From the Rift — Story (1/5) · chapters 1–7

From the Rift

Bathing in the grey current

Characters of the story

Counted from the data of the 23 chapters: 25 characters, 203 lines of dialogue — per character the name, first chapter and number of lines.

• System (also: Incoming) — chapter 1 · 2 lines
• She — chapter II · 8 lines
• I (also: I to Iain) — chapter II · 72 lines
• Grandmother — chapter III · 1 line
• Grandfather — chapter III · 3 lines
• Iain (also: Message from Iain) — chapter V · 11 lines
• Iain (Email) — chapter VI · 1 line
• Mother (also: Ma (Memory), Ma) — chapter VI · 4 lines
• Soldier — chapter VIII · 8 lines
• Judge — chapter IX · 1 line
• Shopkeeper — chapter XI · 7 lines
• Man in Black — chapter XII · 1 line
• Woman in the Yellow Sea — chapter XIII · 1 line
• She (also: Female Voice) — chapter XIV · 43 lines
• He — chapter XVI · 8 lines
• Voice at the bar — chapter XVI · 1 line
• Message — chapter XX · 1 line
• Doorkeeper — chapter XX · 2 lines
• DJ Friend — chapter XX · 1 line
• Black Brother — chapter XXI · 14 lines
• Wanderer — chapter XXI · 9 lines
• She (middle) — chapter XXI · 1 line
• Friend on the right — chapter XXI · 1 line
• Friend on the left — chapter XXI · 1 line
• To Myself — chapter XXI · 1 line

Colours of speech in the browser: black (System, Grandfather, Iain, Iain (Email), Judge, Man in Black, She, I, Doorkeeper, Black Brother) · gold (She, Mother, Message, Wanderer, To Myself, Iain) · grey (I, Grandmother, Soldier, He, Voice at the bar, DJ Friend) · green (Shopkeeper) · yellow (Woman in the Yellow Sea) · violet (She (middle), Friend on the right, Friend on the left).

1. By the Lake

Where thoughts drift

Looking out at a small lake, I watched the black ducks drifting.

They are so much smaller than back home.

The light wind from the east created gentle wave patterns on the lake in front of the gray palace, where botany from all over the world was at home.

Perhaps a sign that the world is large, yet somehow becoming smaller.

Another thought drifted through my head.

Back to the stars
back into the expanses and depths
of our being

The windows of the gray palace were fogged over from the humidity within and the cool single-digit air outside. The green of the plants shimmered through only as vague outlines. Everything around me was artificial, artificially beautiful. The sun was shining, warming me through my black coat that fell past my knees when standing. A group of teenagers sat down beside me, perhaps already young adults. I did not even look up. They spoke a language I could not understand, and never would. To my left, an old lady in a purple-yellow jacket, a complete lapse in taste from where I stood, was lecturing her grandchild. The girl was hopping skillfully across the stones by the water.

A question cut through my sinking into thought:

Why are old people so afraid something might happen? If nothing happens, are we even living?

A small smile crossed my face and I sank deeper into my world.

In the end, neither left nor right held any interest. The athletic girl and the boys beside me existed only at the edge of my peripheral vision, though I still gave them the attention they required. Most of my focus was on my phone screen.

System: Mail received - Importance: very high

The message had appeared two minutes earlier.

I felt it was time to sink deep. Once again, I was grateful for my phone's special capabilities. Right now, no one should know how much I communicate, or with whom.

Instead of getting up and rushing to the nearest metro station, I closed my eyes and enjoyed the stillness of my own world, the one that opened within me when I turned my attention inward.

II. Color of the Soul

Years ago I had an encounter that began with a question and ended in empty space. The question kept me thinking for a surprisingly long time before I gave an answer.

Intuitively, the answer was clear to me at once.

I had closed my eyes only briefly - everything as always in my inner world - and after letting my gaze drift, I saw a gray figure. The outlines were blurred. I could see without making anything out. I knew no other world before my inner eye.

Admittedly, I hadn't really thought about it; I just wanted to sink briefly into my world, and that process simply takes some time. Only when she asked again:

She: And? What color would you describe yourself as?

and clarified:

She: And I don't mean your favorite color.

I said, in a stoic tone:

I: Gray. It was so, it is so, and it will always be so.

Weeks later, after trust had built through hours of shared experience, during a platonic visit to her small basement flat, she showed me a little book. In it she had written the same roughly two-hundred-word text hundreds, maybe thousands of times, in handwriting that was tiny in places but always beautiful. She wrote it every night, truly every one. No page had a square centimeter of space. Every corner, every gap, every empty space she had filled with this text. It was hauntingly beautiful. She would not let the book leave her hands. She only leafed through it for a long moment in front of me, this book so clearly precious to her. She never gave me the chance to read the text she wrote every night, not even when I asked.

Perhaps she sensed I was not yet ready.

One thing I have known since that night her book fell into my world -
no matter how gray-ve the world, a good soul never loses its color.

She revealed to me her answer to the question from weeks before; her soul color was not black or white. Nor gray. With the vision of her book rushing past my inner eye, I surfaced again and looked at the message for the third time, still flashing on my phone screen.

My intuition told me:

you don't need to open it. You know its content, you know the lines.

I opened it anyway. I looked at my gray screen and let the message slowly drift past me.

At every crossroads she stands
Not always do you take her path
And if she does not go with you
I come from the darkness
From the shelter of the shadowy forest
I pull her from you
From you into the depths
Darker than the night
She sees your dream
Does not understand what you mean
Take heed - I am not your friend
Yet wait in the empty space
Meeting at half seven

When the last line had fallen into my depths, I felt an emptiness inside.

It looked blue-gray to me, with a grainy background of dark gray-green. Calm chaos, somehow. Stormy stillness. If this emptiness could be described at all, it would be like that.

III. Beautiful Memory

It didn't take long for the emptiness to fill again. I had no desire yet to resurface and lingered in my gray. The message had to rise deeper within me to the gray landscapes of my being. Sink to the summit and climb up into the valley. Suddenly, I thought of my grandfather.

I remember little of what my grandfather told me - he died too young, from the work in the mines. Grandmother said he used to say: "The work has dyed my lungs and soul the color of the mountains."

Grandmother: He may be right. Only he knows why.

But I remember very well a few lines from him, directed at me. He must have told them to me on the second Christmas evening, not long before my fourth birthday. I often dreamed of it, sometimes even today. He sat in his simple wooden armchair with minimal padding, which is why there were always at least three checkered, folded wool blankets there. I sat on his lap and he bounced me with a smooth movement of his right thigh. He looked at the Christmas tree, where about twenty real candles, three-quarters burned down, cast warm golden-yellow light into the room. He had just begun to sip his second glass of wine of the evening. The rest of the family had gathered in the kitchen a few minutes earlier for a crisis committee due to problems with the gas stove. I was alone with him in the living room. Suddenly he said:

Grandfather: Listen to me.

I looked at him and we held each other's gaze for an endless moment before he began to speak. I had stopped playing with the two wooden blocks in my hands, eager to hear what would come.

Grandfather: People think black is death and terror - white the light and the good - and green nature brings the color.

He paused, longer this time.

Grandfather: But I tell you - No matter how dark and deep the black darkness seems, at its depth it is gray - No matter how bright and glaring the white light, at its height it is gray - No matter how colorful nature - beautiful violence brings its patterns back to gray, here and there trimmed in color. In your eyes I see beauty in the cruel. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen. When my time comes, my soul's vortex is yours.

We were still looking deeply into each other's eyes when he finished. I intuitively took my right index finger and held it up, blocks in my left. He set his glass on the windowsill and, with his right index finger extended toward the sky, made a flowing motion downward, slowly letting his arm sink past the armrest until the finger pointed completely downward, toward the floor.

That must be how it happened, because I saw it over and over in my dreams. So often I woke just as his arm sank past the armrest. He died a few months later, shortly before my birthday.

I felt no grief. His death left me indifferent. I knew he was still with me.

I was he, he was I,
and yet we both
are so much more.

So it was, so it is,
so it will always be.

IV. The Melody Resounds

I had sunk deep enough. Slowly I opened my eyes again. The gray gave way to a blue-gray lake, the glassy botany palace with its fogged windows to my right, the now-deserted stones to my left. I looked up and gazed into the distance, over a stone bridge toward a small hill beyond. The trees a muted red, here and there a few muted greens or yellows - it was winter, after all. I looked higher, into the sky, a pale gray-blue.

Something seemed off.

I turned around. The sun still shone in full brilliance, just as when I had arrived at the park, not a cloud in the sky. I turned back toward the hill.

Something was definitely off.

I stared up at the cloudless sky again. For minutes. It was the colors. They were all muted. Gray.

Not sure if I was back in the reality of the outer world or still in my gray inner one.

I closed my eyes again. Everything a dull gray once more. I shook my head, and chaotic patterns in shades of gray flowed into my world. After a short while, I opened my eyes anew. And the colors? ..radiant once more, yes the colors, no longer dull, no longer with those gray depths and streaks.

The phone was still in my hands. I looked at the black screen, pressed the side button with my thumb - no message on my lock screen. I entered my ten-digit code: numbers, Arabic and Cyrillic characters, and at the end one of personal value from the language of the North.

It reminded me of a fir tree, with a small bend at the lower right edge.

Then the fingerprint. Then another iris scan.

Surprised to find no new text on either of my two prepaid SIMs or the four eSIMs, I opened my mailbox. It was still deep night at the main office; no messages should have come through, my assignment was clear.

The loading process - through a host of satellites, private servers, a clever chain of networks - a true Iain cyber-labyrinth - took its time.

I looked once more at the water before me, then up the hill, then into the cloudless sky - the colors radiant.

I was in reality.

I swung my gaze back to the screen and saw exactly one new message.

Incoming: Subject - Change of Plan // Going Hunting - received 2 minutes ago.

V. Tea in the Smog

I loved the hunt. It filled my being, and unlike most hunting practices, our goal was not to kill or weaken our prey. Often, finding and scouting it was pointless. It was not a classical hunt, and the methods we used were our own. Our prey did not camouflage itself with natural patterns in its surroundings. It camouflaged itself with uncertainty and multiplicity in the chaos of the modern world. Often found, but never caught.

The state, which loves order and hates chaos, usually dismisses our prey as insignificant - here and there, as evil.

Surely you wonder what we did with our prey once we had it on the line. My boss, who was also my closest confidant and hunting companion in the virtual cyber world, said something at our last meeting in person - at a chai stand near the airport in New Delhi - that still echoes in me today. I had met Iain only twice in my life, and I have my doubts whether that is his real name.

What I never doubted was his good heart.

The last meeting with him had not started well. The hunt was unsuccessful, we had been outplayed - completely fucked over - and in the end I was nearly taken out. You could also say they wanted to get rid of me while I was visiting one of my contacts in Rishikesh, in a side alley between a Hindu temple and a yoga resort, with a view of the breathtaking sandy banks of the Ganges. The holy river, which rises high in the Gangotri Glacier of the Himalayas and winds down into the jungle, passing Rishikesh on its right before heading east.

Fortunately, the river is not yet completely polluted this close to its source.

In that alley I was talking with an instrument maker; he built strange-looking guitars, sitars. The sitar had dozens of strings and looked like an overcomplicated, bulky acoustic guitar. From my four previous visits I knew that not all strings were played - the majority served for resonance.

Fascinating instrument.

I was looking at a particularly worn one standing in the corner while listening to the instrument maker describe his observations from the past few days, when intuition struck me. My stomach cramped, and I knew I had to run. I moved slowly toward the window, and when I heard the door creak below, I knew there was only one way out. My intuition saved me - that, and the jump into the raging Ganges. I nearly drowned in it, and again it was my intuition, and of course the raft full of rich Indians from Mumbai, that saved me.

Tourism is somehow also a form of pilgrimage.

How did I get back to Delhi? Through the jungle, then over and through the foothills of the Himalayas, more or less, hitchhiking in overcrowded Jeeps, overloaded trucks, and on the back seat of an old iconic motorcycle whose name the young driver enthusiastically tried to drill into me. I had deliberately not taken the direct route back to Delhi to cover my tracks. At the end of my motorcycle ride, I felt sick from all the curves of the mountain roads, and I had arrived in Mussoorie with great detours. I pressed a few bills into the driver's hand, for the ride and to do me one last favor: Order a taxi to take me to Delhi.

Fortunately the taxi driver was silent the entire seven and a half hours, and dropped me at the roadside three kilometers from the airport - we had gotten stuck in the absolutely insane rush hour traffic of Delhi. On my way to the roadside I was honked at only seven times and nearly run over three times, when a hand appeared from nowhere and pulled me toward a thela - a simple wooden cart with an improvised roof of blue plastic sheeting. It was a small chai stand that also sold some vegetables. There were countless such carts in Delhi. And suddenly I stood before him. He was dressed entirely in black. Black sneakers, black pants, black hoodie, black cap pulled low over his face, black breathing mask - only his eyes were visible.

Perplexed, I spoke, after what felt like an eternity of making sure it really was Iain standing before me:

I: What the goddamned fuck. I almost died. I want to leave this hunting shit behind me. My hunt keeps turning into a flight.

Iain: You cannot leave me and the hunt behind. Our patterns will echo into eternity. How do you think I found you? Do you know why we do this shit?

A moment of emptiness hung between us, in which we both looked into the depths of the other's soul through the gate of the eyes, before he continued:

Iain: We hunt seemingly evil people because the necessary task of bringing balance to the world is a thankless one.

I was still looking into the emptiness, and he continued speaking.

Iain: I can express it more beautifully so that it reaches you. We seek stars because the sky is not enough for the balance between good and evil.

Still gazing into the empty space behind his eyes, where the flow of a person from past through present into future is reflected, I lowered my head slightly and closed my eyes for a moment - a gesture of assent.

It was too deep for words.

Iain reached into his pocket and pressed a small gray package into my right hand. He spoke quietly:

Iain: Sometimes the river rests in the darkness, but it never stands still.

It came from my depths; I answered gently:

I: So darkness is a friend of our hunt?! Our shadows have apparently met in the depths for good reason.

With our hands slightly raised upward, we shook, pulled each other closer, and paused briefly in the embrace, with lowered heads. Then we went in opposite directions, but both through the dirt and smog of the beautifully chaotic Delhi.

VI. Angling

Turning my attention back to the email from Iain, which had arrived three minutes earlier, I opened it. A single sentence.

Iain (Email): Follow the melody; you can hear it.

I heard nothing yet - perhaps my frequency was not properly tuned.

Iain must have picked up a signal or pattern, and I trusted him. I stood, glanced at the patterns in the stone I had sat on for so long, and made my way back toward the metro station. Not thirty meters walked, heading toward the bridge I had been staring at, when a girl came toward me. Her little brother was right behind her, holding their father's hand. The girl had a light step, a bright smile, and a small blue speaker dangling from her neck.

A speaker?!

I pricked up my ears and listened. After a few seconds I realized she was learning English. From her speaker came a mythological epic, a fantasy masterpiece of Chinese literature. I sharpened my attention.

Sun Wukong, "equal to heaven," had just been subdued by Buddha Shakyamuni. Or one should rather say: Sun Wukong had been deceived. Instead of leaping from the hand to the end of the cosmos with his heavenly somersault, his jump ends at the Buddha's fingertips. None of the deities in heaven could harm a single hair on the stone monkey, let alone end his life - not with weapons, not with the elements, not with poison. Instead, the Buddha imprisons him in the Mountain of Five Elements, where the monkey is fed molten metal and must wait in the depths of the mountain for his redemption.

I remembered - my Ma always read to me from her favorite book at bedtime. That is why I loved the book too. It gave me many lessons for life.

The masterpiece - an old pilgrimage of a simple monk with his mythical companions, from the East to the West and back, in search of holy scriptures. A story of cosmic importance.

Lost in thought, I saw my mother sitting beside me at the bed, her necklace with a cross in her left hand, a Turritella in her right. She often told me what they stood for.

The cross for the sacrifices we make
And the pain
That we carry on our shoulders until the bloom of the beautiful
The sevenfold spirally wound shell for the circles
That we turn and thus carry the upper downward and the lower upward

Before she left my room, pulling the door nearly shut, she usually said:

Mother: Except at the end and beginning of reality, it's always about balance.

On a small card she had written to me:

I am always there
when you need me.
Whether hard or soft,
poor or rich -
to me you are forever mine.
So you remain wholly your own.

Find one with a great heart,
who shares your dreams
and unites her flow with yours.

Then suddenly the scene changed, and I walked with her toward a large wooden door with beautiful medieval carvings. It was the door of our city library. I held my attention on the carvings until they blurred, then opened my eyes, let my gaze sweep over the meadow behind me, spotted the girl with the speaker around her neck, spoke a small prayer into my right hand - or rather a small thanks:

We shall meet again in the Whole
For I thank you
You do not know for what, but I carry the memory within me
Our shadows dance
And you take me with you
On a journey into balance

... and tossed the words to her with a smooth motion. I looked to the sky, then to the ground, and knew:

The hunt has begun. The dam is broken; the wave cannot be stopped.

VII. The Yellow Sea

Swift steps drove me through the crowd pressing through the park. My vision was slightly blurred, yet I found my way without thinking, without actively orienting myself. I got on Line 7, stood by the door, gazing out the window, and rode through the underground, forty minutes, all the way south. Out of the underground and back into sunshine, breaking on thousands of glass facade panes into a radiant mosaic, finally splashing onto gray streets - a gray-yellow metropolitan sea.

Dark green cap pulled low over my face, I walked eastward for three blocks and turned into a side street. In the distance I saw it - a yellow sign with black lettering at the bottom and a calligraphic character in the center. It was a restaurant, not just any restaurant - the best kebab in the city, at least according to a street artist who painted melancholy, brightly colored, very abstract oil paintings and stacked them to the ceiling in the tiny back room of his studio. He brought his never-ending dreams of fallen tightrope walkers in modern love dramas to canvas. Colorful paint, but in dark gray forms and figures.

After my visit to the "Yellow Sea" a few days ago, I too was convinced that there could be no better place in the city.

Fresh lamb on a spit over special quince wood charcoal from the north of the country, prepared in a semi-covered fire pit made of light, sand-yellow firebricks, is simply unbeatable.

The kitchen with three chefs dressed in black was completely visible through a large glass front on the right side. The three chefs wore black bandanas with a single gossamer-thin yellow line in the center and bustled through the heat of the brick oven in - clearly - coordinated chaos. I stood on the opposite side of the street and now looked through the large window front to the left of the entrance. I gazed into a large room, some twenty tables of dark wood, surrounded by couch-like benches with ocher-colored fabric covers. What was special was that the tables, the seating, the candle holders on the walls and above the guests, like the room and its walls, had no corners. Not a single corner, and the longer I stared in, the more the room began to move. Apparent waves flowed from the light sources across the tables and disappeared into the wooden floor. The room appeared like a yellow-brown sea in gentle wind.

Nearly lost in the yellow sea, I surfaced again and turned my attention to the patterns of the woven, close-fitting, colorful little caps worn by the waiters, who were dressed in khaki shirts reaching almost to the knee, with black pants and shoes. According to my research on the phone during the ride on Line 7, the little caps were called doppa - a traditional head covering of those regions. I recognized one of the waiters. He was on duty as he had been a few days ago and walked with smooth stride, tray full of empty plates and glasses, toward the at least five-meter-long food counter of matte black stone. This counter connected the kitchen directly with the main room, and the faint smell of burnt quince charcoal completed the atmosphere, bringing it near perfection.

Slowly I drew my gaze back from the yellow sea and turned my attention to the entrance door. Seven wavy, horizontal silver stripes on anodized matte gray aluminum, winding upward from the very bottom, ending at different heights with slight flourishes. Without further thought I opened the heavy door and stood in the small entrance area, separated from the main room by a door of frosted glass. The anteroom was lined entirely with dark wood, floor included - only the left wall was ocher-colored clay, and I stared at it. In flowing script, all in black, something was written there in a distant language. On the ride with Line 7 I had fed the photo from my first visit into my phone's translator. It had returned:

On yellow sea in great distress
In a vessel made of sweet wood
The scent of black coal draws through death
And makes us, our ancestors, our children proud

I still stared at the wall and let the calligraphic characters sink deep.

They possessed an intangible elegance, as if painted by the wind.

Seven times I whispered the lines softly to myself, then I turned toward the glass door and went through. He stood before me, nodded briefly, and made a clear hand gesture to follow him. I followed, observing the pattern of his doppa.

At first I thought the woven yellow-white pattern on dark brown background was meant to represent a butterfly, but the wings were not curved. They extended from the head, going outward, straight backward. The shape of both wings seemed more like an inverted heart and not like curved butterfly wings.

I followed him to the back right corner of the room to a small table with two chairs and little incoming light. He pulled back the chair facing the window and took my coat. I sat down and was about to tell the waiter that I would like a white tea with a jujube, as last time, but he was already three meters away at the wardrobe hanging up the coat. I turned my head back toward the kitchen counter and followed with interest the actions of the waiters and chefs in the yellow sea.

Suddenly a voice very near to me:

She: Beautiful to see you at sea again. Long enough has your storm rested.

I turned completely toward the window front and thus toward the person sitting opposite me at the table. Her gentle face barely visible, turned away from every light source, her hair appeared vanilla-yellow in the golden shimmer of the room, and on her folded hands resting on the table, besides long white fingernails, three rings were visible on the right hand and four on the left. I could only fully see the three rings on the right hand. On the middle finger were two thin silver rings that merged into one ring through a tiny golden stone at their center. The ring on the index finger must have been through quite a lot, the bronze ring had much black patina, which made the dragon winding around the finger appear even more mythical. On the ring finger was a simple silver ring with an engraving of flowing characters that I unfortunately could not decipher, no matter how much light would shine on them. I gathered my self and let her sentence resonate within me. Then I answered:

I: I am always at sea, only without storm can I find no one and no one finds me. I follow the flow of my intuition, which streams from its center. What I wonder is why I encounter you here.

She shrugged slightly, the corners of her mouth pulled upward slightly, as did her eyebrows.

She: I believe in you because you gifted me your faith. You let your faith die between us, so that it might sow life within me. Thus I now lead with me your army of the believed-dead. Death is but a shadow of everything that was lived. You will say 'But? But a shadow?!' I say yes. They spring from light and yet have power over their creator. Light's creation paints with them. Shadows are everything we see, everything we are, and yet the light is so much more.

A long pause fell between us. She took two sips from her wine glass before I spoke.

I: The flow of the whole decides when dead faith sows new life in the depths. It is a blessing that you can lead them. You seem to do justice to the thankless task of creating balance. That which I need most in great storms.

Over time I had learned to stop thinking at these meetings, to speak from somewhere else inside me. A place from which we spring, and which turns us into shadows.

She: We will stand by your side. The believed-dead have always stood in life's storm. Like stones on the table, four blocks from here, where the light goes out late.

I had no idea what she was talking about - 'stones on the table...' Yet I sensed - I was where I should be.

I: Beautiful to hear that one is not alone at sea. I follow a melody, do you hear it too?

She: Which melody? I hear only you.

I nodded and she continued.

She: And now to the business part, so that you're well equipped in the storm, even when we're not with you. It will be in the inner pocket. Small, light, a loose iron, if you understand, not very drawn-out, but effective, surely half a dozen, with much luck a whole one. Everything understood, do you need anything else?

First I nodded slightly, then I pushed my outstretched right hand from left to right while lightly shaking my head, to symbolize that everything was understood and nothing more was needed. Then I said:

I: Let us order food and enjoy the yellow sea.

She beckoned a waiter over and answered:

She: Before the storm rises.