Five seconds can alter your life for ever. It can change the course of your dreams and wipe out everything you’d ever hoped for. It can send you into the wilderness, in search of nothing.

Three days into the Nevada desert I felt the soles of my shoes melting. I stopped, turned one foot upside down and examined the bottom of my trainer. The rubber fibres seemed to be on fire, heating to higher temperatures with each step. I didn’t know when I’d find nourishment and I didn’t care.

Waves of heat rose off of the surface of the red sands. It was miles outside of Amargosa near Death Valley, the driest place on earth.

I knew from my research in neurobiology that the brain could last several days without water. The dendrites would repair themselves, the synapses still firing. The brain was an amazing organism with the ability to repair itself against even the worst circumstances, but if I didn’t find water soon dehydration would set in, and the brain could lapse into confusion. I’d start seeing things, hearing things—it would be totally disorientating.

I took a step forwards through an arroyo, checking the landscape for a cactus. Inside would be gallons of water, and some breeds had sustained the lives of ancient Native American tribes wandering the desert for years. I walked for another five minutes until I found a craggy rock and sat down, lowering my head into the palm of my hands. I had no plan, and no desire for one. When I started out I wanted only to escape, to cross several terrains and climates and just go.

Before I set out for my journey, a man at the small farewell gathering they’d insisted on throwing for me muttered something from the back of the room.

‘It’s almost as if his life has been divided into two sections. Before the accident, and after.’

And it was true. I was a different man now. I felt like a cadaver cut down the middle with a saw, my breastbone cut open, exposing the organs. Like a body during an autopsy, my heart had been ripped out and placed on top of my chest for examination. The blood had ceased to flow. I was a cadaver. Hollow.

I considered eating the small energy bar I had left in my backpack, but I knew that if I did there was a chance it would be worse. My insides would tighten. Water was needed for digestion and the food wouldn’t get through the small intestine without it.

‘You OK?’

The voice startled me, and I looked up into the sun. I rubbed my eyes and swallowed hard, my throat parched and sore. Was the process beginning?

‘Here’s some water if you need it.’ The voice was gruff, yet distinctly female. She had greying hair and a creviced jaw darkened with lines. She held the slim canteen towards me. ‘The water’s hot, but it’s better than nothing. Only a fool comes out here without a canteen.’

I took it and unscrewed the metal top, downing it.

‘You lost?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘No one sane comes this far,’ she said. ‘Must be lost. In one way or another.’

The woman wore brown shorts and a longsleeved cotton shirt with pockets and snaps down the front and on the arms. A large black camera hung from a leather strap around her neck. She kicked at the dirt with her boots to make a small clearing, something I’d once read about in a desert manual. Experienced trail guides did it to check for scorpions and rattlers before they sat down.

‘You got a name?’ she asked.

I held the canteen a little longer, considered drinking, then wondered if it was all she had.

‘Jonathan,’ I said. ‘Jonathan Taylor.’

‘Jonathan, you realize it’s 46 degrees out here?’

I said nothing, shrugged.

‘You need more than a T-shirt. And jeans aren’t the best thing for the desert. I’ve got a tent over there,’ she said, pointing to a small clearing of trees. She tapped the camera. ‘You can rest in the shade as long as you want. I’m here for a week taking pictures.’ She looked intently at my face. ‘You’ve got a bad wound there. You need something for it?’

I touched the left side of my jaw. It had been two months now, but the wound wouldn’t heal. I shook my head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look fine,’ she mumbled.

‘So why are you here?’ I asked. ‘Why the desert? It’s pretty dry and desolate out here and there’s not much to do.’

‘I’m a psychologist,’ she said. ‘Former, that is. Always wanted to be a photographer but it’s the one dream I never fulfilled. I’ve always loved the open space in the desert and I guess you could say I’ve escaped my life to come to this place. To shoot my last photos.’

‘Your last?’

‘I’m dying,’ she said matter of factly.

‘Aren’t we all?’

As soon as I said it I wished I could take it back. I looked at her dark expression and knew it was true. She really was dying. ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.

The woman laughed. ‘It’s not about being sorry. We all have a beginning, and we all have an end.’

‘But is there a cure? What’s wrong?’

‘I have cancer, and it’s terminal. Ironically, a brain tumour. Imagine that, a psychologist who uses her brain all her life, with a brain tumour. There is no cure. But it’s OK, Jonathan. I’ve made peace with it. I’ve chosen to come here. And you?’

‘I flew in and just started walking. I walked for days, slept outside. That’s about it. I ended up here kinda by accident.’

The woman stood and took the canteen from my hand. ‘There are no accidents,’ she said, motioning me to follow. ‘We may think that there are, but there aren’t. You have a family?’

I walked slowly, following her towards the tree clearing where she had set up camp, and pondered the irony of her words. There are no accidents.

What the hell? I thought about my wife and daughter. Yes, I said silently. There are accidents.

‘See, I’m taking photos of that rock feature as the sun sets,’ the woman said, pointing to a distant canyon. The mountain range was wide and distinct, with tall peaks jutting high into the heavens. ‘It’s very different from the kind of work I’ve done my whole life. I’ve found my passion now. I’ve discovered my destiny. I may not have more than a few weeks to live it but that’s not important.’

‘What kind of work did you do in psychology?’

‘Hemispheric integration.’

‘Hemispheric what?’

‘I helped people understand the wide capacity of their minds.’

‘My wife was a first-year neurologist,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard that term.’

‘Was?’

I looked down into the brown sand. ‘Was.’ I said firmly.

‘When we experience an event in our lives,’ the woman explained, ‘we record in memory two separate and unique pictorial representations—one in each brain hemisphere. The left hemisphere is responsible for logical, linear thinking. The right is more concerned with spatial relationships and personal safety.’

‘And?’

‘And if we consistently use the perception from only one side of the brain, our choices are limited and personal issues remain unresolved. Learning conscious control of which hemispheric image to utilize broadens the range of choices and responses available to us. Imagine being able to understand and access the brain as it was designed to be used. Accessing this second hemisphere opens doors that we didn’t even know existed.’

I shrugged. I wondered if there was some way I could change my thinking, reprogramme my brain to see the events of the past 100 days differently. If I could drive by that crossroads just one more time and see nothing instead of the image of them lying in the road taking their last breaths, maybe my life could change.

Maybe I could rewind, go back to the old job, go back to the house, back to the former friends and act like life was a series of peaks and valleys and be able to overcome the valley. Get remarried, be like the others in society who are so good at reincarnating second lives. I could have a whole new wife, a new kid, and justify it all by saying there are no accidents and reaching the understanding that it was destined to be.

I was destined to be with this new person. I was destined to bring another life into this world. Ignore that the first family ever existed and got wiped away in one moment.

Problem was, I could see none of it. I was hollow.

‘Why didn’t you jump?’ she asked.

I looked at her blankly.

‘You wanted to jump. You wanted to end it all at the overpass at that crossroads and join your little girl on the other side. You thought that would ease your pain. What stopped you?’

‘I didn’t tell you that,’ I said.

‘But it’s true.’

The crossroads seemed to be a metaphor for my life. There was a crossroads at the end of the road and I had to make a decision. Would I turn left? Or would it be right? There was nowhere else to go. I had stood there on the pavement in the days following the accident, an eggshell, crumbling. I stood at the side of the overpass and clung to the railing, vomiting in the rain. I removed my coat. Puddles seeped into my trainers, but I didn’t care. I took them off, stood barefoot in the centre of a torrential downpour and wailed. I shouted at the top of my lungs, cursing at Lacy and God and anyone who would listen, my heart emptied and replaced with rage. I don’t know how long I’d been there or how I made it out. The overpass was a short walk from the site of impact and the bottom was more than 20 feet down, into rocks below. I hadn’t told her about that moment. I hadn’t told anyone.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, feeling anger rising inside my gut. ‘Are you a psychic or something? One of those witches who can see into someone’s life?’

The woman laughed. ‘I’m not a witch,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

The road that Lacy and Boo had been on was the kind of road that went on for centuries. Not miles, nor minutes nor hours, but it seemed as if there were no exits, no roadside diners or interruptions. Just one junction, three miles from our tiny house. Before the accident, there were times I just drove it listening to the hum of the engine, with no radio or mobile. Years ago someone had nicknamed it the forever highway because it wound through cornfields from one end of the west to the other, connecting states. It snaked up into the mountains and down to the sea. It wound through California into the flat red sands, and it wound so tightly around my family at that crossroads that day that it squeezed the life out.

Years before the accident I recall driving in the dark of night, wondering what would happen if my car broke down and how I’d make it. You’d get out to walk, in search of a petrol station. Maybe another traveller would come along and find remnants of your bones and go on, or maybe you’d be carried away by vultures.

‘Your name?’ I asked. They were the only two words I could manage.

‘Marilyn,’ she said warmly.

I glanced at her profile, noticing a small drop of sweat travelling down her throat. She had a death sentence, yet she seemed more centred than I’d ever been, as if she had a built in compass that had guided her all her life. Here she was an old woman in the middle of the desert, yet completely at home.

‘Could there be any other meaning to this?’ I said. ‘You think there’s a reason we are sitting here in the centre of this scorched earth in the middle of October, just the two of us poor pitiful souls?’

She began laughing then. She threw back her head and I laughed too, the first time since the accident. I leaned against the tree and felt sharp twines against my flesh and a rush of strength and adrenaline. It felt good to feel something. I laughed hard, pulled out of my numbness, until I began to cry. The tears fell and my body heaved with sobs.

‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ I admitted, wiping my face with my arm. ‘I don’t know what I’m seeking…’

‘Does anyone?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know…’

I had a flashback then, Boo in her car seat with a pink plastic sippy cup in the cup holder. ‘I want my bear,’ Boo said, pointing to the stuffed animal on the ground. It had tumbled out of the Explorer onto the driveway when we’d opened the door.

I should have turned back then. Should have stopped everything and seen it as a sign to halt. Stop. Don’t let them go.

‘Get it,’ Boo said, like a demanding little dictator. As always I relented and picked it up, handed it to her, and kissed her on her cheek.

‘I love you, Daddy,’ she’d said, beaming.

The woman in the desert looked at me and waited for my thoughts to leave. ‘Jonathan, none of us knows anything. We think we know, then we don’t. The universe has a way of intervening. Of changing you. In the end, you don’t know what you’re seeking, and you don’t know what you’ll find.’

I shook my head, baffled.

‘But it’s all irrelevant anyway,’ she said. ‘Because it doesn’t matter what you seek or what you find. What matters is that you allow your compass to guide you, and let your gifts and knowledge rise to the surface so you can live out your life’s purpose.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It’s worth the journey.’

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The Compass

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THE COMPASS™TAMMY KLING JOHN SPENCER ELLIS

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

THE COMPASS™
TAMMY KLING JOHN SPENCER ELLIS