“The roots?” I ask.
“Yes. The roots.”
“Well… they… feed the tree? I’m really not a science geek, OK? I dropped out in eleventh grade. I failed biology, so?—”
Josep’s laugh is loud and it startles me into silence. “No. Forget about the trees. These roots aren’t part of the trees. Well, they are, in a sense. But these are the roots of time, Little Baby. And for us, they are a highway to go places.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I’m so confused.
“The Tree of Life, Little Baby, isn’t a tree. It’s a timeline. We can use the roots to go anywhere we want. Just like we use the purple to conjure up new realities.”
“Purple?” What he just said did not enlighten me in any way. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course not. You were born a human. This is what I’m trying to explain. Humans are… boring, and powerless, and limited. You can’t see the purple mist that surrounds your pathetic and contained reality, so you can’t use it to conjure up a new one. But you, my dear Dark Mother, are no longer human. When you took my blood, you took my magic. And this is what you’re looking at. The magic is purple and showing you how to use it properly is my birthday gift to you. Come.”
The moment he says ‘come’, we’re somewhere else. A dark and empty place with no light at all. No roots, no earth, no purple. It’s—awful and even though I can’t sense any movement at all, I feel this dark emptiness pushing in on me. Encroaching. And then suddenly, I remember that I was in a place like this before I woke up.
“Yes,” Josep says. “I put you in the Dark Place so you could understand. We are part of that Darkness, Little Baby. It is us and we are it. And in this Dark Place there is no time. And if there is no time, there is nothing but…” I wave my hand at the emptiness all around us, but of course she can’t see this because we are the Darkness now. “There is nothing. It is insanity for a sentient being. Which we are, obviously. Because we are still communicating.
“In order to bring sanity back, and with it a clarity of vision,” Josep continues, “we must have time. Because the Darkness is the eternal infinity. Or infinite eternal, if you prefer. Darkness, Little Baby, is… well, nothingness. And it’s quite boring. In fact, if we stay here too long we’ll get lost in the insanity. Because if there is no time in the eternal infinity, then there is no existence. Do you see?”
I’m shaking my head through all of that. “No. I can’t see shit.”
He laughs. And to my surprise, so do I. “Of course not. I didn’t mean literally. Do you understand that if there is no time there is no…living? There are no experiences here, Little Baby. You are nothing but a bit of purple mist. Reach down and touch yourself.”
“What?”
“Anywhere. Your arm, your stomach where my Dark Baby lives. Anywhere.”
“This is a real thing? You want me to touch myself.”
“I do.”
I let out a breath and reach down to my stomach. I don’t want to because the thought of that baby being inside me is…
There’s nothing there. There’s just air. I wave my hand in the air, trying to find myself, but I am not here! “What the hell is going on? I’m invisible!”
“No,” Josep says, in that calm, deep voice of his. “You’re not invisible, you simply don’t exist.”
“But that’s impossible! I’m thinking thoughts, so obviously I have a brain!”
“Not a brain, Little Baby. A consciousness. Weren’t you listening? You are nothing but a consciousness. That’s what it means to live in the Darkness. You are nothing but ideas. And while it can be fun for a short period of time, it will drive you insane. You see, when we are nothing but Darkness, we don’t exist. We can’t feel anything. We can’t express ourselves. And we certainly can’t drink blood and fuck, which… I mean, that’s pretty much the best part of having a body, don’t you agree?”
“Well… I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Sure.” I sigh. “Yeah. Blood-drinking is pretty fun. And so is fucking. So. All right. I’ll give you this point.”
“We don’t want to live here in the Darkness, do we?”
“No. I completely agree. I do not want to stay here one moment longer than I have to. In fact, I want to leave right now.”
“Of course you do. We crave existence. Everything does, really.”
“So how do I get out?”
“In the beginning, before I thought it through, I was planning on leaving you here. Forcing you to find your power and all that growth bullshit humans like to brag about. But that’s not a gift. That would be making you work for it and a gift is something you give freely. So I’m going to teach you, Little Baby. And I want you to know that I have never told a single other soul how to do these things.”
