Legend of the Salad Traveler Page 2

  Chapter 2 – The Guide and the Shower

  “So you want to be a god?” the trainer asked his young magician apprentice. Walking over to the counter, the older man of the two grabbed a glass container with a plastic, red lid filled with salted cashew halves. Opening the jar, he placed it in front of the apprentice and then flipped it upside down. The contents spilled out, creating a disorganized mound of cashew halves and fragments.

  “What?” the apprentice shrieked.

  “Here’s your first test,” the trainer said. “Find two cashew halves that match perfectly to make a cashew nut.”

  “You’re joking right?”

  “Don’t ask, just do. You’re the one who wanted to be a god. God’s don’t ask questions. They already know the answer.”

  “But…”

  “No buts, just act.”

  Now it would be easy to say the young apprentice surprised his mentor and was able to quickly find the various cashew halves making up whole nuts, actually showing that he was a god, but that would be nuts. Anyway, the young apprentice actually grew frustrated after just a couple of minutes, sweeping the nuts off the table with scores of them raining onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry, Master; you want me to do something impossible. I just made that reference in passing; you take it as if I was serious. It’s impossible! It’s not like I can make a salad appear out of nowhere.”

  You know what happened next. After both men had the weird sensation of feeling extremely heavy, almost five or six times their body weight, the air above the table scintillated causing objects beyond their field of view to appear distorted. A couple of the remaining cashew halves on the table top were crushed and, within the next instant, a salad appeared. Both men were thoroughly shocked by the sudden appearance of the shimmering, honey-mustard drenched appetizer.

  The young apprentice pondered, Maybe I am a god.

  The salad immediately thought, Damn it, not again.

  The salad was quite upset. I mean, wouldn’t you be upset if you were vacationing with other salads that happened to find their way to the isolated place in an alternate universe where salads like to go to relax, put on a little oil, bathe in the umber-tinted sunlight, only to be willed into existence where you came across a young man with an overachieving sense of self-worth that he could be a god? What the salad didn’t quite realize was that it was actually beginning to cause itself to disappear and reappear. This all begs the question, well not really, but we’ll ask it anyway: If you were a salad and realized you were whisked off to another universe due to the strange happenstance of events, and realized you could take this time off before being consumed, would you: (a.) Get drenched in olive oil and sit out basking in the light of an unknown star on an unknown planet realizing your leaves aren’t wilting, relax, and drop a few points on your blood pressure; ( b.) Pop off to another universe since you seem to now have a knack of appearing and disappearing in and out of different planes of existence; (c.) Head over to the nearest Sizzler’s and go to the salad bar to visit some old friends, who are probably just hanging around, since so many people don’t really want salad.

  Anyway, the salad decided to leave.

  —— ♦ ——

  “Who the hell are you?” Carl’s friend bellowed at the strange man in his shower getting wet from the cascading water, much of it racing past the pulled-back, black and white checkered shower curtain, some landing on Carl’s friend.

  “Wait a minute,” the strange man responded stepping out of the shower, “this isn’t the right transport gate. Damn it! They dropped me off at the wrong place again.”

  “What the…what do you mean they dropped you off?” Carl’s friend asked. “How in the hell did you get here?” Carl’s friend was extremely shocked knowing the shower was empty just a couple of minutes ago when he turned the water on.

  “What smells?” the strange man asked, looking around the room scrunching his nose as though the unpleasant aroma emanated from Carl’s friend. “Aw man, you need to take a shower.”

  “I’m not gonna take a shower with you here. Who knows who you are or what you’re gonna do? I should call the police.”

  “Do you really think I’m gonna be a problem? I mean really, I just popped into your shower. Odd though, looks like it was a miss with the exit point coordinates during the dematerialization.”

  “How in the hell did you get in here?” Carl’s friend was very interested in the answer. To get in the bathroom, you had to go through the bedroom, and he didn’t see anyone go past himself.

  “I just told you, might have been the shower curtain. Probably threw off the transport conductor,” the strange man said, while scrimmaging through the bathroom closet looking for a towel finding a red one he liked and beginning to dry himself off. “I was guiding a couple of gents back to their earth from a short getaway looking for a hat of theirs after it disappeared.”

  “Disappearing hats? Guiding a couple of gents?” Carl’s friend asked.

  “Yeah, I’m an excursion guide. Well that’s part of my job anyway. I was helping these two guys transporting them to earth version green. This is the fourth earth version green, isn’t it?” the stranger inquired. He sat on the toilet to facilitate removing his shoes pouring water from them onto the floor upsetting Carl’s friend. “One of them dropped their wallet.”

  “Green version? This is just earth.”

  “What do you mean just earth?” the stranger asked. “Don’t you know what version of earth you live on?”

  “What the hell do you mean? There’s only one version, this version they sometimes call the big blue planet. Any kid knows that.”

  The stranger’s eyes got big. “Uh oh, this is blue earth? Damn, I thought I might’ve read that departure billboard wrong. And, you really do need to take a shower.”

  “I am, but not with you in here.”

  The stranger smiled. “Don’t worry, I can wait in the other room. Hey, you have anything to eat? Travelling all this time made me hungry.”

  “No, I don’t have any food. Just get out!” Carl’s friend shouted.

  “Geesh, touchy aren’t we?”

  “Dude, you’re really beginning to strain my patience.”

  With that, the stranger walked out of the bathroom into the studio and sat in a chair next to the doorway. “I’ll just wait for you here.”

  Carl’s friend actually meant for him get out of the cottage. He didn’t know why, but he decided to take his shower. The water was already running, the temperature was correct, and the stranger seemed nice enough. Carl’s friend took a peek every minute or so, craning his head to look through the doorway where he could just see making sure the stranger stayed put. Finishing up, drying off and getting dressed, he headed out to the studio. The stranger immediately continued his verbal inquiries and comments.

  “So you don’t have any food, huh?” he asked.

  “No I don’t have any food. I had a salad, but it ended up disappearing.”

  “Really?” The stranger pulled out a small tablet device, flicked through several pages on the multi-touch screen and smiled. “Hey, I read about this salad in the news. Belongs to you, huh?”

  Carl’s friend walked over to the stranger and glanced at the screen viewing an image of his salad the way he remembered it. It sat there with other salads on a beach in a background of twilight hues and indescribable fauna and color-auras he had never witnessed before. There were also words with unknown scripting symbols below the picture.

  “Hey, that looks like my salad! And what’s that writing?”

  “Still learning the language,” the stranger said, “but I think it says something like it’s enjoying its vacation and recommends everyone take one.”

  Growling roared from Carl’s friend’s abdominal region as he looked at the image on the screen; heartburn started flaring up. “You know, I’m actually not feeling too well. Something I ate didn’t quite agree with me. But
you know what, I wouldn’t mind another salad.” Carl’s friend really didn’t enjoy the salad in the bar, and the display on the screen looked more appetizing.

  “Hey, I can be your guide!” The stranger exclaimed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I can help you find your salad.”

  “You’re jokin’ right?”

  “Joking about what?”

  “About finding my salad.”

  “Why would I joke about that?”

  “Well, because you’re acting like my salad is out there gallivanting across the universe having a good time on some alien beach.”

  “Don’t be silly, your salad isn’t gallivanting across the universe. It’s gallivanting across multiple universes. Big difference.”

  Carl’s friend answered with a look of skepticism. “Huh?”

  “Hey, we should try and go find your salad. It’ll be fun. We’ll have to catch the next transport though,” the stranger continued.

  “Transport?” Transport for what? Carl’s friend wondered.

  “It’s for those who can’t travel from point to point in space or jump from existence to existence into different continuums without assistance. We all can’t be like your salad, now can we?”

  “Hey, what about those two gents you were looking for to return their wallet?” Carl’s friend asked.

  “We’ll turn it in to the ‘lost and found’ along the way. Plus they’re always losing something, every time I take them somewhere.”

  “So are we going through the shower?”

  “That’s quite evident, isn’t it?” the stranger replied. “How else do you dematerialize and materialize onto the nearest passing transport?”

  —— ♦ ——

  Meeting and greeting various creatures and persons on the transport gave Carl’s friend an elation he hadn’t felt in a long while. It was similar to the excitement of feeling amped up and supercharged when he first started his radio broadcasts where he could make a difference in the lives of chimney sweeps. Now, to be travelling with exotic creatures or alien species, who cared no more about his appearance as two persons meeting on a subway, was extraordinary. The only problem was, he couldn’t understand anything they said.

  “Dude, how’s it that I can understand you but nobody else? How do you do it?” Carl’s friend asked, wondering how his unexpected visitor, who was now his guide, was able to speak to a couple of the other passengers in what appeared to be their native tongue.

  “Oh yeah, hold on,” Carl’s friend’s guide responded. Reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small, black cube device, he pushed it against Carl’s friend’s skin behind his ear.

  Carl’s friend felt a sharp, lancing sensation. “Ouch!” The streaming of inordinate sounds, grunts, squeaks, bellows and other unintelligible voices now flowed into a symphony of English that Carl’s friend could understand. “What did you do to me?”

  “Injected nanobots,” the guide said. “They’re designed to work with your hearing and translate from the umpteen number of languages you’ll come across out here. Glad it worked… almost thought it wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I kinda bought them secondhand. Sometimes they turn out ending up changing their programming to do something else.”

  Carl’s friend was confused and a little perturbed. “Like what else? What would have happened if they didn’t work?”

  “The really mischievous ones have been known to cause you to start singing and dancing for no reason. Kinda disturbing really.”

  “And what the hell are nanobots?” Carl’s friend asked, rubbing the injection site, attempting to lessen the pain.

  His guide looked puzzled. “You don’t know what they are?”

  “Which is why I asked.”

  The transport came to an immediate stop. Carl’s friend noticed that almost as soon as they had boarded and progressed through their conversation, the trip ended. “We’re here already?” he asked as they flooded out of the vehicle with the other passengers.

  Carl’s friend’s chaperone seemed to focus on navigating through the terminal.

  This process, minus the discussion, continued multiple times during their journey. The strange guide reviewed the departure billboards, rushed them both through various terminals, and boarded a transport. Almost as soon as they departed, every so often a creature or two materializing in the midst of the passengers, they would end up at a different location.

  Arriving at a terminal nearly empty and looking up at the arrival and departure billboards, none of which Carl’s friend could understand, his strange guide cringed appearing somewhat troubled.

  “Uh oh,” the guide said.

  “Uh oh? What do you mean, uh oh?”

  “I think we’re lost. Looking at the departures, the destinations look familiar, but I think we jumped to the wrong parallel waypoint station. We just missed the transport heading back to backtrack. We may have to wait here awhile; that’s if they’ll allow a ticket change.”

  Carl’s friend thought, This is no way to start a trip.

  “You know, we’re getting nowhere fast,” Carl’s friend remarked. “We’re nowhere closer to finding my salad or my way home than when we first started.” He was very frustrated and exhausted from boarding and de-boarding various transports, container devices and other odd inter-dimensional passenger assemblages for what felt like several days. The reality was, in relative Earth time, they actually travelled about six months, in absolute time, it was just one day. The stress of travelling wore on Carl’s friend, every so often thinking he was hallucinating, seeing someone carry a cat in various sized boxes.

  “Know what you need?” the guide asked. “A good drink. Come on, I know a bar.”

  It seems whenever you’re looking for something you’re missing and you have a guide who shows up in your shower out of nowhere, they always seem to know a good bar.