Beholder
During the middle of a battle in WW1 a young, French soldier is given three things: a curse, a blessing, and a quest.
~1918~
Jean leaned against the mud wall of the trench, choking the ash out of his lungs. Beside him, his friend Cash was muttering Hail Marys. A bomb whizzed over their head, exploding behind them. Hunks of dirt rained down. Cash stiffened, his face went from fearful to oddly blank.
“Cash! Get back down here!” Jean called out to his friend as the man started to climb the trench wall. Without thinking, Jean climbed up after him, his hand reaching for his friend’s muck-encrusted boot as all the world went white.
Slowly his vision returned, but he was not on a battlefield. Cash was nowhere to be seen. The army they were fighting was gone. There was no mud, no bombs, no mustard gas or smoke.
Instead, he found himself clean, shaved and combed, wearing a suit as he sat in a wicker chair in a flower garden across from a stunningly beautiful woman with ebony hair, that he recognized immediately as his mother, although he had only ever seen her in pictures.
“Good morning, Jean,” she said in a melodic voice.
“Am I… dead?” he asked, looking between her and their elegant surroundings.
“No, dear, you’re at a crossroads,” she said with a faint smile as she picked up a teapot that was on the table beside her, “Would you care for a cup? It’s chamomile.”
“Thank you, no,” he said, his brow knitting in concern, “I’m sorry, you look very much like my mother, but she died when I was born.”
The woman set the teapot down with a sad smile as she walked up to him and put a warm hand on the side of his face. “I am your mother dear,” she said softly, “You’ve grown into such a fine young man.”
He stared at this woman who claimed to be his mother, blinking in disbelief. A hundred thoughts crowded into his mind, each competing for its spot. There had been so many things he’d wanted to tell her, wanted to ask her.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “We don’t have much time right now. I need to know, do you want to come with me or go back?”
The thought of staying with her in this place, this peaceful, beautiful place, was almost impossible to refuse, but a terrible pain tore at his heart. “Felicity,” he said softly, “I can’t leave Felicity. I’m to be married.”
“Are you sure?” the woman asked.
He hadn’t seen Felicity in four long years, not since the beginning of the war, but he could still picture her clearly. Her auburn curls spilled over her ivory shoulders as she giggled, barefoot as she danced over the pebbles in the chilly creek, urging him to join her. The scent of her perfume intoxicated him as he spun her around the ballroom for her sister’s wedding, the gold ring in his pocket felt like a weight and a buoy. “I love you,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks as she looked up at him before the train pulled out the station.
“Yes,” Jean said.
The woman nodded with a sad sort of smile. “I have to warn you, things will be different when you return. You will be given three things. One is a blessing. The other will seem like a curse.”
“What is the third?” he asked.
“A quest,” she said, her smile growing warmer.
“What quest?”
“That, dear, is for you to find out,” she said as she stood and walked over to him. Leaning down, she whispered, “I love you always, and I will follow you wherever you go. Find the beauty in everything and eventually you’ll find it in yourself, remember that.” She kissed the left side of his face. The warmth of her lips turned into a raging fire and then everything went dark.
He woke a week later in a field hospital missing his left eye, part of his nose, and cheekbone. It took him almost a week to find a mirror, and when he gazed into the mangled holes that had been the left side of his face, he vomited.
A curse, he thought ruefully, as he lay in his cot listening to dying men scream for their mothers. That’s what my mother gave me. A curse.
~1939~
Jean pushed up the prosthetic that covered the holes where his eye and nose had been, as he drove his cabriolet over the potholed dirt road leading to his father’s farm in Ars. Pulling into the driveway, he could see his father walking out the barn, shielding his eyes against the sunlight.
“You never change,” Matisse Bellerose said as he embraced his only son, “I’ve never seen the like of it.”
“I don’t remember looking like this as a boy,” Jean said, chuckling at his own dark joke, “I’ve come for something serious, though. I’m going to America, and I want you to come with me.”
“America? What’s in America?” Matisse scoffed, scratching his short gray hair.
“Safety, Papa,” Jean said, “Hitler is dangerous, maybe more dangerous than the Central Powers ever were, and there are rumors.”
“There are always rumors,” Matisse said gruffly as he walked back into the barn, “This is my home. Your home! Have you forgotten that?”
“My home is in Paris, have you forgotten that? Have you forgotten that when I came home, I found a fiancee who couldn’t bear to look at me and a job that wouldn’t take me back and a town full of people who spoke behind my back like I’d lost my hearing instead of my face?!” He closed his eye, clenching his fists as he forced his anger down, “I didn’t come here to fight with you, Papa.”
With a sigh, his father set down the harness he was mending, “Jean, this farm has been in our family for three hundred years. Does that mean nothing to you?”
Jean looked down at his scuffed wingtips, choosing his words very carefully, “I don’t want to lose anything else for a piece of dirt, Papa. This farm will survive the war better than you and I can, and when it’s over, we can come back to it. I promise you that.”
~1944~
Jean trudged up the last flight of stairs to their tiny apartment in New Orleans. Pushing open the door he dropped the bag on the floor, groceries spilling out as he ran to his father, who was sitting on the kitchen floor, slouched against the cabinet. Matisse’s breath came out in ragged puffs.
“Papa!?” Jean cried, his hands going to his father’s face.
The old man’s eyes opened slowly, and he gave a single wheezing chuckle. “Forty-seven,” he said, just above a whisper.
“What’s that?” Jean asked, leaning his ear to his father’s mouth.
“You’re forty-seven, but you don’t look a day over twenty-one,” his father said gasping for every word, “Time doesn’t touch you. Life. You will see. They’ll all die and you’ll… You’ll still be here. It’s… It’s a blessing.”
And the light faded from his eyes.
~2019~
You can always trust time to march on. Seconds give way to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days, days to weeks and years and decades. The world changed as wagons gave way to automobiles and telephones gave way to computers, and man launched himself into space, and plunged himself into the depths of the ocean, and brought himself to the verge of extinction.
But Jean Bellerose did not change. His friends grew old and withered. Even Felicity’s fiery hair grayed, her flawless skin lost its luster, and at the age of ninety-four in the summer of 1997, she died.
Jean looked into the mirror in his foyer, adjusting the prosthetic over the gaping hole in the twenty-one-year-old face he’d been wearing for the last 101 years. He slung his digital camera over his shoulder as he walked out of the apartment.
The door at the end of the stairwell was open, and as he took the last flight of stairs, mid-summer humidity, jazz music from a nearby busker and the smell of fish frying assaulted his senses, and he smiled. It was a good thing to be alive in New Orleans.
He’d spent the first decades of his new life thinking he was cursed, but somehow, following the death of his father, a peace had washed over him as he remembered his mother’s words, “Find the beauty in everything and eventually you’ll find it in yourself.” He figured that was his quest.
So, he’d worked the last few decades as a photographer and painter and journalist under several different aliases around the world, before settling back into New Orleans as Jean Bellerose again.
He was watching a group of children playing double dutch. They sang as they jumped, their voices and the slap of the ropes and the stomps of their feet making music that made him wish he’d brought a tape recorder instead of a camera.
As he rounded the corner, he crashed into someone. Dirt flew everywhere as a tray full of potted plants fell to the ground. To his horror, his prosthetic fell on top of the heap. Reaching down for it quickly, he cracked skulls with the person he’d collided with moments before. Instinctively, he looked up and found himself staring into the pale blue eyes of a blonde haired woman who was rubbing her head and smiling sheepishly at him as she held out the prosthetic.
“I’m awfully sorry; I’m such a klutz,” she said hurriedly as she dug into her messenger bag and pulled out a bottle of water. Handing it to him, she continued, barely pausing for breath, “You probably want to clean it off before you put it back on. Although I’m afraid your shirt has really seen better days, no thanks to this bit of the community garden. Goodness, one day I’ll learn to watch where I’m going. Is your camera okay?”
Blowing off the prosthetic, he hastily put it back on his face, handing her back the unused water and helping her gather together her plants, which were worse for the collision. “I’m the one who ought to be apologizing,” he said, “My head was in the clouds, and I wasn’t watching where I was going, and for that, I am immensely sorry. Are you injured?”
The woman chuckled, looking herself over. “No worse than when you found me. Oh, I’m Q by the way,” she said, reaching out a grubby hand, “You are?”
Taking her hand, he smiled at her, “Jean. Your name is Cue, like ‘This is your cue’?”
“No, Q, like the letter. My parents were these crazy, nineties-era hippies. Q’s actually short of Quest, but if you think Q’s a weird name, you just can’t imagine the looks I get when I tell people my real name.”
Goosebumps broke out over his arms. He reached down and picked up her flat of plants. “Can I carry this for you?” he asked.
“Sure, thanks,” she said, smiling up at him. Giggling, she wiped her fingers off on the inside of her t-shirt and reached up, wiping dirt off his cheek, “There, now you look less like… well, me.” She chuckled as she took a couple skipping steps, humming to herself, “So, you a tourist?”
“I live here. Actually, I have an apartment down here if you want to go get cleaned up,” he said gesturing to his building with his chin, “4972.”
“No kidding!” Q said, beaming wider, “I live here too! Apartment 4D! We’re neighbors!”
She looked at him without flinching. It had been over a century since someone looked at him that way. He smiled down at her, and his heart tentatively hoped that maybe the curse was not a curse and the blessing was indeed a blessing and that this Quest was his quest.
© Charlie Leger 2019
