The Man with Ten Names

The Man with Ten Names 

By: Kirk Brown

I watched the wind blow dirt across a vast dead green. My skin reflected the ground it stood on, as if the land had become me. Apricot and rose skies framed the hills. My home, made of the Earth, centered my vision. It always did. A universe revolved around it. This universe consisted of three beings. I, and my two parents. Dad cracks like a Whip. I barely withstand it on his bad days. Mom is a prisoner. She hasn’t been healthy for months.

Today I wished for the same thing I always do. For the gilded ground to give us what is owed. Then mom wouldn’t be sick, and we wouldn’t be alone. As I rested, just then, the universe gave birth to a foul beast.

“Charles! Your mother wants to see you, now,” dad shouted from his wooden vantage.

I shook dust from myself and walked. I stepped into my home to find the same picture I always loathed. A deep gray abyss surrounding my sickly mother. She was flanked by two candles burnt to the last measure. Wooden walls surrounding her formed her hollow prison.

“Charles... come here,” mom gasped out.
“Yes, Ma,” I answered. I sat next to her.
“Hold my hand for a moment?” mom pleaded.
“Yes, Ma,” I answered. I took her frail hand.

When I did, my hand tingled and wooden walls began to pool into cream. Black wool sheets became thin white. The dual candles rose and formed hollow circles emitting light. Mom’s bed morphed itself shiny, reflective and gray. A loud buzzing entered my ear. When I looked up, I saw a small box with a solid line drawn across it. When I looked down, I saw another woman holding my hand. I pulled mine away. I stood up with haste. Two women I’d never seen entered our universe. They wore milk white clothes and odd hats. I looked to the Whip to stop the women from entering our home. Another man stood in his place. I said nothing. I did nothing. The women in white surrounded the woman in bed. They shouted and waved their arms. More people entered my universe. Then as swiftly as they came, they left, carrying the woman with them. The man placed a hand on my shoulder and lowered himself to look me in the eye. He was crying.

“I don’t know if your mother is going to make it this time, Michael,” he whispered.

I closed my eyes. When I stepped out of that universe, I was no longer alone. Tall metal and white structures flooded my eyes. Apricot and rose skies framed the hills. People flooded my sight and noise drowned my ears.

Four years have passed since that day. I haven’t seen mom since. People come up to me on certain days like they know me. I don’t know them. I’ve grown comfortable with the man that calls me Michael. I’m unsure where my family went, I’m unsure if I care. I can eat when I please now. I can use the water when I please now. The man that calls me Michael is kinder than the Whip. Although his hair is long and odd, and his jeans are too loose around his ankles. Now, there are black boxes that show moving pictures that help me pass time. I think I like it here better than my wooden universe.

I walked home from school on a cloudy afternoon on a random day. The air felt different. No one came up to me today. I walked through the structure that held my new pocket universe. When I entered my home the man that called me Michael was sitting on the couch staring.

“Come on, Mike,” he solemnly stated to me. I sat next to him. “Turn on the TV, to CBS,” he ordered. I did.

Men were standing around a small desk and a cylinder on the black box. Inside the cylinder were small blue balls. The men picked them up and read out numbers. As they read the numbers, they matched dates to them. September 14th, April 24th, December 30th, February 14th, October 18th, September 6th. When they spoke that date, the man that called me Michael turned his head to me.

“I am so sorry, Michael,” he choked out.

When he did, my hand tingled and brick walls melted into glass. The black box with the men in it vanished. In its place, phantom light appeared holding a picture of men in gray suits. The lights that stood on poles slithered into the walls and sent blue light out from within. The couch flattened from leather into a reflective plastic purple. The man sitting on the couch was not the man that called me Michael. He stood up. The new man placed a hand on my shoulder and lowered himself to look me in the eye. He was crying.

“It’ll be okay, Ayden,” he stated warmly. I kept my eyes open.

Later, the new man told me to pack clothes into a bag and wait on the street for a bus to arrive. When I stepped out of that universe, I was less alone. Tall structures coated in glass and white filled all of my vision. Ashen and meek skies framed the buildings. Phantom lights holding moving pictures appeared on all buildings. Cascading waves of noise. People walked everywhere. The city breathed, where the citizens did not. People were as gray as the sky, and their clothes matched.

I stood on the corner of a street waiting for the bus. A man my age walked up next to me. Holding a bag like mine, wearing a gray suit like mine.

“I’m glad I got drafted,” he grimaced without looking at me. “China nuked New York, and five million people died in seconds,” he turned toward me, “five million.” He looked away, “I won’t be happy until five million and one of those fucking rats are gone.” We stepped onto the bus.

Two years have passed since that day. The man that told me about the bombings is named Ezra. He grew close to me during our boot camp in the Army. I grew fond of him as well. For as tempered to anger as he was, this made his acts of kindness stronger. In boot camp we were forced to shave our heads once a week. Every soldier must be made into a uniform. ‘United we stand.’ When we graduated boot camp, Ezra was placed in my battalion.

We were loaded and shipped out to push an assault on the mainland beaches of China yesterday. I’ve never felt the intensity of the ocean before. Rocking us violently like a newborn baby. I hurled my breakfast most days that I ate while on the trip. The cabins of the freighter always smelled like vomit. I lived in that scent for 15 days. Captain issued us breathing masks yesterday. He said that we would have our boots in the sand of Chinese territory by 0600 tomorrow. The army’s plan was to dive underwater as we made our way to the beach; resurface, then push the front. I didn’t question it.

Then, it was the morning of deliverance. I didn’t sleep last night, and I hurled more than my breakfast. Ezra didn’t sleep either. He talked about his plans after the war for most of the night. He told me that he’s going to start a family with his girlfriend and work as a cybersecurity agent for the government. His girlfriend has scarlet hair, and he’s going to have a son. He’s sure of it. His son is going to be named Eli.

0550 came and sirens cried throughout the cabin. All of the men scrambled into two compact lines. Captain ordered us to put on our rebreathers and wait for a viridescent light to flick on. The next five minutes took five eternities to pass. Some men prayed, some were silent, some cried. Ezra stood across from me. He hit me on the shoulder.

“Five million and one, brother,” he commanded. The fluorescent green light in the corner beamed.

“Signal on! Go, go!” Captain barked.

A pressured hatch opened in the floor and sea water flooded the cabin in seconds. Each man in line was knocked back. We recuperated and began to swim. I came out of the boat and looked ahead, watching cardinal neon probes shoot in front of us, guiding us toward the beach. Thousands of men were drenched in crimson light.

I swam for another five eternities next to Ezra. Then, I could see the sand beneath me. My feet eventually sunk in. We trudged through the water following the red leader. I could hear muffled and drowned gunfire followed by screams. That’s what was waiting for me up there, Lucifer and his demon army.

My head breached the surface of the water and I could see encampments lined along the far side of the beach, spitting death out of them. I couldn’t feel my legs. My head went light. Men dropped like sad lumps discarded next to me as I fully stepped on the beach. I saw a blown- out hole in the sand ahead of me, fabricating cover. My body carried me there. Ezra followed me and we laid down, side by side. He started to scream at me. I couldn’t hear him. He gestured with his head, then stood up. Then, laid back down. His face was blank. I grabbed his uniform.

“Ezra,” I stated. He didn’t look at me. There was a hole through his chest, and his blood began to paint the sand, turning it into his tapestry.

When it did, my hand tingled and Ezra’s gray cloth and plastic uniform transformed into sable iron plates draped from his shoulders and chest. His open-faced helmet pooled over his head and created a mask bearing a mustache. A tassel formed from the armor on his chest and a crest appeared under it. A ring with three lines cutting through it. The blast of explosions and gunfire changed in my ear to the reverberation of metal cracking against metal. The screams were still there. My gun, laid next to me, morphed into a long, thin, curved blade sporting a decorative handle. I ripped the tassel from Ezra’s armor and tucked it into my own iron plates. I wrapped my hand around my katana and stood. The men that bore the same armor as I were defending their land now, and the men charging wore helmets with tufts of fur protruding from the tops. Thousands of men clashed on the beach, creating a canvas that was ours to stain with red.

Two years have passed since that day. I still remember each of the four lives I took, and the way their eyes glazed over as I did. I was wounded during the combat and was dragged back to a small village not far from the beach. A high snow-capped mountain backdropped it, framed by cerulean skies, cherry blossom trees bordering. The people around me spoke an unfamiliar language when not addressing me, but I could speak to them and I could understand them when they spoke to me. People lived off the land, and the black boxes that gave me entertainment were nowhere.

A woman treated me while I was disabled. Her name was Ai. She addressed me as Ashina. I didn’t question it. She was gentle and had a soft, rounded face. We grew close as she treated me. She cared for me where that care was absent before and showed a stoic kindness that resonated in my chest. After, I lived with her over the two years and that became my new universe. Every day I woke up next to her, and every day I was happier than the last. The battle I endured, and my life before now washed away from me. We lived simply, farming the land and surviving off the gains from it. I am okay with where I am. I want to stay here with Ai.

On the morning I wanted to ask Ai to be with me for the rest of our eternities, I walked out of my universe and found apricot and rose skies framing the towering mountain. I smiled. I found Ai resting not far away. She wore her sable and crimson decorative kimono that draped onto the ground. I stepped in front of her and dropped onto my knees.

“Ai, my love,” I stated.
“Yes, Ashina,” she answered.
“I want to be together until my breath leaves me.” I held out a naginata to her, bowing my head.

When I did, my hand tingled and my heart fell. I was petrified and I didn’t want to look up. The ground beneath me cascaded from vivid alive green to cold grey concrete. My ears that were filled with gentle breeze and leaves fluttering on the ground, harshly transformed into the sounds of engines and people chattering. The short blade held in my hands morphed into a small felt box. I slowly looked up and saw that Ai’s kimono had changed as well. The woman in front of me was wearing small black shoes and blue jeans. All I wanted was to look all the way up and see Ai still standing there. When I did, I saw the deep brown eyes I always stared into were now the color of the ocean. Long dark hair had been cut to short blonde locks. I didn’t know this woman. She was crying covering her mouth with her hands. She began to shake her head.

“Yes, yes, oh my god... yes,” she choked out.

She rushed to me and wrapped her arms around me. I looked over her. A large square, castle-like, tower cut through grey and bleak skies. The tower held a large clock on all four sides of its’ body. On the street a tall red bus with two cabins stacked on top of each other drove by. I kneeled on a bridge that cut over a great rushing river. I felt a tear release down my cheek.

“I love you, Jack,” the woman holding me whispered.

A year has passed since that day. I’ve thought of Ai every day. The woman that calls me Jack has noticed my depression. A few months after our marriage, she forced herself and a baby on me. She is now nine months into her pregnancy and is soon to go into labor. Our universe is perched above a small coffee shop. The people here speak in my common language but with a different intonation. The woman that calls me Jack’s family acts like they’ve known me for years. I feel isolated, alone. Once the baby is born, the woman that calls me Jack told me that I have to work. I don’t want to do anything.

I sat on a reclined leather chair on a random, rainy evening. Screams and pained grunts rang from the opposite room from me. The woman that calls me Jack told me to drive her to the hospital. I did. Her labor lasted for 12 hours. It was nine in the morning when the doctors told her to start pushing. She bellowed and contorted her face for an hour. I watched as the human that was taken from me was born into the world. It was a boy. The doctors cleansed him, then reached him out to me. I took him in my arms.

When I did, my hand tingled and I knew that the world around me was going to transmute. Monitors that showed heart rate and other vitals on them sunk into the ground. A black machine rose in their place. It held a hose on it that attached a mask on its end. The new woman that was laying in the hospital bed held the mask up to her face. Short blonde locks had uncurled into thin brown hair. The doctors’ clothes flipped from a light blue into a darker color, and they wore aprons around their waist and masks on their face. The boy I held remained unchanged. I closed my eyes.

When I stepped out of that universe, the bustle of people were still around me. Skyscrapers rose to touch cerulean skies. People wearing black suits and bucketed hats, carrying briefcases, heel-and-toed everywhere. A bridge appeared barely in the backdrop of the city. People called out everywhere drowning my ears in American dialect. The new woman that bore my child directed me to a car that held a squared front and looped metal around its tires. I opened the door for her, and she sat holding our child.

“Drive slow, John,” she ordered. I drove.

Two months have passed since that day. The woman that called me John badgered me every day to start work. I decided to give in to her on a random cloudy afternoon and visited a radio manufacturing factory down on a street corner tucked into the busy metropolis. I asked about jobs on the main line and the broken men directed me to a supervisor. He asked me when I could start working. I said now. He held out his hand. I shook it.

When I did, my hand tingled and the brick walls of the factory crumbled and fell to dust around me. Where grey skies had painted the background of the city, beating sun now drenched my skin. Harsh wind filled my ears and blew pellets of sand onto my face. My black suit was torn from my body and blew into dust along the wind. My body was bare except a small cloth covering my groin. The man’s hand I shook’s skin pooled from a muted white into a dark sun- kissed brown. A vast nothingness of sand filled my vision, with one large structure protruding from the ground, standing solace among the empty canvas. It formed widest at the base and stacked on top of itself narrowing up towards the heavens. The man holding my hand pulled my arm with ferocity. His other arm upheaved into the air raising a wooden stick and cracked it like a whip onto my back. He ordered me to work. I dragged a cubed slab of stone along the desert.

Every day the sun rose, beat me down, fell to rest, then rose to beat me again. The sun hit with more ferocity than my leader on most days. We were fed well enough, enough to maintain the hours of manual labor during a day. The second day in this hell I witnessed a man give up on his work, collapsing on the coarse sand. He was beheaded. I rested with my son during nights. He tended farms when the sun woke up, while I erected the gigantic pyramid for our great Pharoah. A woman that called me her companion worked as a house servant. I didn’t care for her, but I grew closer to my son every day I watched him grow. He no longer felt like the child taken from me. The woman that called me her companion called him by the name Baahir. So, I did.

10 years, this cycle continued. Every year my son grew and every year he was smarter. He out thought me at times and made me look at the world in a certain slant of light. He made the work worth it. He was also now old enough to work on the stones. On a random sun- drenched day, I worked side by side with him using a mechanism to hoist a stone up to the heavens. The pyramid now was larger than life, reaching up toward the clouds and almost connecting to itself. We stood on the top rung of stones lifting one to us.

“Bahir,” I stated, “Pull when I do. Two men make half the work.”

“Yes yt,” he answered.

We heaved. A crack struck thunder throughout the dry land. Men yelled. I turned. A mechanism snapped, sending wood hurdling toward us. I let go of the rope that we heaved. Baahir clung to it. It pulled him ahead, flinging his body over the edge of the stones. Time froze, as did my body. A second turned into an hour before I could hurl my own body to try to catch my son.

“Baahir!” I cried out.
I leaned over the ledge of stone layer. His body was motionless.
“Baahir! Answer me!” I bellowed down to him.
Then, from his head, he began to paint the stones in his blood.
When he did, my hand tingled and tan slabs of stone melted into a street of gray.

Buildings erected from the desert sand, sprouting like weeds in a field. Tall thin trees grew along the edges of the now streets. Hills that were once barren, flooded with green and trees. In the far distance letters began to form on a hilltop, one by one. ‘Hollywood.’ I closed my eyes. The only thing I wanted it to change this time was my son. I prayed to whoever was controlling my destiny and fortune to take away this mistake. It was a mistake. It couldn’t have happened. I opened my eyes. I stood on the top of a parking garage now looking down. A body was still there. A young boy dressed in blue jeans and a sweater. It was not my son. My heart sank like it was. My legs fell limp, and I crumpled onto the pavement of the garage. Sirens wailed into my ears far in the distance. My world faded to dark.

Seven years have passed since that day. I drank every day of the 2,555 that have gone by. Maybe I was trying to end my cycle of worlds, maybe I was bored. There was a new woman that lived with me and tried to comfort me, after that day. She called me David. I no longer worked and lived off her financial support. She thought I wrote screenplays for the movies for some reason. She begged me to write after the first couple years after that day. I didn’t write a word. I barely spoke. I didn’t care to get to know this new woman. She would be gone sooner or later. I didn’t really care which one it was. She would call me cold. She would say I was distant. I never answered her.

On a random sunny afternoon, she came to me holding a file in her hand.

“David,” she paused, “I don’t know what to do anymore. You barely talk to me. You barely do anything. You haven’t touched me in five years. I can’t do this anymore, David, I’m sorry. These are divorce papers that I had a lawyer type up. All you have to do is sign them and come to court on the appointed dates.” I didn’t look at her. “Okay David,” she finished, and placed the folder next to me.

When she did, my hand tingled and the palm trees that lined the streets outside my window washed away. Painted concrete streets formed cracks and became cobbled. Houses engorged into unison buildings sporting pillars on the fronts, capping themselves with faded green roofs. Small carved statues sprung from the corners. Flags contorted out of the walls of the buildings and unrolled victoriously. The flag burned bright crimson with hate and decorated itself with a white circle centered among it. Inside the circle, lines began to paint themselves black forming a X shape, then sprouting lines off of the edges. The bottle of beer I held in my right hand shrunk into a small glass and the liquid inside pooled darker in color. Ice fell from the sky and landed inside my glass. I drank.

Over the course of the following years, the world I lived in tore itself apart. A loud, self- proclaimed righteous man led the nation I resided in toward world domination, claiming a certain race of humans was genetically superior to others. He corralled and burned those he thought lesser. I watched in silence in my small pocket home. By the end of fighting, 75 million people had left the earth. The shadows of former life were etched in stone among cities where newly created nuclear bombs were dropped by the American government. Those bombs ended the fighting.

On a random cloudy day, in my home, I found the same picture I always loathed. A deep gray abyss surrounding me. I was flanked by two candles burnt to the last measure. Wooden walls surrounding me formed my hollow prison. Was this world a reflection of my soul? Was I manifesting each universe in front of me through the actions I took and thoughts I had? How many lives were lost in my creations? I did this. Did I do this? My hand wrapped around the cold grip of metal death. Why would this happen to me? Why am I making this happen? How long? How many more worlds? My finger squeezed. The thoughts stopped.

I could not feel my body any longer, but my eyes perceived light. A faint light. Barely recognizable among a sea of sable. The light began to flutter. Shooting sparks into the dark. The sparks landed on nothingness and permeated for a moment. From the sparks, figures started to form. A woman with a kimono draped over her. I kissed her for 1000 years. A man holding a rifle, wearing a cloth and plastic uniform. I shook his hand for 1000 years. A child wearing a cloth and holding a rope. I hugged him for 1000 years. Another infinite number of figures formed, creating a tunnel. Their arms outstretched pointing towards a faint light shooting sparks from it. I walked for 1000 years until I reached it. The light pulsed, emitting warmth. I stepped in.

I could feel my body again. I opened my eyes. I watched the wind blow dirt across a vast dead green.