STORY BY PATRICK BREHENY pjbreheny@hotmail.com
ANOTHER TIME
Larina was a sprite. A sprite is spirit that isn’t corporeal in any of the planes of space and time. A sprite has no name, but she once was (is) corporeal in a plane and had a name. That plane ended with the end of the world in a nuclear war in 1953 before she was born, which was much a result of her travelling between planes, but that’s another story. It is a story, ICE MAN, but never mind about that now.
She was at first relieved to be a sprite, away from the turmoil and conflict of humanity, but now she’s nostalgic. Yearns for a little more time in that ‘vale of tears’
She’s infiltrating. She’s learning a trick. Most people believe there are ghosts. Larina KNOWS, being one, but she’s found another presentation doubted by even most ghost acceptors, that of a living ghost.
The world is more than vicarious experience for a sprite, in it as a living ghost. She’s IN it, all five senses functioning, with the drives and emotions, except she has EJECTION if necessary. The sweet part of being a living ghost is that you ARE a ghost, so if things get tough you can just go. Away. Fast.
She sortied on recons to various time periods to see where she’d like to engage. Though a sprite has no gender, she thinks of herself as ‘she’, was a she in her only previous interlude in a human plane. She can’t be political. If you want to dispute that attitude, she doesn’t. If she materializes it will be as female and she’s only there to play, has learned by her interference in human adventure previously that she shouldn’t change anything. Last time led to annihilation. She wants to be in the movie, follow the script, be a player, but not the protagonist or antagonist. After that last unexpected event, well---Just be careful.
She thought the 1960s, which were chronologically after the end of the world in 1953, but existed in another plane, would be a colorful time to live in.
She went. As a hippie chick. She’s not bothered by later correctness that objects to ‘chick’ and ’babe’, even to ‘honey’ and ‘sweetheart’. As a human she’s voraciously sexual--- missed out on that last time--- and planned to acknowledge and pursue it in the free love culture.
So where geographically would be a good place in the 60s to land? California was the scene, always ahead of the rest of the country, and San Francisco was supposed to be the hub, but San Fran had baggage---the beats, politics, radical intellectualism. True hedonism was a bit further to the south, in Los Angeles. L.A. in general, and Hollywood in particular.
She arrived again as Larina. She couldn’t put together documents showing who she was, much less finishing high school, but took the GED exam without showing more ID than a library card, and was admitted to Los Angles Community College, to the academic program from which, if she completed two years with passing grades, she could transfer to a state college.
Tuition was quite low in that period, but one still had to live. She found a job that would provide that, if barely, as a clerk in the privately owned Campus Book Store, across Vermont Avenue from the main entrance to LACC. The liberal manager paid her in cash because she’d “lost” her Social Security card.
The Breakaway was a huge patio outside the cafeteria, where hung out a group she hoped to be accepted by, and it was there that she, and handsome Cliff, found each other right away, bringing an abandonment to her free love aspirations. She was 23, he was 26. She would always be 23. She was 23 in 2020 when she went back millennia with the ICE MAN---but that’s another story---and she wasn’t even born in 1953 when the world ended in that plane and she became an unborn sprite.
Cliff was a veteran on the G.I Bill that paid his bills. He lived in an apartment in a court on Virgil Avenue, a few blocks from the campus. Cliff’s friends from the patio liked to gather at his pad, because he sold baggies, and always had one out for guests to roll joints from. He was quite popular.
She wasn’t comfortable with the pot high. It made her edgy, and her adrenalin would flow without any external threat. Maybe ghosts just had to stay in the real world. But she smoked to engender their trust. It was the rite of belonging. If she didn’t, she’d be suspected of being a cop or a snitch. But there were times she had the horrors. Who knew ever what it was laced with? Angel dust? Roach spray? Old kitty litter?
As to acid, she’d seen the bad trips, and told Cliff, “I’m leery of it.” .
Cliff was stoned on hash when she said that, and he couldn’t stop laughing. He did apologize, explained, “Timothy Leary.”
But Cliff had a moral code, which was that he didn’t sell anything he wouldn’t take himself. He admitted that ethic came from the Army, where an NCO wouldn’t tell you to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He didn’t take acid either, nor speed, not anything but weed. Hash just came in the door with friends, he didn’t sell it. Only baggies. OK, he could get you a pound or a kilo, but only grass.
Cliff was liberal and conservative. He was a fan of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. He believed they were changing the world. She knew it didn’t change. He couldn’t understand that. ”You’re a Chicana. Fair is fair. Fight for your rights.” Of Viet Nam, where he’d been, and though his new pals opposed it, he’d say. “We made a commitment to defend the South.” The problem of course---besides the protest in the states--- was that there were so many in the South who were combatants against, and you didn’t know who was or wasn’t the enemy.
She couldn’t engage influentially again in another plane, and for the sake of those in it had to say, “I’m apolitical.”
He countered, “Nobody’s apolitical.”
“Sprites are.”
Which prompted, “Oh, baby, what a trip you are!”
The both transferred in two years to Cal State L.A., continued living near LACC at Cliff’s, to where she’d moved. With his conviction that their ideals were going to change the world, Cliff wanted to populate it with children he could teach his new beliefs to so they’d continue them. She could let him try, and did, but it was dishonest. How could she find the way to tell him she wasn’t THAT human? She wouldn’t age and she couldn’t procreate.
During the two years they were at Cal State, Cliff began obsessively trying her with methods that promised fertility, from hormone regimens to Hari Krishnas chanting for.
Larina had been a Catholic when she lived a life with a birth and a history, interrupted by her time travel. How would that theology accommodate time and space? The Church adjusted to science. The earth wasn’t flat. Evolution wasn’t endorsed, but it wasn’t denied. They just didn’t take a position. You could take Genesis as allegory simply because they didn’t say you couldn’t. Cliff’s religion was immaterial, because he no longer practiced any that was traditional.
After the two years at Cal State, she was, well, tiring of his impossible quest to get her pregnant. And he had aged ever so slightly in their four years together, a couple of crow’s feet shaping below his eyes. She still looked 18, which he’d remarked on when she was physically 23, and he now noticed,
“You still look 18.”
“Ageless. Would you mind having a hippy wife who looks 18 when you’re 60.”
“I’d mind being sixty.”
“You won’t if you get there.”
“No, we’ll have a different world.”
“The world doesn’t change.”
“If enough people want...”
“Enough people don’t.”
That conversation was a non-sequitur lead-in to his next remedy for her problem, drinking nun urine.
“You know I don’t give anybody anything I won’t take my self. Its boiled, the dose is small, and mixed with Gatorade, it actually doesn’t taste bad.”
She had to tell him, and she did.
“I can’t give you a child. I’m a sprite. A spirit.”
“Oh, baby, you HAVE been taking acid.”
“I’m a sprite. A ghost.”
“You’re real.”
“Yes, real. I’m real. But I’m transient”
“We’re all transient.”
“Not like me. Or yes, like me. You just don’t know yet how much like me.”
She saw his manner toward her had changed. He wasn’t thinking pregnancy now, he was thinking mental health.
“Larina, If it’s not LSD, not drugs then its…There are therapies, medications, counseling.”
“Counsel you to adjust back to that society we left?”
“Yeah, sorry I suggested that. But you’re not a sprite, a ghost.”
“I am, Cliff. I love you and in fairness to you, and as much as it hurts me, I’m leaving before I cause problems here too.”
“Leaving to where? We can discuss that. Don’t be sorry. You never cause problems. You’re talking some crazy shit, but even if what you say was so, you’re a sprite and a spirit and a ghost, don’t you think I’d be happy that it happened?”
She knew she hadn’t convinced him. He meant what he said, but was improvising. His girlfriend just went crazy. He didn’t know what to say to her.
“I have to go.”
“Okay. Go where, Larina?”
“Back”
“To?”
“To where I came from.”
“Honey. Talk to me.”
“So sorry, Cliff.”
“Oh, shit, Larina.”
“Goodbye. I love you.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“A sprit doesn’t need one.””
“Ah-ha-ha-ha. Come on.”
It was that kind of laugh of hysteria, when nothing is funny.
And then…he stopped laughing.
Because Larina, she just wasn’t there.