Suddenly, Johnny could hear a faint, timorous voice. “Help me,” the urgent voice implored. “Help me.” It took Johnny some time to locate the source of the incessant cries, but when he did he saw an old man lying on his side. A strange, celestial fluid was leaking out of his ears. It was celestial in the sense that it turned the sand grains into a twilit star-field.
“What happened?” an astonished Johnny asked the injured or dying old man.
“I fell over and all this star-junk started pouring out of my ears.”
“Can you get up?”
“No. I am paralyzed.”
“What should I do?”
“Tell me your name. I only trust people with names.”
“My name is Johnny Phoenix.”
“What? That’s my name too.”
Johnny Phoenix looked over the hairy ear cavities, the wrinkles his dour face wore without dignity, his callused hands, his dirty clothing, and his decrepit shoes that almost ceased to be anything whatsoever. He found it odd that the old-timer had the same name as him. He found it odd that the old-timer had been mysteriously wounded. The “outer space” fluid that pooled beside his dilapidated body was also unorthodox. But the oddest thing of all became apparent to Johnny when he peered into the old man’s glassy eyes and saw nothing but his very own existence. Johnny was, in reality, looking down upon his own body.
“You’re me!” Johnny Phoenix exclaimed to…well…an older version of himself. The old man moaned and tilted his time-ravaged face towards the younger man he once was. “I am,” the old man stated, matter-of-factly. “I am the you that is tiresome and sickly. I’ve been over the highest mountains and trekked through the widest deserts. I’ve been in search of myself for decades. Alas, I’ve found nothing to share with the angels of conquest. I filled my head with cosmic notions, and now look at me…the very substance I created with grandiose ideas is leaking out of my ears!”
Johnny didn’t know how to help the dying doppelganger. He only had the implements of a baroque profession in his dusty bag. He thought about taking off his shirt and tying it around his second head, and then thought against it when he realized for the second time that the cosmic ink obliterated matter. At a loss for words, Johnny just stood there and watched the elaborate hallucination cough and moan.
After a coughing fit that caused more celestial fluid to exit the winding tunnels of his ears, the older version of Johnny spoke in a soft cadence that resembled the shuffling of tiny feet:
“You didn’t ask for this moment. You don’t have to help me. I am not even your responsibility, even though I am the you that came from a future you can’t see. If you let me die, this celestial fluid will probably eat away at the known, measurable world. It will kill those carnies, Athena, that prophetic plant, and everything else. The choice is up to you: you heal me or kill the world. Once again, you don’t have to help me even though I asked you to.”
The quandary was quite flagrant. If Johnny didn’t do something, the world was going to become an inky void, a waxy expanse of limitless stars. If he miraculously healed the older version of himself, the hallucinatory doppelganger would probably incessantly haunt him until he became a perfect mirror for its withering. As he stood there pondering the immensity of his decision, the old Johnny coughed once again and broadcasted the cosmic cancer all over the granular, brown ocean.
Then, out of nowhere, or a somewhere that resided in the dark recesses of internal processes, the prophetic flower’s parting words came back to the pondering Johnny:
When reason falls away, when preconceived notions are thrown away like stones into the sea, when time dies in the lap of its owner, when the search ends at the Great Wall, the edge of the world is reached, Aletheia speaks.
The lingering words were aromatic and true. Johnny had to stop rationalizing all the time. He had to let the narrative of his life go on like the alchemical seasons, without the blathering interference of his ego. He had to stop differentiating between the real and the unreal with armored, preconceived notions. Thirdly, he needed to let time perish. This meant he needed to let the old man die in a puddle of his own making.
“I’ve decided to let you pass on, old one,” Johnny said in a confident and earnest tone to his fallen, wizened self. “If the world disappears in that inky wax you call grandiose notions, so be it. The world deserves the heavens anyways.”
“So, you’re going to let me vanish? You’re going to just watch your future die?”
Following his raspy questions, the old Johnny Phoenix—that consummate lover of inebriating dreams—coughed like he had never coughed before. The celestial fluid spewed out of his ears like hot magma from a grumpy volcano. Some of it landed on his cheek. His cheek soon resembled Orion’s Belt.
“I am going to let you vanish. My personal history must die. My future must die. I must only follow the silent language of my heart and the magical pulse of this grand universe. I am sorry you didn’t have anything to share with those angels. You should have. You should have told them about your sadness.”
And, in a flash, the old Johnny was gone. The celestial fluid and wrinkled face ceased to exist. When the real Johnny Phoenix heard a melodious bird trill a couple times, he turned around to see if he could catch sight of the winged one. To his astonishment, the bird was resting its spindly legs on an opulent wall that reached higher than anything constructed by man.
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