[Narrator. Submitted for your consideration: Maylee Morningtree, Native American, age: eleven. Girl, interrupted. Height: five feet, weight: one hundred pounds. Brown hair, black eyes. Until this morning, happy schoolgirl, reasonably confident athlete. And the next subject of: The Possibility Zone.]
Things were not going well for Maylee Morningtree after the accident. It was in an ICU bed in hospital that she regained self awareness. She could hear the machine working that kept her breathing. Back in her small Arizona town not a month after a totally awesome extreme-skill camp tour in Costa Rica where for three weeks she had learned to tackle treacherous trails, dive for sunken treasure, rappel down cliffs... the three boys who'd rounded out the activity team to which she'd been assigned eventually accepted her as a full equal for her strength, determination, and courage.
Smooth way to end up, Maylee thought to herself. Going the tomboy route would actually make it easier, so she thought... a stint in the service, a degree in criminal justice, a position on the police force. Then, if she felt she'd had the maturity at the time, night school and the bar exam.
Briefly she assessed her situation: she couldn't feel a thing even with all the hoses in her mouth and various other parts of her body and wires and needles in her limbs keeping her "alive." Bad, she realised. Prevailing over all that challenge only to end up as a vegetable, courtesy of some damn drunk driver? Not on my watch! I have a mission! I have a destiny! Miles to go before I sleep...
Maylee relaxed, if that was possible. Hours passed. Dimly she became aware of a television set flashing to life, flickering through channels on the far wall and being watched by a young boy the next bed over. This caught Maylee's eye. At least he has enough control over his world to watch the tube. Me, I literally can't move a muscle or make a sound to save my own life, she rued. The commercials ended and the main program resumed, an animated cartoon about a game of roller hockey. Hm, I could so get into this - kind of about real people, more interesting even than that girl who talks with animals...
Her mind wandered and within a few moments Maylee felt the protecting presence of her grandfather's spirit, a decorated combat veteran and Native American shaman who had passed away a few years earlier from ill health, but who even now was a trusted source of strength and comfort to her.
Grandfather nodded to her. With all the strength
that remained in Maylee's body, she smiled.
{This side - Hospital.}
The nurse who heard the alarms tore open the partition
that instant. As the doctors and nurses of the code-blue team filed in,
each took up their assigned task in an effort to save her life. Despite
repeated defib shocks and massive infusions of medication, Maylee flatlined,
permanently and irrevocably. A man in a black shirt with a white collar
came in and blessed her body.
[fade music up to hollow muffle: The Doors' "Break on through to the other side"]
{That side.}
Maylee Morningtree found herself underwater - under a great depth of the most beautiful clear blue water she had ever seen, teeming with tons of fish. Desperate for air, she swam towards the surface.
[the music is heard more clearly]
It was broad daylight. There was a pier off in the distance.
Maylee checked herself - two legs, two arms - and found that she was one hundred percent. Nary a scratch. She swam for the shore.
[The music, now heard crystal clear, is coming from the pier's carrousel]
A surfer, a boy Maylee's age with red dreadlocks and a headband that secured his sunglasses to his face, wearing a black lycra shirt and blue/green Billabong trunks, paddled towards her, towing another surfboard behind him (holding the leash between his toes). "Yo Maylee!" he addressed her, continuing "I think I know what happened," He held up the free end of the leash that was missing its ankle cuff.
"Thanks!" Maylee replied, totally freaked that the guy knew her name without any prior introduction. She mounted the board, noticing only now that by some chain of events she'd been outfitted with a blue lycra shirt and pink Roxy trunks. She paddled and caught a wave into shore standing up, astonished that she knew how to do this because back at the Costa Rican adventure camp, the first time she'd ever had anything to do with the ocean, she'd only learned to bodyboard. Looking down at her feet, she learned the guy was right... the ankle cuff was still on her leg, but the connection had failed. Seeing a surf shop across the way attached to a small cafe, she unwrapped the cuff and decided to see what could be done about the problem.
"Hiya Maylee!" shouted a girl from behind the counter. She was tall and pretty with very natural looking curly purple hair, a pair of reading glasses perched high on her forehead. Purple hair, eh? Some unique genetic trait, Maylee wondered, now getting used to the idea of people on the street knowing who she was.
The clerk had one arm in a cast in a blue shoulder sling. A plastic tag bearing the name "Reggie" was pinned onto her magenta t-shirt emblazoned with the shop's logo, a retro-movie spacecraft soaring into the cosmos on a column of fire. Before Maylee could say a word to explain the problem, "Aw, not again," Reggie said when she got up to look, wearing a pair of surplus woodland-camo BDU pants. "That's the third leash this week of that type that's failed. My dad'll have to talk to the manufacturer. Ooh, it's one-thirty. Time for lunch! We'll take care of this right after."
Reggie locked the streetside door of the surf shop and stuck a sign on it saying "Out to lunch," then opened the sliding glass door between the surf shop and the cafe, gently leading Maylee to a stool. Maylee studied the menu posted over the range-hood, taking in the aroma of broiled beef that vaguely reminded her of outdoor cookouts back home, and felt around in the back pocket of her trunks.
She found a small waterproof wallet containing a quantity of money and a California minor's ID bearing her photograph, the name Maylee Greatcloud, and an address somewhere in a community called Ocean Shores.
The last name Greatcloud surprised her, but everything else she had experienced today since her emergence from the sea bottom was going well, so she decided to kick back and go with the flow.
A cold, clammy hand gently closed over hers and Maylee heard someone whisper in her ear. "Put it away. Teamfeed is on the house. Something my dad told me about a... 'deduction'." She turned to look into a broad, bright smile. It was that fellow - Otto, the others were calling him - with the red dreadlocks and the funky shades.
"Lil cuz stay right, lil cuz. So, what'll it be?" a huge Hawaiian cook asked her.
"Er,..." she was at a loss for words. "A BLT on wheat and a diet Pepsi. No fries."
"Really, seestah. You mus' be hungry," he opined.
Maylee turned to observe Otto working his way through a huge and complicated bacon avocado cheeseburger. "O-kay... I'll have what that gen-... Otto's having over there," she said with a big grin.
The cook chuckled. "'Kay den. Comin' right up."
Some minutes later, all heads turned to the sound of a skateboard clattering up the sidewalk, then sliding crosswise to a stop. The rider, a freckle-faced Latino boy in baggy old clothes and a red Pro-Tec, came in brandishing a camcorder. "Guys! I caught Maylee's wipeout from the pier!" he proclaimed, beaming. Another kid - Sam - led the cameraman - Twister - to a table in the corner where an iMac was sitting, and the others followed.
"You remember how I showed you, right?" Sam, a short fellow with a short haircut and thick glasses, asked Twister. Twister nodded.
The footage was revealed: Maylee took off on a freak outside set wave and almost connected with the barrel, only to get tossed into the air. All who looked on let out an amazed and sympathetic "Whoa!" Her unridden board tumbled down the face of the wave.
Maylee made no comment, especially about the beam of light - or whatever it was - that appeared for a frame or two after she beefed. This was too much for her right here, right now. "Hey peeps," she said, maintaining her cool for the moment, "I just remembered something. I gotta split. But ah'll bee bahk. Thanks for the lunch."
"Be seeing you," the others said.
She left, and found a taxicab waiting nearby. Maylee read the address to the driver from her ID card.
"Are you sure? That's really not that far," the driver observed.
"Let's go," Maylee insisted.
They arrived at the address, only a couple of blocks from what was it - The Shore Shack? A large wooden house surrounded by trees.
"That'll be $2," the driver said.
Maylee handed him a $5. "Keep the change," she said.
She found a key in her wallet. It opened the door. This person she knew right off the bat, for a change. "Grandpa!" They hugged.
"How's your day going, Maylee?"
"Quite well, actually, but just had one of those..." she searched for a word... "primonotion... premonition... Ungh! Strange feelings."
"The spirits alerted me this day that you might have a very serious question." Maylee knew her grandfather and had absolutely no problem trusting him with anything.
"It's like... earlier today I was this girl who lived in... Dusty Corners, Arizona riding her... skateboard to a friend's house, only to get clobbered by a drunk driver. I end up in hospital and die in the ICU. But just before I kick the bucket you show up and tell me everything's all right. Then I wake up out here, in the ocean. Seems everybody I meet knows my name... and I'm confronted with photographic evidence that I pulled off a stunt I haven't the faintest idea how to do. I am a stranger in my own body."
The old man sat and thought for a very long minute before speaking.
"Not only do we have ideas, we are ideas. The universe itself started as an idea. Even ideas start out as ideas..." He drew a breath, and smiled. "Why don't you go clean yourself up. We'll take a drive up into the hills after dinner."
Maylee Greatcloud found her room after treating herself to a hot shower. The top of her chest of drawers was filled with trophies: soccer, 4H, hockey, surfing, even skateboarding. There was a computer on her desk. She booted it up and picked out an outfit: blue jeans, high tops, a soccer shirt, and a scrunchie.
She logged onto the internet, went to a search engine site, and looked for information first about her home town and then about her school. To her dismay she found that neither existed in reality, at least in this reality, but both lines of inquiry ended up referring to some sort of television show, a popular youth-oriented weekly drama.
Maylee surfed to another site that hosted a movie-credits database. Under "Part" she entered "Maylee Morningtree" and was surprised to find that three actresses had played that character during the run of that show. The most recent holder of that position was not Native American at all, but rather Irish, and while the girl bore a striking resemblance to Maylee she was older by a few years than herself. The actress' most recent work was a role as "Sergeant Wrigley" in a movie due out next year called Attack of the Giant Monkeys.
When she searched the entry about the TV show it was literally like finding out your whole life and world was just nothing more than someone else's artificial construct. You could do as you chose, but only someone else you didn't know would ever get to take credit for it. She turned on the TV and went to the channel guide. Interestingly enough, an "episode" of "her" show was playing at that hour. Curiously, as though about to look inside a box containing a bottle containing the most vile and horrible disease known to man, she tuned in to it. It was about four years earlier by her reckoning, helping her mother - her mother - bake a cake. It was a very happy moment indeed, but also a very intimate moment of quality time. Devastated, she shut the TV set off, and, taking a long moment, went back to the computer.
Nervously, Maylee ran the menu and checked for recently used documents. Included was a long and unsent love letter to Twister, but also something that intrigued her a little more: it was identified just as "novel.doc." That one she opened right away.
Jeez! What have I stumbled onto? I know what this is about! she observed as she scanned through it. But when she got to the most recent chapter, she observed, No! That's not what happened, then erased a bunch of paragraphs and started writing:
The helpers reached the capital after a great battle. The citizens, free at last from the evil overlord's power, rejoiced as a large truck dragged down an imposing monument he had earlier erected in his own honor, or lack thereof, that stood at the very center of the city. It, the statue, was promptly torn to pieces and whacked with shoe soles, a supreme insult in the code of the Arab...
[fade into a corner: stock footage of the fall of Baghdad]
He had gotten away, or so he thought, but the wheels - or tanktreads - of justice would eventually catch up with him. That day would come, but it would not be today. Plenty of other work remained at present just the same...
[Narrator. Centuries ago, a wise man once observed that one person's reality could become another person's fantasy,...]
[zoom into monitor screen]
...and life in the mean time would go on needing to be lived.
[mouse saves and closes document]
[Narrator (finishing). ...and in the Possibility Zone, the opposite can be, and more often than one might expect, is, true.]
[Maylee speaking, offscreen:]
"I think I'm going to enjoy this life. Anyway, I'll be damn sure next time to wear my helmet before getting anywhere near a bike or a skateboard."
[fade music up to loud: The Doors' "Break on through to the other side"]
[End]