Mularski, Nebraska and I skipped the Dining Car lunch, waited until all the midday-eaters were done, then occupied a dining table at the far end of the Parlor Car for a picnic of groceries we’d picked up the day before at Martinotti’s deli in Portland: salami, ham, cheese, Fritos, crispini—and a large dill pickle.
The time was 3:33 p.m., less than three hours before our scheduled arrival home in Santa Barbara.
At the bottom of the brown bag lay a bottle of Ridge Geyserville Zinfandel and a cheap plastic corkscrew I’d purloined from my room in The Benson.
“I might as well open this,” I said. “If we’re going to be eight years old when we hit Santa Barbara, we might as well be tipsy.”
Mularski rose to cadge three wine glasses from the galley. When he returned I popped the cork and poured Nebraska a taster. She sniffed, tasted, and pronounced it not only suitable for our underdeveloped palettes but very fine indeed.
I poured a little more into her glass until it was one-third filled, and did the same for myself. Mularski went for his.
“Hold on,” I said. “We should toast something.” I paused. “To going home.”
As I swirled the glass round and round to enhance its aroma I studied the beautiful color of this wine. It was a perfect garnet, and it sparkled magnificently in the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the window.
Garnet… garnet… garnet… Hmmm.
And then it came to me: Mystery garnet.
I looked at Nebraska, sitting across from me, then Mularski, beside her, and back to Nebraska.
They looked back at me with quizzical expressions.
“Mystery garnet,” I said aloud.
Before my eyes, in a fraction of a second, my eight year-old friends transformed back into adults.
And by the astonished look in their eyes upon me, I could tell that I had too.
I felt for my hair. Much of it was gone. And my eyesight softened everything around me.
Somewhat in shock, we remained quiet, disbelieving.
It was Mularski who finally broke the silence. “How sad.”
Nebraska began to cry. And I wasn’t sure whether these were tears of sadness or happiness.
I raised my glass. “A pact,” I said. “Friends forever.”
We clinked glasses, and sat in communion, red wine and crispini.
After a while, Mularski looked at me, and spoke quietly. “I think mystery garnet is what you said at the beginning of this trip, before we got on that plane. I asked you about a theme, and you said we were searching for a mystery garnet.”
“I remember that too!” said Nebraska, nodding vigorously. “Hey, maybe it’s what Mr. Ouija meant by M-G.”
Two-and-half-hours later the train pulled to a halt at Santa Barbara’s train station. We disembarked and climbed into a taxi.
“Good trip?” asked the cabdriver.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Nothing like a train trip with friends,” said the loquacious cabbie. “How long you know each other?”
The three of us exchanged glances. “Since we were eight,” we all said at once, breaking into uncontrollable laughter.
EPILOGUE
Not long after returning home, I booked an appointment with Dr. Neal Gesell, an eminent psychiatrist, on the basis that maybe I needed psychoanalysis or pharmacology to tame delusional thinking, given my transformation—with Mularski and Nebraska—from all grown up to eight years old, and back again.
Inside his homey den of an office with cathedral ceiling and incandescent lamps, Dr. Gesell invited me to sit opposite him on a leather sofa. “What brings you here?”
I spilled my guts about my odd-yssey.
Dr. Gesell listened attentively, nodding and smiling, until I was done. Then he sighed, eyes twinkling. “Sounds to me like you were given a very special gift,” he said. “You got to see the world again through the eyes of the children you once were, and to set your inner child free.”
“But how?” I asked, surprised not be pronounced nuttier than a fruitcake on April Fools Day.
“I’m reasonably certain the three of you were so traumatized by a life threatening experience that you fell into synch with one another in a collective hypnotic trance.”
“Huh?”
“Do you know anything about hypnosis?”
“A little.”
“You said you are a writer. What about the others?”
“An artist,” I said. “And a creative farmer.”
Dr. Gesell chuckled. “Key word,” he said. “Creative.” He paused. “A-D-D?”
“Yes.” I sat amazed. “Why…?”
“Creative people, the visual spatialists, people with A-D-D for example, are more prone to hypnotic trances than linear thinkers. What you experienced sounds like hypnotic age regression—a medium level of regression, a combination of present and regressed moment.”
“So what you’re saying is, we weren’t really eight again, we just thought we were?”
“You told me so yourself,” replied Dr. Gesell. “Everybody else reacted to you as adults, yes?”
I nodded.
“So what happened was, your minds took you back to a time when you were better prepared to deal with what you had experienced, almost dying in a plane crash.”
“But why eight?” I asked.
“You tell me.”
“Our lives flashed before our eyes and we all got stuck at eight—that’s when the plane stopped diving.”
“Hmmm.” Dr. Gesell sighed. “Lay the number eight on its side and it is the symbol of infinity. Stand it up again and it is an hourglass, representing time. But that may be irrelevant. What’s important here is that eight is the breakout year when we are growing up. One year earlier, at seven, you three could not have coped on your own. But at eight, you were ready to accept any new challenge and try new things. And you had each other.”
“And the Ouija board?”
“You controlled it yourself. Or rather, its message came from your own subconscious.” Dr. Gesell paused and locked his eyes deeply into mine. “The real question is this: How do you feel now?”
“Like a 20-ton weight has been lifted off my shoulder.”
“Why?”
“Because after re-living life as an eight year-old, I realize I’d been carrying a lot of baggage. And now that baggage is gone.”
“How so?”
The past no longer influences my present thinking, and I can manifest in the moment any and all possibilities, fueled by my own imagination.”
Dr. Gesell smiled. “Another gift,” he said. “You very clearly healed the child within you. We’ve all been neutered and closed down by schooling and hurtful life experience. But in four days you and your friends accomplished what it takes most of my patients four years of psychoanalysis to grasp.”
“And that is?”
“To become self-actualized and always live sentiently.”