Johnny Wraith Stories

Help didn’t come when I tumbled off the bridge and into the water. Vatsulu certainly wasn’t any help. He just swam around me in fast circles, blowing little bubbles of laughter while I kicked and splashed for air. Each time I yelled “Help!” I choked down more water and sank deeper. I was drowning, suffocating, losing consciousness. I’d always been a good swimmer, but that night I sure wasn’t. Maybe it was the booze, or the hash, or the shrooms, or a combination thereof. After all, it had been hard enough to stagger about on my feet in such a state of intoxication, so maybe that explains why, despite my struggle, I sank straight down and hit the bottom.

This is the end of me, I thought. At least I’d lasted as long as I had, I reminisced. I suppose it was a good life, I tried to convince myself. One last bubble escaped my nose and floated up.

Then all went cold in my body and blackness took my eyes.

It was forever before my ears rang me out of death, or my sleep, whichever state I may have been in.

“Wake up!”

“Eh?”

“Wake up, Johnny, wake up!” Insisted Vatsulu.

I opened my eyes. Where was I? It looked like I was sitting right where I’d apparently drowned, at the bottom of the canal, but now the canal was empty. I could breathe! When I looked up, I saw a ceiling of water rushing overhead. Vatsulu was running circles around me. He was still orange and had a human face, but now he possessed a dog’s body.   

“What the hell?”

“Johnny, you’re a fish now. Your arms are fins and your legs are a tail. You’re breathing water rather than air now because your lungs have become gills.”

I looked down over my body. I still had my hands and feet. It didn’t make sense.

I shot Vatsulu an accusing glare.

Catching my beam, he stopped running and giggling and sat down in front of me. He perked his ears and tilted his head. I replied with rolling eyes and a shrug.

“I know you still think of yourself as human, so that’s the way you still see yourself. To me you look like a large salmon.”

“To me, you look like a dog.”

“Oh yeah, what kind of dog?” he smiled and perked his ears.

“A Boston Terrier.”

Vatsulu’s smile changed to a frown and his ears dropped. “Thanks a lot. I always thought of myself as a Rottweiler.”

“At least you’re still man’s best friend, but that doesn’t help me much, now that I’m a fish. Does it?”

Vatsulu’s good cheer returned. He barked a few times in laughter, jumped up and ran a few circles around me, and did a back flip into my lap.

“Stop licking my face!” I screamed as I fought to keep from getting the pink, sloppy tongue. “Settle down boy!”

“Just trying to have some fun,” chuckled Vatsulu.

I wiped the spit and snot off my face with the back of my hand and gave him another serious look. “What’s really going on here?” I insisted. “It looks like water has turned into air and air has turned into water, but it only looks that way because now I’m a fish. However, I still look like a man to my own eyes, though it’s only because I still think I’m a man. And you, though you are a fish, you look like a dog.”

“Well, not exactly,” sighed Vatsulu. “I was trying to make this seemingly odd situation you’ve splashed into easier to understand. But, you aren’t ever going to understand all this in this life, so you have to simply accept things as they are, despite their apparent chaos and randomness. You can’t ask, where am I? What is this? Who are you? Who are they? How? Why? Or anything of the sort. There are no answers you will ever be able to comprehend in your current state. Instead, focus on what you see and hear, smell and touch, the things you taste. Seek all the questions without wanting to know the answers. Find your current. I know you still have more questions to ask. Just trust me when I tell you to quit asking for answers and to start seeking more questions. Nevertheless, let me try to answer a little bit better what you have been asking: Johnny, you are a man, a fish, and a dog, not to mention many other things. All that exists is Now. There is no Time. There is no Future or Past. Only Now. And Now you are All Things. You are just focused on being a Man trapped in Time. Like I told you, I have been a million Things, but by saying have been, I was simply trying to communicate with you in terms of your faulty, Time-centric language. The reality is that I am both a fish and a dog right Now.”

I scratched my head.

“At the cost of using faulty Time-centric words, do you realize that you are never the same from one moment to the next?”

“Maybe. Is it kind of like how we are made of spinning atoms that are never positioned in the same way, or like how the cells in our bodies are either dying or dividing, thus we are never the same?”

“Close. And this might be as close as you’ll ever be to understanding the nature of your true, real substance, which is truly and really No Thing at all. Johnny, we are No Thing. But we are All Things. We are beings made of No Thing that swim through Every Thing, in all the shapes and forms Every Thing may infinitely take. This all happens Now, all at the same Time, though Time is a fiction, so, we are Every Thing and No Thing, all at the same Time.”

“Damn Vatsulu, I think I want to believe all of this shit. If I really believed it all, there would be nothing to lose.”

“Sorry Johnny, there is No Thing to lose, and Every Thing to gain, whether you like it or not. Whether you like it or not, we are the same dog.”

“What would I see if I swam up and poked my head into the air?”

“Most likely, Every One would look like a fish to you, but as I’ve been saying, Every One is Every Thing, right Now.”

“Shit...”

“Welcome to the Otherworld.”

“You mean Every World and No World?”

Vatsulu’s eyes brightened. “Johnny, you’re quite the quick study.”

“Thanks…”

“Let’s quit piddle-farting and get started. Time, as you say it, is wasting. We have a long journey ahead, so just follow me. We’ll swim with the current. That’s how we’ll find our way from one place to the next until getting to the End, though there really is no End.”

“Where are we going?”

“No Where in particular. We don’t have to be Any Where. Let’s go!”

Vatsulu took off running along the bottom of the canal and I followed. After a few steps I lifted off my feet and began swimming through the air, doing the Breaststroke. Vatsulu turned back into a fish, and the air turned into water once more.

“Johnny?” Vatsulu yelled back at me with bubbles.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got to go now. You’ll never see Me again, but I will always be Every One you meet.”

“What!”

“Just keep swimming my brother. Go with the currents.”

And so Vatsulu vanished.