Return Of The Knife Master

For the first time in almost ten years, all five Avengedmen stood in the same room together. The atmosphere was absolutely electric. It was better than any high any of them had ever experienced, and absolutely no time was wasted ransacking the singer's bar to begin celebrating. No one mentioned the time gap in their friendship, nor did they pose any questions for the first couple of hours, per Jimmy’s request; though they did share different things that had gone on for them individually. The feeling of having such an important part of their group back with them was indescribable and getting to relive some of their crazy stories again with the drummer was all a part of it.

About three or four beers and a couple of shots into the festivities, the five-some migrated their way outside to sprawl out in front of the gently tumbling waves and underneath the expansive black canvas of majestically twinkling stars. It wasn’t long thereafter that the conversation inevitably came back to the briefly suppressed topic at hand. The four words came from Zack, who instantly received an elbow to the stomach from the other guitarist.

"I'm gonna need more."

"We promised him we'd give him time," Matt said with a scowl over at the green-eyed man.

"No, it's ok. I'm not naïve. I knew we would have to get back to everything before the night was out," the drummer said, and plunked his half empty bottle down next to him. Lifting his hands, he gently brushed off the sand that had clung to them while he'd been absently running his fingers through the powdery granules a few minutes prior.

"And Jimmy said you have the best grasp on everything," Brian snorted.

"My brain is geared more towards the science end of things than a lot of people, but I'm still no Einstein."

"I'll do my best. Ask away.”

“Here, why don’t you start by having Zack decipher this cryptic, Jedi-Master type diagram!” Brian suddenly exclaimed and jumped up to fish through his pockets to find it.

“You brought it with you? Seriously?” the tallest friend mused with an airy chuckle now.

“Of course I did. Let me just find it. Hang on just a second…ha! Here it is!” he said with a smirk now. Walking across the sand, he thrust the paper into the rhythm’s hand in a borderline smug manner. “There you go, Sensi Einstein. Translate!”

“I’m not Einstein,” he groaned with a roll of his eyes, and settled back on his butt as the others huddled around the crumpled page. “You’re explaining the idea that you move outside of the constraints of time here?”

“As simply as I could, yes.”

“This is simple,” the younger man said. He took a moment to ponder his response as Matt, Brian, and Johnny’s eyes poured over the drawing like it was the Holy Grail. “Okay, yeah. So, if I’m understanding this right, this line is representing a timeline, right?”

“Yes. It represents how ‘time’ marches on. Forward in movement only.”

“Okay, so let’s say that line represents about seventy years, a typical lifespan. While everyone else is marching forward from birth to death, Jimmy is- well, being Jimmy,” Zack explained with a laugh now. “While everyone else is being boring, walking the straight line, Jimmy is doing life the Jimmy way. These circles represent the way he moves, but I’m going to switch this up so it makes a little more sense.” Taking his finger, he drew an invisible wavy line that climbed up, and dropped down, much like a roller coaster would. “This is Jimmy. Jimmy’s moving through life in a serpentine manner. He’s going in and out of time as we know it. Right?”

“Yeah,” he affirmed with a grin. What a relief it was that someone was beginning to get it.

“So for example, it took a little bit for Brian to get here, because he had an ass ton of questions to ask Jimmy, but yet the entire time, Jimmy was with each of us. It appears to have happened around the same time, but it’s not the case. Essentially, we’re born and raised to believe we can only do one thing at a time. We’re only moving forward. You can’t get any younger, and you can’t relive yesterday, because it already happened. You can’t live tomorrow, because it isn’t here yet. The crazy part about what Jimmy’s saying is; he doesn’t live life in a linear, sequential timeline like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The way he lives is that every day of the week is actually happening all at the same time; and moreover, every single year from the beginning to the end of the universe. Linear time says Jimmy can’t be in four places at once. The idea that time doesn’t actually exist, means that past, present, and future happens simultaneously. In that case, the serpentine diagram works to help illustrate that he bends ‘time’ by snaking between space and time, but it’s not really necessary.”

“Jimmy, have you ever gone forward enough in time where you’ve met Luke Skywalker?” Matt mused now. “I’m pretty sure that’s just Zack walking around with an alias.”

“Dude, that’d be sick!” Brian blurted.

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m pretty sure Skywalker is still fictional,” the drummer almost hummed, but sat back on his hands as he listened to Zack’s explanation.

“Think of it like a sandwich. You’ve got bread, cheese, and meat. It’s stacked on top of one another so it can be consumed at the same time. It’s that simple. Past, present, and future, happening all at once. The part that makes it a little more difficult to understand is that there are also layers to each ingredient. Best way to say it is each layer has an inner layer. For instance, the five of us are sitting on the beach now, in the present, right? But there are fifteen other houses on this street where people are hanging out, too. Earlier, I was talking to Jimmy at 6:45 in my backyard, but he was with Brian then too. He showed up around 7 when Johnny was blazin’ out by the old cemetery on a detour on his way to being unfashionably late to my house. And he showed up on Matt’s doorstep at 6:20. We are all one ingredient, the cheese, the present, but there are layers to the present. The four of us don’t know how to bend time and space, so we’re immovable pawns in the universe. But because Jimmy can do that, he’s not constricted to the linear timetable. He wasn’t in four places at once, he was just living his life all at once. Crazy, random, and as dramatically as he ever has,” with a small smile crawling up on his lips, the rhythm looked over at their friend and leaned close to bump his shoulder now. “Is that about the long and the short of it, Knife Master?”

“Knife Master? Fuck it’s been a long time since that term’s come up,” Jimmy laughed shortly at the mention of the more than decade old inside joke. “It really is circling, but for illustrative purposes, the serpentine explanation works. The sandwich analogy is about the best damn thing I’ve ever heard; I never would have thought to put it that way. That’s pretty much exactly the way it is.”

“Well, hey, I mean. You did used to joke you were going to run away and never comeback, but when you came back, you’d be the Knife Master!” Johnny quipped with a big ass grin plastered on his face.

"That was actually one of the Berry twins," Jimmy said with a quirky little giggle as he sat back further on his hands, at the same time the singer belted out in surprise at Johnny's words.

“Holy fuck, he’s awake!” Matt mused. “You were so damn quiet, I thought you were asleep! And you didn’t tell me you were going to the spot dude! I would’ve met you there. What did you do when Jimmy showed up?”

“He’s so fuckin’ short, he blended in with the sand!” Jimmy teased with a jab to the smaller man’s ribs now. “Ooh, you’ve gained weight since I saw you last!”

“Hey! Leave my rolls alone. I packed away a lot of beer to get those!” he scolded with a momentary scowl. “And I was baked as fuck, so when Jimmy opened the door and got in the passenger’s seat, I said, ‘Hey man, wanna hit?’ and we rolled and smoked about four more joints between us. What the fuck else do you think I would have done, Shadows?”

“Oh God; I forgot how fucking weird it is sitting in the same space as the two of you!” The singer groaned.

“Well, I’m sure he can circle his ass back into the days of the Oregon Trail, if you wanted him to,” Brian joked, and cracked open another drink.

“I hear the days of early man were quite entertaining!” the bassist snorted. “Those chicks were loud and dominant as fuck!”

“Hey, who’s side are you on, gnome?!” Jimmy nearly squeaked, having felt the need to cut his drink short mid-swallow and almost choked on some air that he subsequently swallowed.

“All jokes aside; I don’t fully get the mechanics of it, but I wish I did. I bet it’s fascinating,” the rhythm said with a sigh.

“Dude, I would kill to see what the women looked like back in the day. Maybe Paris, maybe Los Angeles, or hell, even the women back in the days of Pharaoh over in Egypt,” Johnny marveled.

“Johnny, I hate to break it to you, but the girls back in the day have way higher standards than they do now. It’s not going to happen!” the blue-eyed man said with a thunderous laugh.

“I was just about to say, you’d be having the same amount of sex in another era as you are now. NONE!” the singer bellowed practically in the younger man’s ear, then joined the drummer in hearty laughter.

“God, it’s so good to have you back, Jimmy. You don’t even know. I’m still pissed that you left but fuck it’s good to see you. I can’t say I’m not jealous of everywhere you’ve been. I bet it’s amazing, and I’d love to see even a fraction of what you have,” Zack said begrudgingly now.

“Well, I was going to keep it a surprise, but I kind of thought to make up for the time we’ve lost that I would show you guys some things I’ve seen…..”

“Wait, what?” Brian did a double take at his words.

“Dude, you can do that?!” Johnny shouted.

“No way! Are you serious?!” Zack belted out in complete and total disbelief.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m still having a seriously hard time believing all of this. Don’t get me wrong, I love you dude. I’m ecstatic that you’re back, but you have to see how much bullshit this sounds like. I’m over questioning my sanity, and I know you’re here, but all of this is pretty fucking insane,” Matt admitted.

“It is definitely a trip; no pun intended. How about we just agree to disagree tonight, and we’ll see what the morning light brings, huh?” the drummer offered with the tiniest of smirks. Not one of the guys had a clue as to what was about to become of them. And to say they weren’t prepared was the universe’s biggest understatement.