You Only Live Twice

My stomach hurts like hell.

As do my eyes.

I open them. It's dark. I’m in a tabletop position, as if I have fallen asleep doing yoga. Which has happened before; only, it usually happens at home when I’m listening to meditative ragas, not when I am knee-deep in mud in the middle of a dark forest.

Besides, I haven’t practiced yoga in ages.

But there’s a first time for everything, I guess.

I shiver. I glance at my Garmin to check the temperature, but the display is covered in mud. Whatever the temp is, I could undoubtedly use a warmup.

My lumbar vertebrae click cozily as I do a couple of cat-cows. Mud splashes my face as I crawl into a cobra. I lick it away. It’s yummy, like cold hot chocolate.

As I raise my hips into a downward dog, I notice two things: that I desperately need to pee and that my gun holster is empty. I don’t see the distant headlights until I lift into an up-dog. They are swerving through the trees toward me.

I am just finishing my Sun Salutation vinyasa in a tree pose when they bathe me in light.

How appropriate.

The headlights belong to a massive car, a VW Tiguan, if my pained eyes don’t deceive me. The car stops right in front of me and turns off its electric engine, so silent that the change would be unnoticeable to someone of inferior hearing.

The door slams, and a tall silhouette obscures the light, easing the pain in my eyes.

Thanks.

“Where is the money?” says a deep male voice.

I want to ask what money, but I double over and puke instead.

I am a spiritual person, not a materialist, and the notion of money sometimes does that to me. Especially when mentioned by a dark silhouette in an even darker forest, neither of which I remember seeing before.

Before I finish puking, I am lifted into the air by the nape of my neck. The final burst of vomit splashes my shoes, but they are so thoroughly coated in mud that it can’t reach them. Ha!

“I asked,” the voice booms into my ear, “where the money is.”

“Don’t make him ask thrice, Harry,” says a female voice to my left.

It sounds familiar. I try to look at her, but I can’t turn my head. I try to answer, but the skin on the front of my neck is pressing on my vocals so hard that only a gurgling sound comes out.

“Drop him.”

I fall back into the mud with a splash. Fetal position — open. I grunt, but try to stay positive: at least the pain in my hip dulled the burning in my eyes.

When I finish swallowing mud, I say: “I don’t think he asked twice, the second time wasn’t a real question, only an allusion to the first. I think you call that kind of question—”

I am stopped from saying “embedded” by a punch embedded into my stomach. That sends me into a fetal position — closed. Now my hip hurts less, and the pain in my eyes is gone entirely.

And my pants are wet. What a relief.

A cold object presses against my temple, sending nostalgic waves down my spine. Now there’s something to warm the fella up. Good ol’ Glock 19.

“Then don’t make him ask twice.”

Although she tries hard to keep her voice even, I can hear a trace of amusement in it. No woman can resist my sense of humor. Especially the jokes they think are my last ones.

Only, they never turn out to be that. What appears as my final hour always turns out to be my finest hour.

It would be even finer now if I could remember who these people are. And what money they are after.

“Your threat is emptier than my bladder,” I say, pointing at my wet pants. “If he shoots me, he won’t be able to ask me anything. Once or twice.”

“Only if he shoots you in the head,” she says. “You can answer our questions just as well without your knees.”

No, not the knees! If they shoot my knees, I will have bought my brand-new Garmin Fenix 8 at the Black Friday 70% discount for nothing.

As the muzzle of the gun turns toward my patella, I say, “Fine, you win! I’ll tell you where the money is.”

I bid for time. “But I want fifty percent.”

“You want 50% of your own cash?” The woman chuckles. “And what’s your bargaining chip?”

I point at my only possession. “This.”

Her chuckle turns into laughter. “The Fenix? What with it?”

“It's a limited edition. Besides the usual features — like tracking your pace, heart rate, sleep quality, and calories — it’s customized to your personal chakras. I'm the only one who knows how to transfer the ownership properly. It's priceless, and I'm generously offering it to you for a small amount of money, as I think a person like you could use it more than I could.”

“Are you calling me fat?” She cocks her gun.

“No, of course not. If anything, you are malnourished. I'm calling you evil.”

“That's more like it.” She lowers the gun. “Well, I am evil, and no watch is gonna change it.”

“If you're so sure, why don't you put it on?” I take the Fenix off, wipe the mud from it, and offer it to her.

“How stupid do you think I am? It'll zap me or something,” she says disgustedly. “Either lead us to the money, or Happy shoots your knees. That’s my final offer.”

“Where is the money?” asks Happy — for the second time! — and cocks his gun.

“Well, in the forest, of course.” That is the best I came up with during my bidding time. “Why else do you think I’m here?”

“Take us there.”

The owl hoots in the distance. A good omen.

I point in that direction. “This way.”

She hands me the flashlight. “Lead the way.”

I start a hiking track on my Garmin and head down a narrow path between the pines, hearing them move close behind me.

I look up to seek guidance in the Zodiac, but the sky is overcast. That is a bad omen.

Or not?

If I can get far enough from the Tiguan, we’ll be in complete darkness, and I will be the only one with the light.

There comes a time in every man's life when he must choose between what's easy and what's right. I am constantly presented with such choices in my profession, and one such appears before me when we reach a fork.

Uphill or down, that is the question.

Never in my life have I even been tempted by the easy way. The only dilemmas I have ever faced were choosing which path is harder.

But that's fortunately not the problem here. Since going downhill won’t do much good for my cholesterol levels, I turn upwards. I can’t wait for this misadventure to finish so I can savor the statistics with my gorgeous Fenix.

She will be so proud of me.

And even more so when she finds out that I even sprinted uphill, which is just what I do after the next bend, where Tiguan’s headlights no longer penetrate the overgrowth — I switch off the flashlight and dart off the path into pitch darkness.

“Shoot him!”

She is not caught off guard — mainly because she has a guard, whose bullets are flying rapidly in my direction, ricocheting haphazardly off the trees and rocks.

I trip at the apex and start to roll downhill. As the darkness spins wildly around me, I tap my Fenix to change the type of activity, but there is no option for “Rolling like a pancake”. Frustrated by that limitation and determined to write a ticket to customer support about it as soon as I return to civilization, I opt for Winter Sports > Snowboarding, hoping that the similar frequency of bouncing in both sports implies a similar intensity of calorie burning.

Random collisions with rock, of which not a single bone in my body is spared, anchor my conviction that I have avoided the easy choice in the broadest possible arc, filling my spirit with pride of alpha-masculinity.

Lest the time of my descent go to waste, I while it away in revising basic anatomy, naming each body part as a rock hits it.

Occipital bone.

Ulna.

Sacrum.

Phalanges.

The exercise is temporarily halted by the next blow, forcing all thought from my frontal lobe.

Scrotum.

Iliac crest.

Coccyx.

My descent ends in a frontal — yet also posterior: lumbar vertebrae, thoracic vertebrae, scapulae — collision with a massive felled tree. By the hollow sound of the crash, I know it to be a white oak — Quercus bicolor — often found in forests where you get lost, not remembering where you are or how you got there (elementary geobotany).

I get up, shaking the dust off the scorched mud, which is clinging to my torn clothes, which is covering my bruised skin, which is encapsulating my contused bones, which are guarding my unbreakable spirit, which I am about to puke.

When I’m finished vomiting, I strain my ears. I hear crickets chirping and a trickle of a nearby stream, but not a trace of my pursuers.

Suddenly, a loud hoot penetrates the forest silence, like a firecracker resonating in a church, making me jump and reflexively call out the name of my savior.

“Sean H. Connery—”

A large tawny owl is perched on the very Quercus Bicolor I slammed into; her twinkling eyes are pointed straight at me, as if she's contemplating my soul.

She continues hooting.

It's a good omen. She's trying to tell me something.

I look around. The felled tree lies on the doorstep of a high-ceilinged cave, etched into the rocky cliff before me. It saved my life — had it not been there, I would have rolled straight into what seems like a bottomless pit.

I climb over it, switch on the flashlight, and step into the dark corridor. Calcified stalactites overhang its ceiling, while sharp stalagmites litter its floor (introductory geology), both of which make for a tricky crossing.

The owl is still hooting as the corridor before me expands into a vast chamber. Increasing the luminosity of the flashlight, I walk around it to discover that there is a cove in each of its four corners — two on the anterior and two on the posterior side. The floor of the chamber is smooth, the stalagmites gone, but the ceiling still harbours the sharp-edged stalactites, which seem to grow in an unusual, regular pattern.

Upon closer examination, I realize they form a word.

PAENULA

Paenula means cloak (the basics of Latin). However, the translation doesn't help me deduce why that word is here.

I enter the right anterior cove and discover a cell phone on its floor. I try to turn it on, but it’s dead.

Closer inspection of the left anterior cove reveals a crumpled napkin. I unravel it, hoping it has some kind of code, but it's only full of snot.

That’s when I hear tires screeching just outside the cave.

Curse that bloody owl with her hooting. And those bloody VW engineers with their silent electric motors.

The slamming of car doors, then a gunshot. The hooting stops.

“Bloody birds.”

“Don't be so ungrateful, Happy. If I'm right, he was following her all along. And she brought him here.”

I hear their shoes hit the gravel when they jump over the tree. As their steps echo through the corridor, I switch off the flashlight and silently move into the right posterior cove, hoping to find some cover there.

I step onto something soft on the floor. I pick it up. A wallet. I open it and illuminate it with my Fenix. Inside, there is $35 and an ID card.

My ID card.

“Come out, Harry, it's over!”

The beams of their flashlights move across the chamber walls, and I hide deeper into the cove.

Could that be the money they are after? It seems unlikely, but what are the odds of there being two piles of my cash in this forest? If there are, it's pretty clear where to search first — there’s only one more cove to check.

“Clarissa, I found something. A napkin.”

Clarissa. The name seems familiar, but I don't have time to place it now. I move out of my cove and start to sneak along the chamber wall toward the unexplored cove.

“LIVE AND LET DIEEEEE!”

Paul McCartney's voice echoes loudly from my Fenix across the chamber.

Before I manage to react, there is a flash, an explosion, and a sharp pain erupts in my stomach.

I collapse to the ground against the wall.

How did this happen? The sleeping alarm should never sound unless—

“Well, well, well,” Clarissa says playfully when they reach me.

I throw the wallet at her feet. “Here is your money.”

Happy picks it up and hands it to her.

“Well, that's more than I asked for, but I will take it all to compensate for my partner’s troubles.”

She hands a five-dollar bill to Happy and pockets the rest.

“I wish you a pleasant rest of the evening.”

She curtsies to me and throws the wallet into the ever-expanding pool of my blood. The Tiguan's engine is as silent as ever, but I hear its wheels' rumbling diminish down the gravel road.

Using the final atoms of my strength, I grab the bloody flashlight and crawl into the left posterior cove. In its centre lies a booklet — a Garmin Fenix 8 manual.

I chuckle. It's not what I hoped to find here, but it’s just what I need.

Drops of my blood soak the pages as I search for the chapter about sleep alarms. Just as I remembered, it says: “The sleep alarm will not activate if the device detects that the user is awake.”

Well, what the hell just happened then?

I go to my sleep statistics on Fenix, and my already nebulous adrenaline spikes even more. My watch indicates that I have been in REM sleep for the last hour and a half!

I don’t understand. How could they have let such a huge bug slip into the limited editi—

Everything goes dark before I finish the thought.

***

My bladder feels like it’s about to burst.

My heart is pounding wildly in my ears.

I open my eyes. I'm lying in Shavasana on a mat in the middle of a dimly lit, high-ceilinged room. All around me, bodies lie still in the same pose.

Is this what heaven is like? Perennial dead man’s pose for the dead men, stuck forever in a celestial yoga studio?

Or is this hell?

But I’m not paralyzed. I can move my fingers.

I check my Fenix. 19:57.

When the thumping in my ears subsides, I notice the notes of calming Indian music drifting around the room, accompanied by the sounds of the forest.

I’m just about to get up to search for the bathroom when someone speaks.

“You can start to open your eyes slowly.”

Shivers run down my spine from the sound of that voice.

I raise my head. Clarissa lies in a Shavasana at the front of the room. I want to run away, but my limbs freeze in terror.

“Slowly, at your own speed, you can move into a seated position, and then standing,” she declares. “Today is the last session of the month, so I beg you to pay your membership fee if you haven't done it yet.”

Still petrified, I watch the cadavers around me start to rise, recognising among them the familiar faces from my yoga class.

Then I dash to the bathroom.

I laugh out loud as I'm peeing. God, what a ridiculous dream!

The memories flood my brain just as I’m flooding the urinal. I’ve spent the day at the mall, where I first bought the new Garmin, and then went to the movies.

My eyes are still stinging from the experience. I’ll never buy a front row ticket again.

Or eat so many Nachos. I conceal a loud fart by flushing the urinal, hoping I didn't fart during the meditation.

Back in the exercise room, a queue has already formed for payment.

“Cash or card?” Clarissa asks me when it's my turn.

“Card.”

She passes me the POS device, and I take my phone from the jacket pocket, only to realise that it's dead.

“Sorry, my battery is out.”

I put my hand into the other pocket where I usually keep my wallet, but there is only a used napkin there.

I smile awkwardly. “Hm, that's strange, I can't find my wallet.”

It's not in my inner pocket either — I only find Garmin instructions there.

I'm on the verge of panic when it strikes me.

I have two inner pockets, and I know exactly what's in the other one!

I put my hand into the right inner pocket of my overcoat — as long as a cape — and produce a wallet from it.

“I'm sorry for this,” I say, handing her thirty bucks. “I was at the premiere of Skyfall earlier today, and it was so crowded I was scared of pickpockets, so I put it where I never usually put it. I never hold anything in this inner pocket.”

“No problem,” she smiles politely, ignoring the wholly unnecessary length of my awkward explanation.

On my leave, I give five bucks to her assistant, Happy, who is just folding up our yoga mats. He declines politely, but I insist — he's always so lovely to all of us in the community, and he's definitely earned it.