The Oblivious

Chapter Three: Premonition

        What is déjà vu?  Is it a feeling or an experience?  If it’s a feeling, then is it a good feeling or bad one?  If it is an experience, then why is it that it can’t be recorded?  Can you pinpoint, exactly, what makes a situation so familiar?  Why can’t you recreate the feeling by doing the same thing twice?  Is it possible to relive a future event? ...  Is déjà vu even real?

         These were the questions that Nathan struggled to answer ever since he was a teenager.  He had déjà vu so often that his life felt like it was playing itself backwards.  He found it strange that, as common as déjà vu was, no one had ever found any substantial answers as to why it happens.  Another strange occurrence was how commonly everyone learns to ignore it when it occurs.

         He attempted to make a record of all the dreams and daydreams he encountered, but the occurrences were so frequent and the descriptions were so ambiguous that the whole thing became ridiculous.  His notebook was filled with entries like, “June 15th: I had a dream of sitting at the kitchen table, reading my tablet, and eating a bowl of ‘Incredible Berry Bits’ cereal.”  Granted, the events weren’t significant, but they brought on feelings that were:  sensations of conviction, humility, and revelation.  Nathan’s search for an explanation of déjà vu eventually faded with his adolescence.  Like many young people, he found comfort in an apathetic attitude towards life.

         Nathan was twenty-four, yet he still looked like a teenager.  He wore plastic thick brown-rimmed glasses.  He was a bit on the scrawny side and believed wearing baggy clothes concealed his skinny frame, which it didn’t; instead it made him look like a fourth-grader who hadn’t grown into his clothes.

         His brother, on the other hand, never experienced déjà vu, nor could he relate to it.  Peter, like most older-brothers, communicated with physical force, compelling Nathan to forget the subject altogether.

         As a child, Nathan would scream, “OW, PETER!  STOP PUNCHING ME!”

        Peter spoke with his teeth clenched together, “Shut up about your stupid dreams already.  People are gonna lock you up for sounding crazy.  Nobody knows the future.  Who cares, anyway?  Just let it go.”  Peter punched his little brother every time he mentioned it, administering hundreds of bruises over years to Nathan, for his incessant questions and rants about his premonitions.  Neither of them could have expected that those dreams were warning them of the grim future that they were living in now.  Sitting in the bunker, Nathan had to confront the subject of déjà vu all over again, trying to piece together how his family knew that all this would happen.

         A few years before the eruption, Uncle Harken bought this property from a miner after the coal industry turned belly-up.  The major oil companies invested in extracting natural gas, and then flooded the market with a cheaper energy than coal.  Coalmines were shut down and replaced by underground shale fracturing, or as they called it, “fracking.”  

         Consequently, the land was cheap and secluded.  Uncle Harken, along with other family friends, built several cabins on top of the old mining property.  They became a community of people who wanted to escape from the unnecessary pressures of the world, abandoning the consumerism of corporate America, and leaving society to its own pointless politics.  But even before they all moved out there, they were already a very close-knit group of people.  These were the people who watched each other’s children grow up; Peter and Nathan played with their kids and slept over at their houses.

         Nathan’s parents were the last ones to have their cabin built and then move onto the property.  It was always their intention to eventually quit their jobs and settle down, however they didn’t anticipate that their retirement would end so abruptly.  On the day of the volcano blast, Nathan’s parents invited everyone to come over for a house warming party.  Their house was full of their old friends, along with their children; turning the party into a reunion.  Their last moments were in celebration of a new home, an ending that Nathan thought to be poetic.