“In late trading, Game Town Enterprise stocks went up by …”
The newscaster’s voice, along with his face, disappeared as Miss Magee, having finished her TV dinner and thrown away its tinfoil container, switched off the television. She carried a pot of tea, along with cup and saucer, to her study. There, she lifted a large canvas handbag, placed it upside down on her desk and swept it away with a flourish—fancying herself a magician removing a piece of cloth draped over a caged bird—to unveil a pile of perfectly stacked notebooks. She sat down, heaved a deep sigh and selected the top book to begin marking her class assignment, an essay entitled “My Favorite Birthday.”
In all, it was a very ordinary evening for the ninth grade teacher from the Game Town Middle School. The first homework book she opened belonged to Dorian Dove. She considered Dorian to be a very ordinary boy; but his story soon captivated her—she even forgot to pour her tea. And the story went like this.
My Best Birthday
by Dorian Dove
My favorite birthday was this year. In fact, it was last week. As usual, my parents gave me a few dollars to spend playing games and watching a movie, so I rode my bicycle into town. My little brother Danny wanted to tag along, but I told him no because he’s only seven and he’s still riding his bicycle with training wheels. I didn’t want to have to keep stopping and waiting for the slowpoke to catch up. Plus, I didn’t want to spend my birthday money paying for him to play video games—he’s really not that good.
In town, outside the ice cream parlor, I rode by what used to be my favorite game, Jack and John. I don’t usually pay much attention to it because I haven’t played it for a long time. On that day, however, something made me stop and turn around. There were two boys—well, they were so big that they were practically men—watching the game. They weren’t playing it, but were just standing there watching the graphics flash on and off the screen, the pictures of Jack and John fighting and racing and…you know, the clips that try to get you to play the game.
There was something really familiar about those two boys. It was like I knew them, but I couldn’t remember where from. I glanced over at the game screen, then at the boys, then back at the screen…. Of course! They looked just like the game heroes, Jack and John. But they couldn’t be Jack and John. Their hair was slightly longer than the game heroes, but more importantly, they were standing right there on the sidewalk, in real life, instead of inside the video game.
They looked so much like Jack and John that I got off my bike and moved closer to get a better look. It was ridiculous. Still, I couldn’t help myself—I just had to ask them. But right as I opened my mouth to utter, “Aren’t you …?” they saw me and interrupted with—
“Aren’t you the boy?”
I didn’t know how to respond. I am a boy, of course, but I had no way of knowing whether I was the boy because I didn’t know which boy they had in mind.
They took a step towards me.
“Aren’t you the boy who comes into town every year on his birthday to play Jack and John?”
I stepped back, thinking fast to remember if I’d done anything wrong, like painting graffiti near the ice cream parlor. No, I hadn’t even skated down the sidewalk here.
“Uh, yes … er, no …” I sputtered. “I mean, I used to play Jack and John, but I promised myself that I’d never play it again.”
“And when exactly was that?” they persisted, hovering ever closer.
I thought that it was kind of weird that these two look-alikes were asking me all these questions, but something inside me told me to tell them the truth.
“It was a year ago, on my last birthday.”
“So you are the boy!” they both shouted, throwing their hands up in the air.
They seemed so certain and excited that I didn’t want to disappoint them, so I said:
“Yes, I guess I am.”
They said they had a story to tell me, so I sat down on the bench outside the ice cream parlor with John, or at least the guy who looked like John, while Jack, or at least the guy who looked like Jack, went inside and returned after a few minutes with three triple scoops of chocolate forest—my favorite.
In order for you to understand why that day was special, and why it was my absolutely best birthday, I need to tell you what they said to me while we licked our huge ice cream cones. And, as I sat between them, looking at Jack and then at John as they took turns speaking, they told me this story. They told me it was important to remember the story, so I took out my cell phone and recorded as they spoke. These are their exact words.
The story starts right here in Game Town which, as you know, although tiny compared to the big cities, is famous the world over for making video games. Most of the men and women here work to make the games, all the children play the games, and in almost every building and house, shop and sidewalk, computer and phone, there are all kinds of games.
Of Game Town’s many games, none is more popular than Jack and John. Its inventor claims it’s “the most advanced, most challenging, most fun game ever.” And, as everyone knows, it is really clever and challenging, consisting of hundreds of games within the game in which Jack competes against John in every type of contest imaginable. They race against each other and fight against each other. They compete in “School” to show who is smarter and in “Career” to see who can make more money; in “Home” to prove who can build the biggest house and in “Get Jill” to win the hand of the prettiest girl; and even in “Hair” to show off the best hairstyle! In fact, the game consists of so many options for Jack to compete against John—and the inventor is constantly coming up with and adding new ones—that even those gamers who play every day and night all year around still can’t manage to try every type of competition.
Like many games, you can either play Jack and John by yourself or against a friend. By yourself, the game automatically designates you “Jack” against the computer’s “John”. Playing solo this way against John is famously difficult, and there are only a few whiz kids who regularly beat the computer. When you and a friend play, and one of you is “Jack” and the other “John,” you each have an even chance of winning—supposedly.
Although nearly everyone has heard of Jack and John, there is much about it they don’t know. For instance, Jack and John are actually brothers. Their parents met in a previous generation video game and, since starring in games was all their parents knew, they taught Jack and John the tricks of the trade. From the time they were small children, Jack and John learned how to perform and compete against each other. But competition didn’t come naturally to the boys, and they often helped each other out or let the other win just to be nice.
John, being the older of the two, taught his brother how to ride a bicycle, and that was one of Jack’s fondest memories—his hands on the handlebars wobbling while John, walking and then running beside him, steadied the bike as it gathered speed.
“Pedal! Pedal!” shouted John.
Jack glanced downwards to watch his legs push down on his feet and his feet push down on the pedals and, when he looked up, he was riding and John was no longer beside him but some yards back, clapping and cheering him on. That day Jack rode and rode, and the thrill of freedom buzzing from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair blown by the rushing wind brought a huge smile to his face—a smile that remained for years.
But Jack and John’s parents knew that for the boys to succeed in game world, they couldn’t always be so nice to each other, so they reserved their praise for the brother who won a contest. The boys quickly learned that winning mattered most, and by the time they were teenagers, their competitive spirit had grown so strong that it caught the attention of Game Town’s number one inventor.
The inventor created a masterpiece, a stage for the brothers to display all their talents and skills, and he even named it after them: Jack and John. For a long time the boys loved starring in the game, and they were proud that it did what all other games could do rolled into one. They got to show off to the world what fine athletes, how super-intelligent, how successful, and how good-looking they were. Jack and John basked in the attention they received as, through the screen, they watched the excitement and admiration in the gamers’ eyes.
“Did you see that girl?” Jack would say. “Did you see how she was looking at me?”
“Sure I saw,” John would respond. “She was looking at you until I won, and then she started looking at me!”
But after a while the game started to grow old—at least for Jack. In any game, there is a winner and a loser, and since the inventor programmed John as the computer’s default player, he won far more often than Jack.
When Jack first noticed that John was winning more, he thought to himself, “I’ll just have to try harder, and soon I’ll be as good as John, if not better.”
Try as he might, though, John still beat him most times, and Jack started to grow disheartened and get grumpy, and his joyful smile slowly faded.
John, likewise, noticed that he was winning more often than Jack, and he began to feel that he was better than his brother. Not just a better athlete, or more intelligent, or more successful, but a better person. There was now a hint of a swagger in his walk and his chin carried itself slightly higher in the air. Some frequent gamers even wondered whether John wasn’t celebrating his victories in his champion’s stance—arms and fists raised high in the air—for a little longer than before.
The feeling of being better-than, or superior, went to John’s head. It changed the way he spoke to and acted towards Jack. He boasted about all his wins and made up rhymes about how he was better than his brother, like:
In the pool or in the school
In the ring or on the track
On the horse around the course
John will certainly beat Jack
It doesn’t matter when you play
Could be night could be day
After lunch or after dinner
Jack’s a loser and John’s a winner
All John’s strutting and bragging and taunting, of course, only made Jack feel worse. At night, even John’s snoring seemed to be singing his own praises. Jack lay in the dark, eyes open, reminiscing about the happy times before the days of games and competition, when he and his brother used to share everything and anything and there was no fighting and striving, winning and losing.
“There must be somewhere better than here,” Jack wondered. “What exists outside the game? Where do all those gamers come from and where do they go? There must be someplace where it’s not all about who wins and who loses.”
And Jack began to dream of escaping from the game.
The fateful day arrived. A boy rode up on his bicycle and took some coins out of his pocket to play Jack and John. Before slotting them into the machine, the boy said, breathless with anticipation:
“Alright, today is my birthday and, like every year, my parents gave me money to play a few games, and, like every year, I’m here to play Jack and John…”
Jack, daydreaming about where the boy had come from on his bicycle, hardly paid attention to the boy’s chatter.
“…but, unlike every year,” the boy went on, “this time I’m going to win! You hear that, Jack? We’re going to beat John! And that will be the best birthday present of all.”
This shook Jack awake. The boy’s overwhelming desire to beat John rekindled Jack’s smoldering desire to defeat his brother once and for all. Fierce rivalry coursed through Jack’s blood as he watched the boy put his money into the machine and choose the “Tour of Champs” cycling competition.
In an instant Jack and John appeared at the starting line, smartly outfitted in their bicycling helmets and shoes and their harlequin shirts and shorts—Jack’s colors blue and yellow and John’s red and green.
The brothers climbed onto their bicycles and sat at the ready. Jack stared through the screen into the boy’s eyes, and their focus and determination steeled Jack’s resolve.
“Very well,” Jack said to himself through clenched teeth. “If I can’t beat John for myself, then I’ll beat him for the boy as his birthday present.”
The starter horn sounded and they were off.
Jack, pedaling with all his might, raced ahead of John. He zoomed recklessly downhill, pumped furiously uphill and leaned his bike into the corners dangerously close to the ground. He soon built a substantial lead.
The boy was delighted and began to laugh and shout:
“This is my day, John! You hear me? This is my day!”
As Jack sped down the steep final hill before the finish line, both he and the boy were so elated by the prospect of victory that neither noticed the bump on the road. The bicycle’s speeding front tire hit the bump hard, the wheel began to shake, the handlebars to wobble, and Jack knew that he was losing control.
“Oh, no!” screamed both Jack and the boy as the bicycle cartwheeled down the hill, back wheel over front, throwing Jack from his seat high into the air. Only through a lucky landing on soft grass by the side of the road did he manage to avoid serious injury.
“Yaaaayyyy!” resounded John’s triumphant cry.
Jack was barely able to lift his head to see the huge grin on his brother’s face as John raced past Jack’s wrecked bike lying in the middle of the road. The thorn of defeat sank even deeper into Jack, and John couldn’t resist the temptation to twist it in further—
“You can’t snatch a victory even when it’s sitting in the palm of your hand. You’re such a loser, Jack. When will you ever learn to be a winner?”
Jack winced as John, fists raised high in celebration, crossed the finish line.
The birthday boy grew sad and angry and began to cry—
“It’s not fair!” he wailed. “I should have won. I’m never going to play this stupid game again!”
And he ran off.
At this point, the two big boys stopped telling their story and looked at me. I sat there as frozen as my ice cream and realized my tongue was hanging out in disbelief.
“And that birthday boy …” they both said.
I didn’t want to say it because it couldn’t be, it simply wasn’t possible, but my mouth moved faster than my brain, and the words blurted out—
“Was me!”
They smiled and nodded silently, giving me a chance to let the strange truth sink in. What was strange, of course, was not only that I was indeed the boy, but that sitting next to me on the bench were—somehow, some way—Jack and John.
I looked around to see if anybody else had spotted them, but all the boys and girls and men and women were continuing on their preoccupied ways to the offices and stores, restaurants and movie theaters.
Had I been drawn into a parallel universe? I licked my ice cream to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was cold and it was real chocolate forest alright—I’d know the taste anywhere.
Between their telling and my listening, we’d been eating the cones unusually slowly and we all had two out of the three scoops left to go. As they had talked, I’d noticed how they kept referring to “Jack” and “John,” not like they were talking about themselves, but about two different people entirely. And in that same manner they continued their story.
Jack lay on his back in the grass, watching the clouds spin overhead. He was dazed by the fall and spent from the race. Most of all, he was ashamed that he’d been unable to give the boy his birthday present.
With no will to pick himself up, Jack lay there on the ground. The sun started to melt into the horizon, and he lay there still.
“I wish I could just sink into the earth and disappear from this game. I never want to compete again.”
With that thought an exhausted Jack drifted off to sleep, through a maze of peculiar dreams filled with all kinds of creatures and sounds he had never seen or heard before. When he awoke, a chorus of birds was singing sunrise songs.
Jack yawned and stretched his arms back over his head.
“That’s odd,” he said, feeling the ground with his hands. “The grass seems to have disappeared overnight.”
Something even odder appeared when he opened his eyes. Towering over him were immense trees, their trunks shooting up so straight and tall that their branches and leaves formed a skyscraping canopy. He was in the middle of a forest.
Jack rubbed the sleep from his eyes, but the trees stood there still, as tall as ever.
“How could you have grown around me while I slept?” he asked the trees. “Was I asleep for so long?”
He stood up and walked around, searching for something remotely familiar. But there was no trace of the game, or of John. There was no race track, only a path through the forest covered with bright red and yellow leaves. There were no racehorses, only squirrels and chipmunks gathering acorns, and golden deer darting between the trees. There was no sound of the referee announcing the next competition, only the singing of birds, the high-pitched rhythm of crickets rubbing their tiny wings, and the faint rustling of leaves as the trees swayed to the forest’s music in the autumn breeze.
The tranquil surroundings did nothing to calm Jack. He had never been alone in a forest before. Come to think of it, he had never been alone anywhere before. He started to panic—
“Where’s the game? Where’s John? Where’s my bicycle…?”
His bicycle…. It came back to Jack in a flash: his bike wrecked in the crash, him lying in the grass with a heartfelt wish to disappear from the game.
“That must be how I ended up in the forest! I wished so hard that my wish came true. I’m no longer in the game!”
With that realization—the fact that he had succeeded in something, in escaping from the game, and that he wasn’t destined to lose to his brother forever—Jack felt much better. He took a deep breath and opened his arms wide to embrace the golden morning sunlight trickling through the trees.
“I’ve heard people speak of heaven,” he pondered as he walked slowly through the forest, removing his bicycle helmet and tossing it aside. “Maybe this is it.”
John, meanwhile, was not feeling quite so blissful or relaxed. He was searching high and low for his brother. But Jack wasn’t in the athletics stadium, or at the battleground, or at the house and building construction site, or in the countless other competition venues.
Where could Jack be? John wondered. In all their lives together, neither he nor his brother had ever strayed like this, simply disappearing. It was unthinkable.
Then John remembered the previous day’s bicycle race and Jack’s fall, and that he had last seen his brother lying in the grass. He rushed back to the finish line. Jack wasn’t there, but the outline of his body was clearly imprinted in the thick grass.
The sight of Jack’s shape without Jack in it confused John and he paced up and down on the grass. A feeling of irritation grew—
“How could he just disappear on me like that? Doesn’t he know we have games to play? How am I ever going to play without Jack?”
This last thought stopped John in his tracks. How was he going to play the games without Jack? The thought kept racing through his mind and spun itself into a kind of looking glass in which John, for the first time, caught a glimpse of just how intertwined his life was with that of his brother.
Even the most casual observer could have told you that Jack and John, being brothers and stuck in the same game for eternity, were practically joined at the hip. But that’s how life is: we often fail to see the things that are most obvious and most important until drastic circumstances force us to take a closer look.
That glimpse was like a small candle flickering in a hitherto dark patch in the recesses of John’s mind, and it lit up other candles, other thoughts. If there was no Jack, there was no game. And if there was no game, who was John without a game? That question distressed John further, but now he simply became sad and plopped down on the grass in his brother’s outline. He noticed how perfectly his body matched the shape of his brother’s.
“Where are you, Jack? I need you. Please come back.”
John’s entreaty met dead silence. Only in a game in which there are no longer players can the silence be so total, so lonely.
“Jack, where are you?” he pleaded again. “Without you I’m nothing.”
With those words, John’s lips trembled and tears appeared in the corner of each eye. He felt that his heart was tearing in two, right down the middle.
John thought of how he had raced past to the finish line while Jack lay defeated in the grass.
“What if he was badly hurt? I could have at least stopped to check on him.”
Then, remembering the game, he quickly corrected himself—
“I could have at least come back to check on him after I won.”
The memory of that sudden victory, just when he’d thought that Jack had him beat, cheered John up, and he instantly indulged in two of his favorite pastimes: counting How Many Times I Have Beaten Jack and ranking My Favorite Wins.
“Seven hundred and thirty-three million, five-hundred thousand and twenty-six wins… and the bike race makes twenty-seven—and it’s definitely one for the history books!”
Then another thought struck John, wiping the grin from his face as quickly as it had appeared. “That means that Jack has lost seven hundred and thirty-three million, five hundred and twenty-seven times. That’s an awful lot of losses!”
Lying there, where his brother had lain in defeat only the day before, John got an inkling of how terrible it must have felt to lose so very many times. He recalled Jack’s face as he had lain on the grass: wide eyes and drawn cheeks, and a flattened body looking as if it had just been run over by something big and heavy. Simply put, Jack had been crushed.
Then John remembered what he had called his brother as he’d whizzed past him: a loser. He winced—
“Sheesh! That must have made a bad situation a thousand times worse!” he realized.
Slowly, other times he’d called Jack a loser—or worse names—popped into John’s head.
“That’s why he disappeared!” John decided. “I need to find him and apologize.”
But the day’s long search and the series of thoughts and realizations—more thinking, it seemed, than he normally did in a whole year—had left John feeling very sleepy.
“I must find Jack,” his mind kept saying, but his body just lay there in the grass. “I…must…find…Jack….”
Night soon fell around him.
The same dreams filled with strange creatures and sounds that Jack had experienced the night before came to John. He awoke in the same spot in the forest with the same sense of bewilderment as Jack had the morning before. And, upon jumping up and seeing nothing familiar and everything new, he panicked just like Jack had done and began to run about wildly.
But wait…. by the side of the path there was a shiny blue and yellow object, something—if it was what John thought—that would be most reassuring.
“I’d know those colors anywhere,” said John as he walked over and picked up Jack’s helmet.
“Well, at least I know I’m on the right track,” he murmured, and then looked up to scan the trail. In the dark brown earth amid the red and yellow leaves, there were the unmistakable footprints of cycling shoes.
“Jack!” called John, as he began to scamper after his brother’s trail through the forest.
“Oh, Jack…!”
Up ahead, Jack, still walking leisurely in order to soak up every tree, birdsong and furry creature, had discarded his cumbersome cycling shoes. The soft soil massaged the soles of his feet and squished between his toes. Though the sensations were all new to him, he felt like he had been here before. It was like finding a long lost home.
Suddenly Jack reached the edge of the forest, emerging from the trees to stand on the fringe of a plateau. A cool breeze floated by and Jack took a deep breath, inhaling the magical view. The plateau slid into a valley, green hills gently rolling downwards to meet a river lazily winding its way to a distant ocean. On the far side of the river, the hills rose into a starker, more ancient form, one that existed before the birth of grass and trees: a mountain.
The mountain’s crags and scars told a thousand tales of those who had climbed it in search of life, love, a light that had gone out, or an answer whose question they had forgotten. Indeed, the mountain soared so high that surely it was possible to survey the entire world from its summit, which wore a majestic crown of snow. The snow crystals sparkled like an ethereal welcome sign, tantalizing Jack to explore the mountain’s mystery.
Jack’s boyhood smile, hidden for so long, returned to his face, and he started his slow descent into the valley towards the mountain.
John, meanwhile, was walking so fast that he had already found Jack’s shoes.
“Why would Jack throw away his good cycling shoes like that?” John frowned. “I hope he’s okay.”
And John started to run through the forest, now following the footprints of Jack’s bare feet. In no time he too had emerged from the forest onto the spot on the plateau where Jack had stood only a couple of hours before. John’s eyes, sharp as a hunter’s, scanned the landscape: the mountain’s snowcap, its craggy cliffs, the hills, the river…. There! Reaching the other side of the river, now moving slowly up the first hill leading to the mountain, a blue and yellow figure….
“Jack!” hollered John. “Jack! Jack! Wait up!”
The words sailed through the valley to reach Jack’s ears. Only moments before he had wondered if he was the only person in the world, whichever world this was. Now he froze.
“Jack! Jack!”
Jack felt no need to turn around—he’d have recognized that voice anywhere. Before he knew what he was doing, he began to run, scrambling up the hills, his mind racing even faster than his legs—
“Is this yet another game, a new one dreamed up by the inventor? John Chases Jack? Well, this time John’s not going to win. I won’t let him catch me. I can’t let him….”
Seeing Jack start to run, John sprinted downwards into the valley.
If “John Chases Jack” had in fact been a game, it would have been a most exhilarating one to watch—a type of freeform steeplechase. The brothers bounded over the hills, jumped over bushes and leaped across boulders like a couple of mountain goats. Soon the boulders turned into longer and higher rocks and the rocks into sheer walls. Jack, and soon afterwards John, had to resort to rock climbing.
As his hands clawed their way upwards, Jack grimaced each time his bare soles caught a sharp edge of stone, and his feet became so sore that, after climbing onto a ledge, he could only hobble to the next rock face. John—still calling “Jack! Wait!”—gained ground.
Jack began to hear his brother’s feet kicking up loose gravel behind him and then, as he scaled a ninety-degree wall, Jack could hear and even feel John’s hot panting breath rising up below him.
John, with the tips of his shoes lodged precariously in a couple of tiny holds in the rock, looked up and was horrified by the sight of the soles of Jack’s feet.
“Jack, your feet, they’re covered in bl …”
But before he could finish saying the word, a tiny red drop trickled from Jack’s foot and fell right into John’s eye. Instinctively reaching to rub his eye, John let go of his precious grip on the rock, losing his balance. His legs swung out from beneath him, and he hung onto the mountain by one hand.
“Jack! Jack” he screamed. “I’m falling! Help me, Jack!”
Jack, who had pulled himself up onto the ledge, looked back to see his brother, terrified eyes as big as balloons, dangling like a puppet over a fatal drop to the ground. He reached down for John’s free hand but it was too far away, and so, holding onto the ledge for support, he lowered his body back down the wall.
“John, grab hold of my ankle,” Jack urged.
John lunged desperately for Jack’s leg and managed to catch it, but the sudden tug unbalanced Jack, forcing one hand to let go of the ledge. Now both Jack and John dangled precariously in mid-air, Jack with one hand on the ledge and John with one hand on Jack’s ankle. The combination of John’s full weight and his own pulling down on his arm was a terrible strain. Between clenched teeth Jack said—
“John—sorry—but I can’t hold on…I’ll have to let go….”
Both brothers had the same thought: This is it; our final game is played out….
But John also had another thought—
“Jack,” he gasped, “there’s something I want to tell you before we.…”
They were words John had never spoken to Jack, although he had said them all the time in the “Get Jill” game. But to Jill he had never meant it and he had just said the words to get the girl, to outdo Jack, to win. They seemed awkward words to say to his brother, and they balled up in his throat and he almost swallowed them back down. But figuring he’d never get another chance, he blurted out a garbled:
“I love you.”
Knowing that was not how he wished to say it, John took a deep breath and said, this time clearly and sincerely:
“Jack, you’re the best brother in the whole wide world. I love you.”
Jack felt a tremendous feeling of warmth, stuck for years inside him, surge into his heart and overflow onto his face in a contented smile and tears of joy—so that when the loop of rope appeared, Jack figured that it was simply a mirage created by his watery, blurred vision. He blinked away the tears, but amazingly the rope was still there, inches from his free hand.
“Well?” asked a voice from above. “Are you going to just stare at it or are you going to grab it?”
Jack looked up to see two gently shining dark eyes surrounded by lines and folds of ancient, craggy skin—seemingly as ancient and craggy as the mountain itself, and surely with as many secrets. Wisps of silver hair flew off an otherwise bald head and two bushy grey eyebrows remained raised to punctuate the question Jack had just heard. Suddenly the bushy eyebrows came together pointedly—
“Young man, grab the rope!”
The stern command jerked Jack out of his daze. He curled his fingers tightly around the loop so that his arms were now spread-eagled, supported by the strong taut rope with one hand and by the ledge with the other.
“There you go,” said the old man encouragingly as he peered over the ledge. “Now just hang tight.” Hand over fist the old man effortlessly guided the rope and the brothers up towards him.
What superhuman strength does he have to lift us up like that? Jack wondered, as the old man helped him and then John onto the ledge and out of harm’s way.
The brothers lay face up, exhausted and dazed, on the stone ledge. Jack made an effort to stand in order to greet the old man, but the blood drained from his head and he fainted backwards.
After some time, a cool, wet cloth on his brow brought Jack round. He looked once again into those shiny dark eyes. The silvery wisps of hair, filtering the sunlight, danced in a wild halo around the old man’s head.
Jack smiled weakly at the old man—
“Are we in heaven?”
The creases of the old man’s face bunched up into deep valleys flowing with rivers of laughter as he replied:
“Some call it heaven.” Then, with the careless shrug of an afterthought, he added, “Some call it hell.”
John, who was still recovering from the terrifying experience, stared at the old man’s thin arms and stammered, “H-h-how did you …?”
“How did I pull you two up?” The old man laughed heartily. “You don’t think I have the strength, do you?”
The old man pursed his lips and blew a tuneful whistle. In response, a heavy clopping rhythm shook the ground beneath the brothers’ backs.
“Well, you’re probably right. Here’s the one with all the strength.”
Into view trotted a huge creature, a sort of overgrown bull with thick layers of overgrown dark shaggy hair, a proud pair of horns squarely set like a couple of football uprights, and a long flowing lock of a tail jauntily swishing behind him.
“Meet Yakkity Yak,” announced the old man, scratching the yak behind the ears with one hand while, with the other, he unfastened the long rope from a harness around the animal’s giant girth. “But you can just call him Yakkity….
“In fact, it was Yakkity who alerted me to your…er…arrival. He heard about you through the grapevine passed up here all the way from his forest friends—they have a speedy channel of communication. I thought I’d bring the rope on my way to greet you, just in case. People don’t make it up this side of the mountain without some help.”
Jack managed to raise his head. “Thank you, Yakkity, for saving us.”
Yakkity lowered his head, tipping a tuft of hair rakishly over one eye, and bent his front legs in a kind of bow.
“And of course thank you too, Mr…Mr…?”
The old man either did not hear Jack fumbling for his name, or he simply chose not to respond. Instead he said, “Okay, you two, let’s get you rested and fed.”
One by one, the old man helped the brothers to their feet and then cupped his hands together to give them each a leg up onto the broad carpet of Yakkity’s back. Jack was surprised by the ease with which the old man hoisted him upwards.
“Wow, he really is very strong,” he thought to himself.
The old man eyed Jack’s torn feet. “We’ll have to take care of those, won’t we?”
As he led the way ahead of Yakkity, Jack and John could see the old man shaking his head and chuckling to himself:
“Heh-heh…fancy trying to climb the mountain without any shoes…heh-heh….”
The old man led them along the wide ledge, so wide that it formed a terrace around the middle of the mountain. Below them Jack and John could see the valley and river they had crossed, the plateau, and the vast forest stretching endlessly back into the distance.
A quarter of the way around the mountain they entered a wide cave which narrowed and darkened until the brothers could no longer see the old man walking ahead of them. Then they could see nothing at all. The complete darkness washing over them like a cool black pool, along with the hypnotic clackity-clack of Yakkity’s hooves, helped the brothers forget, for the time being, about the game, the chase, and the world of winning and losing.
Just as cubs and pups feel a sense of security when near their mother, Jack and John, once inside the mountain, fell into a soothed calm. Through this blissful expanse they floated effortlessly, their bodies slouching ever so slowly forward and lower until, Jack’s head resting on the soft pillow of Yakkity’s mane and John’s head resting on Jack’s back, they fell into a deep slumber.
***
Jack could still feel Yakkity’s fur on the side of his face as he returned from the honeyed land of dreamless dreams, but Yakkity seemed to have stopped moving.
“Mmmm.…” he yawned. “Where are we, Yakkity?”
Opening his eyes, Jack saw that he was no longer atop Yakkity, but rather enveloped in thick yak-hair blankets. He turned over and saw that John was lying next to him, also wrapped in warm blankets, and that all around them lushly woven carpets and rugs covered the wide round floor.
Lit candles stood in tiny alcoves carved into the rounded stone walls, which merged in a dome high above.
“We’re still in a cave,” said Jack to himself.
“Yes, you are,” responded a voice evenly.
Jack spun about to find the old man sitting cross-legged on the floor, his eyes closed, with the candlelight caressing his serene features like morning sunlight on a calm, glassy lake.
John stirred and mumbled incoherently.
“Look, John,” said Jack, leaning over and gently shaking his brother’s shoulder, “we’re in the cave of the….” Jack stopped himself, and then asked, “Sorry, sir, what is your name?”
“What were you about to call me?” asked the old man, voice still even, eyes still closed. “The cave of the…?”
“The…uh…old man,” answered Jack somewhat sheepishly.
“Then that is my name!” beamed the old man, opening his eyes, which seemed to light up the room more than all the candles put together.
“Way back, when I was a boy, I went on a long journey that lasted many years. Nobody knew my name and they just called me ‘boy.’ So now it’s most fitting that you call me ‘old man.’”
A delicious smell wafted through the cave, causing the brothers’ stomachs to rumble and their mouths to water. They could not even remember the last time they had eaten.
“Ah, it seems you woke up just in time,” said the old man, his legs gracefully pushing him up into a standing position without the help of his hands. “Soup’s ready. Put on the pajamas and robes next to you and follow me.”
Jack and John were so hungry that they whipped on the clothes and leapt from their beds, but as Jack’s wounded feet hit the floor he cringed and nearly fell over. The old man, as if in anticipation, was right by his side to support him and guide him towards the food.
“I washed your feet in groundberry juice and wrapped them in cotton, but it will still take them a couple of days to heal.”
“Thank you, old man,” said Jack, as he limped past a curtain, through a tunnel, and into another cave, this one filled with pots and pans, ladles and spatulas, jars and barrels of stored food and water.
In the middle of the kitchen was a low round table shaped from clay and encircled by three fluffy cushions. The old man gestured for the boys to sit down while, from a large pot, he ladled soup into two ceramic bowls and then carried them over to the table. For himself, he brought a miniature teapot and a tiny teacup, both of them flame-colored like an exotic ripe mango.
The old man poured himself some tea but, before he’d sipped it, the boys had licked their bowls clean, so he set down his cup and, without asking, took their bowls to the stove and served them more.
“That’s really tasty soup,” said John, still licking his spoon. “What’s in it?”
“It all grows wild in these parts,” answered the old man, with a vague sweep of his arm. “Mesquite mushrooms and luscious kula leaves, all kinds of relishing roots and tumbo tubers, and,” he said with a wink, “a wide variety of herbs for hungry boys.
“All served,” added the old man, as he returned and placed the bowls back on the table, “with a hefty portion of yak’s milk—of course.”
The old man sat quietly on his cushion as the boys finished off their second, and then third, and then fourth, bowls of soup. He took tiny sips from his tiny teacup, all the while with the slightest hint of a smile. Looking at the old man’s smile was like catching a glimpse of a mountain summit, which contained a mass of contentment beneath it.
A few burps let the old man know that the boys had eaten their fill, so he led them through another curtain and tunnel and into another cave, this one a grand sitting room. In the middle of the room were yak-hair covered sofa chairs surrounding a fireplace. A clay chimney funneled smoke from the fire through the high ceiling, while cool night air and starlight seeped into the room through a couple of large, oval skylights held open by pulleys.
“It’s night already!” John exclaimed. “And there I was thinking that we were eating breakfast!”
Once they were all settled into the comfy chairs, the old man, pouring himself another tiny cup of tea, said:
“I’ve always been a sucker for a story, and my guess is that there’s a good one behind how you two ended up dangling from a ledge on the side of this mountain.”
So Jack and John related their strange journey, from the life of competition in a video game to the fateful bicycle race, and finally to their magical transportation from a spot on the grass to the forest near the mountain. As John told his side of the tale, Jack was moved to learn how his brother had searched for him and had eventually laid down overcome with grief in Jack’s outline in the grass.
Then they described the hectic chase up the mountain.
“Lo and behold,” concluded John, with a huge sigh of relief, “there appeared an old man…”
“…who miraculously saved us!” grinned Jack.
“Indeed a splendid tale!” applauded the old man. “Many have made long pilgrimages to the mountain, but you may well be the first whose tortuous route took you through a video game!”
Long…tortuous…that’s exactly what the whole ordeal was, thought Jack. It was a great solace to have found someone who understood, and something in the old man’s gentle gaze let him know that he and John had been through the worst of it.
But just as between the brothers and the mountain had been a valley, there were still some ups and downs to go.
The first “down” started right away with the old man asking if one of them would care to place another log on the fire.
The boys both sprang from their seats, with Jack momentarily forgetting his tender feet.
“I’ll get it!” Jack and John cried at the same time, hurrying over to the woodpile and grabbing hold of the same log.
“Let me do it,” tugged Jack.
“No, let me…” tugged back John, but with such force that he snatched the log away, sending Jack sprawling backwards to land—thump!—on his backside.
They stared at each other, frozen. John held the log high above him like a prize and Jack sat forlornly on the floor. They looked at the old man, who sat there as still and as peacefully as ever, and they felt ashamed to have fought in front of him.
As if to break the spell of the brothers’ embarrassment, the old man got up, walked over to John, and delicately removed the log from his grasp, saying—
“I’ll do it this time.”
The old man carefully set the log in the fireplace and the fire roared back to life.
“Come on, you two,” he smiled. “Let’s watch the little object of your quarrel go up in smoke.”
Jack and John returned to the fireplace and—wouldn’t you know it?—tried to sit in the same chair.
“That’s my…” John started, but this time the old man intervened.
“Jack, why don’t you sit over here on this other chair. There’s more than enough room for all of us, even—if he cares to join us—for Yakkity.”
The brothers laughed at the thought of Yakkity trying to wiggle into one of the chairs by the fireplace.
The old man took a sip of tea and observed—
“It seems as though the two of you are still in the game.”
Jack and John screwed up their faces in puzzlement.
“Or rather,” the old man continued, replacing his cup on the side table, “the game is still in you.”
And their screwed-up faces grew even screwier.
“Yes, it’s plain to see: the game is so much a part of you that you have no clue what I am talking about.”
The brothers felt the old man lean in towards them, yet somehow his body seemed to remain perfectly still.
“Jack, do you remember the first words you said to me on the cliff?”
Jack could only recall two dark eyes peering over the ledge—eyes that seemed to contain the mysteries of the universe—surrounded by a silver halo. He shrugged and said—
“Sorry, I can’t remember ….”
“‘Are we in heaven?’” said the old man. “That’s what you asked me: ‘Are we in heaven?’ And do you remember what I said?”
Jack still couldn’t remember, but John, who had been lying close by on the cliff, could.
“‘Some call it heaven’—that’s what he told you, Jack.”
It was now coming back to Jack. He stared at the flames leaping from the log in the fireplace and whispered—
“‘And some call it hell.’”
“Exactly!” said the old man. “In other words, this here is reality. It is what we make of it. Heaven or hell—it’s up to us.”
Before Jack and John had a chance to start screwing up their faces again, the old man twirled a hand in front of them.
“I’m talking about choice. We each have a choice how we’re going to think and act—and react—every second of our lives.”
Now the old man’s other hand twirled about.
“But we also each have our programming—whether it’s from a video game inventor, or from our parents and teachers, or from our stories and scriptures. The programming is always trying to tell us what to do and what to say, even if we know from experience that doing or saying those very same things can make us miserable.”
The open palm of the second hand offered itself to them as the old man said:
“Programming—even it’s hellish.”
Then the palm of the first hand—
“Choice—which can help us to decide between heaven and hell.”
The old man paused to take a slow sip of tea, and then continued:
“Let me tell you a story about choice and programming, heaven and hell—
“Once two birds were flying together high in the sky. One bird looked down far below to the ground and saw something very strange. There were all sorts of animals and birds packed into a small meadow. Around the meadow were vast open fields filled with luscious green grass and trees, but all the animals and birds stood shoulder to shoulder, feather to feather, in the small meadow, and the bird could not spot a single one in the surrounding fields. Oddest of all was that between the meadow and fields was no fence, no barrier of any kind. The bird told his companion to take a look.
“‘Oh, that,’ said the other bird. ‘Yes, that is indeed a very strange sight, and a very sad one too. Let me tell you what happened:
“‘Many years ago a mad scientist herded all the birds and animals from these lands into that small meadow. Then he built a high wall around it and shot at any creature who tried to escape from the meadow. The animals and birds soon learned that staying in the meadow meant safety, and the meadow became their whole existence.
“‘Eventually, the mad scientist died, and even the walls grew old and crumbled. But by then many generations of animals and birds had come and gone, and each had learned to stay inside the meadow. In fact, a whole doctrine had developed around living in the meadow: that good creatures lived inside the meadow and bad ones lived outside, that inside was heaven and outside was hell.
“‘When animals and birds from outside would happen by and try to convince the ones inside to join them in the open fields and limitless sky, the ones inside would grow hostile and chase them away.
“‘And there they remain to this day, living in their ‘heavenly meadow.’’”
Jack thought that he had begun to understand what the old man was explaining to them, but at the same time he felt more confused, so he asked—
“How do we know whether we’re in heaven or in hell?”
“Ah, my dear boy,” the old man smiled, “I see you don’t like to waste time. You go straight to the heart of a matter. ‘How do we know whether we’re in heaven or in hell?’ is a question that’s plagued many a wise man, precisely because it has no answer. All I can tell you is that the answer lies in the very asking of the question.”
Jack and John looked puzzled again.
“Perhaps you haven’t seen,” said the old man. “So many plod along, like you did for quite some time, immersed in game after game, not even bothering to ask the question: Is this heaven or hell?
“Don’t worry yourselves,” he smiled. “You have plenty of time—
“A bit of advice I’ll give you is: pay attention. Always pay close attention to what you’re doing and saying—even what you’re thinking—and, above all, how you feel. And remember that realizing we always have a choice is just a beginning. Don’t equate choice with heaven and programming with hell. Sometimes, after all, our choices can be hellish and our programming heavenly.
“Sometimes,” he continued with a wink, “our parents and teachers are wise. Sometimes it may even be the right choice to remain in the small meadow—
“Just pay attention. Paying attention will help you to find your way, to negotiate the river that winds its way between heaven and hell.”
“How will it do that?” asked Jack.
“It already has,” laughed the old man. “You, my friend, are living proof by the fact that you are sitting here in front of me—
“Jack, you grew so dissatisfied in the game that your deep misery forced you to pay attention to how you were feeling. And once you started paying attention, you began to wonder if there was any choice, and then to wish there was a choice, and then you found your way to the forest, and…here!”
The old man looked over at John, who had been listening quietly—
“And you, John, were you happy?”
“Pretty happy,” John replied. “After all, it felt good to win a lot.…” Then he paused, remembering Jack lying on the grass near the finish line. “But I…I finally realized that my winning was at the expense of Jack’s losing. My feeling good was at the expense of Jack’s feeling bad. And, after much thinking—so much thinking that my head began to hurt—I realized that if Jack feels bad, there’s no way that I can really feel good.”
John looked over at Jack with wide eyes—
“And finally I realized that without Jack I’m nothing.”
The three fell into a deep silence.
Jack and John look at each other for a while longer, and then turned to the old man. They felt themselves being drawn into the darkly captivating whirlpool of his eyes. Hand in hand, the brothers spiraled downwards and upwards at the same time, through the skylight, and into space. They became two moons spinning around each other and then two stars dancing in the Milky Way. Space became an ocean and they were two dolphins leaping and diving until, finally, they saw the old man beckoning them from a light-filled underwater tunnel and they swam after him, floating and spiraling again till, with a couple of blinks, they found themselves sitting in their chairs still looking at the old man.
“What was all that?” they both asked.
“All that,” answered the old man, “is you. And you contain all the possibilities in the universe. Nobody needs to invent or create you. You are.”
Without looking for it, the old man reached over and picked up his tiny cup of tea.
The next few days followed a similar routine. Jack and John rested and ate copious amounts of soup. It was as though, having played one game after another their whole lives, they had never really allowed themselves to relax or to taste food, and for several days they felt a need for sleep and nutrition that they never knew existed inside of them. Their bodies could not seem to get enough of lolling on the thick, comfortable rugs or eating bowl after bowl of hearty soup.
Every evening they chatted by the fireplace with the old man while he sipped his tea. Funny, they never saw him eat anything. He was nourished, it seemed, merely through his radiant smile, through the way he took delight in every single action—from gracefully ladling the boys’ soup to walking with his soft cat-like steps—indeed, through his very breath.
Jack’s feet healed quickly. The old man gave the brothers some warm yak-hair jackets, and he and Yakkity took them on long strolls down the ancient mountainside snake path to the meadows below. One day the old man explained how, on his journey around the world many years before, a king had bequeathed him the land, and when he grew old he had returned to live here.
“Why did the king give you all this land?” John asked.
The old man’s eyes momentarily drifted off to a bygone time.
“That, my friend, is a different story altogether.”
That same evening, around the fireplace, the old man’s silver hair glowed in the rays of the full moon pouring through the skylights.
“As much as I enjoy having the two of you as guests,” he said, “it’s getting time for you to move on. There’s no rush, though. Winter is coming, so build yourselves a cabin at the foot of the mountain. You’ll find plenty of wood lying about. And I’ll show you where to find the wild food to make the soups you like so much. Plus, Yakkity has a friend who will supply you with fresh milk every day.”
Jack and John were overcome by the old man’s generosity.
“How can we ever repay you?” Jack asked.
“As a matter of fact,” the old man said, slowly lifting his teacup from the side table. “There is one job you can do for me.”
“What’s that?” Jack and John asked quickly at the same time, eager to be of some service to their friend who had rescued and sheltered them.
“You can learn how to be brothers,” the old man told them.
Jack and John looked at each other quizzically for a moment, and then John said:
“But we already are brothers.”
“Yes, you’re right,” said the old man in the same delicate way he held his tiny cup. “Because you have the same parents and grew up together, you will always be brothers. But being brothers, really acting towards each other like brothers, means something more.”
“Like what?” asked Jack.
“Yes, like what something more?” asked John.
The old man was not one to answer a question of such magnitude directly. His fingers rotated his cup—
“Jack,” he said.
“Er…yes,” said Jack.
“Take a moment to reflect on your life and tell me the time you felt the best, the happiest, the most fulfilled.”
Jack looked up through the skylight at the moon and the stars as he thought back, then forwards, then back again. Finally he looked down and rested his eyes on the glowing embers.
“Well, up till a couple of weeks ago I would have picked the time, long ago, that John taught me to ride a bicycle.” Jack turned to his brother—
“Remember? You were right there beside me, helping me to steer and balance and cheering me on…”
John smiled and nodded, whereupon Jack let the joy from that day rush through his voice:
“Once I started pedaling on my own, I felt so free, almost weightless, like I could do anything and go anywhere I wanted and nothing could stop me.”
The old man had closed his eyes, and Jack sensed that their mysterious friend was listening so intently and deeply that he could see the whole scene as if he had been there himself those many years ago.
“Then,” Jack continued. “Well…then, a couple of weeks ago, I ended up here, on this mountain, or at least with one hand on the mountain and one hand hanging onto John.”
Again Jack looked at his brother, and they both let out a short, somewhat nervous laugh.
“You said something to me, John, which I’ll never forget. You told me that I’m the best brother in the whole world and that you love me. Although I thought for sure that we were done for, I felt truly happy…yes, truly happy.”
With a contented smile, Jack sat back in his comfy chair.
Without opening his eyes, the old man asked—
“How about you, John?”
My happiest time? My most fulfilled? John wondered. His mind raced through his millions of victories over Jack, from the very first to the very last: the Tour of Champs cycling competition—now that was a real vict…. Then he remembered how the triumphantly joyous occasion had quickly turned into a sad one—both for him and Jack. He thought of Jack’s disappearance and the pursuit through the forest and up the mountain. Eventually his mind also settled on that pivotal moment on the ledge.
“It was the same time,” John said.
“Which time?” winked Jack. “When you told me I’m the best brother in the world?”
“Well, yes,” John said seriously. “The only thing between me and a hundred-foot drop was your hand…was you. And you didn’t think for an instant of letting go of me so that you could save yourself. You were there for me…. Come to think of it, you’ve always been there for me.”
John’s last few words escaped as barely a whisper, his voice cracking with emotion. Jack got out of his chair and knelt by John, putting one arm around his brother’s shoulders to hug him affectionately.
The old man opened his eyes and his face crinkled into a broad smile stretching from ear to ear.
“Perfect,” he said, “absolutely perfect.”
As though he were handing them an invisible ball, the old man offered up the palm of one hand—the same hand, Jack remembered, that some days ago had contained “choice”—and said:
“There you have it.”
John looked around as if he had missed something.
The old man moved his palm a little closer and opened it a bit wider—
“That’s your job. To do your best to recreate that moment on the mountain.”
John was horrified, and his jaw dropped so low that it just about fell into his lap—
“What?” he cried. “You mean we have to hang off the ledge again?”
The old man’s hand flew to his mouth and his cheeks blew into shiny bubbles, like he was suppressing a cough. But then a giggle managed to burst through his lips, then a couple of chuckles, followed by a few chortles, some guffaws, and finally a full-blown fit of laughter, which bounced around the cave. It was as if scores of old men were roaring in laughter.
Watching the old man laugh this way, with his body shaking uncontrollably and his mouth so wide open that it pushed tears from his eyes, the brothers, with no clue as to why, started to laugh too.
Hundreds of ha-ha-has gushed from the cave and spilled down the sides of the mountain, catching hold of Yakkity and his friends.
“Yakkity-yak! Yakkity-yak!” they howled, and their laughter spread like a wave through the meadows and forest, enveloping the biggest of bears and smallest of squirrels. Back and forth between cave and forest, the howling rose to a crescendo. The animals’ legs turned to jelly and their shaking bodies rolled and jiggled every which way on the ground, while the old man and the brothers tossed about in their chairs, holding their sides.
Slowly, gradually, the waves of laughter subsided into ripples until the wind, with a little smile, returned to silence.
Once he had sufficiently recovered, the old man said—
“Don’t be silly. Of course I don’t intend for you to hang off the ledge again. I mean for you to recreate the moment in spirit. Recreate the feeling, not the circumstances.”
“Phew!” breathed Jack, although he still didn’t understand what the old man had in mind.
The old man looked down and contemplated his tea. When his eyes lifted to look at the boys they were filled with the transcendental quality of a dream—a dream he knew was possible, one he knew was already real—
“That’s all you need to do. Let one another know that he’s the best brother in the whole world, that you’re always there for him, that you’ll always be cheering him on. You don’t even need to say much. You can speak through your actions, your presence, your smiles.”
As if to demonstrate, the most tender and reassuring of smiles blossomed on the old man’s face.
“That’s your job, boys. Get on with it…and have fun!”
***
Jack and John were keen to get started building their cabin. The old man, along with Yakkity and his friend Yikkity, led them to a colossal pine tree that had fallen down in a storm during the summer.
The brothers stood admiring the stateliness of the tree, stretched on the earth in its final tragic pose.
The old man told them:
“I remember this tree when it was just a sapling. It was shorter than the other trees, and all it could think about, day and night, was being tall. One year it started to grow… and grow…and grow…. Even in the winter, when the other trees went to sleep, its ambition to be tall kept it growing. It grew straight and proud and soon towered over the other trees, and eventually the entire forest. It had realized its dream.
“As the saying goes: ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ The tree’s tremendous height was precisely what allowed a furious gust of wind to grab hold of it and send it crashing to the ground.”
Jack and John pondered the tree’s magnificent life, its rise and fall, while Yakkity and Yikkity sniffed its trunk and its great upturned root, searching for a clue to the restless desire that had driven it to such heights.
The old man knelt down and fondly stroked one of the tree’s branches—
“In your long life you helped make the earth beautiful and the air fresh. Part of you has already dissolved back into the soil and the wind and the clouds, and part of you will help to make a warm, cozy cabin for Jack and John.”
And the brothers silently expressed their gratitude to the pine tree.
For the next few days, Jack and John sawed and split the great tree into logs and poles, which Yakkity and Yikkity carried to a sheltered meadow in the valley, not far from the river where it ran past the other side of the mountain. The work was hard, and each night, after eating their soup which they cooked on an open fire, the boys plopped to sleep exhausted under the stars, insulated from the cold by snug yak-hair blankets.
And each morning at the crack of dawn, regular as an alarm clock, Yikkity sauntered over and lapped at their faces with her huge wet tongue to rouse them from their slumber so that they could collect fresh milk from her udder.
Once they had sawn enough logs, Jack and John started to build the cabin. Having competed against each other countless times in the game to see who could construct the bigger and better house, they built quickly and skillfully. Around a raised and spacious octagonal wooden floor, they hammered together log upon log and the walls rose rapidly.
Throughout their busy days, they faithfully performed the “job” the old man had assigned them. Speaking little, they worked together shoulder to shoulder, one anticipating when the other needed a piece of wood, more nails, a drink of water, or simply a smile. And at the end of each day they surveyed their progress and congratulated each other’s efforts.
“Well done, Jack. What a creatively shaped window!”
“Great idea to add a porch all the way around the house, John. Good work!”
Then they gave each other a big hug and went off to cook their soup. Even as winter approached, their budding hearts kept them warm inside.
But all warmth between those dearest to us, under the right conditions—or, more to the point, under the wrong conditions—can easily turn into heat. If we are careless, the heat can gather and erupt as explosively as a volcano. And that is precisely what happened to Jack and John.
Into their cooperation crept self-doubt, a feeling of uncertainty that perhaps one was not doing as well as the other. John began to peer over his shoulder at Jack, and Jack began to peer over his shoulder back at John.
“Am I setting the logs in place as evenly as he is?” John asked himself.
“Am I hammering the logs together as quickly as he is?” Jack wondered to himself.
Nail by nail, log by log, Jack accelerated the pace of his hammering, while John made increasingly frequent inspections to compare their craftsmanship. There was no need for a referee or a whistle or a starter gun; the brothers felt it in their bones—the competition was on.
They worked fast and furiously, forgetting to rest and to make their soup. Never have cabin walls been constructed quite as quickly or as evenly, and by sunset the brothers were already connecting poles from the tops of the walls to a central support beam in order to lay the roof. Only when night fell did they stop working, and in strained silence, without any soup, they went straight to sleep.
The next morning there was no need for Yikkity to wake them up. Before first bird-chirp John sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes—
“I’d better start gathering hay for the roof thatches. I bet I’ll collect more hay and bind more thatches and….”
Chip, chip, chip interrupted John’s scheming.
“Whatever could that be…?”
He glanced over at Jack’s blanket, but there was no Jack. John jumped up and, through the hazy light of dawn’s first rays, followed the chipping sound. Near the cabin he found Jack, surrounded by small, evenly-sized squares of wood, in the process of whittling yet another one.
“Jack, what are you doing?” asked John, perplexed.
“Oh, just making shingles for the roof,” replied Jack, a thin layer of nonchalance barely disguising his evident delight at having got a head start over John.
“Shingles?” frowned John. “I figured we’d use thatches.”
“Thatches?” laughed Jack. “Oh, no. The cabin will look much better topped by shingles.”
“Plus,” continued John, talking over Jack, “we could make the thatches quickly. Carving out all the shingles we’d need for the roof will take ages, and winter…”
“Well, if you’d stop arguing and start working,” snapped Jack, “we’ll be done with the shingles all the sooner.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” growled John….
And, well, you know the rest. As the red sun rose behind them, their bickering and quarreling and squabbling gathered steam. In no time they were nose to nose, trading all sorts of insults…until they were interrupted by a jovial cry—
“Ah, my two dear brothers!”
Jack and John’s mouths froze in mid-sentence, their lips bursting at the seams, and they turned, cheek to puffed-up cheek, to see the old man nimbly skipping from rock to rock as he made his way down the valley towards them. Wrapped around his neck was a long white scarf waving buoyantly behind him in the light breeze. Reaching the valley floor, he stopped to admire the cabin—
“What a splendidly well-made structure! It will make a very fine dwelling indeed!”
There was no way the old man could have avoided the ruckus of Jack and John’s angry words booming through the valley, but he didn’t let on. Instead, he paced slowly but deliberately around the cabin. Then he stopped in front of the brothers and placed one hand on Jack’s left shoulder and the other on John’s right—
“I’m wondering,” he asked, “what you’ve decided to put on the roof—shingles or thatches?”
“Uh…” hemmed Jack, looking off to the side.
“Er…” hawed John, looking off to the other side.
“Oh, silly me,” laughed the old man, lifting a piece of wood from Jack’s fingers. “You’ve obviously settled on shingles.”
“The fact is…” began John, but then he stopped, ashamed to admit that he’d been fighting with his brother over the matter.
“The fact is,” said Jack, “we just failed our job.”
The old man’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise—
“Failed?”
The old man laughed heartily as if the brothers had just told him a good joke—
“Why, there’s no such thing as failure…. But why don’t we sit down and you can tell me about it anyway.”
After they had seated themselves on a few logs, first Jack and then John tried to explain what had just happened between them, but they both got stuck in the same place—
“Everything was fine between us, better than ever. But once we got different ideas about the roof—shingles or thatches—it was like a different part of ourselves took over. It was like…like….”
“Like you were back in the game?” suggested the old man.
“Yes,” sighed John. “Exactly like we were back in the game.”
“When will we ever be rid of this wretched game?” implored Jack.
The old man looked long and softly at Jack, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the fresh morning air while the sunlight danced in his hair and warmed the intricately lined features of his face.
The brothers grew quiet. They had learned to sit patiently whenever the old man retreated into silence like this. Where exactly he went they had no idea, but he always returned with insight from another world and visions from the stars.
When the old man finally spoke, he began slowly, with a somewhat supernatural voice, as if he had not fully returned to earth or to his body—
“The game will forever be a part of you. And you can be grateful for that.”
Although Jack and John wondered why they should be grateful for the game forever being part of them, they had also learned to wait patiently for the old man to explain what he meant—for he always did.
“Look,” the old man said, opening his eyes while, with an arc of his arm, he swept the brothers’ attention over to the cabin. “Look at what the game has taught you. The game has taught you to build yourselves a home. The game has taught you to climb mountains and to swim in rivers and to do a thousand and one things. And all those, my friends, are things to be grateful for.”
The old man paused, then smiled a boyish smile that made him resemble an elf—
“The trick is to learn how to play with the game instead of having the game play with you.”
While they still didn’t quite know what he was getting at, the brothers smiled conspiratorially with the old man at the notion of getting the upper hand over the game.
“While you are learning to be brothers,” the old man continued, “which, I might add, you are learning well, the game will sometimes feel lonely and left out and want to play with you just like old times. The snag is, because the game knows you, Jack and John, well, because the game is Jack and John, it knows how to get you to play without you even realizing that you are playing.
“So we’ll make it a little harder for the game to find you. And while the game is searching here and calling out ‘Jack and John!’ and looking there and shouting ‘Where are you?’ you’ll jump out and surprise the game.
“‘Hello, game, old friend,’ you’ll say. ‘How are you today?’”
The old man stood up and shook hands with the game as if it were a person, and his mime made the brothers laugh out loud.
“‘You’re here to play, are you, Mr. Game?’” the old man went on. “‘Alright, let’s play for a few minutes, but then we really must be getting back to our job, the business of being brothers. We’re sure you’ll understand.’”
Jack and John were not only highly amused, but also highly intrigued.
“How do we hide from the game?” asked Jack.
“Well, it’s not so much a matter of hiding…” said the old man, turning around and busying his hands with his scarf—
“…as it is a matter of transformation.”
And the old man spun around to face the boys, wearing around his head a perfectly coiled white turban.
Jack and John clapped in delight. The old man’s little play was now in full swing—
“And to nudge your transformation along, we’ll employ the oldest trick in the book. An oldie but a goodie….”
He leaned in close, the brilliant white of the turban highlighting the dark mystery in his eyes, and, cupping one hand to his mouth, he whispered:
“We’ll give you new names.”
New names? It was difficult for the brothers to imagine. The names “Jack” and “John” was how they had always known themselves and each other. Moreover, those names were famous to gamers the world over. Jack and John, after all, was the game, and the game was Jack and John….
But that was precisely the point, wasn’t it? If Jack and John was the game, and they no longer played the game—or at least no longer wished to play it—then they wouldn’t, they couldn’t, be Jack and John, could they? Not really.
What they would become, they didn’t yet know. It was as though they were following the old man, via his pitch black eyes, through one of the long tunnels in the mountain, still too dark to see where they were going and even to make out the shapes of their own bodies. But just like the morning rays twinkling in the old man’s eyes, the boys were starting to see a glimmer of light.
Jack took another step into the unknown—
“So what are our new names then?”
The old man sat back down on his log and, once again, closed his eyes. Jack and John immediately sensed that the old man was in another place entirely, perhaps in an ocean where names float about until they bump into somebody. After a short spell, the old man looked at the brothers—
“When I was on my long journey, my quest as a boy, I met lots of different people who spoke many different languages—some of them very ancient.
“Your new names are from two of those ancient languages.”
He turned to Jack—
“Your name is Jabal. It means mountain. When I first saw you, you were hanging off the mountain, but at the same time clinging steadfastly to it and to your brother as though you were part of the mountain, as though you were the mountain itself. Always remember that you are a mountain, a solid rock, for yourself and for your brother.
“And remember,” the old man said, turning to John, “that your brother Jabal is a mountain for you.
“Your new name,” he said, still addressing John, “is Shamayim. It means sky. It also means heaven. When I first saw you, you were dangling in the sky, in the heaven of your realization that you love your brother. Your name will remind you of that realization, of your boundless love.
“And for you, Jabal, who wonders where heaven is, the name Shamayim will remind you that heaven is always nearby, in your brother, in you.”
The old man paused, looked at the brothers, and muttered, almost to himself:
“Jabal and Shamayim, mountain and sky—earth and heaven—reflecting each other…and between them, harmony and love…. I like it!”
The old man chuckled, and then noticed that the brothers were gawking at him. His eyes flashed in mock seriousness, and he unraveled the turban and waved the scarf at them as if to shoo them away—
“Now stop sitting around listening to an old man. Go finish building your cabin!”
Finish building the cabin is exactly what the brothers did, only this time more slowly and playfully, enjoying having fun with their new names. Like when Shamayim winked and said:
“Since you’re such a solid mountain of a brother, Jabal, let me stand on your shoulders to reach that pole.”
Or when Jabal looked up at the clear blue sky and laughed in delight—
“What a beautiful day you’ve created for us, Shamayim. Surely we should take a break from building and hike up to that peak over there, where the mountain meets heaven.”
On that particular day, when they put away their tools and hiked up the mountain, they noticed the game coming out to play. As they neared the peak, first Shamayim and then Jabal quickened their pace ever so slightly. This time, however, the brothers were ready.
“Hello?” jested Jabal. “Are those John’s feet I see hurrying to get to the top?”
Without missing a step, Shamayim looked down at his feet and quipped:
“Well, if they are John’s feet, Jack’s feet must be close behind!”
“Well, if Jack and John are both here,” cried Jabal, “that means we’d better…”
“Race!” they both shouted, sprinting off laughing.
In fact, they laughed so hard while they ran that, before they reached the peak, they had to stop to catch their breath.
From then on, whenever the game appeared, Jabal and Shamayim gently teased and played with Jack and John. By and by, the game no longer appeared much—almost as if it had retired into a long-deserved rest of its own.
A new kind of existence took hold of the brothers, one in which there was no winning and no losing, no front and no behind. There were only white clouds floating in the blue sky, trees swaying in the breeze, birds singing their songs—all to the subtle rhythm of the universe.
For Jabal and Shamayim, being brothers was no long “a job,” but rather a birthright. They had finally found joy and peace with each other and, at the same time, within themselves.
What about the roof, you might ask? It turned out most splendidly, covered with both thatches and shingles. Thatches descended from the roof’s pointed pinnacle while shingles skirted the eaves. And around the eaves ran a gutter to channel the spring rain into a cistern, from which the brothers drew water throughout the summer to make sure their newly planted flowers grew and blossomed.
For the first time since she had begun reading the story, Miss Magee let her eyes drift from Dorian Dove’s homework book. Gosh! It was past ten o’clock! She would have to get to the other pupils’ essays early the next morning before school.
But she couldn’t stop reading Dorian’s remarkable story now. After all, there were only a couple of pages left to go….
The two brothers told me how, after the summer, after their flowers had blossomed into all sorts of shapes and colors, they had bidden farewell to the old man and to Yakkity and Yikkity and had set off on a journey. Their first destination had been to find the boy—to find me!
“And here we are!” John, or rather Shamayim, told me.
“And there you are,” said Jack, or rather Jabal. “Now that we’ve told you our tale, it’s time for us to go on our way.”
Our triple-scoop ice cream cones were long gone and my rumbling stomach told me that it was well past lunch time. As we got up off the bench, a street photographer came by and, after I paid him most of my birthday money, the three of us posed for a photo next to the Jack and John game outside the ice-cream parlor.
Jabal and Shamayim walked over to a bicycle leaning against the curb. Painted in every color of the rainbow, it was the longest bicycle I’d ever seen, with two sets of pedals, two sets of handlebars, and two seats.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a tandem, a bicycle built for two,” Jabal said, adjusting a strap on one of the saddlebags that carried food and equipment for their long journey.
“Where are you heading now?” I asked.
“Well, we came from that way…” said Shamayim, motioning with his thumb back over his shoulder.
“…So we’ll go this way,” said Jabal, pointing up ahead.
“And where are you going?” Shamayim asked, buckling on his rainbow colored helmet.
“Well,” I said, “I was going to play some games and watch a movie…but now I think I’ll go home, have some lunch, and play with my little brother Danny. Maybe I’ll help him learn to ride his bicycle without the training wheels.”
“Good plan!” Jabal smiled. His eyes shined, and I wondered if I hadn’t caught a glimpse of the old man’s mysterious eyes.
Then they each gave me a hug, wished me a happy birthday, and got on their bicycle.
I rode behind them for a while, watching their four feet pedal in unison, and thought to myself that this really was my best birthday ever. And I thought about how the whole thing—Jack and John leaving the game, becoming Jabal and Shamayim and then coming back to find me—was only possible because I had lost to the game on my last birthday. How true were the old man’s words: There’s no such thing as failure.
When we reached the edge of town, I stopped to watch them ride past the sign reading
Thank you for visiting Game Town
the home of Jack and John
Please come again
and then dissolve into the distance.
Miss Magee closed Dorian’s book. Pasted to the back cover was a picture. It must have been the one taken by the street photographer. Underneath the photo, Dorian had written out a caption: “Jabal (Jack), me, Shamayim (John).” In the photo, Dorian sat on the bench outside the ice cream parlor with his arms stretched around—
Around what? There seemed to be two shapes. They shimmered oh so vaguely, and Miss Magee couldn’t quite make them out. She rubbed her tired eyes and looked again. The shapes were no longer there—only empty space.
In gratitude
to two contemporary masters,
Osho and Thich Nhat Hanh.
The story of the animals and birds in the meadow
is adapted from a Hasidic tale related by Osho in
Osho, The True Sage, Pune: Tao Publishing, 1976, pp. 266-7.