Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Chapter 22
A Novel
If you’re joining us just now, follow the snake’s tail to the Prologue or climb a ladder to the Table of Contents.
Chapter 22: When a Friend Loses Heart
“It was nearing sunset, as it always was in this region of the Astral Plane, when the Man-Cub, Mowgli, and his two companions entered the palace complex of the Shattered City. Baloo the bear walked at Mowgli’s side, while the leopard Bagheera lingered a few paces behind, vigilant of any threats that might harass their rear. . . ”
(Even in his distracted state, Mowgli could not resist snickering at the phrase “harass their rear”.)
“They traversed an unroofed arcade whose split and sundered columns were wrapped in withered creepers. A zigzagging staircase of worn and unleveled stones rose before them. Mowgli placed his right foot tentatively on the first step and—”
“WILL YOU STOP NARRATING EVERYTHING WE’RE DOING?!” Evan said, shaking his fist at the panther. “God!—So annoying!”
“Dr Evan,” Bagheera remarked, “I know you’re upset. But if we are to find Niyati, you must keep your anger in check. Remember the lessons you learned in the Tower of the Tumtum Tree. The thumb-sized Purusha meditating in the hollow of your chest will guide you in lieu of your missing heart. But only if you let it.”
Then Baloo the bear (who also happened to be Evan’s friend Gordon) spoke: “Don’t worry, pal. We’ll get Niyati back.”
Evan sighed and resumed his ascent, no longer carrying if the steps fell out from under him. Weirder shit had already happened. It was obvious he couldn’t control the particulars of this complicated dream, even if he was the one supposedly manufacturing it.
At the top of the steps they made their way through the ruins of a squat tower that was so dull and uninteresting that it seemed to serve no purpose other than to contrast semi-dramatically with the misty calm of the vine-clad courtyard they emerged into.
The courtyard was tiered at its cracked and frayed edges and appeared to have been the playing field of some ancient arena in former times, even though Shattered City had no history and had always been in a state of perpetual decay.
It was only now that it dawned on Evan that he had not seen the winged monkeys of the Canadian Colony of Norway patrolling the skies as they entered the palace grounds. This was because the monkeys were all here.
They had drawn in their wings and were trying to keep a low profile. The chimpanzees were hard at work, comparing notes and typing up all of Shakespeare on ancient typewriters. They chattered volubly among one another, and some adjusted their tortoise-rimmed glasses, looking discreetly over their shoulders as Evan and his friends.
“Be on your guard, Mowgli,” the librarian said. “We are among the Bandar-log, which is to say the Monkey People. They are Manat’s loyal servants.”
One of the chimps stopped typing and spoke out loud in the Bowery accents of the Lower East Side: “Loyal soivants, she says. As if we had a chice in the madder.”
“Then you’re not on Manat’s side?” Evan asked.
“Whhhhy, if Manat was here right now, I’d wring her lousy neck until she cried out in—”
A horrible scream rent the air, causing everyone to jump. The chimpanzee stopped mid-sentence, index finger raised. “But I have woik to do! And so I bid you good day!” He hit the carriage return and resumed typing.
Evan looked down.
A baby macaque was looking up at him.
Evan stared at the macaque.
The macaque grinned.
“What?!” Evan exclaimed.
“Will you be our leader?” the baby asked.
“No. Sorry.”
A booming voice came from a nearby ledge. “How can you expect him to govern us, when he can’t even govern himself.”
Evan looked up and saw an orangutan holding a bone scepter. Around him were bowls of sacred ghee and low-burning fires.
“I don’t even know you, dude!” Evan said.
The macaque slunk behind Evan’s right calf. “That’s Prometheus,” he whispered.
The orangutan raised his eyebrow and stroked his hennaed beard. “What is the source of mankind’s fire?”
When Mowgli spoke, it was in the voice of the Purusha in his chest: “You are a Rithwik, Prometheus, a custodian of the sacrificial flame. Before you lie the uttararani (upper tenon) and adararani (lower mortise)—the wooden implements by which you kindle fire.”
Prometheus drew the string of the uttararani back and forth until a wisp of smoke rose from the bowl. “Yes,” he said. “I can make fire. But that’s not what I asked. I asked: What is the source of mankind’s fire?”
“I don’t have time for riddles.” Mowgli turned to Bagheera. “We need to find Manat.”
“She’s everywhere,” the macaque said, pointing in all directions.
Evan looked up and saw the camouflaged length of a python creeping between the fractured pillars and gaps in the walls.
“Kaa-Manat wants you to find her,” said the Rithwik. “She has ordered us not to interfere.”
“Over here, pal!” Gordon shouted.
Evan glanced over at Baloo who was pointing to a hole in the wall. “I think this is the way in!”
Prometheus frowned and fed the fire with brush, paying no more heed to the visitors.
Mowgli and Bagheera made their way between the rubble of the courtyard, avoiding the chimps and orangutans, who pointed at them and whispered animatedly among themselves. When he walked between the serried ranks of the militant baboons (who could not speak because they were wild animals), they sneered, bared their fangs and beat their breasts, wondering how the other Bandar-log could have presumed such a weak and puny primate might lead them.
The mother of the macaque grabbed baby and scrambled up a storm blasted tree to join the other macaques. They gazed down in awe, not at Mowgli but at Bagheera, whom they recognized as that archetypal librarian of the Canadian Colony of Norway, who was wont to chastise them for not returning their books on time.—“But if time is an illusion,” they would say, “then due dates and deadlines are but the shadows of shadows and the ghosts of ghosts.”
“I know time is real,” said the baby macaque.
“How so?” his mother asked.
“Because the gods have told me that I shall see Mowgli again within the fullness of it.”
The hole Baloo had pointed out was wide enough for the three of them to enter side by side. In the ruby-red glow of the ornate chamber they stepped into they found a statue of a Hindu goddess, eyes lowered in demure. On either side of the statue a flight of steps led down.
“Hmm,” Gordon said. “It looks like we can go either that way . . .” (bobbing his head to the left) “Or that way. . . ” (bobbing his head to the right) “Or should we split up?”
“Jesus Christ, Gordon. Haven’t you seen, like, any horror movie? Ever? We can’t split up.”
“So which way do we go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Evan said. “It’s all predetermined.” He did an eeny, meeny, miny, moe and his finger landed on the right staircase (which also happened to be the right one).
He took the lead, descending the steps of the torchlit passage. The librarian followed. This time the bear was last. When they reached the bottom of the steps, Baloo looked up and said, “Woah, that’s kinda freaky.”
“What?” Mowgli asked, turning.
The torso of the statue had twisted on its base to face them. Its eyes were still closed. But the enigmatic countenance seemed to be aware of them and look down on them smilingly. Then it rose from its plinth like an overly-long and languorously-voided turd and slithered down the opposite staircase.
Now the subterranean vaults and passages echoed with the sultry voice of Kathleen Turner: “Just as you misinterpreted Madame Blavatsky’s intentions earlier in your dream, so you now misinterpret my own. I’m not as evil as you think I am.”
Evan scanned the ground for traps and pitfalls because when Manat said “I’m not as evil as you think I am,” she sounded a lot like Jessica Rabbit, which brought back all those humiliating memories of his wanking his way through puberty through the aid of an internal array of highly-interactive mental images of Kathleen Turner as pert, rain-drenched Joan Wilder in the 1984 hit Romancing the Stone. And that movie kinda reminded him of Raiders of the Lost Ark.—So the upshot of this discursive (howbeit instantaneous) train of associations was that the last thing he needed was to step on a goddamned pressure plate and launch a hail of poisoned darts into his naked torso, or trigger some huge-ass boulder to come pinballing down a smoothbore poop-chute.
Gotta keep her talking.
“I kinda remember when you hijacked Madame Blavatsky’s astral form and chased me all over Hell, fangs out. I mean, call me crazy, but that was kinda evil.”
Manat chucked. “You have spunk. I like spunk.”
Evan snorted. “Bruh . . .”
The three adventurers entered a chamber with a staircase leading up to an arched gallery whose banisters were wriggling and hissing. Evan held up his hand to silence Baloo and Bagheera. Manat’s voice was coming from a spiral staircase to the left. He waved for them to follow.
“You and I are very much alike,” Manat implied.
“What could I possibly have in common with you?”
“We are both concerned about the workings of Destiny.”
Evan stopped dead in his tracks because Manat (as the Pre-Islamic goddess of Fate) was alluding to the fact that both her name and Niyati’s meant Destiny. There was an implied threat.
He resumed his descent. “Niyati has nothing to do with this! Let her go!”
“She has everything to do with it. You yourself told her so in the Garden of Fractal Paths: ‘The only thing that has ever given this dream meaning to me is you.’ Don’t you see, Man-Cub? I am trying to reunite the two of you. The only thing I have ever wanted from you is this very dream that you are in.”
Evan entered Kaa-Manat’s throne room. Above him loomed the demoness in all her ghastliness. A dragon’s head sprouted from a formless knot of snakes. Beneath its slavering fangs Niyati stood on a landing near the top of the polished steps.
She turned and looked at him. She was obviously frightened, but something didn’t seem right. And since it was his dream, her figure became suddenly awash in those auburn-black tones that wavered ambiguously in Evan’s dream between the intimations of doubt and the glimmers of prophecy.
What Mowgli didn’t realize was that the reason Niyati was acting so peculiarly was because Evan was about to make the most important choice of his dream, and the librarian had warned her in that infinite nightclub on the Astral Plane that she would not permitted to advise or influence Evan on this decision.
“What exactly do you want?” Evan asked Manat, moving slowly up the steps.
Bagheera and Baloo remained below.
“If you freely give me the dream that you are in, you will wake up on the airplane and it will be as if you never dreamed it at all.”
Evan reached the landing and touched Niyati’s shoulder. She turned away from him. This pissed him off, so he turned away from her too. When he did this he saw a statue of Lord Shiva under an arched corridor and knew that his heart was inside of it. He had to distract Manat while he came up with a plan.
“So you’re saying that if I give you this dream, I’m still gonna meet Niyati in a few months? And she and I are still gonna get married?”
The child demon grinned in the bowels of a second Shattered City located billions of light years away. “You will indeed meet Niyati, Man-Cub. And you shall live a long, full life.”
Evan noticed that she hadn’t said that this long life would be a happy one. “But if I do that, then all the lessons I’ve learned in the course of this little adventure will be lost—like, forever.”
“Yes,” the demoness sneered. “But even were you to make to the end of the dream, you would wake up and forget all the lessons you had learned anyway. So what difference does it make?”
Evan looked down at Baloo the bear, who was waiting patiently at the base of the steps, because he too had been forbidden from weighing in on these proceedings. Mowgli thought of Gordon, that young boy who ran away from home and whom he and Niyati would meet for the first time a few months from now—Gordon, who would die alone only a few days after Evan and Niyati were married when a drunk driver swerved off Ventura Highway and struck him.
And he recalled how he had mistreated his roommate Levi, the kindest person he had ever known; and how it was his cruel and thoughtless behavior toward him that would contribute to his friend’s gradual descent into despair. And he saw Levi step from that cliff in the Wasatch Mountains, and he felt again the anguish of Levi’s parents.
Evan scratched his head and looked up at the monster. “I think I’ll keep this dream, thank you.”
Niyati grinned and clapped her hands together. “Good choice,” she whispered.
“Foolish child!” Manat said. And now her voice was no longer the voice of Kathleen Turner, but the hiss of a baleful fiend. “If you will not give me your dream, then you and all your friends die here and now.”
A bronze statue in the niche behind Niyati came to life, its brazen limbs transformed into the coils of a python.
“Look out!” Evan yelled.
Within seconds Niyati was caught in its folds. Evan stomped on one its multifarious heads, then ran to the statue of Lord Shiva to try to wrest the scepter from its grip. But to no avail.
Baloo and Bagheera sprinted up the steps, but were seized halfway up by Manat’s snaky tentacles. They roared in fury, as they struggled against the multiplying appendages.
Then something happened that caused everyone, including Manat, to pause. There was a constant thud and rumbling sound coming from outside. It was constant, rhythmic, unremitting. Dust fell from the ceiling; then chunks of masonry. But the dust and rubble landed only on Manat and her tentacular limbs.
Niyati was free.
“What’s happening?” Evan asked.
Outside the palace, the Bandar-log had raised the gates of the Shattered City so that Levi and his elephants could enter. And each and every elephant was an extension of that sweet-tempered Mormon from the Salt Lake Valley. And when his army was in place, Levi issued the order and the elephants lowered their heads and pushed.
But that was only the beginning.
“Cowabunga, dude!” Marcus yelled, leading a wolf pack into the throne room. And sometimes he was a wolf, but at other times he was just Marcus. But each and every wolf was a version of him.
“What are you doing here?!” Evan exclaimed in astonishment.
“I’m here to kick asses and take names,” Marcus said. “And I’m all out of names!”
Niyati seized Evan’s hands. “Evan, don’t you see what’s happened? Your friends saw that you had lost heart. And so they’ve come to encourage you.”
“You can do it, Evan!” Levi shouted from outside. “I told you I’d be back when you needed me the most!” Then, in human form (and sporting a cashmere scarf from Nordstrom), Levi raised a megaphone to his mouth and cried, “Push!” And a trillion elephants leaned into the walls of the Shattered City.
“Evan,” Niyati said, “you’ve complained ever since your dream began that you haven’t been able to find a weapon. The only weapon you ever needed was here!” She touched his breast; and the thumb-sized Purusha in Evan’s ribcage faded away in a blossom of white light to make room for something greater.
Evan turned to the statue of Lord Shiva and extended his right hand. And when he did this, the unborn universe that Evan had picked up on that beach in Sydney shot out of the statue’s chest and flew into his own.
As these events were unfolding, Kaa-Manat had sunken into a state semi-paralysis and—despite the boiling rage inside of her—all she could do was look down at the playing pieces on the game board, because the unseen powers governing the laws of Evan’s dream had laid an injunction upon her.
“Dr Evan,” Bagheera remarked, “you have achieved your objective in this round of the game. You must advance to the next level.”
“And leave you guys here?!”
“We’ll take care of Manat!” Levi said.
“Yeah, pal!” Gordon seconded.
Marcus winked. “We got your back, dude!”
But now the combined roar of a trillion Bengal tigers resounded far and wide throughout the Shattered City. And the tigers’ leader strode into the throne room.
A sly grin overspread Manat’s face when she saw recognized Shere Khan.
Growling menacingly, head lowered, the tiger crept toward Bagheera, circling the panther with blazing eyes.
But when Shere Khan spoke, it was in the Slavic accents of Madame Blavatsky: “Mowgli, do as Bagheera says! You have finished this round of the game.—Go!”
With a howl, Manat broke free of all restraints that had been imposed upon her. Her lashing tails clashed with the wolves, tigers, and sloth-bears that now began to multiply and divide as portions of the ceiling that the elephants dislodged came crashing down on the python queen’s pullulating appendages.
“Sister,” Shere Khan said to Bagheera, nodding toward Kaa-Manat. “Shall we?”
“Let’s roll this bitch,” the librarian said.
The passageway behind the statue of Lord Shiva lit up (like the pixelated clue of a Nintendo game). Evan realized by the tugging of his heart that this was the way out.
He turned to run as Niyati called out to him: “Evan, you are my warrior-king!” Then a spear materialized in her right hand.
“How come you get a weapon?!”
Niyati smiled and shrugged. Then she lanced a serpent’s head and used the leverage to pole vault down the steps and join the fray.
Evan ran down the passageway and entered a room where a broad staircase led up and out of the palace. He heard the die fall on the game board as seven-year-old Niyati said, “When you land on a ladder, you go up.”
Mowgli sprinted up the steps (two at a time) as the panoptic camera in his subconscious mind panned in on Shere Khan’s right eye, the iris of which had begun to rotate clockwise, because the Emcee of the Astral Plane (who was still in the DJ booth) had lowered the needle on Track 1 of the Rocky III soundtrack, which caused Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” to be blasted at full volume through the collective dream.
Evan reached the top step and raised his fists over his head. Then he ran through the archway and emerged onto the courtyard where the Bandar-log stood waiting for him.
The baby macaque looked up at Evan. “Will you be our leader?”
“YES!” Mowgli roared as a pair of massive wings unfurled behind him.
The baboons beat their breasts and snorted, eager to obey their leader, as the chimps, orangutans, and macaques whooped and screamed and spread their own wings.
Prometheus rose from his seat and nodded gravely.
Since the baby macaque’s wings had not yet fledged, Evan lifted him up and placed him on his back between his shoulder blades. “Hold on,” he whispered, and felt the grip of tiny fingers digging into the nape of his neck.
Mowgli ran to the end of the courtyard and launched himself into the sky. “Follow me!”
The Bandar-log, those erstwhile servants of the demoness Manat, rose at the command of their beloved general.
—“They flew over legions of elephants and tigers that filled every street and byway of the Shattered City,” said the archetypal librarian from the Canadian Colony of Norway, who was reading from a storybook to the spellbound monkeys, who sat in the library’s gothic reading room.
“They neared the edge of the crater, which should have been impossible, since the crater was of infinite diameter. Higher and higher they climbed as the city sank beneath a sea of rising lava. But Mowgli knew—in the adyts of his restored heart—that his friends had survived this cataclysm.
“Prometheus had taken up a position on Mowgli’s right hand. For he was now the Grand Vizier of the Bandar-log’s King.”
—As the librarian read that part, the hennaed orangutan smiled and nodded sagely at the others.
“‘Where are we going, my Lord?’ Prometheus asked.
“‘We’re leaving this crater for another—the crater of Ngorongoro in Tanzania.’
“‘To Africa!’ Prometheus repeated, and the order spread through the ranks, as (on cue) the Emcee of the Astral Plane switched to Track 2 of Toto IV and the song ‘Africa’ reverberated through the thin air of the planet Earth where the sun rises in the west.
“They flew out of the Deccan peninsula and passed over the Indian Ocean, upon whose quivering waters they could see the lines of longitude and latitude. Yemen lay to their right; and they could even discern the Seychelles and Madagascar to off to the left, because (unlike reflections in rear-view mirrors) things seen on the Astral Plane were often much farther away than they appeared.
“As the sun sank in the east, they met with storm clouds and rain. But the baboons produced a saffron canopy, which they bore on long poles, shielding the other primates beneath its vast and billowy spread.
“The baby macaque dozed on Mowgli’s neck behind his great wings.”
—“I tried to stay awake!” the baby macaque interrupted. But his mother shushed him.
The librarian smirked: “Two baboons bearing large brass lanterns on iron chains flew in the vanguard, defying the elements. And when the rains ceased, they released the silken canopy which fluttered away in the wind and landed in the Maldives.
“The Emcee of the Astral Plane doused the lights of the DJ booth and ended the night’s program with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Free Bird’.
“The primates (including Evan) lit their BICs and waved them overhead. And by the powers of Prometheus, the quivering flames of the monkeys’ lighters blazed unextinguished in the stiff cool winds of the upper air.
“The expanse of light attracted each and every firefly in the Astral Plane, and they converged behind the winged monkeys who were nearing the end of their quest.
“‘Do you see it?’ Mowgli whispered to Prometheus, pointing to a low black ridge cutting across the pre-dawn horizon.
“The Rithwik nodded.
“The fireflies and the Bandar-log reached the rim of the crater of Ngorongoro just as dawn broke in the west. And from the clefts and fissures in the floor of the basin, trillions upon trillions of unborn universes began to rise into the air.
“Prometheus had to double his speed to catch up with Mowgli, who had flown far ahead of his army.”
—“It was hard to keep up,” the orangutan commented.
“The inert singularities mingled with the fireflies, as Maasai in their brilliantly-colored robes stood along the crater’s ledge, pointing at Mowgli and his friends.
“‘We need to go this way!’ Mowgli said, veering sharply to the left. He glided in a downward arc and the Bandar-log followed. Around them condensed a lambent fog of flashing fireflies and winking singularities.
“‘There it is!’ Mowgli exclaimed, gesturing toward two unborn universes, which had now begun to spin around each other at a velocity exceeding that of the speed of light. An inter-dimensional portal opened between them and expanded to the size of a house.
“Mowgli reached behind him and lifted the baby macaque from his back, who was now wide awake.
“‘I’m afraid I have to leave you, little buddy.’
“The macaque nodded as Mowgli handed him to his mother.”
—And the baby macaque wept as he recalled Mowgli’s parting words.
“Mowgli turned to the Bandar-log and said, ‘Thank you all for believing in me, when I had lost faith in myself.’ Then he fell backwards, Icarus-like, into the closing wormhole.
“‘But Lord Mowgli!’ Prometheus shouted. ‘How did you know which way to go?’
“The Man-Cub shrugged and replied: ‘I just followed my heart!’
“‘Did you hear that!’ Prometheus roared in triumph. ‘He just revealed the secret source of mankind’s fire!’
Continue to Chapter 23
the secret source of mankind’s fire... yes, indeed :-)