“Drugs are a black hole of negativity,” Catherine said. “I don’t want you around that scene.”
“I’m not into drugs!” Jason found himself nearly shouting. “I couldn’t skate if I took drugs, and all I want to do is skate!”
“What’s on the Web that’s so wonderful?” Catherine demanded, her own anger flaring. “Drugs and porn and advertising. Nothing but commercialism and materialism—”
“Talk!” Jason waved his hands. “Conversation! Information! My friends are online!”
“You need to make friends here,” she said. “We live in Missouri now.”
“I don’t need to make friends here! I’ve already got friends! And the second I can get back to them, I will!”
She looked at him from across the table. The anger faded from her expression. She looked at him sadly.
“You can’t go back to California,” she said. “You know why.”
“I know, all right,” Jason said.
Concern filled her eyes. “If you go back to California,” she said, “you’ll die.” Jason looked at the framed photograph of Queen Nepher-Ankh-Hotep that sat on the side table between two sprays of Aunt Lucy’s irises. The Egyptian queen looked back at him with serene kohl-rimmed eyes.
“So I hear,” he said.
Back in 1975, an Oregon housewife named Jennifer McCullum was informed by a vision that in a previous life she had been Queen of Egypt. So benevolent and spiritual had been her reign that she had since been incarnated many times, always with her consciousness located on a higher celestial plane than most of the other people stuck on this metaphysical backwater, the earth. Subsequent visions instructed the reincarnated monarch in spiritual techniques which she subsequently taught to her disciples. According to her own account, around the same time as the “Nepher-Ankh-Hotep Revelations,” as they were subsequently called, McCullum also began to experience another series of visions terrifying in their violence and destruction: communities ravaged by earthquake and fire, flood and tidal wave. These visions were first experienced in black-and-white, like an old newsreel, but by 1989 McCullum was receiving in full color. Eventually, with the aid of a disembodied Atlantean spirit guide named Louise, McCullum was able to piece together the narrative thread of her visions.
In the near future, McCullum reported, a series of natural disasters would strike North America. California would be leveled by earthquakes and would then drop into the sea. Other bits of the American continent were also doomed, either by quake, submergence, tornadoes, volcanoes, or “poisonous vibrations.” Atlantis would rise from the Atlantic, and Lemuria from the Pacific, causing tidal waves that would wash most coastal cities out to sea.
Few places on earth would be safe from this apocalypse.
Among them, the former Queen of Egypt asserted, were several states in the American heartland, among them Missouri. Positive vibrations emanating from the Memphis Pyramid would exert a spiritually calming influence on the surrounding countryside.
Which was why Catherine Adams moved herself and her son Jason to Cabells Mound, where her Aunt Lucy, recently widowed, needed someone to help out in her greenhouse business. And which was why city boy Jason, skilled at urban pastimes like inline skating and speeding packets of data along the Information Superhighway, found himself among the watery cotton fields of the Swampeast.
“Have you ever thought,” Jason said, “that Queen Pharaoh Nepher-Whatsis is just plain crazy!”
“How can you say that?” Catherine asked. “She’s only trying to help people. She wants to save our lives. Nepher-Ankh-Hotep means ‘Gift of a Beautiful Life.’ She is the most actualized being I have ever met.”
Actualized. There was that word again. Every time he listened to his mother talk about metaphysics, she’d use a term like actualized or negative thoughtform or color vibration, and Jason’s brain would simply shut down. It was as if his understanding had run smack into a linguistic wall. What did these words mean, anyway?
They meant whatever his mother wanted them to mean. They all meant, You have to stay here and like it.
“And it’s not just Nepher-Ankh-Hotep,” Catherine said. “Lots of people have received catastrophe revelations. They all agree that California is going to be destroyed.”
“So Colin’s going to be killed? And Aunt Charmian. And Abie?” He looked at her. “Dad is going to be killed?”
His mother gazed at him sadly. “It’s not up to me. It’s karma. California has so much negative karma that it can’t survive, and it’s going to be wiped out for the same reason Atlantis was destroyed. But we can always hope that our friends will survive, the way the people from Atlantis survived and went to Mexico and Egypt. But if they do die, it’s because they chose it, they chose this incarnation in order to experience California’s destruction.”
Jason could feel his brain “de-focusing under this onslaught—he couldn’t understand why people, or even disembodied spirits, would choose to experience mass destruction, why they’d line up to get annihilated like people paying for the earthquake ride at Universal Studios—but he gathered his energies and made the attempt.
“What’s wrong with California’s karma, anyhow?” he asked. “And how can a whole state have karma anyway? And why,” warming to the subject, “is Missouri’s karma supposed to be all that great? They had slavery here. And all those Cherokee died just north of here on the Trail of Tears.” The Trail of Tears had been the subject of a field trip the previous month.
It had rained.
Jason, stuck in an alien land, in lousy weather, and far from his spiritual home, had taken the Cherokee experience very much to heart.
“I am trying to save your life,” Catherine said.
“I’ll take my chances in L.A.! My karma can’t suck that badly!”
“We were talking,” Catherine said, narrowing her eyes, “about the Internet. I don’t want you spending all your time online—I want you to restrict yourself to an hour a day.”
Jason was aghast. “An hour!”
“One hour per day. That’s all.” There was a grim finality in Catherine’s tone. “And I want you to make some effort to make friends here.”
“I don’t want to know anyone here!”
“There are good people here. You shouldn’t look down at them just because they don’t live in the city. You should get to know them.”
“How?” Jason waved his hands. “How do I meet these good people?”
“You can stop radiating hostility all the time, for one thing.”
“I don’t radiate hostility!” Jason shouted.
“You certainly do. You glare at everyone as if they were going to attack you. If you met them halfway—”
“I am not interested! I am not interested at all! One minute after I’m eighteen, I’m out of here!” Jason bolted from the dinner table, stormed up the stairs to his study, slammed the door, and turned the skeleton key that locked it.
His mother’s voice came up from below. “You better not be online!”
Jason paced the room, feeling like a trapped animal. His life was one prison after another. He was a minor, completely dependent on other people. He was in an alien country, walled off by the levee, with nothing but soaked cotton fields to look at. His school, with its red brick, concrete, and windows protected by steel mesh, even looked like a prison.