"Live. Die. Repeat." Tagline for Edge of Tomorrow, Warner Brothers Pictures, 2014.
Jack felt his knees seem to turn to gelatin, and he slumped to the "grass" listlessly, feeling an agonizing twist of failure and loss and regret in his chest as he came unglued.
At least it was fast, he thought numbly. And it didn't hurt. It didn't hurt. Why was I so stupid? Why didn't I just let things alone and scram when I had the goddamn chance! Sorry for saying that God, he hurriedly added.
He wanted to cry like a child, but couldn't. Spirits don't cry after all, he thought dully.
"It's not fair," he croaked out simply as he pressed the knuckles of both fists against his forehead. "All I wanted to do in those last minutes, all I wanted to do, was just find Ann and tell her, out loud, how much I loved her! And now I'm DEAD because I had to play the idiot hero! Now I'll never, ever get that chance!" he lamented bitterly.
"Actually Jack-" Mufasa began.
His attention snapping back to the late lion king, Jack desperately asked, "What was her reaction, when she found out? What shape is-was-my body in? Was the funeral an open casket or closed one? Did she come? Did the news just destroy her utterly, or is she going to manage to press on?"
"And my parents! My siblings!" he went on. "Oh good God, my poor mother and sisters especially must be so completely devastated-" he began thickly.
With a commanding, growling grunt, Mufasa cut the upset playwright short.
"As I was about to say to you just now Jack," the lion went on after a few moments, "you aren't actually as dead as you currently believe yourself to be."
The writer tried to process this for a few seconds, but could only come up with an astonished "WHAT?!" of abject confusion.
"This may be difficult for you to understand," Mwaguzi told him simply, "but what Mufasa means is that you've still currently got a toehold in the world of the living."
"I do? That's great!" he beamed earnestly, standing up in wild hope. "But how! And can I be-well, brought back-somehow from this limbo I'm in?"
"Well first," the patas monkey informed him, "to make a long story short, by all the laws of biology and reality, yes, you are and should remain stone dead." A terrible, sick feeling floated up within the writer at the words.
"But," the former shaman continued, "very, very thankfully for you, the great Powers at the middle of this multiverse, who watch and supervise from its nexus-call them gods if you would like-have gone to the rare trouble of making you into a special case."
"A miracle, in other words," Jack replied in grateful, astonished awe as he looked above his head and around him. "If you're here, God or Christ or both, I fervently thank you for this!," he declared, clasping his hands together.
"Yes," Mufasa droned with a faint smile. "I suppose that's as good a term as any for it."
"Wow," Jack could only manage. "I-I don't know what to say to this. I-I'm actually being brought back from the dead a la Lazarus. There's not many men who can say that."
"No, indeed not," Mwaguzi smiled with a slow nod. "But now at any rate it's time to get down to business and send you back Mr. Driscoll. Could you kneel and let me place my hands on your head, please?"
"Oh, absolutely," Jack found himself replying in a giddy, half-delirious laugh. "First though, I have two important questions I want to know."
"Then by all means ask them," Mwaguzi tolerantly said.
"Well, I know it's a rather superficial and selfish one, but do any of you know where I can find Ann?"
All three of his 'heavenly' companions said nothing for a few seconds, shooting him and each other quick, uncertain glances. A terrible chill began to rise within the New Yorker again.
"What?" he said, trying to keep his voice measured. "What do you fellas know? Just tell me!"
"Kong has her," Mufasa rumbled simply. "He didn't find her, she went searching for him, to keep him calm."
A combination of astonishment and horror galvanized Jack Driscoll, one that was at least as awful as the one he'd had on realizing he was now technically dead. It wasn't totally shocking though.
"Wait a moment!" he shouted. "Kong has Ann again?!"
"Yes, but everything's okay, at least for now," Mwaguzi tried to reassure him. "They're both happy, and he's just carrying her arou-"
"NO! No," Jack snapped back at the patas monkey, pointing his finger at the wrinkled face. "Kong having a hold of my dame is NOT okay in any way! He's a worked-up, fierce, massive, dangerous beast, and-"
"And do you truly think he would hurt her?" Mufasa cut in simply, meeting Jack's gaze with his measured, wise, calming one. "You and I both know what he did for her on Skull Island, right Jack?"
He had a good point, and the playwright felt some of the panic and terror drain from his disembodied form.
"No," he grudgingly admitted. "Not in a thousand years-not deliberately, at least," he added. But one thing she is in damned serious danger from is her own kind, from the trigger-happy cops and soldier boys, he realized, the bonfire of horror flaring up once more like a dragon's breath.
"I've got no time to waste," he said authoritatively, desperately, even as he kneeled down before the former shaman of the Mzima Pride. "Send me back pronto Mister mystical monkey."
"I'm seconds away from obliging, Jack," Mwaguzi assured him even as he raised both his hands in the sapphire light. "But you said you had another question to ask first. You might as well do it."
"Yes, but now there's no ti-"
"You have time," Mufasa assured him. "Just enough."
Still in a kneeling position, Jack looked into the eyes of the lion, the painted dog, and the patas monkey before giving a long look up and around at the luminous cobalt mist above him, voice filled with astonishment and disbelief and gratitude and bewilderment at the force who he knew was watching, was very near, had granted him reprieve after reprieve as he asked, "Why me? Why am I being allowed to live, literally being granted a miracle," his eyes switching back to the animals, "when Lord knows there have been so many equally deserving, way more experienced, smarter and stronger and just better fellas-like you Mufasa, Ben Hayes, Lumpy, Herb-along the way that died horrible deaths that by all rights, should've been meant for me too?"
"I mean, the last fella I want to sound like is like the person who looks a gift horse in the mouth," he continued, "but why are Ann and I so special that we've been allowed to squeak by? Why are the powers that be in this multi-verse so interested in me that they want me to stick around? It could've been so easy you know," he churned on, spreading his hands out helplessly. "I could've been killed by Kong up at his mountain lair. One of those savages could've chosen me instead of Mike to take that first spear through the chest. I could've been killed by Nduli or have already bled to death long before your baboon protégé showed up, squished by one of the brontosaurus, or ripped to pieces by the bullets from Jimmy's Thompson."
"Why am I being favored like this? It's almost like we're the heroic leads in some movie or novel," he chuckled giddily, "and I'm therefore just too damn interesting, too important to die!"
"Who can say when it comes to things like that?" Mufasa told him simply. "There are two answers I can tell you to your question though: One is that this cosmos and the multiverse is, for better or worse, a capricious place."
While the late lion king was speaking, Jack was listening, but no longer looking at the big cat.
That was because he was just a bit preoccupied with the sight and sensation of Mwaguzi, standing erect on his greyhound's hind legs, placing his callused hands in the playwright's thick black hair, presumably to send his sprit/soul back into his body and repair this particular Jack's badly broken crown at the same time.
Suddenly, light came from the hands, a Christmastime combination of green and red, forming a living aura over his skin, flowing into his head, then neck, then lithe body like some wonderful, soothing brew.
He felt the oddest sensations, seemingly of shattered bones in the top of his head and cervical vertebrae fusing together and arching back into place, of nerve cells growing, extending, forming and then completing a bridge in his upper neck, of a switchboard being repaired, and then relinked with the biological telephone network and power lines which ran throughout his body.
And then Mufasa spoke a final time before Jack found himself back in the partly crushed taxi, the New York cold, and his healed, living mortal body of flesh and bone and blood. The words rang in his astonished, flabbergasted mind for several seconds before he regained awareness.
"As for the second? Well," the lion hinted with a hopeful, knowing smile, "let's just say that's something that even Rafiki isn't aware of."
"What are you talking about Mufasa?
Mwaguzi replied in the lion king's stead. "While even we can't get a full idea of how it will play out upon this plane…ah, well, all we can tell you Mr. Driscoll is that the Mzima Pride and the Circle of Life there aren't quite finished with you and Ann by a long shot," he laughed knowingly.
"Are you saying-"
"Perhaps. But that's for another time," Jumbe chimed in with a canine grin. "And you won't remember those words in a couple of your minutes anyhow. Now go save your kike and tell her how you feel, Abu Chuma!" he commanded the writer.
Before Jack could even consider producing another word in response, there was a blinding flash of light.
And then he opened his eyes again.
Happy Father's Day to all my readers!
Ironically, I just saw The Edge Of Tomorrowyesterday. What an awesome movie it was!
