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It was an hour before dawn when I pulled off the pavement and onto gravel and dirt. If not for the fresh tire tracks that I could see by the headlights, I would have turned back and kept driving on Highway 1, even more lost than I already was. My nagging doubt abated when I began to pass other cars parked to the sides of the mountain road. My headlights shed enough light that I could read the license plates. I thought I was a bit eccentric driving to Big Sur from Colorado, but there were cars displaying plates from the likes of Wisconsin, Tennessee, and even New York. And the variety of the cars was more than a little quixotic, with vehicles ranging from an old military jeep to a brand new Hummer, a conspicuously out of place Lexus and more than a few junkers. The trees closed in and a gargantuan stump impeded any further driving, so I parked next to a sad-looking old moped and got out, pulling on my pack and arming the car alarm. I had bought my supplies from an all-night convenience store. The clerk there had given me a look I knew well from my days working in retail, having seen it on customer service employees who had to answer the same question ten times an hour, and getting paid too little to do it. I supposed that men in suits driving expensive SUVs and showing up at odd hours of the night was a common and annoying occurrence. The pre-dawn light and gibbous moon were enough to show the well-worn path. The trees stood like sentinels, dark against the brightening sky, with their branches whispering mysteriously at me in the breeze. I had thought that a surreal peace would come upon me as soon as I had arrived, but instead I felt nervous and foolish. After all, I was hiking in the same suit I had worn to work a day and a half ago. It didn’t take long before I had to strip off my sport coat and tie. It was shaping up to be a muggy and miserable day, not too warm but definitely too humid. I looked at my Seiko and knew the sun had to be up by now, but the mountains would obscure it for a while yet. The sky was hazy - fog was descending. It was all very poetic. I stopped to retrieve a bottle of water, and that’s when I saw the first cultist. He was relieving himself on a tree, near a shabby tent and a campfire. “Oh, hello brother!” said the man when he had finished. “Uh, hi.” “Welcome to Los Padres! Here on business?” He laughed heartily. He looked as bedraggled as his tent, wearing an ancient flannel shirt and jeans that were more patches than original material. “Come, have some breakfast.” I was a bit hungry, but my appetite vanished when the man scooped up some mush with his hands from a pot by the fire and stuffed it into his mouth. “No, thanks. I’ve got to get going.” “Oh, I understand. Going to see Him. Go brother, and may you find your answers!” I walked away as swiftly as I could. Not much further up the path was the main camp. This was an odd bunch. A collective of thoroughly unclothed people formed a ring around a small fire, their hair long and blowing lightly in the breeze. Nearby was a couple with a veritable circus tent, a small gas generator, a laptop and television, and a portable electric stove. Both the man and the woman were chatting away on cell phones. A tiny, wiry old woman came out of nowhere to walk beside me while I gawked. “Haven’t seen you before. Here for some answers?” she asked, startling me. “Huh? Yeah, I guess.” “Many come, but only the faithful stay.” She grabbed my arm with a bony hand and clenched like a vice. We walked past a gaggle of dreadlocked men, women and children, who smelt like a college dorm party. “What question drives you?” I faltered in my step. Not once had I even considered what I would ask. I put one hand in my pocket and felt my cell phone. The battery had died sometime in the night while I was driving. My girlfriend had been right in the middle of condemning me, and maybe three minutes from breaking up with me. Before that, most of the rest of the battery had been used trying to convince the vice president of sales I was sick. He told me not to bother coming in, whenever it was I returned home. “I don’t know what my question is yet.” She let go in shock. “You must not go until you know what you will ask!” “Is that some kind of rule?” I asked, growing irritated by this strange old crow and by the bizarre community now staring at us. “Only the believers deserve the answers!” she cried. I walked faster to put distance between us. “I don’t want to join your crazy cult, I just want answers!” I ran, ignoring whispers and prying eyes. The air was still cool but the humidity and the exertion caused sweat to drip into my eyes. My suit was surely ruined, but like my job and even my girlfriend, it didn’t matter to me anymore. All that mattered were the answers to the unknown questions. “Don’t mind them,” said a middle-aged Asian man, wearing a clean sweater vest and a miniscule pair of eyeglasses. He had sidled up to me just as the old woman had and now kept pace. “And we’re not really a cult.” “Looks a helluva lot like one to me!” I said. “No, no,” he said with a soft chuckle. “These people come and go, they don’t really worship. Most stay because they want to figure out the perfect question to ask. They talk to one another about it, or meditate. Old Mercedes back there, she believes everyone should share before they see Him, or at the very least be sure of what you will ask.” “So it is a rule?” He laughed again. “Not at all. It’s just that He only allows a few questions, and will answer no more once you have asked the limit. Some stay because they hope to one day ask another question, or perhaps learn some truth from others who come back down.” We reached the end of a relatively flat area, apparently the borders of the camp. “Here I leave you, son. May you find your answers, whatever your questions may be!” I left the camp behind and continued to climb. A stream burbled nearby, and the breeze still blew, but everything else was silence, like the world had drawn its breath. The fog bank had closed in, the redwoods stood like ghosts in the murk. I felt like the mist had seeped into my head. Once, quite briefly, I had the realization that the past forty-eight hours had been exactly the same way, a haze of nothing in the midst of my ludicrous actions. But that thought slowly became gray and unfocused, till it too was consumed like the trees behind me as I walked. I heard a low noise which I took to be a machine, or maybe a distant car or plane high above. As I stepped into a clearing I saw it was coming from a group of people sitting cross legged in tall grass, all humming the same tone. There was as much variety here as there was in the camp below: young twenty-somethings, elderly folk, large people, skinny people, all different races and evenly split between the genders. I wondered for the first time if they had been like me, drawn inexplicably to this spot. The Asian man’s insistence that these people did not worship would have been amusing, had I not completely forgotten the conversation I had just had with him. There was a small hill that I thought could have been a burial mound. I could see faintly through the fog that there were dozens of people spread out around this hill, and probably many more that I could not see. I stepped onto the hill, blood pounding in my ears, my limbs trembling from the hike and from anticipation, though what would be up there for me I had little idea. I reached the crest and saw a lone figure sitting cross-legged and still. He was of middle age, completely bald, and he wore a red robe that made him look like a Buddhist monk. His eyes were closed, so I waited nervously, fearful of disturbing him. Without opening his eyes he spoke. “Why have you come?” His voice was soft and low. “I have come a great distance to —” “Yeah, yeah, save the speech. You got a question or not?” The mysticism of the moment was shattered instantly. He opened his eyes and I saw not a wise man but a very bored man who would have looked more at home in a cubicle. “Well, I don’t really know what I want to ask...” “Ha, that’s a first. Usually it’s ‘Is my boyfriend cheating on me?’ or ‘How can I get rich quick?’ Blah blah blah. I answer five questions, no more.” “Just five?” I asked, desperately searching for a question now. “Yes. You’ve got four questions left.” “No, that wasn’t a question!” I could feel myself panicking. This was worse than any presentation or meeting I had ever experienced. “What should I ask?” I murmured to myself. “Ask that which you want to know most. You’ve got three more questions,” he said, then yawned. I saw a slight smirk on his face and a note of anger entered my voice. “Alright, um, why did I drive here on a whim?” “Because you are horribly lost in life and you think some guy in California has the answers that might give your life meaning. Also because you might be nuts. Two more questions.” Suddenly the perfect question formed in my mind, the one I thought would solve my sudden identity crisis. “What is the meaning of life?” The man sighed. “Oh boy, this one again, my favorite. You want the truth or a happy lie?” “The truth!” Why did he have to ask that? He sighed again. “Alright, but don’t yell at me later. The meaning of life, specifically your life because knowing the rest would be too depressing, is nonexistent. You, Theodore, don’t have any significance whatsoever. I’d say I’m sorry, but that’d be a lie and you didn’t want that. The cold, hard, terrible truth is you are meaningless.” I sat down and tried to think, but I couldn’t. The fog had consumed everything except for me and him, alone on the top of the hill. It even appeared to absorb the sound of the chanting people below, so that the entire universe at the moment consisted of the two of us and my cavernous empty head, and yet despite that isolation I felt in the core of my being he was right. “That can’t be,” I whispered. “There has to be some purpose to my life.” “Nope, none,” said the man almost cheerfully. “You’d be surprised how many people are in the same boat though. Buck up! You’ve got one more question left!” Only one came to mind, and before thinking about it I spoke. “So many people come here with questions and everyone says you always have the right answer, for everything. How do you know?” He looked at me for a few moments, expressionless and motionless. When finally he spoke, his words were slow and deliberate and without emotion. “No one has ever asked me how I know things. Not once. I’ve answered forty-three thousand, two hundred and seventy-four questions and not one of them was about me.” He stood up and began to take off his robe. He walked over wearing a white shirt and boxer shorts and handed the robe to me. He looked average and insignificant. “What are you doing?” I asked. “To answer your final question, I don’t know the answers. Whatever I say becomes the right answer, no matter what. Your name wasn’t Theodore. I don’t know what your name was, but it became Theodore when I said it.” I could only stare at him. “Look,” he continued, “don’t question it, don’t try to understand it. I stopped doing that long ago and it’s done wonders for my health. I’m not special in any way. It’s just that when I tell someone something, it happens. Remember the recession a few years ago? A bunch of people asked me some lotto numbers, and pretty soon inflation went through the roof. Or the earthquake in LA last year? A seismologist asked me when the next big earthquake would be, I made up a date and wham! What a mess!” He stopped and looked at me with pity in his eyes. He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “You’ll get the hang of it, eventually.” With that he walked past and started off down the hill. “Wait, where are you going?” I called, standing up with the robe in my hand. “To a beach somewhere, with lots of hot women that dig me.” “But... what about... the people, and the questions?” “You’re the Answer Man now. My little gift to you. You want your life to mean something, don’t you?” “But... how?” He stopped, now almost invisible in the gray. He was laughing. “How? The same way I became him — because the Answer Man just said you are!” His laugh was loud and wild, like a man who had survived a shipwreck. “Oh and by the way, I suggest keeping the five question rule, otherwise nobody will leave. Except for those psychos in the camp.” He laughed some more and disappeared down the hill. I was left alone, still wearing my slacks and dress shirt, holding the red robe of the Answer Man. * In between working for a vampiric megacorporation and cursing the names Newton and Leibniz, Z.T. Burian attempts to write. You can follow his wacky misadventures on his blog. Story © 2010 Z.T. Burian. This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010. |