Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (26 page)

Ismael sighed. “I can help you find Bridget. It is a long and arduous trek, but it can be done.”

“Listen. The first time I saw you, you cracked Nicholas in the knee with a club. The second time I saw you, you were standing in the crowd when Bridget jumped to her death. The third time I saw you, you promised to
lead
me to Bridget. I think you need to fill in some fucking
gaps
.”

Ismael looked upward, meditatively. “Agreed,” he said at last. “We are not precisely on a schedule, and I can see how this might set your mind at ease. Let me tell you how I met Bridget.” He gestured for Darrin to give him back the water bottle, took a sip, and then began to speak.

2

The day I met Bridget, I was travelling from my home in Oakland to a place in San Francisco, near the park, where I had a meeting with an associate. The briarpatch is many things, but one of its baser attributes is a series of shortcuts. If one is experienced in walking its pathways, one can use it to travel quickly from one point to another in the narrower world, with the added advantage of avoiding the press of humanity on trains and buses. It is a trivial journey, as I can enter the shed in my back yard, pass into the briarpatch, take a relatively safe ten minute walk along a lonely dirt track in a place where the air is sweet and fields of red blossoms sway in the breeze, and emerge behind one of the many statues hidden in Golden Gate Park. The man who designed the park despised statues, and whenever the city forced one upon him, he planted densely around it, often hiding the monument completely from view, which made my spot a convenient exit point. Because of the vagaries of time, which does not flow evenly everywhere in the briarpatch, I sometimes arrive in the park shortly before even leaving my home. Efficient, hmm?

But one day last year, I emerged from the briarpatch to find a woman sitting cross-legged—much as we are sitting now—at the base of the statue, smoking a joint. She stared up at me, and did not seem particularly startled by my emergence from empty air. “Want a drag?” she asked.

I nearly said no and hurried away. But I am always looking for . . . prospects, people who can be guided and saved . . . and I have come to develop a sense for these things. Some people are willing to consider the mysteries that lie at the heart of the world, and I thought this woman might be one. Either that or she was sufficiently stoned that seeing a man appear from nowhere didn’t merit comment. So I sat with her, and we passed the joint back and forth in companionable silence, looking at the legs of the forgotten statue. Finally she said, “How did you do that? Just . . . appear like that?”

I answered her honestly, which is generally my policy, because most people don’t believe me, and those who
do
can sometimes be useful to me. I said, “There is a world—there are
worlds
—behind and beyond this world, and some people can travel those worlds at will. I am one of those people.”

She pinched closed the end of the joint and put it away in her pocket, then said, “Prove it.”

“I’m not a magician. I don’t do shows.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

Then she said, more softly: “I
want
to believe you.”

I have a hard heart. I have endured much in the way of suffering, and little in the way of joy, and I discovered long ago that compassion is just a winding path to greater misery, because when you allow yourself to care for someone, they can hurt you far more than any stranger ever could. But I felt compassion for this woman, and the longing in her voice.

“Take my hand,” I said, and she did. “Now look.” I nodded to the left of the statue, and she gasped, because she could see it then, as clearly as I could, a wooden archway hung with boughs of white flowers, and beyond the arch, a path that led off into a place that was not the park.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, seeing the red flowers in the distance, and I agreed that some parts of it were beautiful, but other parts were ugly, or dangerous, or simply incredibly strange. I let go of her hand, and she made a noise of disappointment, because she could not see it anymore. “If you spent enough time in the briarpatch, you wouldn’t need my help to see it anymore.”

“Why do you call it the briarpatch?”

“It’s just what a friend of mine used to call it,” I told her. “His name was Harczos, and he used to say he was born and raised in the briarpatch, and there was nowhere he would rather be. Though since then I have heard others call it the same thing. Harczos was a talkative man. I suppose his term for the place spread. Before I met Harczos, I called it the dark wood, or sometimes the wild garden, but the briarpatch seemed more fitting.”

She surprised me with her next question. She said “What is it
for
?”

Most people, made aware of the briarpatch’s existence, don’t think to question its utility. I had to think for a moment before I answered her. “There is a better world, a place where there is no pain or suffering, where everything is made luminous. But it is difficult to reach. It is almost impossible to even glimpse from this world, though sometimes—through sex, through music, meditation, drugs—it is possible. From the briarpatch, you can more directly sense the existence of that better world. It is . . . a step closer to the sublime. There are places where you can glimpse the light, indirectly, without its true potency, but enough to get a sense of its power. There may even be an overland route, a way to walk to that better world from the briarpatch, but I have not found it yet. The briarpatch provides encouragement, reassurance that there are other worlds than this, and other options besides drudgery and empty death.”

She nodded as if this all made sense, but then said, “That’s what it means to you, the purpose it serves for you. Okay. But what is it, really?”

A fair question, and—forgive me—a thorny one. Harczos used to go on and on about the true nature of the briarpatch, and I tossed off one of his favourite quips: “It is the fleeting memory of a dream had by God.” The sort of answer that says nothing much and may or may not mean something, but that certainly sounds meaningful, in a kōan sort of way. But she looked at me with this terrible ferocity that I came to know so well—a look that said this was a serious talk we were having, that even though she was high enough to take the discovery of the briarpatch in stride, she wasn’t anywhere near high enough to take it lightly. I suspect you saw the same look on her face many times during your relationship. I certainly saw it many times while I knew her.

“Tell me,” she said, and I sighed and replied, “It is a mystery. It is an impenetrable thicket of miracles. I have never been a philosopher, but for a while my friend Harczos believed the briarpatch was a dumping ground for worlds too implausible to exist. He said it was God’s storehouse, the place where the creator put away worlds half-made and then abandoned because they did not fit into the greater scheme of the universe, or because they were poorly made, or because they displeased Him. I have met scientist-shamans who talk on and on about quantum mechanics, convinced the briarpatch is a garden of forking paths,
possible
worlds that have not quite resolved into proper existence. I have met people who believe the briarpatch is Fairyland, and people who believe it is the access tunnels to the workings of the universe, where gods and their minions can make adjustments to reality, and people who believe it is the medicine lands, or the Dreamtime, or the outer boroughs of Hell. No one knows what it is. But it is full of wonders.”

That seemed to satisfy her, and I thought more highly of her then, because she was happier with a messy, incomplete, truthful answer than with a neat complete one. “I’d like to go there,” she said. “Will you show me?”

3

“Enough.” Darrin stared down at his knees. He believed Ismael, all too easily. Bridget had always longed for something more, something important, and she’d dabbled in drugs, and religions both mainstream and alternative, and extreme activities of all kinds. How could she have passed up an opportunity like that, to see a world beyond the world she knew? How had he not realized? In the months before Bridget left him, Darrin had been busy, routinely working seventy-hour weeks. Bridget had professed not to mind, and she’d certainly always been an independent person with friends and a life of her own. They’d kept their Sundays together, their walks and brunches, their time spent sipping margaritas in the back yard, and those days had kept Darrin sane. But maybe they’d just been habit—or, worse, obligation—for Bridget. Now he had some idea of what she’d been doing the other six days of the week.

“She did love you, you know,” Ismael said.

“Then why didn’t she tell me about . . . all this?” He looked up into Ismael’s long, placid face.

“She planned to, for a while,” Ismael said. “Until she decided to kill herself. She didn’t think you would go along with it.”

Darrin stood up then, wobbling a bit, one of his legs having fallen asleep during Ismael’s story. “Yes. Right.
That
. Why did she kill herself? What did you have to do with that?”

Ismael didn’t even bother to look at him when he answered. “Death is one path to the better world. You’ve heard of suicide cults. They believe that by casting aside their bodies, their souls could go to a better place. They are correct in theory, but woefully inadequate in practice. The soul and the body are tightly wound together, nearly inseparable, and it takes months of preparation to unbind them. While Bridget still lived with you, she took trips with me, here, into the briarpatch. She learned her way around, learned to see the same paths I could see, and, eventually, I took her to a place where she could see the light of the better world. Not reach its source, no—I’ve never found a direct path—but
see
it, as you can see the skyline of San Francisco from the shores of Oakland. After seeing the light, she decided to leave you, and dedicate herself to preparing for the journey there.”

Darrin sat back down, his anger draining away. It was exhausting, being angry. “What kind of preparation did that involve? Brainwashing her? Sleeping with her?”

“The pleasures of the flesh no longer interest me,” Ismael said. “I have had a surfeit of them, and they all grow tedious in time. No, Darrin. She meditated. She fasted. She studied. She drank preparations developed over the centuries by certain shamans, though I suspect they work more as placebo than true magic. She ritually destroyed most of her possessions, and gave the rest away. Leaving you was the most difficult step for her, because you were symbolic of everything she was leaving behind, of the total abandonment of her life. She needed to turn her back completely on this world, to carry nothing from her old life with her, until she felt she could leave this world without regret. And then, once she felt she was ready, I went with her to Golden Gate Bridge, and she jumped. As she fell, she saw a light appear beneath her, a pinprick at first, growing to a portal. When people give up everything of this world, even their bodies, a door to the better world opens before them. The body cannot pass through that door, but the
spirit
can, and with her study, and her willingness to give up everything, she was able to separate her spirit and her body. Her physical form died when it hit the water, but her spirit lived on, and passed through the portal, into the light of a better world.” He spread his hands. “She transitioned. She is a blessed one. She dwells forever in the light.”

“You said you could take me to her. But if you can’t get to this place with the light unless you die, how are we supposed to do that?”

“We are going to find a northwest passage. We will search for an overland route to the better world, a way to reach it physically, and once we get there, you will find Bridget. I believe that once you see the light, you will choose to stay there forever. As will I.”

“If you’re so keen to find this place, why don’t you just kill yourself? Instead of trying to find some path that might not even exist?”

“The path
does
exist. I know, because my old friend Harczos found it. He did not take me with him, because we had a . . . difference of opinion. But he went away, into the light, and came out again to tell me he’d found it. Because of our falling out, he would not take me there.” Ismael shook his head. “It is a cruelty on his part that I have never been able to forgive; we have not spoken for many decades.”

“Decades?” Darrin said. “What are you talking about? You don’t look more than maybe thirty-five.”

“I am at least 800 years old,” Ismael said. “I stopped aging before I was forty, as near as I can tell. If I could die, I would, but I will live forever, Darrin. The overland route is my only hope for transcending the essential misery of existence.”

“You’re crazy,” Darrin said, though he knew saying something like that, in a place like this, was folly—how could he know what was possible and impossible anymore?

“Not crazy, Darrin. Just born and raised in the briarpatch. I have no father, no mother. Neither did Harczos. We are implausible creatures, people who might have been, and we came into existence in the briarpatch independent of any creation, just like these hedges, just like that fence. There are a dozen of us, children of the briarpatch, possibly a score, though Harczos is the only one I’ve spent any amount of time with.” He paused. “Before you, that is. You are a child of the briarpatch too, Darrin.”

“Bullshit,” Darrin said, but his heart was pounding.

“You were found wandering the streets as a toddler. You came out of the briarpatch, and you suffered from years of blindness, until the devastation of your life opened your eyes to other passages in the world again. No one held your hand or showed you the way. You can see paths that I cannot, just as Harczos could. I have explored as far as I can alone, but with your help, I can access whole other regions of the briarpatch, and together we may be able to find our northwest passage.”

“What makes you think I can find it?”

Ismael shrugged. “I know I cannot find it on my own. With your help, I can cover so much more ground. I
know
it exists, somewhere, in the tangles of the briarpatch. We may fail, I suppose, but I have all the time in the world, so why not try? Hope is very important, Darrin. It’s something I haven’t felt for a long time.”