Ah My Goddess Fan Fiction ❯ Trial By Tenderness ❯ Part 22 - Soulbound ( Chapter 22 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Part 22 Soulbound



My return flight landed early in the morning on a rainy Monday in Beijing. The sky was roofed with a bleak castmetal gray; clothing the city in even more grit than usual. The roads were rimmed with rainwater pooling alongside the curbs as I rode the crowded bus into the city from Capital Airport. The dreariness of the weather suited my mood...it resonated with the gnawing sense of apprehension I was feeling inside. I had been unable to sleep during the six hours of the flight from Dunhuang. My body was definitely feeling strange.
When I first came to Japan, I noticed telltale signs that my proprioception was awry. Now, it was happening again. I couldn't sense any muscular 'feedback' when I moved; thus, I was constantly bumping into things. Also, fatigue had set in and my eyesight occasionally blurred. It was a softer version of the physical abnormalities I endured when Urd had first brought me to Japan. But those were the result of being transported through a TV. I was unclued as to why I was feeling this way now. Oddly, the inside of the bus looked almost psychedelic rather than urban-worn.
BeiDa was being pelted by a humid rain when I stepped off the bus with my luggage. I waited under a tree until the downpour subsided and then walked to Shao Yuan, the dorm I was staying at. I was gravely concerned that the downpour and humidity may have damaged the papers I had brought with me from the cave, even though I had placed them in waterproof containers. When I got to my room, I pulled them out of the storage cylinders and inspected them for any water damage. I breathed a big sigh of relief; they were all as dry as when I left Dunhuang. Then I called Dr. Zhao to inform him of my return. Filled with nervous anxiety, I decided to drop my 'bombshell' on him.
"Dr. Zhao, I need you to set aside some time this evening so I can show you a discovery I encountered in Dunhuang. It's really important," I requested with nerve-drenched deference.
"What do you mean, important? Dunhuang is one of the most heavily catalogued historical sites in China! What new discovery could you have possibly found there? I need some kind of justification to rearrange my schedule on such short notice!" the authoritive voice on the phone crackled.
""Please? On my honor as one bound to academic ethics...it'll be worth it. I'll show you. Meet me in the Philosophy lecture hall at 7pm this evening. And if you could, I want you to bring a couple of experts on archaic classical Chinese."
"What is the meaning of this? You want me to tie up *my* evening...and then you ask for me to involve two other scholars whose time is as precious as mine? This had better be important, Cevn-shih!" he groused.
Good old Dr. Zhao. Behind his academician's gruff pretense was a heart of gold. By staking my scholarly honor upon my request, I had basically insisted that he come...and he had recognized this. This was almost the Japanese equivalent of accompanying a request with a saikeirei or holding a deep bow until an answer is given. I knew that he would on the phone to the two top scholars of classical Chinese at BeiDa, convincing them to come. I hoped that they did, because they're going to have the time of their lives if they show up.
Otherwise, I'm going to be the laughingstock of BeiDa's intelligentsia for at least this semester.

* * * * * * * *

After the last class shuffled out of the lecture hall at 5pm, I entered the classroom armed with tape, string and the easel papers from the cave. I was going to create a mockup of the interior of the antechamber by taping the sheets to the walls, right here in the classroom. There were a few student looker-ons whose curiosity was stirred by this longhaired foreign student who was hanging up papers all over the classroom.
"It must appear to them like I'm preparing the room for a party," I observed. Then I recognized one of the faces. She walked in and sat down on one of the desks.
"Hi, Lin!" I hailed, glad to see a familiar face. She was dressed in a denim jacket with a red blouse embroidered with floral stitchwork; her hair was braided into twin ponytails piled in buns on the side of her head in the classical Chinese feminine fashion. She looked girlish and innocent; as if she was too young to be a graduate student with her hair styled thus. Lin definitely didn't need to wear makeup; her auburn-toned face possessed a timeless beauty and charm resembling that of the actress Gong Li.
"What are you doing, Cevn? It looks like you're going to have a party here, but I don't see any refreshments...and that stuff you're hanging up certainly doesn't look like good luck posters. In fact, I think they look like rubbings from some kind of steles."
"You're perspicacious as usual, Lin. You're going to make a fine economic theorist...and probably a few million RMB as well," I complimented. She giggled at my praise as she picked up one of the sheets off a desk and examined it.
"What *is* this?" she asked, a bright star amidst a rainy evening. I began to narrate to her the tale of my discovery at Dunhuang. Looking at me with incredulity, she quickly thrust down the paper she was holding, suddenly afraid that she might damage it. I assured her that I trusted her with handling the papers...and then I asked her to help me post them up. She looked at me with a reserved air, but agreed. It seemed that she was either feeling pretty intimidated by what I had told her...or she thought I was about ready to pull an exemplary academic fraud.
Lost languages. A chamber secreted within one of the Dunhuang caves. Statues of goddesses and painted devas. A new myth...that the future was going to hyperspace into the past. A symbiosis of nostalgia and paleolithia; a complete antithesis to the information age...within a concrescent archaic revival.
As I watched her put up the papers, I tried to imagine what she was thinking. Her reaction would be echoed in a greater context by the dissertation committee. This discovery would really throw a pipewrench in the orthodox belief that Ruism was the fundamental and predominant influence on China's early intellectual history. "Ruism", as Dr. Zhao stressed, was the proper term the teachings of Kung Fu Tzu.
Actually, these documents may prove that China's history extends much further back than the Hsia Dynasty. This finding would please more than a few historians who argued that China should have pride of place as the world's oldest extant civilization. The only challengers to that claim were the Egyptologists, who claimed that Egyptian civilization dated back to 4241 BCE according to Breasted, or that it began with the First Dynasty in 3188 BCE as later scholars believed. I knew that both civilizations were an offshoot of the Paludorians, who were forced into a diaspora by fierce barbarian invasions and natural disasters in the 7th Millennia BCE.
I had translated their language on panel 7 of the antechamber. My metallect had informed me as to the date of the construction of the Paludorian languages. These languages were the mythical pre-Aryan civilizations often referred to by the classical Indian texts, albeit in a corrupted etymological form.
"How does one cloth the uninteresting with the vibrancy?" I thought with concern. To the software guru aspiring to be a millionaire...these finds would mean nothing; they would hold his or her attention for as long as it took to read the one-paragraph blip in the newspaper. This dissertation...it was everything but important. Could I find an audience, other than the intellectuals who would dissect it?
"What did you say the name of the place was...the place where you found these?" Lin asked, pulling me out of my reverie.
"Dunhuang."
"No, you silly goof! I *know* that!" she said with a scowl, and then shot a rubber band at my chest. I was embarrassed at my gaffe. "What I meant was, what are you going to call the antechamber where you found all the ancient languages?" she clarified.
I had never thought about that. I had been so wrapped up in trying to deal with the sheer gravity of my discovery...that I had neglected giving the 'Goddess Chamber' a name.
"Cave 948" wouldn't do.
I looked outside of the window, noticing that the rain clouds were underlit by the setting sun. The explosion of colors in the sky reminded me of the sunrises I used to enjoy as a child. I would get up really early and sneak out of the house, just for the experience of seeing the sun arise over the horizon. On rainy days, the whole sky would glow with a spectacular spectrum of colors. The sky looked like God's own watercolor finger painting.
The dawning of mankind's civilization was displayed in those caves. Ad reductio sensible...Civilization is nonexistent until there is a developed language or literature to record it. I already recognized that the panels in the caves were organized like an encyclopedia of sorts. The concepts in each panel were grouped in an orderly fashion: numerations, animal names, terms of emotion, designations for family members, geological features, etc. I looked out the classroom window again to see the twilight sky fading.
"I think I'm going to call it 'The Encyclopedia of Dawn', Lin. What do you think?" I asked.
"That's a beautiful, hopeful name. I was hoping you weren't going to call it the 'Chinese Rosetta Stone' or something like that," she teased in English. I made a face at her.
Lin was really such a nice Chinese woman. I was well aware that women in China were generally much more polite and cheerful than their American counterparts; in fact, they were more akin to their Japanese sisters in deportment and demeanor. Being near Lin was pleasant...I didn't feel haunted by the distrust, paranoia or self-disgust that I normally felt during a social situation with a woman. Almost all the time, I would be gripped by the all-too-familiar crushing emotional sickness, the aftermath of the sexual trauma that I had lived through. It was an instinct, in the sense that animals are instinctively disturbed by fire.
But not around Lin. There just wasn't any reason to feel all weird around her. Once more, I mentally studied the possible causes of this...how my emotional pain seemed to subside inconsonantly. Was it due to something going on inside of me, or was it the result of my environment or the people around me? I looked at the room, now half-filled with hanging papers.
The Encyclopedia of Dawn.

* * * * * * * *

Urd had taken to the streets, wandering aimlessly in the rain without an umbrella. Soaked to the bone, she felt miserable and alone. The sea of anonymous faces deepened her depression and loneliness...it was amazing how she could be in the midst of the hustle and bustle of urban Beijing...and yet feel so empty inside.
Including the very real scale of the Multiverse, which possessed a quintillion times more sentient beings than there were atoms in the Milky Way galaxy and its nearest 14 million neighboring stellar aggregates.
*That* awareness only served to overwhelm her with a geometric sense of isolation; there was no one to hear the winterbare ruined choir of her memories.
Urd knew that she could wander into a bar and drain every bottle of booze in the place...and that wouldn't change a thing. Urd thought about Belldandy and Skuld...how much she must have disappointed them over the millennia. She thought about Cevn, the only person in the city that knew her at all. Yet he didn't know her...and he never could know her.
Urd waxed invidious towards her younger sisters. Skuld had a future that promised her romance, even though she vociferously denied it. Urd knew the look on Sentaro's face last year. And now, Tomohisa was nurturing a preludial romantic inclination towards Skuld. Then there was Belldandy, who had the comfort of her mortal boyfriend Keiichi to keep her from feeling alone. Urd felt bittersweet as she remembered all the times she tried to get those two in bed together. They had such a wonderful life ahead of them.
"Everybody but me! Not Urd!" she said to herself angrily, her mood becoming more depressed.
"Great! Now I'm starting to sound like Skuld!" she harped with personal irritation. Urd wandered into a drinkery and ordered a bottle of jiu. Resting her elbows on the bar, she cupped her hands under her chin and closed her eyes, trying to remember the good times.
With her powers intact, she could easily move mountains. She could call down thunder and lighting that would obliterate Earth's largest cities; she was almost as adept as Thoor in mastering the Earthrealm's random atmospheric electrical energies.
"It takes a lot of calculations to force a lightning bolt to strike *just right*!" she told the barkeep, who looked at her like she was crazy. Urd knew that she could even break her seal...and then move entire planets if she wished. Her magical powers were much greater than Belldandy's, based in part on the fact that she was 25,000 years older. Urd relied almost exclusively upon her magical and arcanical skills...these were parcel to her lifestyle. But with all the power at her command, she couldn't move the most immovable object of all. The human heart.
She cursed Cevn.
"Asshole! Why couldn't he have wished for me like Keiichi wished for Belldandy? Maybe then, things would be different. Why couldn't he have wished that *I* find someone to love? Instead, he makes his senseless wish...and then runs away from me in my time of need," she stole with a yell. Urd felt her anger fold inward as she realized that she had created her own desolation. There was no way she could face either of her sisters after all that had been done.
"They must hate me for leaving them...they must feel that I'm so terrible...they couldn't possibly love me anymore," she thought.
She felt immobilized by the wounding of her heart. Shipwrecked in the middle of the sea of potentials. Leaving a half-empty bottle on the bar, she walked back out into the rain.
"I *deserve* to be alone!" she said as her tears were washed into anonymity by the rain spattering her face. Urd kicked at a large puddle of muddy rainwater, watching it spray outwards onto the street.

* * * * * * * *

"Whoa! How could a simple ward do *that*?" Mara wondered, amazed at the holoimage on the wall. Ever since her Demon comrades in Vanagdrasil had placed a warding spell on Urd, the Eldest Norn's spirits had spiraled down into a deep malaise. Mara was pleased to see Urd suffer so much, but she was also deeply discontented...because Urd's suffering was so *accidental*.
"It would have been so much better if *I* had been the one to cause her this much grief!" she said, focusing her regret on herself.
Mara also regretted the fact that Urd's two other sisters were not present as witnesses to Urd's current state of melancholy. It would have been much more pleasurable if Belldandy and Skuld could experience Urd's misery as direct observers. Empathy was a powerful tool for increasing the overall amount of grief inducement.
She ran a bonecomb through her long brown-blonde curly locks as she reviewed the holotape her DGO coworkers had sent her. It showed Urd walking aimlessly in a street, her clothes unkempt and her head hanging down low.
"What could drive her to feel this dejected? Wouldn't it be great if I could distill and bottle it! Misery in a Bottle, bwah haahaa!" she shouted cheerfully.
"But really...if I could learn the cause of her spiritlessnesss, then I would be able to *use* it...to make the others feel as bad as Urd feels now!" Mara wondered aloud. She sensed that Belldandy and Keiichi had returned to their home, so she sent a Sere-Hawk on a spying mission to see what was happening at that front.

* * * * * * * *

Dr. Zhao arrived promptly at 7pm accompanied by two aged professors of ancient Chinese. He introduced them to myself and Lin, who had decided to stay and observe what would happen. It seemed that she had some reservations about what I had told her about the contents of the papers, so she wanted to hang out and offer me some moral support.
"All right, we came at your request. This is Dr. Chen and this is Dr. Yao. They are BeiDa's foremost experts on all aspects of the Chinese language...they are respected throughout China as leaders in the field of linguistic sciences," he introduced as I bowed politely to them.
"Now tell me and these two good doctors what this is all about," Dr. Zhao requested. Behind his back, both of the linguistic professors suddenly made a beeline over to the proto-Chinese section of hanging papers and began to gesture and point animatedly. Dr. Zhao looked at their sudden burst of interest and knitted his brows with a keen expression.
"This...this is *incredible*!" Dr. Chen said in a loud voice. "Yes! Here and here...and *here*!" Dr. Yao added, pointing at several sets of characters. "These characters match the earliest known Chinese, predating the Shang dynasty!"
"Definitely. They resemble the archaisms found carved into the excavated divination plastrons and scapulas. The archeologists have only found 43 known words in the 2002 digs; they're all represented here!"
"Yes...but there are *thousands* of characters here!" Dr. Chen, barely containing his excitement. I thought this might be an appropriate interlude to explain things to Dr. Zhao...but Dr. Chen broke in and provided an explanation for me.
"Dr. Zhao, if these transcriptions...are an authenticatable set of early Chinese characters, then what we are looking at....is a find of the first import!"
Lin looked at me with an unreadable expression that suggested deep surprise or disbelief. I winked at her and smiled, and then I addressed all three professors.
"Yes, this set of papers are the transcribed record of proto-Chinese taken from a cave I explored in Dunhuang. But that is only the beginning...there are *nine sets* of papers here, each representing an early civilization!" I explained as I compassed the room, filled with excitement as I gestured towards each set of papers.
"This set of papers were transcribed from a panel whose content is pre-Linear B, possessing attributes of Class A and B. The one next to this is an previously unknown language which relies on phonic rhyming sequences to create words. These next series of illustrations are pre-lingual, dating back 45,000 years. They were developed by Cro-Magnon man. This next set is from another lost language whose phonemic tag is Paludorian...the predecessor of Chinese and Egyptian. The next set is the early language of the Kurgans, a culture that flourished in the Urals 9000 years ago. This next panel has proto-Olmec hieroglyphic symbols which flourished in the 11th millennia BCE...and are also duplicated in pre-Anatolian Turkish. It's call Gokjash..."
As I continued, Dr. Zhao looked at me with a dubious expression...as if I had gone insane.
"Dr Zhao, there is a archeolinguistic principle, which I would term 'natura non facit saltum quin contra specula' in Latin. This phrase corresponds to the notion that the apparent discontinuity of history *cannot* to be considered as a definite continuity; in fact, upon speculation, the opposite is true. Too many researchers expect anomalous gaps to be explained within the framework of constants...because they're unwilling to risk transcending the paradigms. Yet, this model of morphologic explanation disallows several important considerations. For example, in each linguistic lineage, a large number of local dialects come down to us as extant or readily deciphered, while the languages of major cultures with a wide geocultural extent such as Sumerian and other Turanian languages, became extinct and remain lost. Recidivistic amalgamation and diasporic diffusion do not fully account for this phenomena..." I started to explain, trying to justify the potential for lost 'pockets' of history predominated by a fundamental language. Dr. Yao looked at me with a grave countenance, while Dr. Chen was still studying the proto-Chinese section with scholarly enthusiasm.
"Yes...it is possible. And he does have a point. There is a marked similarity between what is on this set of papers and what archeolinguists have conjectured as one possible structure of pre-Linear B," Dr. Yao confirmed.
"And this! This bears a resemblance to..."
At this point, the two linguists were discussing between themselves, leaving Dr. Zhao and I out of their conversation. It was so ironic...I knew the translation of every word in the room, but it took the authoritative voice of the renowned linguistics professors to confirm to Dr. Zhao that this was a bona fide discovery. With a dawning apprehension, I realized the this process would probably repeat itself during my dissertation defense...
"Do you realize what this means? It'll take years just to translate all of this..." Dr. Yao finished.
"Uh... with all due respect. Learned professors...I *have* translated all of this. Every figure, hieroglyph, pictogram and scratch/numeral. All of it. You've probably noticed translations noted in Chinese and English on the papers in the margins of the etchings. Further, the entire set of nine languages are organized within conceptual sets, in order to provide continuity. In other words, they were deliberately *integrated* within comprehensible contexts."
Dr. Zhao looked at me with a funny expression, then said that he would try and find another linguist for my dissertation committee. He called to the other professors who were busy inspecting each of the nine sets of papers filled with early language. Reluctantly, they left with him.
Lin, who had been present during the whole meeting, looked at me with a curious smile.
"I have never seen...I have *never* seen a professor from this university act so excited. Those two professors were almost ready to jump out of their Mao suits," she quipped. I laughed at her joke...it was a common catchphrase among the students when referring to the 'old guard' of elderly professors. Lin looked at me with an expression of respect.
"I'm not going to miss your dissertation defense for anything in the world, Cevn! With the exception of my classes, of course..." she said before excusing herself, leaving me alone in the lecture hall. I almost fell to my knees with relief...the two elderly savants seemed inclined to consider this discovery as genuine.

* * * * * * * *

Sora loitered in front of the Castleland Shopping Center in Shibuya, looking though the gaps in the bustling crowd for Megumi. She had really missed the company of her best friend in the past few weeks. On one hand, Sora felt genuinely happy that Megumi had finally gotten together with Genji. On the other hand, she'd been hearing "Genji this, Genji that" from Megumi for the past several months.
But there was a downside as well; Megumi didn't have the same liberty as before to hang out with Sora. Sora knew that Megumi was doing the kind of thing that a girl does when she first hooks up with the guy she likes. Nevertheless, Sora was *slightly* resentful at the fact that she and Megumi had been spending most of their time on the phone rather than hanging out. She planned to dispense an appropriate amount of teasing today to vent some of her resentment.
"Hi Sora!" Megumi called out as she waved to her friend.
"Hi Megumi!"
The two coeds hugged in the middle of the busy entrance to the mall, then walked inside. Sound and lights flashed all around them as they were caught up in the kinetic aura of the mall. Castleland was ten stories of intense shopping pleasure, six floors above and four underground.
"Hey, how's things with you and Genji?" Sora asked.
Megumi looked at her and made an exaggerated dreamy face, rolling her eyes and sighing.
"Well, things are going really great with us. I'm *so* in love with him!"
"Hmmm, so when is the 'happy event' going to happen?" Sora teased.
"*SORA*!" Megumi shouted in mock indignation. "What kind of girl do you think I am?"
"Well, the kind of girl that gets so wrapped up in her new boyfriend that she forgets about everything else...including her best friend!" Sora replied directly. Megumi looked at Sora and realized that she *had* been cozying too much at home lately. She knew that she had it coming, so she offered an apology.
"Oh Sora, I'm sorry. But you know how it is..."
"I wish I did. I'm still waiting to hook my fish..." Sora said, suddenly serious. Both girls were quiet for a moment. Megumi mentally berated Aoshima for being so fickle. The boy *knew* that Sora liked him, but he wasn't man enough to tell her either way...to tell her if he liked her or not.
Sora and Megumi had come prepared to do some mondo major shopping. After all, summer break would be ending in a couple of weeks and they both needed to shop for fall and winter outfits. Megumi envied Sora; she had the best of both worlds. Megumi had to rely on the carefully-budgeted allowance that her parents doled her every month; while Sora worked at her parent's ramen shop and made a bundle. Of course, Sora didn't have to pay any taxes, because her folks always paid her in cash. So she had plenty of yen to blow on clothes and stuff.
The next few hours were a whirlwind of shopping. Megumi had sprang for a nice long winter jacket, while Sora had bought three fall outfits and a skiing outfit. Then they hit the accessory store and bought a variety of belts, earrings and clip-ons. Finally, Sora tugged Megumi into buying a nice evening dress.
"After all, you have a boyfriend now," she argued. Armed with a variety of bagged goodies, they decided to lunch at a okonomiyaki kiosk in the food court.
Megumi had a gnawing suspicion that something was amiss today. While they were shopping, she noticed that she had caught the eyes of *too* many men. Or was it Sora? Sora was dressed in a mini-skirt with a midriff-baring sleeveless shorttop T-shirt.
"That's pretty brave for her to be wearing," Megumi noted. They piled their shopping bags into the booth, then climbed in.
A young high school-aged waiter soon came over and gave them menus. Megumi noticed that he was gawking at her. He seemed reluctant to go away to attend his other customers.
"Hey Megumi, what's up with that kid? He was staring at you like you're some kind of idol star or something," Sora said quietly.
"He's probably just one of those poor hormone-driven high school guys," she replied with a giggle. A moment later he returned to take their orders. Megumi ordered her okonomiyaki. The waiter asked her again for her order. After the third time, Megumi scowled at him and pointed towards Sora.
"Hey, if you value your job, quit ignoring my friend here!"
"What is the matter with you? Can't you listen!? She had to repeat her order *three* times already. And you still haven't let me tell you what I want!" Sora chewed him out. The waiter took Sora's order and hustled off, seemingly embarrassed. Megumi could only shake her head in disdain.
"Hey, any news about you and Mr. Smarmy? Any news?" she asked excitedly. Sora reacted by looked down at the table with a sad expression.
"No. I ran into him two weeks ago and invited him to picnic in the park with me so we could talk about our sophomore classes. I spent all morning cooking a special sawachi-bento for him...I really loaded it with the good stuff! Beef, braised tako, lychees and strawberries. After eating it, he started pumping me for inside information about the Motor Club. Sigh...it was obvious that he wasn't interested in much else."
Megumi felt condolent towards Sora. The girl definitely had been dealt a bad hand by genetics. She was a college sophomore with the body of a high school freshman. Most guys wouldn't notice her pixie-like face with its delicate lines and freckles. Sora was really beautiful in her own way. Like an elf or kodama. Megumi often thought that Sora was Tinkerbell in disguise. But someone like Aoshima Toshiyuki...he was attracted by brash, voluptuous women with a 'flash' sense of fashion, kinda like Genji's sister Sayoko. Sora was too down-to-earth. The tragic truth was, Sora was one of the lucky ones whose age would restrain her...she would look much younger than her years as she grew older. Megumi cursed Aoshima for being such a fool. Sora would be *so* good for him! But then she privately thought Sora's sweet nature would probably be wasted on a guy like Aoshima Toshiyuki.
The waiter returned and set both okonomiyaki plates in front of Megumi and then asked her for her home phone number. Sora looked at him with an indignant expression while Megumi became very fidgety.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Sora asked the dumbfounded waiter with acridity. Megumi looked at the boy while he stared at her with rapt attention.
"Something's really funny here!" Megumi noted to herself in a low voice. There was something strangely familiar about this situation. Then she remembered the time she had gone out to eat with Belldandy. Panic swirled inside of her breast as she surveyed the restaurant; *every* pair of male eyes was trained on her, peering over the tops of the booths.
Then she remembered what she forgot.
In her breathless anticipation of going shopping with Sora, she had missed taking this morning's pill. The one that suppressed the 'beauty spell' that Belldandy had cast upon her.
"Sora...I'll be right back...I need to go to the ladies room!" she said, frantically searching her purse as she stood up to leave. Before she could gain her feet, she bumped into someone.
"Excuse me, I have..." she apologized.
"Hi Megumi! That's a nice outfit you're wearing. I do say you look really beautiful this afternoon! Radiant, as a matter of fact!"
Megumi watched as Sora's hardened expression softened to shyness. She turned her head and saw Aoshima standing next to her, blocking her exit out of the booth seat.
"Hi Toshi..er, Aoshima!" Sora said in a cheerful voice.
"He's *here*!" Sora thought happily, "I don't believe it...we just ran into him here in Shibuya of all places!" She basked in the glow of the surprise encounter with the man of her dreams. Right here in the restaurant! It must be auspicious!
"Hi Megumi!" Aoshima responded, ignoring her completely. "Is there something different about you, or is it that your loveliness is in full bloom today?" Megumi looked at Aoshima, who was boring into her with eyes filled with appreciation and passion.
"*Hi, Aoshima!!*" Sora said in a loud voice.
"Megumi, I heard that you were going out with Genji. I won't allow such a waste! I was thinking that you might want to make a switch and go out with a guy who has good looks, a charming personality, a puissant soul...and lots of money. Namely me!"
"**HI, AOSHIMA**!!!"
Megumi gestured towards Sora, trying to get Aoshima to notice her friend. She finished searching her purse, only to find that in her haste this morning, she had forgotten to pack any of the lozenges.
"Shit!" she swore at herself.
Sora gestured 'come closer' with her index finger, then leaned over the table and cupped her hand, whispering into Megumi's ear.
"Megumi, would you *stop* whatever you're doing that's causing Toshiyuki to ignore me and pay attention to you. Remember...*I'm* the one who's interested in him. You've already got a boyfriend. Make him stop it!"
"Sora, there's nothing I can do about it. Really!" Megumi replied, frustrated at this whole inept situation. She could tell that this encounter was really upsetting Sora. She immediately regretted her answer as she noticed Sora's face becoming redder with impending anger.
Sora Hasegawa was struck speechless by Megumi's answer.
"So, she *wants* to do nothing about it!" she thought in a blaze of betrayal and disbelief. Her heart sank as she realized that Aoshima had been secretly harboring a desire for her best friend. She felt tears stinging her eyes. Then Aoshima finally turned his notice towards her.
"Sora...would you stop bothering Megumi!" Aoshima confronted her.
"THAT DOES IT!" Megumi said, pounding the table for emphasis as she stood up and tried to push Aoshima out of her way. Aoshima responded by wrapping his arms around her and hugging her.
"Oh, Megumi...I didn't know you felt this way..." he said dreamily.
Sora saw Megumi stand up and receive Aoshima's hug. Something went --snap-- in her soul as she stuffed a big bite of okonomiyaki in her mouth in anger.
"It's either that...or yell and scream," she thought. A second later, she felt the doughy pancake-like bite lodge in her throat.
Megumi felt an immense wave of disgust as she realized that Aoshima was holding her fast to his chest. Tightly. Awkwardly. She couldn't quite get to her feet because she was only partly standing up in the booth, so she had to lean on him to balance herself.
"Poor Sora..." she thought. "She must think I'm trying for Aoshima..."

**Acccgakk!** **Gyuuhh!**

Sora shifted into panic mode as she realized that she couldn't swallow or breathe. She shuffled herself, trying to sit up and get out of the booth. The feeling of suffocation swarmed over her like steam, igniting her fears like a thousand bonfires.
Megumi looked at Sora, who was gesturing at her throat. She suddenly remembered their plan.
"She's actually doing it! Go for it girl!" she thought proudly. Months ago, they devised a scheme of seduction. Meet Aoshima at a restaurant; then at some point in the meal, Sora would fake a choking attack. Aoshima would already be plied with food, so he would be in a sensuous mood. He would save Sora, thus playing the part of the hero. Between the combination of food, heroism and Sora, he would be pliant...and then Sora could apply the damsel-in-distress act. Aoshima would be sure to take her home; then she could 'thank' him and nature would take its course.
Sora staggered, her face turning purple.
"Sora, aren't you kinda of overdoing it?" Megumi thought, both shocked and amused by Sora's 'act'.
"Time to play my part," Megumi whispered to herself.
"AOSHIMA! Sora's choking to death! You've gotta save her! C'mon, you're the only one who can help!" she screamed in her most feminine frightened-to-death voice. She grabbed him by the elbow and tried to steer him towards Sora.
"Megumi...you can call me Toshiyuki! By the way, you said someone's choking? I don't see anyone...oh, it's just Sora. Don't bother about her. Really, you shouldn't get so upset. Let me comfort you in your time of need," he replied, completely addleheaded. Megumi couldn't do anything else but stare at him in disbelief and anger. She slapped him, trying to break the spell her enhanced beauty had over him. He was insane with affection for her.
Sora felt her hearing going tinny and her eyesight fading fuzzy. She saw Aoshima comforting Megumi and ignoring her. Spite welled up in her heart at the betrayal, mixing with the very frightening experience of being unable to get any fresh air. She collapsed to floor and rolled over on her side.
Megumi heard a "thud" and struggled with Aoshima to turn and look at her friend. Her heartpace quickened as she saw Sora gasping for breath as if some invisible force was burking her.
Megumi swiftly realized that Sora was choking *for real*.
"Oh my God...nobody's raising a hand to help!" she thought, gripped by a frenzy of concern. As luck would have it, there were only men seated in her section of the restaurant. And all of them keenly watching her...while ignoring Sora.
"Somebody help! My friend's choking to death! HELPPPP!" Megumi screamed, bullhorn loud. A middle-aged woman sprang up from her booth on the other side of the restaurant and rushed over to where Sora was lying.
"I'm a nurse...ohmygod, she's unconscious!" She reached under Sora's arms and hoisted her up to her feet. Megumi felt an anchor sweep of fear as she saw Sora's head hanging limply...she was passed out! Megumi thanked the stars that Sora was so petite; the off-duty nurse would have no problem lifting her. Seconds later, the nurse was applying a Heimlich Maneuver on Sora, reaching under her breastbone and squeezing...trying to free whatever was stuck in her throat. Megumi was almost ready to burst into tears for fear that her best friend might die. Aoshima stood behind her, his arms tightly wrapped around her waist. Megumi was too upset to try and push him off of her. Sora looked like a limp rag in the nurse's arms. Desperate with fear, Megumi prayed for Sora to be okay.
With a hacking gurgle, Sora coughed up a large chunk of pasty okonomiyaki, then vomited up most of her lunch. A moment later, she was gasping big tides of air. The nurse gently lowered her back down on the floor and comforted her as she came to.
Sora had thought she was going to die. Sheer fright possessed her as she felt her mind being erased into a stupor. Then, she felt her senses coming back to her. She opened her eyes and saw a blurry set of stars. All her ears could hear was a buzzing sound, like a coveful of bees. Her senses cleared a little more and she looked up to see Megumi looking at her.
Toshiyuki had his arms around Megumi's waist, comforting her while commenting how gross Sora looked after upchucking her lunch.

* * * * * * * *

Genji was reading a Soseki novel when he heard the door slam.
"Megumi's not due back until this evening...it must be Skuld or Tomohisa," he thought as he returned to reading. The classical modern writers like Akutagawa, Soseki, Ogai, and Edogawa Rampo had always fascinated him. Recently, he afforded himself some free time to reread the books that he enjoyed as a kid. It was fun revisiting his old literary friends with an adult appreciation.
He could hear someone dashing down the hallway with pounding footfalls. He looked up just as the shoji door slid aside with a "whoosh". Megumi was standing there, looking deeply upset. Putting his book aside, he wordlessly looked at her as his senses swam with grave concern.
She caught her breath, then quickly slid down into a seated position next to him and collapsed into his arms. He held her, feeling her whole body shake with deep sobs. He was too surprised to say anything...he had never seen her like *this* before.
"What can I say? She's *really* freaked out about something!" he thought, wanting to be supportive without being overly curious. He stroked her hair and neck in a massaging, comforting motion, trying to settle her down. She was so upset that she couldn't talk.
After a few minutes, he asked Megumi in a quiet voice if there was anything he could do to help.
"No!!! N..nothing can help," she wailed in jarring shouts.
"I...snff...I just lost my best friend!"

* * * * * * * *

It was a beautiful Beijing weekend. The east winds had blown the dirt and smog west, creating a rare bright blue sky. I had another meeting with Dr. Zhao two days ago to discuss my upcoming dissertation and research defense. Dr. Zhao informed me that there would be *fourteen* scholars on the panel. He confided in me that this dissertation was a special case because of the radical discoveries I would be presenting. Observing that I was super-nervous, he sagely suggested that I take Sunday off and visit one of the local scenic spots. He explained that taking a break right now would reduce my overall stress level and help me when I actually had to defend my work. He reminded me with a chuckle that he had presented his dissertation and defended it almost fifty years ago...
I could see his point. After I presented my findings of the Encyclopedia of Dawn to him, I had basically holed myself up in my dorm room or in my section of the stacks at the Library, putting the finishing touches on my dissertation. It didn't seem like a dissertation...it was more like a textbook. Over the past several weeks, I had hired eight freelancers to type up various drafts. The finished product was over 1200 pages, including a number of computer charts and facsimiles of the etching rubbings from the Encyclopedia of Dawn walls. All I had to do was spend a small fortune to get it copied for the committee. Despite its completed state, I couldn't shake the plague of concerns for my book.
My dissertation had taken a life of its own. It had stamped itself on my life, making my will over to its devices. I breathed, ate and slept with this project. My dreams were rarefied with possible defense scenarios...then I would wake up, and before I could start to meditate, it would capture my waking consciousness.
It seemed like my whole life was taken hostage by my work.
So I headed out to the Summer Palace, the Yiheyuan, for a day of rest and reflection. The Summer Palace was an incomparable example of the largesse of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Unlike the Forbidden City at Tiananmen, the Summer Palace was grandly beautiful. From an architectural standpoint, the Imperial Palace of the Forbidden City was designed to oppose nature and man. Its huge walls, lengthy promenade and imposing size served to intimidate human scale and manifest imperial authority. In contrast, the Summer Palace was built to complement nature; the large hill overlooking Kunming Lake was crested with ornate temples and pagodas, aesthetically harmonizing with the site plan. It was ornamental in composition.
I entered through the East Palace Gate and proceeded to ascend the stairs winding through the residential palaces. This complex of buildings had suffered significant neglect during the past 30 years that they had been 'tourist traps'. Despite the hustle and squalor, I was still able to stretch my fashionings towards the past, mentally casting the structures in the new paint and rich ornament they possessed centuries ago.
Besides, the Summer Palace bordered the timeless Kunming Lake; interconnected with a series of ascending stairways. On a clear day like today, the lake was serenely beautiful, unsullied by the wear and tear of tourism.
Then I strolled down the covered Long Gallery. Hundreds of red pillars faded into a colonnaded blur as I followed them with my eyes down the walkway. Each pair of column suspended an arcadic beam with a pastoral or natural scene painted on it. One could only stop and appreciate a few scenes at random...there was just *too* many. I identified scenes from locales all over China: Hunan, Guilan, Shansi, etc.
Reaching the end of the gallery, I turned left to ascend the walkway to the summit of the Wanshoushan, or Longevity Hill. This afforded a dramatic vistage of Kunming Lake and the entire Summer Palace complex. The lake was placid, with only a few ripples to disturb an otherwise mirror-like reflection of the sky above.
I decided to visit the Back Lake next. The Back Lake was an artificial canal bordered with bi-leveled scenic walks; one could stroll at water level, or twenty feet above, at ground level. The boardwalk was lined with shops, a leftover from the earlier days of the palace. One of the emperors had constructed it as a vacation retreat for his mother. The empress dowager liked to shop, but couldn't mingle with the commoners and experience what it was like to browse a bazaar. So she had her own personal 'mall' of shops built alongside the canal, so she could do her 'shopping' while being punted down the Back Lake in a dragoon boat. In modernity, these niches had been converted to restaurants and gift shops.
Walking along the canal-side path, I was cooled by the breeze that chambertunneled through the artificial canyon. As I approached the point where the Back Lake turns towards Kunming Lake, I staired up and walked over to one of the bridges. From here, I could see where the Back Lake emptied into the Kunming Lake. Each bridge was elaborately engraved with chinoiserie, and arched in the classical Chinese semi-arch. Despite all of this beauty, natural and man-made, the thoughts of my upcoming dissertation asserted themselves, competing with my enjoyment of the scenery.
"Oh, woeful disaster! Lady jump lake! Lady jump lake!"
It took a moment to register that I was hearing someone yelling at the top of his lungs. Looking down in the direction of the shouting, I saw a crowd quickly milling near a portion of the lower deckwalk, gesturing into the water. I listened intently and heard yells of dismay.
"Why doesn't somebody do anything?" I wondered with disgust. Evidently, bystander apathy wasn't just a trait unique to urban America. Then I noticed the posted signs prohibiting any boating or swimming in the Back Lake.
"I can't believe this!" I muttered to myself in aversion. I looked back at the passive crowd and made a decision. Stepping on the bridge railing, I dove almost ten meters into the water.
"Nothing like good ol' civil obedience...defying the threats of sanction designed to maintain social conformity," I thought sarcastically as I frontstroked towards the crowd.
The water was sour and brackish. I surfaced and oriented myself to where the crowd was pointing...it was underneath the second bridge. I dove underwater and tried to see if anything was moving. The water was thickly greened with algae, stinging my eyes. I kept swimming underwater until I felt a slight countercurrent of water brush against my face. Going deeper, I saw clouds of bubbles floating towards the surface, indicating underwater motion. Swimming towards the bubbles, I could see a form struggling in the water. Reluctantly, I had to surface...my lungs were starting to burn from lack of oxygen. At least I knew where the person was.
Catching a gulp of air, I doubled up and dove straight down. The water was filled with swirling strands of hair...I couldn't tell what color it was. Her long tresses floated against me as I tried to reach out to her. She was jerking and twisting in the water. I swam next to her and she flailed against me with her arms, hitting me in the face and chest. She was moving too fast and was blindly struggling; so I decided to try and grab one of her wildly kicking legs or at least her waist. I reached around her hips and *still* couldn't lift her. Then I noticed that she had a rope attached to one of her ankles. I dove downward, getting kicked in the head by her thrashing legs. I grabbed the rope and swam down another ten feet until I saw that it was attached to a big rock resting at the bottom of the canal.
My lungs burned for air and I kicked off the floor of the canal to the surface for a quick inhalation.
"No swim lake, very bad! Forbidden, foreigner go jail!" I heard several women in the crowd warn with maternal concern.
"Don't you drown, lady...please just hang on for another moment," I thought as I dove back down to the rock. I struggled to lift the rock; it was too heavy to swim up to the surface with. My mind raced as I attempted to try and devise a lifesaving solution. I swam to the side of the canal and noticed that rocks were arranged in an underwater terrace-like setting, sloping upwards step-like toward the surface. I realized that I could drag the rock over and lift it up by successive stages: resting it on a rock shelf, then pushing it up a few feet to the next sloping crop of rocks.
"Hang in there," I mentally encouraged the woman, whose flailing motions were rapidly subsiding.
"Dammit, she's drowning!" I fearfully observed. I pulled the rock over to the side and struggled to lift it several feet onto the first rock shelf. My lungs were already bursting with pain...but I knew the every second she was underwater increased her chances of dying. I struggled and lifted the rock up another few feet.
I could see the surface looming...she would float to the surface before I did. I couldn't hold my breath anymore and I choked down a lungful of water and coughed...then lifted the rock up another few feet. I looked up and saw that she was floating on the surface. My body was going numb from exertion. I hit the surface of the canal and coughed violently, sucking in deep gasps of air. I swam over to where the crowd was and asked for a knife. Then I dove under her, cut her loose and used an underarm carry to bring her to shore.
As I dragged her to the lakeside through the water, I saw a generous waft of long platinum white hair floating on the water...and felt a dawning horror. Rolling her over, I agonized in heartfelt pain and grief. It felt like the world had just smothered me with razor-edged feathers. It was a reality that was so abhorrent as to appear surreal. This rescue attempt had deteriorated into something unspeakably horrible...and personally agonizing.
"URD!" I screamed.
"H..how could you do this?" I said desperately, angrily as I pulled her inert form up on shore, trying to shunt away any thoughts that she may already be dead.
"Don't you die on me, Urd!" I shouted. I remembered the new MiCPR which focused on rapid chest compressions and less on breathing. I felt the normal "yuck" factor...and was terrified that I would have to push on her breast bone. It wasn't called a breast bone by whim, and Urd's front certainly emphasized this with the two swells on her ribcage.
"Fuck it, I can't be thinking this shit right now!" I yelled at myself. Focus. C'mon, get your shit together and focus. I laid my ear against her chest, while resting my hand on her chin. There was no pulse, no heartbeat, no breathing...my heart froze with a glaze of fear..
"Call a doctor, you dumbasses!!!" I yelled...in English like an idiot because I was so overwrought. Definitely not the polite "get help!" shown in the Red Cross videos. I repeated the request in Chinese and saw a couple bystanders whip out their cellphones. Almost instinctively, I tilted her head and pulled in a lungful of air, then clamped my mouth on hers and exhaled. Her airway seemed to receive breath, I noted with relief. Then I went to work on her chest, trying to get into a zone with compressions. Once compression per second, imitating the heart beat. After a minute, I mouthed her another lungful of air and checked her vitals as quick as I could. The pallor of her skin told me that she was in cyanosis. Tears came to my eyes as I tried to revive her. My whole body was tense as my mind tried to come to grips with this. I fought back my fears and continued with the CPR...to no avail.
"I'm not going to lose you, Urd...I'm not going to let you go!" I thought willfully, even as the realization dawned that she was probably already dead. Somehow, deep down I knew that this was the real death...that a Goddess could die. I kept the CPR up, even though the muscles in my arms were burning with the effort of doing over 600 one-second compression. Ten minutes and the paramedic still weren't here? But there was no response, no revival of her vitals.
It was over...
"Please don't let her go like this!!! Give me a miracle!" I screamed inside, I begged inside, as I mentally willed her to live. I pounded my fists on the ground in frustration, ignoring the crowd that had queued up. I had seen death before, but no one had died right next to me, virtually in my arms. No one like Urd. I cursed openly at the futility of my efforts to revive her, clenching my whole body in emotional angst. I suddenly was swamped with shame; the shame of how I had shut her out of my life. *I* was the *real* dumbass! My stupid auto-protect selfish reaction meant nothing now. Not in this situation. If I could only turn back the clock...but Urd was the Norn of the Past, not me. I was just some messed-up consciousness in a mortal body. Urd was the pinnacle: a being so far above me, I was a nothing compared to her. She was the *real* precious miracle of life. And it was gone! In a last attempt to resuscitate her, I tried to manifest every bit of spiritual energy I had towards the thought that Urd must live. Almost instantly, I felt a strange tingling rise up my back and down my arms. A light blue glow formed at my fingertips and seemed to seep into her still body.
As I enfreaked at the sight of this 'spark', Urd shuddered. With a violent seizure, she choked up, spasmed, and coughed out a lungful of water all over me.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," I cried with joy in my heart. I rolled her on her side as she gasped for air, and then I helped her with a few more lungfuls of air. She was still very weak and unconscious...but I was overwhelmed with gratitude that she was alive.
A moment later, her eyes fluttered open and fixed me with a dim emerald stare. I leaned closer so I could hear anything she might say. Her eyes then turned icy with anger.
"YOU! You asshole! Why didn't you just let me die?" she said hoarsely. As Urd gathered strength, she started yelling at me.
"This is all your fault! Why did you have to meddle...why did you prolong my pain? Did you ever stop to consider that I *wanted* to die? I can't continue without hope! I have the most utterly lonely existence in the universe...and you couldn't let me put an end to it!" she screamed shrilly with fiery sorrow.
"Urd...you're okay now," I told her in a calming voice, trying to settle her down. She must have been really shook up. Where the hell was the ambulance crew?
"She's raving," I thought.
Recovering quickly, Urd sat up and slapped me, then pounded me with her fists. "It's *not* okay, you stupid mortal fool! You don't understand what you just did! You've doomed me! It's right in front of your nose, but you're too blind to see it! Idiot!!! If you really understood me, you would have just let me drown in there!"
"Urd!" I shouted, but she interrupted me, yelling maniacally.
"Don't you see! I've fallen in love with someone...but I can't love him. Because he can't love me...because of the Ultimate Force. He'll never love me. It won't let him. Because of the Ultimate Force...I'm always going to be alone. Why didn't you just let me die?" I tried to absorb all of this while she kicked at me with her heels. I slid back away from her. The crowd was already gossiping about how I must be a lover that spurned her. One of the penchants for the Chinese is their gossip...and this situation was giving them a figurative shedful of fuel.
"*Shut up, all of you*!" I shouted to the queued crowd and stood up. I was dazed and confused by the fervency of Urd's rage towards me. I had just saved her life...and now she was spewing solarflare ire at me.
"Cevn, I hate you. I..I just can't bring myself to feel any other way about you! Because of you...because I'm the Goddess of the Past...I'll never feel what it's like to be loved again. You hear me...NEVER! *It's impossible for me to be in love!!!* I'm the Norn of the Past...snff...of the past! The goddamned Past! Not the Present! Not the Future! I'm the Goddess of 'what has been and cannot be returned to'!!!" she screamed shrilly.
Then she seemed to collapse into herself for a moment, embodying the posture of utter defeat. Urd looked at me...and I flinched at the blunt intensity of her expression of woe.
"I hope you're happy, Mr. 'I've been so abused and mistreated, wah wah wah, poor me my life sucks.' You have no concept of what *real* loss is! What the *real* pain is! Look what you've doomed me to live with. The past...snff...and the present can't mix. So I'll never have someone special in my life...snff...like Belldandy and Skuld. Please, j..just leave me alone," she said in a sad, hopeless voice. Urd looked at me...and I flinched at the blunt intensity of her expression of woe. Something seemed to snap in her, and she stood up suddenly.
"GO AWAY!" she screamed at the top of her lungs.
I couldn't handle this loathing any longer. I couldn't even handle my own thoughts, which were piling up like a roadwreck on a busy freeway. I backstepped away, as if putting distance between me and her would somehow take away the sting of her words. I had just saved her life, and then she turns on me and condemns my actions with an insane rage.
Urd reached down and found a good sized rock and heaved it at me. I turned my head just in the nick of time as it struck me on the temple so hard that it knocked me off of my feet. The crowd started murmuring again as I dizzily stood up. That impact on my head fucking *hurt*! Desperately looking for a place to run, I sprinted in the direction of the Marble Boat. I had to get away from her...she's a walking disaster area. She had hurt me again with an overwhelming betrayal.
"That's just like you, running away. Well then, get the hell away from me!" I heard Urd's cloying curses fade in the distance as I slowed down to a jog, my senses and emotions reeling.
I reached the Marble Boat and collapsed into one of the marble benches. Looking down at my shirt, I saw that it was streaked with spatters of blood...Urd must have gotten me really good with the rock she threw.
Two days before my dissertation and *this* had to happen. I just didn't know what to make of her outburst. Something had unlocked the chambers of her sanity, driving her mad with rage. Mad enough to lash out at me...mad enough to try and take her own life. Without her powers, she would have been literally dead in the water if I hadn't coincidently arrived at the same place and time.
I knew for sure that I couldn't stand her any more. Urd had been rough on me from the very start. I tried...I really tried to give her a break. I wanted to believe in her, but then she killed any chances of that when she impersonated Dr. Ogawa. I cut her out of my life like a surgeon removing a malignant tumor. Despite this, when I first saw her floating in the water, my heartstrings felt like they had been pulled taunt by a piano tuner.
*Why?*
My head was throbbing painfully where she hit me with the rock. The tourists avoided coming anywhere near where I was seated. I calmed myself down as I looked out over Kunming Lake.
"Why did you do this, Urd?" I questioned sadly. I knew that someone with *that* much rage must be leveling with a really deep pain. Urd had all the classic symptoms of someone with deep wounds: superficial personality, forced humor, intoxication as a means of escape, hyperactivity, and deceitfulness. Yet there was so much about her that I couldn't understand.
Then in a flash of insight, I understood...
...and I felt like something had torn my heart in two. Her situation was tragic, piteous, horrid. It was wretched in hyperbole...like in a Greek drama gone badly. But it was *real* for her. I still was repulsed...I didn't want to believe what I was thinking.
Urd was the Goddess of the Past. Thus, her allotment of romantic love was somehow limited to that era! A chill ran down my spine as I realized that she was literally unable be in love in the here and now. My own struggles with my past issues and how they messed up my ability to relate to women...they suddenly receded to insignificance.
Urd was oppressed...not by emotional pain, but by the Ultimate Force itself. It was too terrible to imagine. I started punching the nearest stone pillar, punching punching punching until my knuckles were raw and bloody. It was so fucking unfair to her!
"How could she live with the knowledge that she would forever forth be denied a chance to fall in love again? How could anybody?" I reflected with frank astonishment. No wonder Urd was so vicarious about Belldandy and Keiichi's relationship.
I felt anger change into sympathy change into empathy. Urd was totally justified in thinking that I couldn't understand what she must feel. I never could relate to that kind of enforced isolation away from intimacy. But I knew well the shallow recess of loneliness. Once more, I realized that Urd and I had a common feeling that oppressed us both...to different degrees.
I cast a glance in the direction where she was sitting on the side of the lake, a speck in the midst of the crowd. Then I remembered all the spiritual lessons that I had ever encountered... that pain shared is pain lessened. I had been helped so often to release my grief. And in turn, I had helped so many people confront and walk through their pain. In NA, there was this thing called a Fifth Step where an addict confronts their worst nightmares. I remembered talking to another human being about my deepest fears and pain many times. I *had* to, because the alternative was so much worse.
But Urd was a source of *my* pain. Could I do the right thing for once...and just let it go for a moment so I could help her? I struggled with myself. Urd was a jennet that bred sympathies in my heart.
"Words are only words." "Are you going to let her get away with mistreating you?" "What about forgiveness and acceptance?" my mind argued. I recalled the ongoing lesson of my recovery: my highest good is realized when I offer myself to serve others in need. The still-suffering addict, the still-suffering student...
The still-suffering Goddess?
"Fuck suffering!" I thought angrily. I realized that I *had* to go comfort her. What sense would it make for me to save her life, but not her soul? Her kokoro was made crystal clear today. Urd was right, I *had* abandoned her...by running away from myself and my fears when I should have been supportive. I had let my own pain conquer me...rendering me unavailable. Even if she raged at me some more, I still had to offer comfort. Unexpectedly, I remembered like yesterday the time when I had freaked out at the compound over some argument with Urd. I ran out to the porch, watching the rain and feeling so alone in myself. Urd had come to apologize to me...and her caring presence itself warmed me. Now it was time for me to return the favor.
I swallowed my apprehension and walked down the pier and along the lakeside. As I approached, I could hear deep sobbing amidst the chatter of the onlookers. Urd was sitting on the ground, her head between her knees, hugging herself and rocking from side to side. It was piteous to behold her. She seemed to me to be a lost soul. Where the hell were the paramedics? This wasn't exactly remote rural China; they should have arrived a long time ago.
"Empathy, not sympathy," I reminded myself. I knelt down beside her, feeling her pain filling the air around me. The crowd had thinned, but a number of people remained to watch our little drama.
""My God, Urd, I didn't know...what you were going through. I..I don't know what to say. Saying that it must be agonizing to bear seems extremely idiotic. I think I understand it a little, what you said...about the Ultimate Force. Because you are who you are, all the romantic forms of love that you're ever going to have...has already occurred in the past. I can't even begin...snff...to imagine what it must feel like inside of your soul to know this." I said, struggling with tears. The empathic part of me wanted to burst with sadness, but I held it in check...I needed to be supportive. She half turned her face and glanced at me, then returned to burying her face between her knees.
"I just want you to know that I'm here with you, Urd, for whatever it's worth. It's probably worthless, but I'm here for you...you're not alone. I..I just hope you can accept what little I have to offer in caring and empathy. Because it seems like nothing..." I was going to choke if I said anything more.
Urd lifted her head and turned to face me. I watched her face bear transience with anger and fear and sadness, contorting visibly as each emotion played across. She started sobbing again, looking at me with tears falling down her delicate cheeks. Her expression changed as she looked at me with mix of gratitude and astonishment.
"Y..you came back? For me? After all that I've done to you? After what I just did?" she said, her surprise clearly betrayed by her voice. I nodded to her...and her crying increased.
"Urd, I'd like to offer you a hug and a shoulder to cry on...if you need it," I offered.
"I...don't know what to do," she said as she reached up and pulled herself towards me, resting her head on my shoulder. I tentatively hugged her, then gently wrapped my arms around her...fighting fear all the way. I couldn't believe...that she couldn't believe that *she* could reach out for help. I couldn't believe that I was trying to console her...so vulnerably.
"Please...now is not the time for all my freaky weirdness towards women to surface," I thought dreadfully. But it was coming; I could feel part of my being rapidly becoming paralyzed with strangling anxiety. I wanted to leap in the lake and get away from her so bad...
"Cevn...I'm sorry...I'm really sorry this had to happen," she apologized, sobbing on my shoulder. This was so mixed up...she was *apologizing* to me, when just a little earlier she may have been trying to kill herself. I felt a hand clamp down on my other shoulder, gripping me tightly.
"Now what?" I thought.
"You under arrest for go swimming in forbidden area of park!" a commanding voice directly announced in broken English.
"You cannot go water...you must come with us jail."
Urd and I both looked up to see six Red Guard policemen. No medical rescue personnel had shown up through the entire incident; yet here were the cops? I thought to myself that this *had already* been a really insane day. Now they're going to arrest me for saving a drowning victim? I started an eloquent explanation in Mandarin, but one of the Red Guards pulled his baton out and waved it in front of my face threateningly. Another pushed his way in between Urd and myself, brusquely pushing her over on her back while two other guards pulled me roughly to my feet. I swallowed my rage as Urd climbed back to her knees and looked at me sadly. They had physically torn me from her at the point where it seemed to me that she was finally starting to feel like someone gave a damn about her.
"You come now with us," the leader said. It flashed across my mind that I could try and make a break for it...but I decided not to resist them. Three more Red Guards had just shown up. Once more, a crowd was forming as they handcuffed me and escorted me away. I wanted to scream at the policemen, but instead all I could manage was to be quietly led away.
"You *bastards*!" I heard Urd shout repeatedly as the distance swallowed her voice.