Chapter thirty-seven

It was the best Christmas ever for the Tartals. Everyone who carried the Tartal name was now under the same roof, united as a family for the first time in a long time. Since Ben had distanced himself from the family, the Tartals had not gone to mass in ages, but that Christmas morning, the Tartals went to church as a family. Once they came home, Ben made a wonderful meal for lunch, and Audrey was busy wrapping last-minute gifts. She baked a special birthday cake for Zeke. The comforting aroma of butter and cinnamon filling the house brought back many memories of Mrs. Braganza and the days of his carefree childhood when he played with Coconut all the time. Coco was very old now and barely left his little doghouse that Ben had brought inside for the winter.

“The family could have been complete if only Mrs. Braganza was here like before,” he thought.

He also wished that poetic Zig and naughty Zag could be there as they often had been in the old days when he was just a kid. But Zeke knew that not all wishes were meant to be fulfilled, and he was okay with it.

The new year brought a lot of peace and tranquility to Zeke’s life. He could feel the harmony and prosperity all around him. Maya was attending school regularly again, and she excelled as a sales trainee at Tartal’s Garage. Everything in Zeke’s life was looking up except for the fact that he still missed his cosmic friends. Zeke and Gael finally graduated high school that June with good grades and immediately started looking into colleges. Zeke was passionate about art, literature, and history, while Gael had an interest in management studies, wanting to be an entrepreneur and establishing a lawn care business of his own after all he had learned in yard work and landscaping.

• • •

Everything in Zeke’s life was perfect, and he had nothing to worry about. He had his family and friends around him, yet one morning late in June, he woke up feeling restless. The state of perpetual bliss, harmony, and happiness that Zeke had attained had suddenly turned into a deep sinking feeling he couldn’t quite explain even if he wanted to. This restlessness continued for days. It began bothering him so much that he stopped reading books and even stopped listening to his favorite music, which had always lifted his spirits.

Days turned to months, but the feeling of hopelessness never went away. Moonlit nights would come and go, and the magical amethyst would lie in one corner of his drawer, uncharged, unused, and almost unwanted. All of his crystals would lie unattended as well. He felt no motivation to clear his chakras or to meditate. He even stopped doing the Ho’oponopono practice. He could no longer feel his connection with his spiritual guides and angels. This feeling of loneliness and a divide with everything around him wasn’t an uncommon feeling for him, but the unease he felt this time was unmatched, different from anything he had felt before. Even though everything around him was perfectly fine on an apparent level, something inside him was wrong — seriously wrong.

Then one morning, all his negative thoughts, all his internal emptiness, started to manifest as he woke up, and a shocking bit of news awaited him. Coconut was missing. Zeke started feeling dizzy almost immediately after hearing the news, and he felt like he would faint. It was a feeling that lasted for quite a while. Maya had fed Coconut and put him to bed the night before, but when Leia checked on him in the morning, he wasn’t there.

Coco was really old and frail, and he had lived far longer than anyone could have hoped for, but they were sure he wouldn’t be able to walk too far on his own. They searched for him everywhere — in and around the house and throughout the neighborhood, but he was nowhere to be found. They looked for days but could find no trace of him. Coconut, their dog, a member of their family and Zeke’s constant companion since childhood, was gone and presumed dead.

Zeke had been through a lot of emotional challenges in his life. His journey towards a spiritual awakening hadn’t always been easy, but this trepidation was very different from anything he had ever faced. A strong premonition of an imminent change slowly surfacing from his core was getting the better of him. Was everything about to fall apart? Was he heading toward some sort of darkness? This sudden change in his thoughts left him terrified, far more so than anything he had ever faced in his physical life. But what he felt had very little to do with Coconut’s disappearance. His despair had been caused by a much darker and more malicious energy. Zeke felt the menacing presence of an old acquaintance — a being of pure evil, a being so unbelievably corrupt, it penetrated Zeke’s pure aura and sent him into a deep, downward spiral.

Everybody hoped and prayed that Coconut would come back home somehow. At that point, however, it would have been nothing short of a miracle. Nonetheless, something that concerned them more than that was the strangeness they observed in Zeke’s behavior. He had been a loner for most of his life, and his family and friends had learned to leave him alone when he wasn’t in the mood to communicate. Nobody really noticed the changes he was going through because no one could ever understand how deep they were. He felt the presence of true darkness for the first time in his life, and Coconut’s disappearance had taken this feeling of dread to a much deeper level.

“Holy Tony, look around. Coco’s lost and must be found!” he prayed earnestly night after night.

Coco unfortunately didn’t return, and Zeke’s sense of foreboding didn’t leave him. It stayed with him for months and eventually grew stronger, keeping him awake in bed and making him question the nature of good and evil as well as everything around him. Some days, the presence of dread he felt was so strong that he could feel it like a knife in his stomach.

The fear of death that he once held had now returned, and it grew larger, deeper, and darker with each passing day. He often felt as if the walls of his house had suddenly come alive and came closer and closer to choking him to death. It made him feel like he was losing his mind. He didn’t even wish to meet Zig, Zag, or Zoom anymore. He had applied to many colleges before graduation, but now he couldn’t even bring himself to open the response letters. He decided he wasn’t ready for his first year of college and the pressure that went along with it. Higher education would come in time, and he promised his father he would read tons of books in the meantime to keep his mind active.

“Good, because I didn’t want to fund your college education anyway,” Ben admitted openly. “Nevertheless, you will have to get a job.”

“I’m making money online, Dad. I have a small business, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. I will tell you that I’m developing a video game about space warriors, though.”

“Naturally,” Ben replied. “Where else would your mind live?”

Zeke just chuckled and said to himself, “If you only knew…”