Jumping Waves

by Layla Voll

Kurt Wagner stood on the silent blue sand and waited for the next shift to come in over the screaming trees.

He had never much liked the beach. There were too many people and no good way to cover himself, which meant either using the image inducer, or - well, it meant using the image inducer. But once, on a miraculously warm, calm summer day on Muir Island, Kitty and Meggan had dragged Excalibur outside to go jumping in the surf. Wisdom had refused, quite sensibly pointing out that the North Atlantic ocean, even in the summer, even on a very warm day, was still the North Atlantic ocean, a body of water in which great blocks of ice regularly floated about with impunity. But Wisdom had lost the argument with Kitty, as he usually did, and they had all been pulled into the rolling waves to wait, shivering, as a great wall of water came bearing down upon them.

For a moment Kurt had nearly panicked, readying himself to teleport out of harm's way. But he followed Kitty's instructions to the letter, tensing himself until just before the water hit, then leaping high into the wave itself, to be caught and tossed and finally brought back down, his feet once again on the rocky ocean bottom far away from where he had started

He thought of Muir often, though in all the many shifts, he had never once seen anything that resembled it, except in the way that places in dreams had sometimes resembled places in the real world, back when there was a real world to resemble. But each time he readied himself for the shift, he thought of Kitty, and Meggan, and Rahne, and even Wisdom, laughing in the great, cold, salty waves. He jumped with all his strength, teleporting into the nothingness of the in-between of dimensions just as the shift hit, to be tossed again, somewhere far away.

The first time he had looked up to see the bright wall that marked the shift, he had instinctively tried to teleport out of harm's way. And for the brief fraction of a second that the shift passed over, he had been in that odd gray place outside of time and space that allowed him to teleport. When he'd teleported back, he'd found himself in the middle of a park festival celebrating Queen Marilyn's Silver Jubilee.

Kurt had seen enough as an X-Man to guess that the structure of reality was somehow fraying. After all those battles for the fate of the world on the far side of the moon, on the astral plane, in the deserts of Egypt, battles of which most of the world was blissfully unaware, it looked as if someone had lost one of those battles. He was beginning to doubt whether he would ever find out exactly what had happened: the realities he was jumping into had become progressively stranger, and he hadn't seen anyone he recognized, or, indeed, anyone at all for quite some time. But he kept stubbornly jumping, wave after wave.

Bitter pink mist trailed by, like a Southern Gothic novel written by a cotton candy machine. He thought of Rogue, his sister in one of those odd ways that only made sense if you were an X-Man. She had come to Xavier from the swamps of Louisiana to become a normal girl and ended up becoming a hero. But for all the times they had managed to save the world, in the end, had her sacrifices really mattered? For all that his friends had lost, what had they gained? Had they only managed to buy the universe another year or so of time?

He wondered what people had done with that extra year. All the normal things that people usually did, probably: laughed, cried, made love, told bad jokes, mowed the lawn. Conquered their fear of flying; broke a favorite vase. Gave up thumb sucking, started wetting the bed. Recarpeted the den and finally painted over the hideous orange color the last owners had left on the walls, after countless evenings of saying "we should really repaint that some day." Or perhaps decided to leave it all for another year. He wondered what he would have done if he had known that there would only be one more year left of reality.

Memorized more poetry, he decided. He was getting a little tired of reciting the same few verses of Rilke to himself. He wasn't even sure any more whether he was remembering them correctly, or whether the poems were now more Wagner than Rilke, but he loved the sound of the rich, flowing German words. Perhaps some day the shifts would bring him to a library, although there was no guarantee that he would find the Rilke of his reality. No guarantee that he wouldn't find a leather bound volume of the Collected Works of Kurt Wagner, actually.

He balanced on a stiff tendril of pink mist, eyes half closed, watching dreamily for signs of another shift.

Logan had told him of monks in the Far East who entered this state somewhere beyond sleep, somewhere not quite awake, and he thought he had found it, or something approximating it. The monks had recited mantras to bring them closer to a state of enlightenment. Yet another thing we failed at, he thought sadly.

There was so very much they had failed at. Not just the X-Men, although Xavier's Dream had not exactly been a resounding success, but humanity in general. It would have been nice to know that, before the end, humanity had managed to evolve one more step. Not in the sense that Magneto had meant, with his specious distinctions between homo sapiens and homo sapiens superior, but that humanity had managed to come one step closer to God, one step closer to the new heaven and the new earth St John had written of in the book of Revelations.

He smiled for a moment. He remembered talking to Kitty once, wonderfully logical Katherine Pryde, about the Book of Revelations. She'd called it ridiculous, saying that the over-the-top images of ringing trumpets and multi-headed beasts were straight out of second-rate, late night horror movies. Which was slightly unfair: if anything, St. John had been a master of understatement in describing the end of the world. He wondered what Kitty thought now. He wondered if there were any Kittys who had managed to stay sane. Probably. Katherine Pryde, in any reality, would always have that inner strength he had always admired.

The mist grew eyes and teeth, and chanted a hymn to the coming of the next shift. Kurt watched the waves of mist, watched and waited, and then - teleported into the void again.

Kurt sat on the stringy pillow at the head of his cot while colorless green ideas slept furiously all around him. Odd, he thought, although he couldn't quite put his finger on why. But peaceful. The rows of beds stretched on and on, to a place where their parallel rows crossed and crossed again. He thought about Logan's monks, reciting their mantras to come closer to God. He wondered if any of them had actually seen the infinite face of God. He wondered whether it would be possible, here, in this dormitory of the infinite.

Reciting Job would certainly be appropriate: Job had lost home, family, everything he knew, all because God had decided to play dice with the universe and made a bet with Satan. Job had cursed the day he was born, and cried out to God for answers. The Book of Job was powerful and heartwrenching. But for the sheer beauty of language, he decided, nothing would be better than the Psalms.

Naturally, there was a Gideon's Bible on the bedside table. He picked a Psalm at random. Psalm 92:

"It is a good thing to give thanks to Yahweh,
To sing praises to your name, Most High;

To proclaim your loving kindness in the morning,
And your faithfulness every night."

He recited the clear words over and over again, here where there was no morning and no night, and it was a good thing. He recited the words until they tasted brighter and brighter in his mouth, until finally he felt the rolling movement of another shift and gathered himself, shouting the words into the nothingness-

He leaned against the tree and dangled his feet in the blue, blue water. The scene looked familiar, but he wasn't quite sure if it was because the water looked like the pond on the grounds of the Mansion, or because it looked like the cover of a book Kitty had given him once when he'd asked about the United States. After a moment, he came up with the title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He decided not to look up to see whether the words were written in the sky.

He thought of Logan's monks again. Logan had told him once that there were certain monks who believed that God had 999 names. Or perhaps an infinite number of names. He couldn't quite remember. But it was the task of humanity to collect them all. Once collected, humanity's task was done, and the world would end.

Well, the world had already ended. And it didn't look as if humanity had managed to tally up the names of God. Another task left undone. He wondered how one went about collecting the names of God.

He listened to the laughing of the waves against the shore.

He wondered if perhaps the monks had set themselves an impossible task. Perhaps God had scattered His names across the realities, so that they would never have had the chance to gather them all. It seemed unfair, but so much of the world had seemed unfair.

He listened to the chattering of the rocks in the surf.

He wondered whether God had a different name in each shift.

He listened to the whispering of the waves against the shore.

He wondered if he could understand what the waves were saying.

He listened long and hard, until he almost thought he heard something at the edges of his understanding, until he heard again the drumming of the oncoming shift --

Kurt teleported again, into a lashing hurricane. His prehensile toes clung to the rigging of an old-fashioned schooner, and the wind howled around him. God had spoken to Job, in the end. God had answered him out of the whirlwind. Kurt balanced on the wet rope and let the wind scream around him, and he listened to the whirlwind.

Kurt Wagner listened for the first of the names of God.

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