Chapter 4: A Sojourn to Hell

Being a product of the northeastern United States, I have certain cultural baggage that goes beyond expecting my baseball team (the New York Yankees) to contend for the playoffs every year and talking "funny." Things like being able to easily find an excellent Italian restaurant and get a meal nearly as good as you might get by actually flying to Italy. Or being accustomed to readily available and cheap bread other regions of the country would label "artisan" but Northeasterners take for granted as their due. Or lacking any stake whatsoever in the whole racial war, my family not having arrived until the turn of the twentieth century or later. Or being able to read about the American Civil War without much emotional baggage since the Revolutionary War was a much more tangible fight for those in the Northeast, as testified to by the battlefields preserved by the state and federal governments littering our region. There are dozens of other examples but let it suffice to say that the Northeast and the South might as well be two different countries, culturally-speaking.

This became painfully apparent to me almost immediately upon my arrival in Augusta, Georgia and Ixandarius took me to a car dealership to purchase a vehicle with my new identity. My guide to being an immortal had chosen to keep my new name close enough to my old one that I would turn my head when someone shouted it. So Kiernan McCormick was born. And apparently his back-story was good enough to get me a nice Mitsubishi Galant at a reasonable price, a decent-sized house on a ridiculously huge plot of land in someplace called Columbia County for almost nothing, a maid service and lawn care guys every other week, and a part-time adjunct professorship at Augusta State University.

The culture shock came when we were walking around the dealership lot and a large, heavy-set black man with a heavy beard and mustache but completely bald head wearing a light blue suit said something to us in a gruff, good-natured tone. I would tell you what the gentleman said except I only understood the first word, "Howdy-," the rest being an incomprehensible slur in a seriously deep Georgia twang. Or so it seemed to me. Ixandarius simply grinned at the man, shook his hand, and introduced us, explaining that I was new in town from up North and needed a car. The salesman turned his widening smile on me and slurred something else unintelligible, dollar signs rolling in his eyes and a waiting expression on his face. I looked at him for a long minute before turning to Ixandarius and whispering, "Is he really speaking English? Not some kind of ... of ... I don't know? A patois?"

I probably don't need to tell you that he was offended but that perfectly good example of the differences between the two regions of the country in culture, in the form of linguistic differences also demonstrated another cultural difference. If the reverse situation occurred, a Southerner buying a car in the North, race/racism probably would not even occur to the car dealer as the reason for the failure in communication. Race for many in the North is background noise, like gender and religion. Something you do notice, but by and large has nothing to do with the situation at hand. It is usually only when someone like Al Sharpton decides to blow something out of proportion (or worse), or one of the minority of bigoted assholes pokes his head up from under the rock under which his kind spawns, or someone like Eric Holder ignores law-breaking because of race that it even comes to the forefront to claim attention. For that car salesman, however, it never even occurred to him that I truly did not understand a word he was saying beyond "Howdy." He never even thought about the fact that the closest I had ever come to hearing a Southern accent that thick was when President Bush the Younger would give a speech, and he had been educated in the Northeast. The salesman immediately jumped to me being a racist, thinking that "patois" was some kind of white code word for stupid. Luckily for the both of us, his supervisor, a lankily tall black guy from Philadelphia, saw his best salesman yelling (incomprehensibly) at me and came running.

I am not sure what he told his boss (especially since his accent actually got thicker the angrier he got) but my stupidly blank face and Ixandarius (trying manfully to hold back a laugh) assured the supervisor that there was a miscommunication somewhere. A familiar accent relaxed me and, once I could understand what was being said, I found out Mr. Jackson (the supervisor) had something else in common with me besides being Northern transplants: We both went to Rutgers University-New Brunswick. I watched the other salesman out of the corner of my eye as he, face openly displaying his sullenly suspicious glare, watched us reminisce about various professors and laugh about being Northern fish out of Southern water here in Georgia. I eventually settled on a white Galant and we briefly haggled over price before heading in to sign the papers.

I would like to say that was the only such bump, but it wasn't. I walked around the Augusta area for six months feeling like a backwoods Tartar from the middle of nowhere on the Mongolian steppes lost in the South without his translator. "Could you repeat that a little slower?" became my catch phrase and any time I approached someone in a store or government office and an accent other than thick Southern came out of their mouth I wanted to reach over the counter and kiss them, I was so relieved!

Thankfully, my workload was light my first semester at Augusta State University, only having to teach one U. S. History I class and one World History II class. Part of my thankfulness about that comes from the fact that many of my students did not have abominably thick accents, many of them being children of military personnel (or military personnel themselves) from nearby Fort Gordon or Northern transplants like me.

Explanations as to how I could afford a nice ride, killer pad, and servants on a part-time adjunct professor's salary teaching only two classes are in order. Part of the reason Ixandarius kept my name so noticeably Irish is because he also arranged for me to be my own cousin in order to inherit a large share of the estates of those who died in the conflagration he caused. While he never confided his reasons for that to me, pondering it briefly allowed me to come up with two reasons that are probably pretty close. First and foremost is that fact that setting up a new life, back-story and all, takes money. Second, living the life of a sentinel can be expensive; living forever in a modicum of comfort while policing other immortal beings takes both money and planning. The share of the combined estates of my family that eventually came to me when the New Jersey and New York probate courts, as well as the state and federal tax collectors, got done with them was in the mid-eight figures. About a half million dollars was spent buying the car, the house, furniture, wardrobe, and cleaning and lawn care services. Another half million went into a checking account, two savings accounts, five brokerage accounts, and an IRA (mostly for show, since I would never be retired). The rest of my sudden, tragically obtained fortune was invested rather conservatively with a New York investment house in offshore accounts (mainly because sentinels needed the flexibility certain foreign banks allow and U. S. banks no longer do). My salary, plus a fraction of the yearly interest on my investments was enough to cover the bills on the house and the car as well as pay for incidentals and sentinel-related expenses. The rest of the interest was re-invested. I learned fairly quickly why rich people really don't pay much in taxes and it had more to do with them not needing to work, and therefore pay high income tax rates, and less to do with them cheating the IRS.

Why the minutiae? I suppose I concentrated on those aspects of arriving in Augusta so I could put off concentrating on the fact that I found Augusta to be one of the lower circles of Hell! I appeared out of the nowhereness of the oubliette in front of the Marriott Courtyard Hotel just off of Washington Road with nothing but the clothes on my back and a wallet full of forged i. d. and fraudulently obtained credit cards. And neither the wallet nor the clothes were mine. I immediately burst into full-on perspiration in the 99º heat and 90% humidity. The sun was high in the sky and a slight breeze kicked up by the traffic whizzing by on the street running past the hotel did nothing to help. It was like standing in front of the mouth of Hell and expecting the scorching breath from the infernal deeps to cool you off.

Ixandarius had appeared with me, standing next to me as I surveyed the area. He nudged me several times before I turned to glare at him through a fog of sweat. He pushed me in the direction of the hotel lobby door and guided me through checking in with my new identity. The room was nice, but I only spent my nights there sleeping. The rest of the time was spent running around the Augusta area setting up my new life.

The first thing I learned after checking in and closing the door on my comfortably air conditioned hotel room was that time had moved while I was suspended in that white nothingness. It was 24 June, 2012 when that monster invaded my birthday party but I quickly learned that it was the waning days of summer now. This was doubly shocking; not only was I in that white nothingness for almost three months, but it was 99º with 90% humidity in the later half of September!

"When the fuck does it cool down around here?" I demanded of Ixandarius when he told me it was the 20^th of September. "Is there even a winter here?"

He busted out in a deep belly laugh, collapsing on the bed and having to wipe tears out of his eyes when he finally got it together. "It will cool down in a month or so and by November-December it will be winter-ish. Cold does not get very cold nor stay overlong here in Georgia. Some winters they get snow, but it is a rarity and also does not last long."

"And this 'winter' ends when, exactly?" I inquired through gritted teeth.

He shrugged. "March, maybe April if the groundhog in Pennsylvania sees his shadow," he replied with a grin. "But by the end of April the temperatures will be in the 80's once more and it solidifies there by May."

This was not what I wanted to hear. I was used to snowy winters and long springs that wait until June to start getting hot. And Ixandarius simply glared at me when I asked, plaintively, if I could not live somewhere else. Somewhere more suitable to human life. Later that month someone told me something that made me glad I was now immortal. Apparently, people in Augusta take near debilitating allergies for granted. Everyone has allergy issues here and I guess that is not unexpected in a place where my car was routinely painted yellow in the spring by the pollen and it got so bad sometimes that it almost looked like it was snowing in the glow of the street lights, or maybe a yellow fog had rolled in from some otherworldly plane. Before the gas explosion and my magical makeover, I had horrible allergies that exacerbated my medical problems. Two of the twenty medications I used to take were to keep my allergies under control and avoid allergy-related breathing issues.

But like I said, immortality did grant me immunity from such common ailments as allergies. Actually, according to Ixandarius, I would never have to worry about any ailments ever again.

I harp on the fact that I was miserable in my undeserved exile to hell-on-earth so that I could ignore the large things. Things like magic lessons not nearly as fun and exciting as Harry Potter's. And the politics of being a sentinel in a neighborhood where sentinels are less than popular with the lesser immortals. And the taxonomy of my fellow anomalies and how I should go about performing those duties assigned to me by the Fates. That last one in particular was mind-bending. It is very hard to go from being a good Catholic who both believes in the Church and is a rational academic to being someone seriously studying mythology the way a zoologist studies animals. Learning to differentiate between the myths of human creativity and religious hysteria and the reality of what Ixandarius named anomalies was surreal. And then, of course, came the discussion on God.

Or rather, Gods.

It came during one of our lessons on anomalies following a trying day at work. It was a Tuesday about a month after my arrival in Augusta, so I had a late afternoon U. S. History I class to teach and papers were due. I got to hear half a dozen semi-literate pleas for extensions which were all denied. Since I was sure I would hear about it from the department head, I stuck around and began wading through some of the abominable prose and semi-plagiarized arguments until Dr. van Hoyven hunted me down for "a word." After a half hour of high-brow reasoning as to why should I moderate my stance on deadlines for the freshmen and sophomores in my classes, Van Hoyven left and I packed up the trash my students handed in and headed home in my Galant for the scheduled lesson with Ixandarius.

The Greek was sitting on my leather couch watching an evening playoff game in my rather spacious living room. Since I was a Yankees fan and neither team was in black-and-white pinstripes or their away uniform, I could not care less about it. I was, at best, a casual baseball fan, getting my sports highs from soccer and college football. Ixandarius sat sprawled on the sofa in a black cotton t-shirt, white sweat shorts, and flip-flops with a beer in one hand and a bag of pretzels in the other. Since I don't drink, I was wondering where the hell the beer came from right after wondering how the hell he managed to get into my house through "pick-proof" locks and a security system?

As I was opening my mouth to inquire about those queries and others, Ixandarius shouted ecstatically as the team at bat hit a walk-off home run. Glancing at the t. v. showed me it was the Phillies and the Rockies, the visiting Phils losing by two runs.

"One of the few things America has come up with to advance the human condition has been baseball," he said with a contented sigh, flicking off the big screen t. v., rolling up the half-empty bag of pretzels, and standing with a stretch of his back. He looked at me reproachfully. "Did you know you had no alcohol in the house? Nor snack food? Looking through your cabinet was a depressing exercise in futility and quite revealing. You, Kiernan, are a sad individual."

I looked at him for a long moment before explaining, "I have had to watch my diet carefully my whole life. I had medical problems that required a strict diet and a lot of exercise if I wanted to live a life with as few pills as possible. Just because you blow me up and rebuild me without those problems doesn't make my taste in food go away."

He raised his hand in a fencer's gesture acknowledging a touch. "Sorry. I keep forgetting how new and unknown you are. Since the game is so spectacularly over, let us to work. I know we left off last time on the concept of teleportation, and I know it is something you would dearly love to be able to do. I seem to have neglected a subject on taxonomy, however, which was somewhat lax of me since Koyote has been spotted lurking around Tennessee. That is entirely too close to leave you in ignorance."