Directions

Part 1

It was evening when they headed off, and Seth found himself recalling a chronic nightmare from his early teens. It had always been the same dizzying non-scene. Instead of the comfort of true dark it had been suffused with suffocating dimness; instead of the clarity of true cold there had been a damp chill; instead of the pleasure of solitude or company, he had been crowded by unfamiliar faces of people it seemed he should have known. Remembering, he could almost feel the unreality of dream coming over him. He wasn’t even drunk yet, although the evening would certainly culminate in a booth at the Welcome Mat. Now, not yet drunk, he found himself surrounded by half-light, chill, and strangers.

Who were these people? Most of them, he had known in high school—known them. They had made fun of each other's faults and dreams, had eaten together at lunch and copied each other's homework, already copied from awkwardly condescending nerds; they had told the track team to run Forrest run, told the football players to stick it and where, told each other that girl X was just a cheap ride anyway. They had known each other the way you always know your clan. And now this.

Had Seth always been on the fringe? Had he held together with them because they were his people, or because there was nowhere else to go in the closed loop of high school? He had never thought about it before college, and thinking about it now, he didn't know. Jeremy, the band geek, was now a steady-C music major, with a sudden Asian fetish that bordered on disturbing. Darner had taken up some "urban dance" thing, taking himself and the way he moved seriously and expecting others to as well. Even though he walked like a drunken, crippled penguin now. Darner's girlfriend Donna was mostly unchanged, but she had always been a pharmacist of sorts, and seemed to be expanding the range of drugs she handled now that she was away from home. Seth himself had given up black grunge sweats in favor of jeans and gray grunge t-shirts, but didn't feel any different. There were a half-dozen others from the clan who might not have changed. But they weren’t there, and if anybody kept in touch with them, Seth didn't know about it. There were others here now—Donna and Darner had picked up a couple warm bodies, and Jeremy seemed to meet an endless succession of wannabe band-girls—but who were they? Not Seth's clan.

The group was on its way to see Dead Gun IV, in which people struck well-angled poses and then were blown up, or blew something up, or maybe said a line. Or all three, wearing designer shoes and brand -name clothing. The lines from the preview were good, at any rate. And one of Jeremy’s wannabes was on the verge of hooking up with Seth. She was a saxophonist. Jeremy had subtly rejected her because of her short hair, but she was hot enough that Seth was willing to see what happened when she’d had a few.

They were rattling down to the parking lot, where Seth's secondhand compact and Donna's pickup and one of the druggies' cars waited. Jeremy had a truck too, of truly ancient years, but it had spontaneously ignited last month and he didn't trust it now for anything more than a series of jokes. That was Jeremy, at least—not familiar or even recognizable as a human being, but as a humorously paranoid relationship. Seth opened his mouth to say something funny and not really nostalgic at all.

The young woman was sitting on a park bench under a tree, reading. She looked to be in her late twenties, with dark hair that curled halfway down her back. She read by the illumination of a nearby streetlight, and the glow of it gave her an unearthly aura, a personal space inviolable to every force he knew. Her tanned skin shone softly: her hands, her face, her throat. She seemed to glance at him for a moment as he and the others passed by. Her eyes were distant, untroubled, dark; they were unexplored territory; in them grew virgin forests. She turned a page, reached out with one hand and lightly touched the tree trunk in a seemingly unconscious gesture, eyes on her book, so that Seth could not be sure she had ever looked up at all. That was the first time he saw her.

He forgot what he had been about to say and remained silent until they reached the theater and bought tickets.

The movie was unable to hold Seth's interest, and he found himself restless even during the climactic battle. Walking out of the theater to the parking lot, he found that he had been developing a headache for at least the past hour, and that he was in a foul mood. He spat on the sidewalk. That was from high school, and one of those people remembered what it meant.

Jeremy said, "What, I thought it was ok." The girls all nodded except Donna, who was still humming the theme off-tempo, which she always did for kicks. The other guys said several things in favor of the lead female character and her guns. One of Darner's crew admitted that the kung fu had been weak, but argued that the grappling-hook scene made up for that easily. Seth spat again dismissively.

Darner chipped in snidely. "Oh, what are you now, an artist? You go to Dead Gun flicks for plot, hey?" It might have been a joke at the expense of the movie, but Seth didn't care.

"I can't believe you posers," he said. "It was crap! I'll pay to see the CG, but we did better shit than some of that with a potato gun in grade six. A little quality, please!"

Always, one person didn't like the movie when everybody else did, or loved what the rest knew was an obvious bomb. It had never been Seth before. Mr. Kung Fu started telling him that anything with a fast-cut gun-and-machete fight at two hundred feet, on the side of an office building, was quality, and Seth turned on him and said "Yeah, if you ignore the jungle groove sound track. What the hell was that?"

"Sure," sax girl said suddenly, "you go listen to your emo rock."

There was laughter. The world was dim, cold, alien, and laughing at him. Seth's whole body warmed fuzzily; the air constricted around him and then went loose. All the words he knew were meaningless. He went to his car as if it hurt his legs to walk the same asphalt as his former friends.

"Hey!" shouted sax-girl. "Hey, you giving me a ride or what?"

A few choice lines presented themselves, most of them involving the incompatibility of his car with the herpes virus. But he was sick of lines, and wouldn't have spoken even if he could. He drove away in silence. They were no longer his people.

A month later, Seth's life and therefore his mood had not improved appreciably. He stalked into his dorm room and threw his backpack onto his bed as the door, driven by weighted hinges, slammed shut behind him. "Well, this day was sh—"

His roommate Isaac tensed slightly, hunching over a textbook. "Don't."

He spat into the trashcan. "Why not?"

Isaac turned and glared. "We've been over the free speech thing. You may have had yet another bad day, but we all have bad days and I want my room to be a pleasant place."

"Yeah? Well, it's not 'pleasant' for me unless I can cut loose. You understand? You’re so... sterile. I can't stand it."

Seth sagged into his chair and put a pair of headphones around his neck. With a sigh, Isaac changed the subject. "So, what happened to make your day so lousy?"

"Lost my job."

"So? I thought you said it was a 'crap job' you couldn’t wait to get out of."

"Yeah, well, it kept me in school. I don't find another soon, I'll have to kill my savings just to pay the next fee bill."

"I thought that you wanted to quit here because you hated everything about it. Wasn’t that why you refused to pick a major?"

Seth was rummaging through his CDs. "That was back when Dad was willing to pay for me to go to the technical school. When I failed English last semester, he almost disowned me. 'You're on your own now,' he says. 'If you got time to party and get piss-ass drunk, or whatever kids do these days, then you got time to study.' He's not going to pay for my education if there's no return on the investment."

"Makes sense to me."

"It's not like I could help it the professor was a rat bastard who hated me." Choosing and inserting a disk, Seth started his player and turned the volume all the way up without putting the headphones on his ears. He put his feet against his desk and tipped back, apparently listening to the music through his neck.

"Last week you were talking about quitting school and just working. I thought you—"

"You think too damn much." Seth slammed his chair back down. "I don’t have a damn job any more, do I?"

"You keep talking about your dad. What does your mom have to say about it?"

"She's dead."

"Oh." Isaac looked down at his books. "I'm sorry."

"Goddamn crazy dad sits around writing poetry to her and telling me to make something of myself even though he's going all to pot."

That shut Isaac up for a while, except for another mumbled "sorry." Finally, he came up with a non sequitur. "I have a friend who works with the student newspaper; he could find you a little gig for the time being."

"What? I don't want any jobs at our paper. It sucks."

Isaac snorted. "They don’t take people who've failed English anyway. But the office is always looking for people who live on campus, to do deliveries in the morning."

"Shyeah, right."

"Seriously. You get up at four, walk a quarter of a mile to Journalism. The printer people drop off the bundles."

"Sure."

Isaac plowed through the interjection. "Then you put them in the on-campus delivery truck and leave one bundle in the box at each building. Then walk back here. It takes an hour if you do it right, and they pay ten dollars a day. It's the perfect extra-cash job."

"You are so full—"

"That’s seven hundred a semester. That pays for the meal ticket at least. And ten dollars an hour is more than they pay the people who write the thing."

"If it's so good, you do it," Seth said dismissively.

"I already have too much work to do, especially with training and classes at Serif. I can’t live on three hours of sleep a night."

"So what about tuition?"

"I don't know. I'm sure the Student Center could find you workstudy on campus if you'd quit whining and ask. Go to sleep earlier in the evening and you'll be fine. You have most of your classes relatively early in the day anyway. 'Early to bed and early to—'"

"Just shut your face. I'll try it 'cause I need some cash, but if I don't like it, I swear I'll wake you up every morning to say how stupid your idea is."

"And I'll give your beer to the hall monitor."

"Bite me, you fucking puritan."

Isaac smiled to himself.

It was that private smile—sometimes tired, sometimes bitter, sometimes pleased, but always incomprehensible—that won. Seth had given up trying to see how his roommate could find amusement in random situations, even in their most vicious arguments. He fantasized occasionally about punching that smile: making it bleed, maybe lose a few teeth. But it seemed that if he did that, the smile would somehow have won again. So he went to the Journalism building, filled out a form, and decided that the next best thing would be to prove Isaac wrong. That ought to be easy enough.

As far as that goal was concerned, next Monday began auspiciously. Seth's alarm woke him at four o'clock with the most obnoxious squealing he had ever heard. The air was cold and damp even before he stepped outside. His body felt heavy. He couldn't get rid of an odd taste in his mouth. The darkness was disquieting. The "truck" was a golf cart with a flatbed attachment on the back, and cleaning up yesterday's papers was an irritating chore. By the third drop, he was amusing himself with scenarios in which he did bodily harm to Isaac while explaining why this was lame.

Finally, though, he finished. It had taken him twenty minutes longer than predicted. Even if experience would cut the time, this was another point for his side. Seth drove back to the Journalism building, parked the truck, tossed the old papers into the recycling bin, and began his homeward trudge. He was tired enough to entertain the possibility of returning to his cold bed, hoping for another hour or two of sleep before he had to go to class.

On the way, he worked over his gripe. "This 'perfect job' is the most retarded thing since toilet-scrubbing. In fact, I'd rather scrub toilets. They don't leave ink and shit all over your hands. See this on my palm? That's the headline. I swear those bundles will break my back. And this has got to be the worst time to be prancing around outdoors. Only freaks and crack-heads are out this early—"

His soliloquy was cut short when he turned a corner and almost stepped on a young woman crouched on the sidewalk. She seemed familiar, but he stopped and stared for a few moments before he recognized the girl from the park bench that evening a few weeks before. Her gaze was unfocused and her face soft, giving her demeanor a sort of remorseless gentleness that Seth found unsettling. She was ruffling and raking one of the campus' ornamental hedges with her fingers as if combing it. Slowly, her arms rose and fell, swept back and forth, moved in and out among the twigs. The motion of her fingertips was startlingly rapid.

"What are you doing?"

She answered without pausing or looking up. "I am counting the leaves."

He stopped. The reply had been completely deadpan. Was she joking? Was she insane? Was she fantastically bored? He glanced around, but there was nobody else in sight. He thought for a moment about making a sarcastic remark, but nothing came to mind. He considered just nodding and walking away, but that seemed insufficient, and he would never be able to bring himself to talk to her again. After an uncomfortable pause, he shifted his weight and asked "Why?"

Still no response other than her soft voice: "I... the bush would forget itself and die."

"What? Why?"

She shifted to the side and continued her counting in a new section of the hedge. "I do not know the precise channels at work."

"That’s crazy. What kind of person goes around counting leaves at half past five in the morning?"

"A goddess."

It was so matter-of-fact that she might as well have said "A professional leaf-counter, duh," and rolled her eyes. As it was, Seth bobbed his head back and blinked. She had shifted again by the time he came up with a response. "You're shitting me."

"No." She looked at him now, hands momentarily still. "That is not how I work. I grew the first man and woman of my tribe from the second budding of my sacred bush. I once knew a monkey-god who truly shat his people out, but in the end they were nothing more than fertilizer."

This was one of the most interesting, if bizarre, conversations Seth had ever had. With a shrug, he decided to play along and see where it went. "What happened to them?"

"Oh, he despoiled the fruits of the grove where I lived." She frowned, then smiled brilliantly. It was the most frightening expression Seth had ever seen. "On the third night after, my tribe attacked his in the dark of the moon, killed his warriors and priests, took his women and children as slaves, razed his town, broke his altars, and killed the sacred monkey who channeled his commands. It was the most exhilarating night of my life."

"Cool!" Seth nodded. She had seemed kind of weird, but anybody who could BS so well this early was at least fun to listen to. It was almost worth waking up for in the small hours of the morning. "So, did you do that kind of thing often?"

"I was not much of a conqueror, no. As an agricultural deity, I was mostly occupied with giving my people a good harvest each year. At one time, I was able to take advantage of favorable circumstances to achieve jurisdiction over all plant life, but only a century later my tribe merged with others and I became a member of a pantheon. My cousin directed our warriors thereafter."

"Yeah, mergers suck. What happened after that?"

"That which happened to all of us. We were what modern folklorists might call continental Celtic deities. Our faces were blurred by time and by the blending of worship among the peoples of central and southern Europe. Then the Christians moved out of Rome and destroyed everything." Her eyes narrowed. "My cousin died along with the last descendants of his people, a century ago in the Great War. Others of my family may have survived, but I lost contact with them ages ago."

"That’s too bad." Seth began to wonder how much time she had spent on this story. If it was made up on the spot, she was good, but maybe a little too studious for his taste. If she was reusing it from an earlier conversation... well, that was just weird. "Right. So, did you ever meet Jesus?"

"I never encountered this Yesu because my demesne was in Europe rather than the Middle-East. I never met the Hebrew God because it has never manifested where I could encounter it. Nor have I met the Moslem deity, for the same reason." She shook her head thoughtfully, then brightened. "But their followings are large enough already. Will you join my tribe?"

"Sure, why not?" Seth shrugged.

She regarded him sadly, in a way reminiscent of one of Isaac's expressions. She sighed. “I have forgotten how casual the people of this age are. It is a serious thing to join such a small tribe as mine is become."

"Yeah, well, corporate religion's for losers. And I must be psycho already, since I’m getting up at the butt-crack of dawn. How about you tell me about it?"

"You do not seem to fully grasp the significance. Shall I show you my sacred bush?"

He snickered. "Yeah, show me your bush. Go on."

He was mildly put off when she held out a small potted evergreen. It looked like an unusually full bonsai of sorts, with dark green needles and waxy red berries. It was similar in appearance to the hedge she had been combing through, so he supposed that he had simply not noticed it earlier. The pot was well crafted, with beautiful geometric patterns that seemed to merge with the plant’s roots and stem. Its leaves gave off a faint but pleasant scent.

"Um... nice. What next?"

She stepped forward and turned the pot to present a particularly berry-rich branch. "You must eat of the fruit. If you then declare yourself a follower of Thea Eibe, I will become your patron and use my powers to enrich your life as best I can. I admit freely that this is no significant boon, as you are not a farmer. You will be instructed in my doctrines and cultic practices as becomes necessary. If you bring me other worshippers, my domain will expand and so—

"Whoa, rewind." Seth pointed at the plant. "You want me to eat one of those?"

"Three would be better. It is a noted magical number."

"Well, thanks, I'd really love to, but no thanks." Half turning, he held up a hand barrier-like. "I’d love to help you, Thea, but I’m not that down with rabbit food. Bird food. I mean, aren’t those poisonous? Even if I was that hungry, the vending machines have better stuff."

He turned the rest of the way and headed for the dorms. "Well, catch you around. Good luck with your cult there."

As he left, she spoke again as if to herself. Her voice was surprisingly bitter. "I suppose it was to be expected. We shall simply have to find another way to live, won’t we?"

He looked back. She was walking the other way, apparently talking to the potted plant.

~ To Part 2 ~

Illustration by Ryan Armand