The Way Fayer

When he opened his eyes, he was looking at a seat across from his own. Quilted leather. Mahogany. The interior of the vehicle was more like a carriage than a car, lampstands glowing softly from the corners. A small screen blocked him from the front of the vehicle: tempered glass. He looked out the window to his right, blinking and squinting as he did. A field rolling by with the sun on its horizon. The field seemed to go on forever. He could not tell if the sun was rising or setting, but soon he would know. Daybreak or twilight. The dawn of direction.

Somehow, a feeling of panic and serenity coincided within him. Fear … but also peace. A part of him screamed. Another part of him sank a little deeper into the seat. Not wanting to leave. To stay in the warm sunlight as it illuminated the antiquity of the vehicle: carrying the stories of a forgotten past, but with the elegance of youth. As if it had always existed and yet remained unchanged.

His attention turned to the screen before him. Polished and thick. He knocked on it: thud, thud, thud. Durable. Not worth trying to break, even if he could fit through it. On the other side, a slick black wheel steering itself as the vehicle turned onto a gravel road. No driver. Unmanned and approaching the mystery without a clue to spare. But … What mystery? he wondered. And where am I coming from? A question that his dreams had been trying to answer. Dreams he could no longer remember.

So the panic began to win over, pressing against his throat like a knife. His breath turned shallow, hands cold and clammy. Promised an end even before the beginning. 

But … The beginning of what? 

Inhaling. The air seemed to leak out of his lungs as if through holes. Soul leaking from his body. Nothing could catch it. All the more reason to breathe faster. Chasing an unrepentant breath. Hyperventilation. Slowly, eyes closed, repentance. Deep breaths. Chest rising and falling more comfortably. Hands grounding him against the leather seat. Squeezing, holding, touching as the tingling subsided and he could feel his finger tips once more. Exhaling through pursed lips. Still feeling empty in lungs and in soul, but resolved to overcome it—for now. Reaching upward, he ran his fingers over his face and through his hair. He looked at his hands. Pale. Soft. Long, slender fingers. 

He leaned closer to the screen, curious. Focus zooming out and away from what existed on the other side of it. He wanted to see what it reflected. Two bright eyes staring back, whites’ signaling attention as if he were his own predator. Gray, maybe blue corneas. Bright, in any case. Thin lips. Long, unkempt hair. Fuller cheeks than he would have expected. Looking down, he noticed that he wore a suit. 

“Huh,” he muttered—then started, jumping at the sound of his own voice. Gravelly and smoky. Baritone. Somehow comforting. “My name is Virgil,” he said. “I come from … nowhere. Nowhere I know.”

He checked his tie. Red and white stripes. Perfectly dimpled. It ran under a light gray vest that matched his suit. On it a thin gold chain ran into a pocket where he found a timepiece that read six o’clock. Glancing out the window, he saw that the sun had climbed a little higher in the sky. 

“Morning,” he muttered, hardly realizing it.

Trees flashed by on either side of the drive. Tall, twirly, and green. Wide, breathing, and alive. Grass and plants filled the earth below them, matching their sway in the morning breeze. Following their lead. The blades looked up to the trees as people do to heaven.

“Heaven,” he said. “Heaven?” 

Strangely, it felt like a memory.

The car hummed out of the hallway of trees and into a clearing. Road curving down a hill to form a circle drive at the bottom. A stone fountain in its center: Apollo reaching toward the zenith as if willing the sun to find it, guarded by angels spouting water from their mouths that arched through the early-morning light in iridescent streams.

And then there was the mansion.

The surrounding fields of seeming infinity shrunk in comparison, though not to their detriment. An unspoken reverence that made them more lush, more golden, more green. The mansion itself, with its towering gables and dark red brick, a dimension of prehistoric modernity, not unlike the car approaching it. Old and new. Archaic and fresh. A vestige of something lost but preserved by its absence, shared by the vehicle bringing its newest member, Virgil, left only to wonder if he too shared in the origins of the paradox. 

Black, tile roofs. Spires, spinning into a sky of spiraling clouds. Large windows of stained-glass; others clear and open to see velvet curtains and chandeliers contained within. A double-front door: two, three, maybe four times Virgil’s height—as he would have guessed it.

Suddenly, he was standing there. On the porch. Turning to see the carriage drawn back into the woods. Rolling across the cobbled drive before slushing back onto the gravel, controlled, it seemed, by the source of invisibility itself. A license plate that spelled: “TNTL5.” 

Virgil looked back at the heavy, oak doors blocking him from the great mystery within, the entrance to a planet enclosed by a galaxy of meadow. A brass door-knocker sat on each, resting in the mouths of lions. He set his hand toward the one on the right, but it expanded out of reach. Warping into space and — 

He was standing in a foyer. Confused. Still on his toes. Observing an improbable actuality, not to be explained.