The Story of You and Me (26 page)

The guides waved to us. One woman held a large thermos and poured liquid into outstretched paper cups that the others held in front of her. They passed them to people in the circle. My cup arrived and I accepted it. It was brown, smelled a little funky and I wrinkled up my nose. I wished Alejandro was close by at the lodge, instead of picking up Jackson who-knows-where.

“Good luck, everyone,” Dr. Kelsey said. “I can’t wait for you to experience the mind-blowing bliss and freedom this program gives people. To life! Bottoms up.”
 

“To life!” We collectively said and raised our cups.
 

I belted the concoction back. It tasted a little bitter. But not half as bad as many herbal teas. This Quest experience was going to be cake. Maybe I’d even learn something to help my Nana. What was I worried about?

Chapter Twenty-three

I kneeled on the dirt and vomited into scrub brush that kept weaving back and forth in front of me like it was drunk. “I don’t understand?” I retched again. “I don’t get it?” My stomach wouldn’t stop heaving. “I’m sick. Am I supposed to be sick? Is everyone sick?” I pushed my grimy hair back from my sweaty forehead, rolled onto my ass and propped myself up with one hand on the ground behind me.

“You aren’t sick, Sophie. You’re actually becoming healthy.” Dr. Kelsey sat across from me on the earth, his legs akimbo, about twelve feet way.
 
Several lanterns flanking him cast ominous shadows onto the rocks and cliffs around us. “The plant medicine is helping you expunge all the poisons in your life that are keeping you imprisoned. That are stopping you from knowing your truth.” All three versions of him leaned back against a huge boulder as he fidgeted with something rectangular and silver colored in his lap.

I felt feverish and dabbed my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt. Moments later I was freezing and shivered. My skin started crawling and felt like it was peeling off. I feared I’d be left with bloody muscles and tendons and visible bones. I peered down at my hand—it was still intact. “I feel like shit.”
 

“It’ll pass,” Dr. Kelsey said. “Nothing bad can happen to you. I’m your guide for tonight. All the other Quest participants share a guide with four other people. You lucked out. You’ve got me all to yourself.” He didn’t make eye contact—just kept peering down at his shiny toy.

I gazed around. There was a full moon overhead. We were on top of a mountain cliff that jutted out high over a canyon. Below was scruffy dried out looking vegetation, most likely due to the summer heat and lack of rain. Hooded areas mottled the canyon walls. Darkness filled their interiors and possibly led to caves. Steep precipices dropped abruptly to rocky tunnels.
 

Wild animals wailed in the distance. At first their cries were faint but quickly increased in volume until their screams rippled through the air around me. I clamped my hands over my ears. But now I could not only hear them, but see and practically touch them.

An enormous owl with a wingspan of ten or more feet swooped toward my face, talons extended, shrieking.

I flinched, ducked and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them the owl perched on a sturdy branch in a tall glistening pine tree and peered down at me with yellow saucer shaped eyes. “Hoo!” the owl screeched.

“Hoo back.” I huddled into a ball, squeezing my knees toward my chest.

Dr. Kelsey’s magnetic voice echoed around me. “Tell the owl you are not scared of it. It has no power over you.”

“What if it flies into my hair and gets caught? What if it attacks me? What if it lands on me and sticks its long spiky talons into my shoulders? And they jab into my heart and then I die?” I shuddered. “What the freak should I do then?” I pushed myself to standing and stumbled away from the scrub brush toward the cliff, toward a precipice.
 

 
“What the owl does is up to you, Sophie. You tell the owl what to do. Just like you can tell MS what to do.”

“Hah! You’re a riot.”

“That’s why you’re on the Quest. You need to learn this information so you can help yourself as well as your grandmother. Integrate it. Believe it. Live it.”

Everything was becoming even more hazy around me. But I could swear Dr. Kelsey was holding that silver thing to his face.

“Ask yourself the important questions, Sophie. The questions that can change lives,” Dr. Kelsey’s voice boomed and echoed from some place close to me. Or maybe it was far away from me. Really, it was too difficult, or possibly too easy, to figure out. But then I experienced a brief moment of clarity, where I saw something too familiar.
 

“Important question. Why did you have a camera pointed at me?” I asked.

“Because we need to share your journey with others. We need to help people with cancer or MS. People in wheelchairs,” he said. “You’re ripping your mind open to discover your essence. Save people. Just like you want to save your grandmother.”

“My essence believes that you have a flipping camera pointed at me,” I said. “Turn it off.”

“You need to tell the owl to leave and turn it off,” Dr. Kelsey said. “Not me.”

I swiveled. “I am not scared of you, owl,” I said.

The gigantic bird’s feathers morphed from dark green to gray to turquoise and then to black. All in a matter of seconds. Funny thing was, the owl’s eyes stayed the same. Yellow. Round. Creepy. No matter what color the owl was, it’s enormous round yellow eyes stayed the same color and glared at me. Then blinked.
 

I looked around. I saw stony cliffs while snippets of songs played in my head. I heard a few lines from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” made me wonder if I could fly.

I felt my soul split from my body and fly high into the sky toward a cliff that jutted out over the canyon far below. My grandmother stood on that cliff and shook her finger at me. “Go back, Sophie. Stop it, now!”

But blood wasn’t the only thing that coursed through my veins. Power and hunger mingled with my blood, circulated through my brain and poured through my body. Suddenly I no longer felt sick.
 

I felt amazing.
 

Invincible.
 

Omnipotent.

I started to giggle.

I wanted to fly.

I smelled smoke.

I held my hands out like airplane wings and skipped across the cliff, swerving to and fro. That rock in front of me—that I almost banged into—was the most beautiful rock I’d ever seen in my life. That plant above my head talked to me. An enormous spider that was even taller than me stood up tall on its back legs, regarded me through flickers of a flame that illuminated it and said, “Sophie! Follow me. Something bad’s happening. This place, this beautiful place is burning.” The spider waddled away from me.

“Hey!” I watched the flickers turn into flames that licked the scrub brush on the cliff. “Like—spiders creep me out. Seriously. Why should I follow you?”

“Because, if you stay here, you’ll burn,” the spider said. “Come on!”

“But,” I said. “If you’re a spider—why do you have a camera?”

The spider paused and morphed back into a glistening, sweaty, corpulent version of Dr. Kelsey. “Sophie. There’s a fire! We have to go! Come with me,” he held out his hand—which morphed back into hairy spider legs curling toward me.
 

I shuddered. “You go. I’ll be fine. I’m good in emergencies. Always have been.”

Flames popped up around Dr. Kelsey. He dropped his camera, turned hairy tail and lumbered away until he was out of sight.
 

I watched as the camera fell in slow motion into a scratchy bush, close to the cliff’s edge. The fires grew. I heard the dead plants scream as they caught fire, sizzled: their bodies lighting like a corpses lined up on a conveyor belt in a crematorium. One after the next.
 

I didn’t know why, but I needed to get that camera. Thick clouds of smoke congealed in the canyons and billowed in the air around me. Colonies of bats squealed as they flew out from caves in the cliffs around me, winging their way through the smoke. One large flock exploded out of the rocks just feet above my head, screeching and flapping their wings around me as they escaped into the night sky.

 
I screamed, ducked low to the ground and coughed. I clawed my way on the earth toward the camera that lay discarded, like a flashy toy the day after Christmas. It stuck out of scrub brush that clung to the edge of the cliff. It was illuminated by other plants that exploded like tiny bombs as the flames licked their base, expanded upwards and popped as they ignited like tiny little bombs.

But I didn’t care about bombs, or other acts of warfare. I was here to save a life. I was a good soldier and I would carry on. I crawled toward the scrub brush, snaked my hand close to its flames and snatched the camera. My hand started to burn. I clutched the camera to my chest, looked up and saw flames circling me. Engulfing me. I was literally
 
toast.
 

If I ran, I’d be burned. If I stayed, I’d die.
 

I looked around for my power animals: no owl, no spider. No bliss coursing through my veins. Only flames making their way toward me. I looked around for a way out of this mess. Flames everywhere. Smoke congealing. Fire licking, building around me. People screaming in the distance. I shook my head, and realized: this was screwed. There was only one way out, and it was if I dropped off the edge of the stony cliff.
 

There was a ledge below it. Unless I wanted to die right now, this was my only option. I stood up and walked to the edge of the cliff. Balanced on its precipice as the flames licked closer to me.

Now was the time. I could just let go. Surrender to the moment. The heat. The inevitability. Really? What did I have to lose?
 
I leaned forward. Just let go, Sophie, I told myself. Really, death is inevitable.
 

But I didn’t want to die, here or now. I wanted to live.

I heard the revs of a loud car engine, its horn honking like crazy, and a guy’s voice yelled, “Sophie Marie Priebe! Step away from that damn cliff. I’m coming for you.”

I turned and saw him. Alejandro. He wasn’t a spider. He wasn’t an action figure with a D emblazed on his long-sleeved T-shirt.
 

He was simply my Alejandro.

“You’re here,” I said as he scooped me up in his arms and hauled ass back to his Jeep, throwing me in the passenger seat and belting me in.

“You bet your ass I’m here,” he hopped in the driver’s seat and revved the engine. “Hang on. I’m going to get us out of this mess.”

* * *

I was back at USCLA emergency room, lying back on a gurney sucking oxygen out of a mask while Alejandro held my hand and texted Nick on his cell. “Damn,” he said.

I pulled the mask off my face. “What?”

“Do you remember passing out on the way down the mountain?”

“No,” I said and immediately wondered if it was from the hallucinogenic plant medicine or a seizure.
 

Alejandro nodded. “Well you did. I think you had a seizure.”

Great.

“I thought you were dying. It freaked the hell out of me and I didn’t know if I should stop or keep driving, but the flames were on our ass, so I just kept driving and held your hand. I got cell coverage about a quarter of a mile down and called 911. They were already on it. I got through to Nick and Tyler. They’re freaking crazy, but they were already in Malibu and went up into the hills. Nick found Beth—”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Is she okay?”

He shook his head. “She’ll live. Things could be worse. She’ll need some skin grafts on her arms. Tyler managed to help some locals evacuate with their two dogs, four cats and two horses. Dr. Carlton Kelsey was treated for smoke inhalation and has left the building. No comment on his part. Most of the people on the Quest are accounted for.”

“Most?”

“A few people on their roster are missing. Police have opened an investigation into Kelsey Vision Quest.”

The nurses kept monitoring my blood pressure, my oxygen intake.
 

“Alejandro,” I said and reached for his hand. “You rescued me. You saved my life. I’ve got to tell you something. I tried to tell you before.”

He wove his fingers through mine. “Anything.”

“I’ve been diagnosed with—”

A harried young female doctor burst into our semi-private curtained area. She flipped through my chart. “You’re nineteen-years-old, you’re in a USCLA stem cell study for early onset MS
and
you just survived a forest fire.” she said. “Someone needs to call Lifetime Network and option your rights for a TV movie.” She examined me and as well as my burns. “You lucked out, young lady,” she said.

I looked at Alejandro. The truth was out, and not in the way that I hoped it would happen.
 

Would he shun me? Would he judge me? Was I tainted in his eyes?
 

Alex squeezed my hand then released it, leaned down and kissed me on the top of my smoke scented hair.
 

The doctor examined me. “You lucked out young lady,” she said. “Your burns are first degree, minor. But your blood pressure’s high. That happens when you suffer from smoke inhalation. The hallucinogenic you took can really mess people up. You could have ended up as a guest in our Psych Ward. I’m assuming you voluntarily took this stuff.”

“Yes. But I was told the medicine was harmless.”

“You were told wrong. You’re dehydrated from vomiting. I see here in the chart you had seizures. The plant medicine could have kicked your MS symptoms into overdrive. The fire you escaped has already consumed a couple hundred acres. You should probably stay overnight for observation. I’ll have you transferred to—”

“No,” I said. “Please. I hate hospitals. I really want to go home.”
 

She signed. “Do you have a roommate? A friend to stay with you?” She eyed me and then Alex, with a questioning look.

 
“Yes. She has me,” Alejandro took my hand and squeezed it, again.. “I’m staying with her. Do you have any instructions? A number I should call if she gets worse? Has more seizures?”