Escape Plans Unlimited

Good evening, readers. Tonight, I have asked Jack from Tales of the Post Apocalyptic Thief to drop by again with his autobiographical fiction wizardry. He tells me he will be adding a shitload of his stories over at his site soon, I suppose time will tell. So for tonight, I have handed the reigns over to Mr. Jack Wild. Go for it Jack! -GTD

Hey everyone. Thanks to GTD for having me over again. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into. Ha!

If you need to catch up, go ahead and check out my post here from last week, and you can also dig up a little more here.

So the lady didn’t get back to my cabin that night. I fell asleep until late the next night, when I awoke to the sound of scraping against the door, drowning out her angry grunting. She got the journal, but it nearly killed her to get it. Everything went as the script said it would. I still feel good about not showing her the script ahead of time, even though she still won’t talk to me now that she saw it. She won’t let me explain why I didn’t want her to see it, she just thinks that I kept her in the dark.

I wanted her to keep her edge, and none of the other pieces of vellum predicted an entire scenario before it had happened. Not to mention that the damned script itself said that I wouldn’t tell her about it until later on. Too bad the writing on the fragment ended with my escape from the bar. She would have never gotten involved if she would have known the importance behind following out the script exactly as I had found it.

I keep my fragments locked in a safe. A safe that no one knows about but me. Well, now you know about it too, but that doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t, because you can’t be sure whether or not I even exist, let alone the safe or its contents. Why, then, did I leave the vellum script out where she could find it? The cold must have really gotten to me that night. Not to mention losing all of that money in the snow. By the time I got back to the cabin, the chill, combined with astonishment at watching my life unfold exactly as the script read, all made me lose my cool and forget to lock up the fragment in the safe before she got back.

I didn’t expect to get so damned cold…and I didn’t expect to sleep for almost 24 hours. Something really got into me that night. I could not believe my eyes and ears as my reality began to merge with something I had already read…word for word, glance for glance, and hand for hand, as I kept counting the cards and piling up my money.

More than once I found my mind returning to my old faithful philosophy, “What the hell is going on here?” Yep, that’s right, my guiding philosophy in theory and in practice comes in the form of a question. How does that sit with you? It never fails to center me on the physical facts of my situation. Asking, “What the hell is going on here?” draws a dividing line between my imaginings, emotions and fantasies with the actual physical reality in which I often find myself. Although lately, even that reality seems anything but solid and predictable.

By the time she stopped hating on me for keeping her in the dark, I had nearly forgotten about my long coveted treasure.

“Did you get it?”

“Yes, but you have to tell me what the hell is going on here before I am going to give it to you.”

“Come on, I told you early on what you were getting yourself into. You chose to stay, and you continue to choose to stay. You coulda left with the money and the journal last night, and you know it!” I might have lied here. Everything I thought I knew went blurry after finding that damned scripted piece of my future. What if your whole life was predetermined–scripted–and part of it included that belief that you had free will?

“Here. Take the damned thing. I’m leaving. Now. For good.” With that, she left. She came back a couple hours later, after wandering around in the snow. I had walked because my car was buried in an 11-foot snow drift, and I didn’t care about getting it out. I worked hard to earn this month at my cabin. No distractions, no flights, no thievery. Just time to rest, enjoy the fireplace, and stare out the windows at the snow as it covered my car.

Thinking back to that night now, I have no idea how she got there in the first place. I know she walked the 2 hours from the bar. But how had she gotten to the bar to begin with? I started to think that she knew more than she had let on, but if that was true, she wouldn’t have gotten so angry about me not showing her the script. Unless….

Seeing her hurting pained me more than she would ever know. In bringing her up to speed about the fragments, the thefts, the global maze I had caught myself in, and the teaching that kept seeming to emerge from everything I touched, I was forced to relive my own painful awakening. I remember when I first looked into her eyes. I saw her smiling at me, searching to meet my gaze across a fire on a ranch in Oregon. I knew at that moment that she would play the role of apprentice. I stopped my searching and settled into the idea of getting close to her.

So much tension and pain, just waiting to be dissolved and converted into power. How could I tell her everything that awaited her? How could I tell her that my own awakening was still underway? When any of my teachers, and there were so many, tried to impart to me the knowledge of things that I needed to face, I could never bring myself to believe them. Just as she would never believe me if I had told her ahead of time the reason she felt so compelled to stare into my eyes.

You wouldn’t believe me either, if I told you why you felt compelled to read this, even now. You still think this is all some kind of story that has nothing to do with your life, don’t you? Of course you do. All is entertainment to you, isn’t it? A great man once said, “All is food for you, all is food for you.”

So, the lady threw Friedman’s journal at me. It bruised my left eye with a deep blue shiner, the same kind of blue she felt when she came back to the cabin that night she feigned a vanishing act. Everytime she ran away and came back, she left more of her false selves buried outside in the snow. Every terrifying view of reality that confronted her along her path left her feeling vibrant and more alive than she had ever felt before.

I suppose it makes sense that this journal left me with a black eye. I had to read with just my right eye. At first glance, it appeared that Friedman was just another innocent bystander in the grand charade unfolding before all of us. He wrote of his travels, of women, of business deals gone bad, and of his regrets and joys. Not much more or less than any other journal. Once I got to the end, I noticed a bulge in the back cover of the little black hardcover Moleskine.
There was nothing in the pocket. No, this was some kind of custom job. I peeled away the cover to find a tiny folded-up piece of vellum.

Why did Friedman have the vellum? Did he know about it? And how in the hell does every single book I get my hands on contain these fragments? At least this one didn’t have another script. It hurts my brain to try to imagine the motives and powers of the author(s) of these damned things.

I decided to share this one with the lady, since her hands had done the stealing this time.

“Pains and Fears? Caterpillars… In time, nothing but a sky full of butterflies.”

I suppose I could share with you a little about her. For now, I’ll just tell you her name: Erica. She doesn’t want me to tell her story for her, so I try to keep my mention of her to a minimum. I think she wants to tell it herself, someday.

Like I said, at first glance, that journal made it seem like Friedman had nothing to do with me. But once I pondered the message on the vellum and studied his entries in more detail, I knew just what I had to do next. Another week here in the snowy north, and then the lady and I would set off for the great plains of Africa, to find the sky full of butterflies and discover our next steps from there.

The toughest and most rewarding part of this adventure is having to take action before knowing anything about what might happen next…

For now, that’s all I have to say.

-Jack-