October 23, 2027
Jacob lay curled in a fetal position, muttering indistinguishable words and low moans as he turned. The single sheet on his cot knotted about him as his hands grasped and clutched. Deep within his mind, memories and visions swarmed in to batter him.
He was there again… in the dream. Helplessly being pulled down a path he knew all too well and no matter how hard he fought or struggled he knew it would end the same. It would take him to somewhere in his past and end where his dark and burgeoning fate he been set. The fate he would do anything to escape.
The nightmare and torture would begin soon, but not before visions of his wasted opportunities and failures would be dangled before him. Reminders of his culpability, his responsibilities… and his guilt. He could already see it happening. A point of pain in his past. A moment of heartache meant to serve as a doorway was coming. Working its way to the surface.
He watched helplessly as his childhood flashed by. The confused and astonished looks adults would give him when he asked questions they couldn’t answer... questions that had never occurred to them. He overheard his minister telling his parents that he was gifted. He saw himself and his brother Aaron fighting back to back behind the school. Four older boys were maneuvering to box them in. Then he saw the look of panic on his mother’s face when they had stumbled home, bloody and bruised. Then time blurred, and he found himself sitting quietly in the back of his father’s truck while the man spoke with a Martial Arts instructor a few towns over. Time swept forward again, and he felt his father’s firm handshake on the day he had earned his black belt. The first touches of manhood spreading over his heart as they shook… a strange mixture of self-respect, excitement, and loneliness.
Then High School came, and with it a fascination with girls, Bible study, history, and mathematics. He saw his brother winning his first martial arts tournament. He felt the ravenous hunger of his intellect and skipped classes to study his interests and still making perfect marks. Then he was running track, competing on the school wrestling team, and stepping in the way of every bully he could find. The bruises he and his brother had received from that first fight had faded, but intolerance for senseless aggression had taken their place. Then it was the dusk of a late autumn day, and he wept as he dug a small backyard grave for the beagle who had been his best friend. He watched the tears of his younger self as the door to innocence closed.
He stood paralyzed with the rest of the world, and watched as a mushroom cloud foiled up on his family’s TV. The city of Mecca vaporized in an instant of radioactive revenge. He saw the furrow of worry that crossed his father’s brow whenever there was news about the Middle East.
Then he was looking at the confusion and fear on the face of his Advanced Physics teacher as she looked over his latest theories. Wonder and excitement blossomed in him as the intricate, irrefutable, and interdependent connections between religion, history, and physics revealed themselves. He watched as his room filled with the weight of enough notebooks, papers, and books to permanently warp the floorboards.
He recalled how he had confounded and infuriated his teachers with impossible questions, and somehow remained oblivious to the hopeful looks that many girls cast at him from under dark lashes. He blushed, remembering when Theresa Vallard, a girl whose plump lips had filled the fantasies of many of his classmates, pulled him under the bleachers and French-kissed him. He blushed even more when he thought of their Prom night together.
Later, acceptance letters and scholarship offers streamed in, with Harvard, Yale, and MIT among them. He remembered the horrible guilt he had felt explaining to his parents that he wanted to go to Divinity School instead. Then he remembered the day that his brother had revealed to the family that he had joined the Army. Admiration and confusion had flooded him over his choice to help fight the new Caliphate Alliance.
He relived the silent ride when his father drove him to Divinity School. He recalled the tearing and confusion he had felt in himself as he waved goodbye. Then with a final look back at his father’s receding truck, he had turned and walked away. It had been a simple and innocuous movement, but it was the one that had turned him away from any hope of a normal life. Instead, he had eaten alone in the corner of a diner while he wrote a letter his parents. He felt the rain that had come down in sheets while he sat there. He remembered how long he had wrestled with his conscience.
Then with a jarring yank, the memories pulled him roughly from his role of observing these experiences and into the reality of their consequences. With a shove they slammed him into his first mistake, his first failure. The moment his foot was set upon this path… the path that had led to his damnation. The path to hell. It all felt as real as when it happened eight years earlier, but strangely hollow. Standing in the shoes of his younger, and more naive self filled him with mourning.
Then he was under the tree in front of Estes Chapel, shivering in the predawn light. Rivulets of water were running down the stately columns and red bricking. The olive green canvas pack over his shoulder held the new workslate his parent’s had bought him. The latest device to merge tablet, laptop, phone, and other technologies together. An extravagant gift for a family of their means. He felt guilty about how much it must have cost them, but he was still glad he had it. The foldable, glassy, palm sized powerhouse would be invaluable for the work he was about to undertake. So he had packed it carefully among his clothes, basic hygiene necessities, and three favorite books. He had debated on scanning the books into the slate to save space, but in the end couldn’t bring himself to do it. There was just something about holding them in his hands that he couldn’t give up.
The first one, his father’s heavy leather bound copy of the NIV Bible, was barely held together by a motley assortment of tape, staples, and rubber bands. Its struggle to retain some semblance of integrity wasn’t helped by the scraps of paper, post-it notes, maps, and sketches stuffed into it. As a result, the volume looked more like the research tome of some eccentric biblical archaeologist than the possession of a seventeen-year-old boy.
The second book, an equally worn and abused “Apocrypha, The Deuterocanonical Old Testament”, had the misfortune of being a paperback edition, and so had given up all attempts at staying in one piece. Absurdly, this maimed volume appeared to have even more notes and pages crammed into its pregnant and duct-taped form than the leather Bible.
The final tome was also a paperback, but this one was titled “The Quantum Conundrum” by Frederick DuPrie Ph.D., and appeared to have only begun its journey towards abusive disintegration at the hands of its owner.
Jacob could feel cold dollops of rain dripping through his hair and streaming unwelcome into his collar. His flannel work shirt clung wetly to him, revealing a profile built through years of hard work. The same was true for the jeans that adhered to his legs. His waist, although not narrow, was compact and cinched by a wide leather belt. Only his feet were still warm, safely encased in wool socks and the gortex boots he purchased the previous day.
For a moment he considered pulling the scuffed black leather jacket in his pack out, but decided to let it be. What was the point? He was already soaked to the bone and more or less water wasn’t going to make any difference. The sun was coming up anyway, and soon some dedicated man of the cloth or a zealous student would notice him if he wasn’t on his way. So he stepped back into the shadow of the elm, hoping it could shield him from discovery a little longer.
Then he heard it, the hiss and squeal of air brakes as a school bus pulled up behind him. The bus filled with missionaries headed for the Sinai Peninsula. So, with a last longing look at the chapel he turned and walked away. The bus doors slapped open and he pulled his workslate from his pack as he boarded. Once in his seat he turned it on and pensively contemplated the letter to his parents. He knew the effect it would have on them, but he also knew there wasn’t anything for him at Divinity School, or any other school for that matter. The answers he sought could only be found where their mysteries had begun. So he thumbed the “SEND” button and closed his eyes.
There was no going back now.
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