The World They Left

     It was a great event - made off into the summer night.  It was the only way that remained.

     -You must leave with me, now, please, we must leave,...please.

     Her voice, it was there, he saw her there.  The night, the highway, the coast.  Across a lot in the town, he walked into the coffee shop, sat there watching the day begin, it wasn't what he was used to, Bohemia of sorts, dreams of California nights, what was once, it seemed to him, a very good place.

     That was gone now, something amiss, a danger, the unknown, a thing that made him feel uneasy, and yet he paid it no mind - he never knew he had been watched far onto the road into town.

     Unaware, looking for a place, he wandered deep into the city, looking for anything, an adventure, an answer perhaps, to maybe write, the words to the road that year, twenty years beyond those that had seen Kerouac.  Amongst the books he had with him, Proust, others, he was sure they'd got it wrong.  In the crowded streets, sounds of things more exciting, not really of anything   looking for it to happen, at least a place to stay, to collect his thoughts and write.  To write what it was, what he saw.  In thin alleys, through hidden streets, he wandered, hoping to find what it was that had happened, lives of a lost generation, what was left of a frail blossom, Kerouac, generations after, there he knew, were people, people with lives like no place else, freedom he could only dream about.  Seemed innocent enough, the road, the nights there.  He could never realise, even as he walked, that he was being nudged toward a horrible fate.

     Finding the highest part of the city, the upper intimacy of a valley of shops, sidewalk restaurants, the comfortable surrounding of terraced and shuttered windows of apartments nearby, he paused again, sitting at the window of the older cafe, in a way awed by where it was, it seemed new to him, another world.  Quietly, he surveyed its unspent beauty, the aura of it near him, he felt-

     It was then that she appeared, sitting down at the table - it seemed almost prearranged.  She looked as though she belonged there, she knew.  Bewildered, not knowing what to think - he sat there, quietly looking at her, waiting for her to speak, waiting to understand why.  She looked plain enough, jeans and a blue cotton shirt, though there was a thing out of the ordinary, a look that made things seem hopeful.  Suddenly he knew, it was what he had been searching for, her, that moment.  There was something else though, it made him uneasy.  She was noticeably concerned.

She spoke,
-Please, no one must get hurt.

He was puzzled.
-It would be wrong, things are not what they seem anymore. I don't have time to explain, please, we must leave.  I have a place we can go, we must leave here before it is too late.

He didn't know what to believe, she seemed like she was really concerned, though he didn't know why she was there.  The desperation is her voice was real, though he didn't understand.  Not at all, in fact, the place seemed uneventful, mundane, everything as it should be.  He had come there looking for the summer of love, ten years gone, and all that was left, the remaining hints of a bygone era, the sombre streets of a city, was the vague foreboding, the warning of this young woman.  The vision that he had sought, the dream, a now distant bleak landscape, a landscape sad of now empty dreams.

His own dream, that of finding the spirit of that summer again, was slowly dissolving, gone in the realisation that the place might never again see that peaceful vision of universal love.  The journey, the adventure that he sought, might never happen, and what was left of the dream, his hopes, existed thinly, fadingly, as insubstantial as the woman who sat before him in the cafe.  Then he realised, that this was the message, that what she was there, at that moment, was maybe everything there was to find, everything that he would find.  With her silent entreat, he made his way out of the cafe with her, finding the desolate and abandoned streets of the city outside.

The mountains, deep into darkening forests, beyond the coastal range, over the hills, the long and winding road - there the highway amongst the trees, worlds silent, inland.  There was an alcove, a warm afternoon sunshine shone through the window, little had been said the way though he found that he trusted her, it occurred to him that he finally understood why she was there, what he was to do.

In the woods nearby, he wandered - meadows far from any other sound save the forest.  It was a wonderful place, a garden with wildflowers, a repose, peaceful friendliness - the cushions in his room, faint incense, quiet and lovely, the depth of his understanding - peace - a life free of cares, he come to understand the world that she had saved him from.

There were others, they lived to escape the city, they had the common understanding of the peace- it recurred and remade there, dispelling the degradation of their dreams, beings isolate, planetary, the cosmos of their empathy wellling over into incredible moments of stasis, realisation.  Isolate yet everywhere, beyond every defilement, contently making a thing that was true to its good origins, never a question as to the right thing to do.  It was given, they just knew - and in that moment, he too knew that he had found where he belonged, and what should have been in a land that had long since forgotten too much of its gentle origins.  Left there, true California, the world never the same since that moment, what it was en reale.

Wandered in the garden yard, forever, loving her, this beyond time itself.  This world, the world he had sought, he knew it was good - had never wished for anything else.