Translucent (8 page)

Karena’s deja-vu was far, far stronger than it had been in her previous life. If you experience so
mething for the second time, the
n undoubtedly you will have a sense of deja-vu, perhaps
even
quite a strong one. But if you experience the exact same thing a third time, the sense of deja-vu will be practically overwhelming.

This is
exactly
what Karena experienced on a day-to-day basis growing up as a child
in her third life
. Everything that happened, everything in the news, everything with other people an
d with the town, she’d known what
would happen before it
even
happened. She even proved this to her parents in the early days when they still didn’t quite believe her story.

One day,
told her parents exactly who was going to win the election for governor in their state the day before the election. And sure enough, the next day that very person was elected, much to the surprise of Harold and Christi.
She did this multiple times, predicting the outcomes of elections and sports tournaments, not that she’
d been paying much attention to
these things in
her past life, but she had a pretty good idea of what the outcomes of major events would be.

She figured she could make a pretty good career betting on the outcomes of these sort
s
of things, but she immediately discarded the idea as fruitless. She would start over everything anyway, and so it wouldn’t prove to be of any merit to her or
to
anyone else.

Growing up from a baby into a toddler and beyond for the third time was even more painful than it had been the second time. Along with the deja-vu, there was also an overwhelming sense of hopelessness that hung over everything.
How long would the Sandman let this go on? How long would she have to endure this repetition? Was this only the beginning, or was this the last time she would start over? There was no way of knowing.

Like last time, Karena tried to focus on other things. Last time she’d focused on learning and knowledge, but
this time she focused on trying to find
Shawn again. She had no idea if he was even
out
there, if he existed in this world on not, but she
resolved that if he was, then she would find him as soon as she could
.

And so the moment her limbs were capable of manipulating pages of a phonebook and
clicking her way through the internet, she began searching for him. When she looked through
the names of people in the suburbs
where she lived, there were no results. She realized that he must have moved here later on in his life, and she immediately realized what a fool she was for not
having asked
him, in all those years they’d been together, where he was
actually
from
. He’d said that he’d gotten a different job in each of his lives, so he could end up practically anywhere in the world.

Right now though, she knew he still had to be a kid if he was alive, and so she began looking for Shawn Ryker in multiple cities and towns all over the state. When her meticulous search yielded no results, she looked through cities and towns in the whole country, going state by state. She would spend hours at the computer searching for Shawn Ryker, finding some results but not the ones she wanted. A couple of times she found someone
with the exact same name
, but when she called them she instantly knew that they were not the right Shawn. All she had to do was say her name and maybe mention the Sandman, and she’d know.
But for the longest time her search yielded nothing and Karena felt like she’d never see Shawn again.

Karena, after months and months of searching, still hadn’t found Shawn. She grew frustrated on multiple occasions, but o
ther times she was glad to have
a distraction from the constant fear of the Sandman.
Besides, it was of absolute necessity that she carried out her search, otherwise she would have no one to whom she could really confide and open up to.

And then, one d
ay, she found someone named Shaw
n Ryker on the Internet who lived all the way in Canada.
Karena called him, and a man answered the phone who was not Shawn.

“Hello?” the man said.

“Hello,” said Karena, awkwardly, as these phone conversations always were.

“Who is this, eh?” the man asked.

“
This is Karena,” said Karena. “Is this Shawn Ryker?”

“This is Shawn’s father,”
said the man. “Who the heck
is Karena?”

“Can you
please
put me on the phone with Shawn?” Karena asked.

“Are you a friend of Shawn?” the man asked. “He doesn’t have any friends, so
you can’t be. Then who are you?
”

Karena felt a surge of excitement at the man saying Shawn had no friends.
This could be him, since she knew that after 8 lifetimes he wasn’t likely to be the most social person
on the planet
.
“Can you just please let me talk to him?” Karena asked.

The man sighed. “All right, fine.” There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, before a boy of about 14 years old answered.

“This is Shawn,” said the boy quietly.

“This is Karena,” Karena answered.

There was silence. “Karena?” the boy asked. “You mean…the Karena who I met…”

“Yes,” Karena replied, almost bubbling over with joy. “I’m the Karena you met in your past life!”

“You’re real,”
Shawn whispered
. “Finally, after all these years, I hear you again.”

Shawn was even more excited to see Karena that Karena was to see him. Although they lived far away, Karena and Shawn were finally communica
ting again, and for Shawn it had been 12 years since they’d spoken.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I started over 12 years ago and I’d almost thought that you were never going to come. Although I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for you to come while I was younger, since I was still a little boy. I can’t believe I never told you where I’d be when you started over, if we actually could meet up again.”

“I searched the whole country,” Karena said. “Until I finally found you in Canada.”

“Well, I was born in America,” said Shawn. “But I’ve lived here for the past 5 years, like I did in my past 8 lives before going back to America and to my hometown.”

“Is your hometown here?” Karena asked.

“Yes,”
Shawn said. “I move back in 6 months.”

Karena could scarcely believe her good fortune at finally finding Shawn and finding out that
he was coming back in 6 months, which, compared to all the years she’d been repeating the same thing, was no time at all.
It seemed that everything might soon return to normal again as Karena settled in her new life, or at least, normal as in similar to her previous life, not normal in the way a normal human would think of
as
normal.

But things were not going to return to normal, not even the way she would define normal in her previous life. Karena didn’t know this, of course, and it’s better to think of her thoug
hts at this time of hope than of
her thoughts later on, when things were far from normal
no matter who is defining the term
. It would be better if the story ended happily with Karena and Shawn being able to see each other regularl
y, and with things being better, even if they had to keep repeating their lives over and over again.
And while they would get to
see each other again, things were not going to get better in the slightest. Instead, for Karena and Shawn both, things were only going to get worse and worse until their dread
of the Sandman
was deeper than the pits of Utumno.

After six months of waiting, Shawn finally came. Karena and Shawn both were overjoyed to see each other again, though it was strange since Karena was less than 2 years old and Shawn was 14. Still, Shawn appeared to be already used to the strangeness of it, since he’d started over so many times, and they were soon talking just like they’d been before Shawn had disappeared in her past life. Though her parents didn’t really know who Shawn was, they trusted their daughter, since she seemed far mo
re competent than the average 2—
year old, and they let her go and see him whenever she wanted.

“What happened with you after I disappeared?” Shawn asked one day soon after he’d arrived in town.

“Nothing much, really,” Karena replied. “I just sort of sat there and waited for two years for the Sandman to come and get me.” Karena then proceeded to tell him what had happened when he came for her, about her getting him by a car before vanishing.

“I tried running away from him once,” Shawn said. “But every time I rounded a corner, he would always be around the next one. It was impossible to lose him, like he could just teleport wherever he wanted to.”

“Who knows if he’s really a physical being?” Karena asked. “No one else can see him, and he seems to have no interactions with the real world.”

“Except the victim can see him interacting with real world objects,” Shawn said. “We saw that when I disappeared. He turned the water glass into the hourglass, something I’d never seen him do before. So he can’t be a spirit.”

“Well, then what is he?” Karena cried, louder than she’d anticipated she would.
“We know all this about him, but the more we find out the more it seems like we know nothing about him at all!”

“Well, we need to try something,” Shawn said. “Over the past 14 years I’ve had an
other
idea for something
we can do, though I have no clue
if it will yield any result, just like wit
h your experiment with the glass
.
”

“What is it?” Karena asked.

“What if we dramatically alter the events in our lives so much that they’re scarcely ev
en recognizable to our previous ones
? What if we change practically everything we can about our lives?”

“What sort of changes are you thinking of?” Karena asked.

“
Nothing in particular,” said Shawn. “
But I’m sure there’s plenty of things we could come up with. You could save your parents, for example.”

“I’ve already decided that I’m doing that,” Karena said.

“You see,” Shawn continued. “Although I’ve been through 8 lives, most of my lives were pretty much the same. I always moved to the same place in Canada at the beginning of my life, and I always have lived and worked in the same town.
The only thing I did differently was have different jobs.
Mostly this is because I’d seen no reason to do anything any different before. In most of my lives I’ve been scared to death all the time, not really doing much with the time I have. I’ve learned a lot, yes, but I haven’t done very much with that knowledge.”

“So should we move somewhere far away, or do crazy things like jumping out of airplanes or what?” Karena asked. “This probably wouldn’t achieve anything even if we did go through with it. I’d rather just focus on making my current life as good and comfortable as possible to live in so I don’t have to spend years and years doing something I hate.”

“I get that,” Shawn said. “And that’s what I did for years too. But now that I’ve met another person who has been through the same things I’ve been through, I think we should do something about this. Get somewhere. Spend our extra time wisely.”

“This extra time wasn’t given to us!” Karena almost yelled, awkwardly rising into a clumsy standing position. “It was stolen from us! Our lives were stolen from us by that monster, and I don’t think that taking advantage of what he’s done to us is the way we should approach this!”

“That’s not what I’m suggesting, Karena,” Shawn said. “I want to get out of this cycle just as much as you do. Which is why we have to do something, anything, to get out of it. And right now, this is the best idea I have. If you can think of something to get us out of here, then please tell me about it, but for now this is all we’ve got.”

Karena sat back down. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “It’s just…he’s gotten into my head and is staying there. I don’t know…I…”

“It’s ok,” Shawn said. “I know exactly how you feel. He’s always in my head too, and he’s been there for far longer than he’s been in yours.”

They sat in silence. Karena realized that even though Shawn was here and things had returned to ‘normal,’ things weren’t going to be all happy the way she’d falsely thought they would be. Far f
rom it.

2 years later…

Two years had passed, and thus far Karena and Shawn had not succeeded in doing anything drastically different in their lives that could potentially invoke some sort of significant change in their situation. Karena was 3, almost 4, and Shawn was 1
6, but nothing was really
different than in their past life.

That was going to change, however, when Karena decided not to go to school.

And not just for a day or two. Karena decided not to go to school period.

Her parents, needless to say, were distressed over this particularly disturbing decision of hers. They were already used to her being quite different from other children her age, being not interested in playing or in anything that female toddl
ers were typically interested in.
But deciding not to go to school was almost pushing it too far. Karena had to do a lot of explaining to them, and her reasons, as she soon realized when explaining them, didn’t seem very legitimate. There were a lot of ‘mights’ and ‘maybes’ and nothing at all was known for certain.
On top of that, there was the fact that she had never even explained anything about the Sandman to them.
In the end, it really came down to a matter of her parents trusting their daughter to do the thing that was most likely to help her, and
although they could never
truly understand what she was going through unless it happened to themselves, they still let her go through with it.

So Karena grew up not going to school at all. At first, this didn’
t cause many problems; she was only in preschool after all, but naturally as she grew older and it became legally mandatory for her to attend school, some complications to her plan were introduced.

However, Karena could see this as a good thing. She didn’t want to spend the rest of this life in jail, that was true, but the more things differed from her last life, th
e better it was, or at least
for the sake of this experiment. And so if she was breaking the law by not attending school, though she could hardly believe she was thinking this, all the better!
Besides, it wasn’t as if she was going to be put in a real prison when she was only a toddler. Maybe they’d just put her in jail or something.

Her parents grew increasingly worried as pressure was put upon them
by
police and the by the state to put Karena in school. One night, Harold, looking particularly worried, said to Karena: “
You know, this isn’t just about you.”

“What do you mean?” Karena asked.

“Nothing happens to you if you decide not to go to school, but something will happen to us. We’ll be put in jail for something that you did.”

Karena hadn’t really thought about this befo
re. She supposed she’d assumed
, rather foolishly,
that she’d get put in jail, but she realized that wouldn’t make much sense if she were an ordinary toddler, like everyone thought she was.

Karena consulted Shawn on this, like she did for most problems she had.

“You could always tell everyone,” he said. “The truth about yourself, I mean. I know your parents wanted you to keep quiet in your past life, but there’s really no reason to keep quiet now. We’re trying to make things as different as possible, remember? I’d say, just tell everyone about what’s happened to you, or simply prove that you’re smarter than the average toddler by speaking fluently in complex sentences. That way you won’t have to go to school, and you’ll have everyone knowing about you, thus making your life even more different than before.”

‘I don’t know,” Karena said. “It seems awful risky, just going out there and declaring it to everyone. The Sandman might not like it.”

“And so what if the Sandman doesn’t like it?” Shawn asked.

“Then who knows what he could do to me?” Karena said. “You know his powers just as much
as I do, if not more
. There seems to be no limit to it. If I do something to his displeasure, he could do something awful.”

“That’s the risk you have to take,” said Shawn. “
But we don’t have any choice. Would you rather just live here and suffer under his oppression or…”

“I know, I know,” Karena interrupted.
“OK, fine, I’ll do it.” Karena had to push herself to see the logic over the fear, but in the end log
ic won, at least in this case.

So she told them.