow top surface of the wall. The tips of his moccasins grazed the solid surface and Jed slid the bough slowly through his hands until he was planted firmly standing atop the great wall of his hometown. Jed Ano stood there for a while, perched on top of the wall, looking down on the town. He had never seen it from this vantage point before. It looked so small and insignificant to him now. It had seemed so encompassing and daunting before his journey. As he looked on his home, he wondered what it was he would be returning to. The town looked dead and lifeless. He heard the faint, eerie songs of the boys and their companions and felt the emptiness of the houses of the boys who were companionless. He considered his fate. Jed Ano stood tall above all of it in this moment, but his destiny lay in descent.