Jeffrey Oshins

18 E. Islay

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

(800)982-8513 oshins@linkline.com

Approximately 78,620 words

The Aztecs

In the decade before the Spanish arrived in Mexico, Aztec Emperor Montezuma II and his people were filled with a sense of foreboding. A series of evil omens had foretold of calamities to come. A fiery comet crossed the sky. The temple of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, burst into flames. The Lake of Mexico boiled and rose, flooding into houses. A weeping woman passed by in the middle of the night, crying "My children, we must flee far away from this city!" Fishermen discovered a bird that wore a strange mirror in the crown of its head. Montezuma looked into the mirror and saw a distant plain, with people making war against each other and riding on the backs of animals resembling deer.

Public Broadcast Service

The Incas

Comets were seen flaming athwart the heavens. Earthquakes shook the land; the moon was girdled with rings of fire of many colors; a thunderbolt fell on one of the royal palaces and consumed it to ashes; and an eagle, chased by several hawks, was seen, screaming in the air, to hover above the great square of Cuzco, when, pierced by the talons of his tormentors, the king of birds fell lifeless in the presence of many of the Inca nobles.

William Prescott

The Mayans

Among devotees of astrology, ‘new science’, and modern paganism, there is a firmly-held belief in a great (though unspecified) event or series of events expected to take place on or around 12 December, A.D. 2012. This belief centers around the expiration of the calendar created by the ancient Mayans, and used by them and other Mesoamerican cultures right up to the time of the Spanish invasion.

The nature of this climactic event is not agreed upon, and takes numerous forms.

Allan Agustson

I am neither beast nor god. What I am, I leave for you to decide.

This narrative is neither Sutra nor Bible. I ask those who believe I am Tatya-Masi not to take what I relate as gospel or apostasy. For what is divine and ordained for one is surely profane and insignificant to another.

There are as many heavens as people who pray to them.

My message, if I have one, is to enjoy being human. I wish I could have been.

When I swim beneath the surface of the lake, or hop through the woods, reality seems no more substantial than a fluttering gauze veil. Indistinguishable shapes move in shadowy dimensions. Voices murmur behind the wind and within the lap of waves.

I love to stand on the shore of the Lake of the Frogs and watch the shadows and reflections, shades of green and gray on the mountainsides, pick out and follow the journey of a single wave, dark-backed with a shining face reflecting the sky, each ripple a ying-yang, the dark and light side of the mountain.

Edgar taught me about ying and yang, the opposing forces that create balance in the universe. The true and greatly missed friend of my childhood had been a nurse at the mental institution where my mother birthed me, and was the one who named me Du. He's from Austria, where du is the familiar pronoun for you, but it might as well be short for duality--land/water; boy/frog. My reflection in the tarnished mirror in the outhouse or in the placid brown surface of a puddle does not match how I imagine myself. I feel out of place in my body, as if someone has played a joke on me. Maybe my being reared by humans causes the feeling of a boy trapped inside someone--or something--else.

At six feet, I weigh nearly two hundred pounds--cumbersome and heavy on land, but swift and supple in the water. My skin is olive-complected. My fist-sized eyes protrude from high cheekbones, and can move independently of each other. My nose and ears are rudimentary ridges. Lips with hard rounded edges stretch around the wide curve of my jaw. Sharp, round nails--useful to make subtle changes of direction underwater--tip my webbed feet and hands.

Edgar once said I might be a mutant--a rapid advancement in evolution. If the world is warming and the polar caps melting, as they say, you might be the future of mankind.

Mostly, I feel inexperienced and shy, but excited about when I will leave the lake. I greet each day with anticipation that this might be the one in which I go to school, meet new friends, see my father, find out what happened to my mother. Maybe then, I will understand why Father had left us at the Lake of the Frogs.

Edgar said that I could earn a living as a musician. He was born in Vienna. As a teenager, he had sung Gregorian Chants in a Choralschola section at the Imperial Chapel.

Five foot-five, cheeks red from the sun, curly blond hair turning gray sprouting from a floppy hat drooping over his ears, dressed in short brown lederhosen--held up by red suspenders--green wool socks covering his skinny bowed legs, he would climb a cliff behind the cabin and his sweet alto would carry through the valley and around the rim of the lake.

Wacht auf aus euren von Niedertracht!

Let the sluggish mind be revived.

He had taken the job of caring for me so he could compose his music. He would sit on a stool hunched over, eyes focused through round wire glasses, sheet paper and pen against the lacquered auburn mahogany piano, jotting letters, slides, and bars in his private tablature.

By the age of three, I could perform anything he had written or played. It got so he would only have to think something and I would play it. My tubular black nails would click as they pressed the ivory keys of the upright twenty-five-inch Bentley. He would sit at a desk beside me furiously marking up his scores. Though I thought his works complex and beautiful, I don't think he ever sent them out into the world to be performed.

The other member of our household was Kare Kuwaru'wa, a pureblood La'ku Indian from the northeast coast of Colombia. Milk chocolate-skinned, long flattened downward-tipped nose, he was capable of running for hours or kneeling all night before the shrine in his bedroom.

Kare was a jungle creature who suffered in the high alpine climate of the lake. Even when the temperature reached its hottest in midsummer, he wore his brown wool poncho.

Edgar and I survived the cold months without too much distress. We had an unlimited supply of slow burning fir, and when spring came and purple lupin and yellow mule-ears carpeted grassy meadows, home to the blue dragon flies mating on the tules, contentment would warm me, and I was happy to live at the Lake of the Frogs.

Our good health lasted until July of the year 2003, when we all should have been fattening ourselves like bears on huckleberries, wild grapes, chanterelles, and game. But disease struck Edgar. Now, it was October and death threatened the cabin.

Edgar lay in the narrow lower bunk bed in the room we shared. His breathing was a horrifying slurping inspiratory shiver followed by a retching half-cough. Outside, crickets trilled, as if the silence of winter was not days away. A horned owl hooted. Moonlight framed a square patch on the wooden floor. Fear would creep up on me like the delicate touch of fingers on the back of my neck, then seize my heart in a sudden terrifying grasp. What would I do if Edgar died? He was my guide. I saw the world through his eyes. I had always assumed when I ventured from the lake he would go with me, introduce me, help me cope with what he had described as the undeniably profound impact I would have on those outside our household.

Since I could remember, I hated my appearance. Kare said the reason I looked like I did was because I was the La'ku god, Tatya-Masi.

I didn't feel like a god. Aside from a few of what Edgar called my gifts, I had no powers, though Kare insisted I had not yet learned to use them.

Now wishing for supernatural ability, I looked at my dying friend and whispered, "I could find the box. I could open it and use the tunjos to heal you."

"Ahh Kare's box." Edgar's mocking tone was interrupted by his suppressed cry.

"You saw it."

"I saw a box. I never saw what was inside of it."

According to Kare, in the box was a small La'ku talisman, a tunjos, hung on a silver chain which would evoke my godly powers.

Edgar liked to talk. To distract him from his pain, I continued. "Do you think it's from Manoa?"

"You're asking me if I think there is a magic necklace at the bottom of this lake that can heal me?"

He tried to end his rhetorical question with a quick, silly hee-hee! But his respiration was racked by a spasm of pain.

In desperation, I closed my eyes and said to myself, I am Tayta-Masi, Bringer of the Sixth World of Water. Heal him. Heal him!

When I looked again all I saw in the dim light of the room was Edgar's ashen face, drawn tight with pain.

I awoke sitting by Edgar's bed. Judging by the sounds of the forest it was an hour before dawn. Edgar was still alive. He loved trout for breakfast. I told myself when I came back from the lake, the command I had chanted last night would have done its work. Edgar would be healed and ready for the last of the tomatoes from the garden. Kare would make cornmeal cakes lathered with wild honey. Edgar would compliment me on my einfuhlung, my empathy, for knowing how much his appetite had quickened. Faith was better than despair.

I dressed quickly in a pair of bib overalls, not bothering to put on my size 18 triple-wide waterproof duck boots. The cabin had four rooms: Edgar's and my bedroom, Kare's room, a large common area with the piano, bookshelves and a stone fireplace, and the kitchen. I passed Kare's open door and saw his dark shape kneeling before his shrine.

Two candles burned on either side of a wooden carving of a serpent with the body of a bird. A red eye in the statute's head glinted as I passed and an inexplicable shiver passed down my spine. I shrugged off the feeling that something had changed in the cabin and moved through the kitchen.

Outside, the temperature was nearly freezing. My exhalation condensed. Once I was in the water, I would not feel the cold. I require immersions at least every twelve hours. Otherwise, my mottled skin dries, itches, and starts to peel in long strips.

My state of mind changes when I'm underwater. I feel more powerful. My senses are heightened. My protruding eyes collect light so I can see in the translucent water as far as I can on land. Immersed, scents are fresh and pungent, like the smell of the forest just after a rain. I breathe through my skin, and glucose in my blood allows my temperature to drop. I can stand cold water, but not freezing.

In a few weeks the lake would freeze and I would have to use the bathhouse, a small wooden structure barely larger than the round, fifty-gallon tub it surrounded. I wanted to enjoy the lake as much as I could.

I picked up a Hawaiian sling, a metal spear attached to elastic tubing, a kind of underwater slingshot, from a fish-cleaning table, hopped past the garden dropped my overalls, leapt twenty yards from the shore and dove beneath the placid slate-gray water.

Intent on catching Edgar's trout, I swam out of our cove to where Silver Creek flowed into the lake. A premonition caused me to kick faster and cover the half-mile swim in three minutes. Something special was going to happen today.

The Lake of the Frogs sits six thousand feet high, formed by a gap between two volcanic ridges in the Eldorado National Forest on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Ten miles long and a mile wide, the rocky shore traces the shape of a snowman. The head, where I live, is accessible only by an arduous hike or a two-hour boat trip.

People did not often come up to the narrow end of the Lake of the Frogs. When they did, I would listen and watch the hikers and boaters either from the woods or through the distended, wavy lens of the surface of the lake. Though I longed to be part of the happy companionship I observed, I never revealed myself.

The first rays of dawn penetrated the twelve feet of water where I sat, illuminating bits of suspended dirt and algae. Seven yards away, behind a boulder, somewhat protected from the stream's flow, a knot of trout was stacked up like crossed branches. In rapid darts, their tapered mouths nipped the surface to feed on insects and other nutrients delivered by the creek.

A small cloud of sand plumed to my left where a brown trout stirred up the bottom looking for frog eggs. Ironically, once there had been lots of frogs in the Lake of the Frogs before it had been stocked with browns. The California frogs had no defenses against the Scottish species of fish and had been almost wiped out.

Maybe I'm the frogs' vengeance on the trout.

The oily scent of brown trout caused me to sweep my nose through the water. Fifteen feet toward the dark of the deep water, a shape as big as a log hovered just behind a boulder.

Brownie!

Underwater, I can swim nearly as fast as a fish and with the Hawaiian sling, my catch doesn't stand a chance. But here was one fish I had never been able to catch. She was the queen of the lake and lived in the deep waters. She only ventured into the shallower depths to spawn.

Trout usually smell me before I can smell them. Today, the huge brown trout was careless. I slowly pulled back the four elastic strands on my sling, but decided she was too far away for a shot.

We both moved at the same time. I sprang kicking as rapidly as I could; my head thrust forward, arms pressed to my side. I'm fast underwater, but I couldn't catch an old fish like Brownie by coming right at her.

Brownie flapped her massive tail--the size of a hawk's wing--against the resistance of the water and shot toward the depths.

Extended, speeding, I couldn't see her, but I sensed her. If she turned, she would escape me. I had to intercept her before she reached the drop-off to the black water.

I narrowed the distance between us, flashing over the sloping bottom where silt covered boulders like a soft tan snow. We arrived at the underwater canyon at the same moment, she a body-length from me, a flying shadow melding into the darkness, moving too fast to release my harpoon on the fly.

To follow her was to risk drowning, but what a feast for Edgar if I caught her. I needed all the miracles I could muster. If my prayers had failed then maybe by eating the strongest fish in the lake, Edgar would be healed.

Brownie's tail turned to the sky and she flipped down the side of the submerged cliff. I beat my feet in an exhausting whir trying to stay close to her; downward into a dark world I had ever seen. The pressure flattened my chest like a giant's hands. I could not draw enough oxygen through my skin. Panic and remorse tightened my throat as I told myself I'd stayed down too long, dove too deep. Go up!

The shade of a shadow of a leaf at night wavered against the ledge. I couldn't see her, but I felt her. I knew Brownie was there.

I stretched the sling and launched my spear. It stuck. As the wounded fish dove for the bottom, the shudder of steel passing into flesh rumbled up the line and tore the wooden handle to the end of my fingers.

I swam after my trout, trying not to pull out the shaft. I was not going to lose her.

In an instant, the tension in my chafed and stinging hands released as the line went slack. The spear drifted up toward me. The edge of my vision sparkled and faded to darkness a telltale sign I was not drawing enough oxygen from the water. I had to surface to breathe.

My mouth opened in a reflexive gasp. In my fading consciousness, a flash of green gleamed in the darkness like the first burst of moonlight over the mountain peaks.

Cruuuu.

A chorus of female voices echoed in the depths--no words--longing, keening. The sound came from the other side of reality. It became a rustling inside my head. Was this blurring of perceptions the moment before death?

Cruuuu.

My senses failed. I was out of air, dying. The chanting altos vibrating through the water calmed me. My panic eased into acceptance.

With one last effort, I dove to the verdant penumbra and thrust my hand into the phosphorescent halo, touching something hard.

Energy coursed through my body, a rush of excitement but more intense as if every doubt or limitation had disappeared. This was it. The box! I had found the box!

The burning in my lungs and panic eased. I felt myself ascending protected by a sphere of emerald light. In the uncertain time of dream, I rose to the surface without the need for breath or sight.

I floated on my back holding the container to my chest. Heat spread through me as if I had drunk a glass of Edgar's schnapps. Sight, hearing, every sense sharpened. High above, I could see the vane of a single feather on a gull circling against the gray clouds spilling over the peaks of the mountains. The sound of a fish splashing a hundred yards away was as loud as if I had dropped a heavy rock into the water at my feet.

The empowerment, the altered interaction between my body and the atmosphere made me wonder if I had died and been reborn in another life. Yet nothing was changed about the familiar landscape.

Heavy raindrops slapped my face. I rolled my left eye and saw the contours and rock formations of the shore I had always known.

A few strong kicks brought me onto the stream-rounded stones of the deserted beach. I staggered ashore and sat next to a driftwood tree.

Cruuuu.

That reverberating chorus penetrated, filled my mind. I fingered the tarnished green and black surface with its relief of frogs and salamanders, and then turned the box over. In the center was a raised image of me.