From the Gap in Reality that Isn't

I haven’t told Linus everything, but I’ve warned him about a lot of shit he can expect leading those tours out to the hole in reality. He’s well prepared for most days. Which is why when he came back today, confused and kind of frightened, I was a bit surprised. He does manage to keep it somewhat under wraps as he stumbles in, all the way up until he sits down at the bar. His tour group, none the wiser, are talking among themselves about some naked, well endowed man. “What is it?” I ask the guide.

Linus shakes his head and gestures Katie over. “Alcohol,” he says.

Katie chuckles and pours a glass. “You love alcohol. I don’t think it’d ever have you this spooked.”

“She’s got a point, Lie,” I pile on.

Linus takes a big gulp. “So, remember how you were talking about how it isn’t actually a hole, but a gap where nothing exists? I think you might’ve been wrong.”

I furrow my brow. I definitely wasn’t wrong. After all, I may not have been one of the idiots who put it together, but we all talked through what that cycle was going to do to the place. Seeing as no one else was far enough away to make it out before it went boom, I probably know the Nothing that was once New Orleans best of anyone still alive. “Why do you say that?” I ask. I can’t disguise the concern in my voice.

Linus takes another drink. “We kinda saw something weird. I think they all think it’s part of our tour, which is fine, better not worry them too much. But if it isn’t a hole, how the hell did some naked guy fall out of it?”

“Alive or dead?” I ask instinctively, my mind thinking back to the files. Anything that might help figure out what’s going on.

“How should I know? He wasn’t really moving, and I wasn’t about to touch something that fell out of nothing. He’s probably got all sorta shit emanating off of him, right?”

I bite my lip. That’s impossible. But so is someone appearing out of the nothingness. It’s not a space or some kind of hole, after all. It’s a lack of space, a feeling where things once were and space once separated the near from the far but aren’t and doesn’t anymore. I look around for Petra, but she’s not back from Houston quite yet. Looking at Katie, I sigh. “Should I just spiral or go and look at this impossible corpse?”

“Might not be a corpse,” Katie points out, “And if it’s alive, that’d be a paying customer unlike some people.” She looks pointedly at Linus, still drinking heavily.

I chuckle. She makes a good point. If whoever or whatever shouldn’t exist is alive, that would give me an opportunity to get more answers. Maybe. Assume he can answer. I turn to Linus. “Can you get me to this mysterious naked man?” I ask.

Linus takes another drink. “Sure, I guess.” He then turns to Katie. “But I’m taking this to go.” He leans in, and with a smirk, adds jokingly, “And not paying for it.”

I shake my head at the idiot. “Come on. It might actually be important,” I tell my friend and business partner. Slowly he gets up and leads me out of our little inn.

He doesn’t do the tour. Not for me. I helped him write the dang thing, after all. Made sure the interesting things were brought up, but the things that ought not to be were left as secrets of the past. He leads me straight to the body. Down the road and around the Lake, right up to the strange distortion. The missing space which was once a city.

Looking out at the wreckage we caused, the wreckage no one can see anymore, I can’t help but wonder about things we used to have but don’t work anymore. Specifically, those satellites that take pictures of the ground. Because the gap would be fascinating to look at on one of those images. See, looking across it from the ground level, the gap isn’t anything. It’s not even a gap. Not apparently, at least. It’s a distortion. All points of the ground that should by all accounts be miles away, look to be right up close. Ground not actually being flat makes the distortion more than visible. Not just that it’s uncomfortable to look at, but looking across the gap at ground level shows a ridge where two different elevations exist in the same place at the same time. And trying to make sense of it only makes it make less sense. It’s roughly a massive circle that’s been contracted to an infinitesimally small point, but that point exists everywhere along the massive circle.

Shaking my head, I look away from the gap in reality. Down at the real. The ground. There is, in fact, a naked man lying there. Well built and posed on the ground as though he trust-fell of the nonexistent space between this point and the other side of the gap. But no one caught him, only the hard dirt. Approaching the body, I had to assume some kind of trick, a prank played on me, because again there is nothing there. Then I see the man’s face and it all makes sense. It’s familiar. It looks like Jean-Paul. J-P was a lot of things. And they all were nonsensical. Of course he could fall out from nothingness into somethingness. I kneel down to get on his level and check his breath. Shallow and slow, but there. Concerning, but not as concerning as it being absent. Not entirely sure what it being absent would mean for the universe at large.

You see, according to his own teachings, and some of the Light’s more restricted records, J-P doesn’t really exist like me or anyone else I know. He doesn’t really live in the here and now. He wanders, just like the rest of us. But where we, being mostly human, were trapped wandering the world and moving always down the river with its flow, he didn’t have that restriction. Doesn’t, I suppose. He is more of a bird. Flitting from the river to the sky and back again. Landing at different areas of the water’s path depending on chance, his mood, and of course where the most interesting fish happen to be.

Why this is, I don’t know for sure. J-P claims to be a demigod of some kind, but he’s tightlipped about his past and very good at lying. The archives posit him as some kind of unique child cursed by a demon to exist without living. I heard one of his immortal frenemies argue he’s just a normal person who got lost, and once lost, could never find their way back to normal. Which would explain the constant wandering. My favorite possibility is the joke Jim made. Jim always explained away J-P by saying, ‘See, I think he’s just a story. Nothing about him is true, but none of it is false either. And he just flits about wherever and whenever the world needs a good story to get it through the here and now.’ I suspect none of the answers I’ve found or been given are really the whole truth, but it’s more than that. Most tall tales are at least founded in some element of a true thing. Where J-P is concerned, I’m not sure if any of them even hold kernels of it.

“You good there?” Linus asks from behind me. I realize I’ve been kneeling over the body for a good few minutes at this point. “Is he dead?”

I stand up and shake my head. “Not so lucky. He’s breathing.”

“Told you that hole leads to somewhere,” Linus states, proud of himself.

Once again, I shake my head. “I don’t think that’s the case.” I turn to face my new business partner. “At least, not entirely. Not right now.”

“If not now then when?” Linus pushes back. He’s right. To someone that doesn’t know J-P, it’d sound like nonsense.

I look at Linus and sigh. “This is an old friend. One of those old friends I was in the city with when everything happened.”

“Wait, I have so many questions: was he naked when you guys were fighting those gods? Are you saying he was somehow thrown here from the explosion? Should I be expecting the rest of your naked friends to come through here soon enough?”

I sit down. “No, not really, and probably not. Jean-Paul is not really... Well, that’s not important. The real question is why now.”

“Why now?”

“Him falling here is ill tidings.”

Linus approaches me. “So when you say friend, you don’t really mean friend.”

“What?” I spit out suddenly, then immediately compose myself. “No, it’s not... Well… It’s just. We were good friends, he taught me much of what I know, what I believe. But it’s like well, he generally enters to prepare the world for coming chaoses. At least that’s what he always told me.” I lie. That’s what I interpret from his statements and the files. Because J-P talks in circles to say nothing using every word he knows in a way that helps you understand everything else better. And, as mentioned, the files posit him the remnants of a cursed child. But the timings of his appearances, both brief and lengthy, always seemed significant to me. Especially when the world started to end in this lifetime. What terrible thing could be coming that he’d need to train a new set of wanderers? I stretch my back and arms. “Come, help me bring him back to the inn.

“Touching you’re weird ominous friend isn’t going to kill me or anything, right?” Linus asked, probably mostly joking, as he, too, did some stretching.

I shrug. “Probably not?” I joke right back as I crouch down by my unconscious friend’s shoulders, “A grumpy me, on the other hand…”

Linus laughs as he goes to lift up J-P by the ankles. Together we slowly carry him back around the lake and up the road to the inn. Linus, being the one facing ahead of us, notices the people still in the dining and drinking area. “Back door?” he half-whispers to me.

I nod. Linus is right, the fewer people know J-P is back, the better. Because while anyone who was in the city probably died, there were a lot more people out there that knew Jean-Paul. More than those who knew any of the rest of us. And some of them are old enough and have seen enough that they might hold the same theory I do about his appearances. And those, while not any of the people at the bar, are the sort to hear any and all rumors that interest them. As quick as a pair of not-particularly-muscular people can carry a two hundred and change pound body around a building, we rush J-P to the rear entrance.

As we slide inside the back door, he asks, “So what now? We going to comp him a room or something? At least until he wakes up and realizes he doesn’t have any money.”

I shake my head. “We can’t afford that. Go, make the guests happy I got it from here.” I start to slide the section of wall away to reveal the basement door.

“Smart. Jeep should be pretty comfy for him, and you can keep an eye on him from that desk of yours that we all assume you’ve got down there,” Randy says as I move the wall away.

“The guests,” I remind him.

“Right,” he says, carefully putting J-P’s ankles back onto the floor then hurrying off to the bar area where his tour group is undoubtedly excitedly chattering away. I unlock the basement door with one hand, using my shoulder to support my friend and mentor’s weight. Then, even more slowly than the walk to the inn, I half-carry, half-drag his unconscious body down the stairs. In the basement, I lay him down on my cot. Making my way back up the stairs, I slide the wall section back into place, then close the door, but I don’t lock it.

“So,” I say, mostly to myself, as I walk back down the stairs. “Why are you here? And why now?” I sit down at my desk. I can’t even focus on my notes. The questions just stick in my mind. As does one other. Something Linus brought up. I survived. J-P survived. Who else could have made it out of New Orleans still existing that day? And, more importantly than that, what else?