You'd look funny
In nuttin but hunny,
But I believe I'd like you that way.
All true
All true acts
Displacement:
Oscillation of amplitude
bip bah bip bah bip bah bip
Rising
Falling
Breath on the calm sea
Breathing
All true acts of Creation are
Born out of sickness ~ turmoil ~ disease
Psychic distortion and the sweet smells
Of sweat and malarial dreams
All true
All too true
In an act
In one act of supreme sublimation
Explains a lot, don't it?
All structure all
structural works of a certain formal
small structure clerks of a
short stature all works of a
contained formalism and restraint
are extremely divergent, but
text and syntax, being
less important than stability,
Hervé bow down before more
regular constraints
straints straints
saints aints
ts ssss.
Nota bene: "The syntax of the arts and of discourse is, as we know, extremely varied; but what we discover in every work of structural enterprise is the submission to regular constraints whose formalism, improperly indicted, is much less important than their stability; for what is happening, at this second stage of the simulacrum-activity, is a kind of battle against chance; this is why the constraint of recurrence of the units has an almost demiurgic value: it is by the regular return of the units and of the associations of units that the work appears constructed, i.e., endowed with meaning; linguistics calls these rules of combination forms, and it would be advantageous to retain this rigorous sense of an overtaxed word: form, it has been said, is what keeps the contiguity of units from appearing as a pure effect of chance: the work of art is what man wrests from chance."
The lens thins, sublimes.
I-the-eye, collector of stray contemporary relics,
Shared, pooled; practitioner of the Art of reassembling
The Symbol itself, flower arranger, subconscious
Lingual emission transmogrified, open channel
For the dissonance of the vital generation:
Desire receding beyond arm's length, dissociated
Voice without a mouth.
I'm absorbed within paper: endings, beginnings.
The human chromatogram: ascents, descendings.
Some substance akin to cobweb language a-seethe beneath
Assembled structure, kicking at the underpinnings.
The concepts are exhausted at conception. Prospero
Prospered when he fathomed the phosphorescent totality
Of all that was always immanent -- an inflexional
Transcendence of the limits of intrusive narcissistic
Architecture and art's telegraphy --
Modernity's desperate rush at Ego.
Blood pools within
An organ. Orange.
Blood-orange. The
Trinity. Set Theory.
Intersection (or
Union?) of the human
And the divine?
Let loose the blood
Of the lamb.
Cracking crab legs, soon he was
thinking how latter-day inhumanity is armored in the
starched shirt uniforms of lobotomized administrators,
goose-stepping legions armed and credentialed behind their
MBAs and professional certifications,
reassuring proof of their honorable intentions when they
lay awake at night alone with their
infantile doubts and dreams of falling, and in the
swollen and pasty, judgmental faces like
green, fluorescent, bilious moons rising from the
hallowed, billowing robes of courthouse orthodoxy,
and in the thunderous counsel of compliance
and acceptance of the status quo advocated from every
monotonous and unimaginative pulpit throughout the
fading land. Inhumanity painted into every sinister,
frozen smile greeting you, scrutinizing you for any
sign of weakness, and locked into the mystic mantra beat of
We've always done it this way.
We require a new kind of liberalism, he thought, not
like the unthematic monstrosity we've had for the
last thirty years, not assembled Frankenstein-wise from
disjointed, unrelated parts. A new liberalism that's genuinely
concerned with global economic disparity,
emotionally connected, empathic. We must all feel
and know without question, as axiomatic, that every hungry
human belly must and will be fed. That's the only
tonic that can cure the spiritual blight. There are to be
no more commercials -- our shame! -- about
starving children, ever. And every
human mind in every corner of the world must be fed.
This is the human duty. This too must be recognized as
fundamental. Unquestionable. But we must
no longer be satisfied with fighting the symptoms of the diseases
of poverty, hunger, and dyseducation, but we must identify
their root causes, and labor tirelessly to eradicate those causes.
We need a new kind of universal compassion that trumps
every vestige of nationalism, that recognizes
shared humanity across the borders that delineate
outmoded states, whose time in this shrunken world is
fading away.
"And here we are again, Mr. Palmer," his sissy-Shrink said, his high-pitched voice strangely out of kilter with his long and limber frame. He inserted his key and pushed open the door. "The Greek Theatre." Reaching inside to palm the light panel he led the way in, Mason following behind.
The room, located in an anonymous suite forty floors above the New York hustle and bedlam, was unchanged. Uniformly pale, milky white light seemingly emanated from the enclosure itself. There were no corners, the round, cylindrical wall curving into gently rounded ceiling and floor. It was a muted luminescent egg of a room whose only visible features were the door, also white with a plain white knob, and the white light switch, and the small white leather sofa in the center of the floor.
This was ‑‑ what? The fifth, or sixth, time he'd been here.
He recalled his Shrink's faltering efforts at explanation several weeks ago.
"Consider the human experience in terms of phenomenology," the boy-man had lectured him. "The first-person I-consciousness is trapped inside a physical, biological body, bounded by its skin and pinched off from all the rest of the universe, isolated and alone. Perception and memory are all we have to tell us what is out there. Contrary to common belief, our consciousness does not directly experience external objects, but only perceptions and memories of external objects. In fact, we have no objective way of knowing what, if anything, really does exist out there. Our real-time experience of the world is no more than a continuous stream of incoming data, modulated waves propagating through our sensory organs, electrochemical impulses racing along networks of neurons intricately wired through pulpy flesh. Holographic analysis merely seeks to control those same vast internal neural networks, to tap into them and reassemble memories in new ways, in vivid ways that allow one to penetrate to the heart of symbolic meaning."
That had been two months ago. Now, today, his Shrink cleared his throat.
"I'm a little excited about today's session, I must admit, Mr. Palmer. The program downloaded a new upgrade last night. Improved tactility binding, and a few other chinks sealed. I scanned through the documentation this morning, but I haven't read it all yet. Looks promising. I'm hoping for a more authentic therapeutic session. You'll be my first client to try it out."
"Your first guinea pig," he said.
His Shrink chuckled and lightly patted him on the back.
"I'm sure it will be just fine. The experience should be more seamless than ever."
Mason frowned disapprovingly at the other man, clad in his usual jeans and beige turtleneck and fusty old gray plaid sport coat. He wore a trim brown goatee, but his neck underneath never seemed quite cleanly shaven. His beard was a continuing work in progress. His Shrink was young, mid-thirtyish, tall and lanky, with a thick shock of unkempt brown hair and closely-spaced black eyes that reminded him of Edgar Allan Poe. Whenever Mason looked at him, those dark eyes darted away and the man grinned nervously. If, as Mason suspected, his Shrink spent his off-hours alone in this room, it wasn't doing him any good. He was not a psychiatrist but a lay analyst, as he had made clear at their very first meeting. What that meant, Mason thought, was that he was a techy-geek PhD who liked to fiddle around with the Lancebourg Device, but he required a clientele to justify his grant. This was of no concern to Mason, who was not attending these sessions so his Shrink could get inside his head. He cared nothing about that. If he were progressing at all through his emotional issues, his Shrink's role beyond facilitator had been immaterial.
No. It was the magic of the machine that intrigued Mason.
"What we try to do here," his Shrink had told him during that first meeting, "is to help you come to terms with your personal human relationships in an absolutely controlled and psychologically safe setting. We're not about Freudian mother complexes or Jungian archetypes or any of that theoretical claptrap. Those methods may have their merits, but this is the twenty-first century, and who has time for all that dilly-dallying? Besides, and in all fairness, what insurance company should be expected to reimburse it? None. Exactly. In modern times we expect and deserve and demand timely returns on our investments, and that's precisely what holographic analysis delivers."
The man had blabbed away while Mason, nodding, tuned him out. It was mere formality of the orientation session. Naturally he would never have sought out this kind of experimental therapy without first conducting a good deal of research on his own.
He probably understood the theory of holographic analysis at least as well as his Shrink did. The Lancebourg Device was essentially a triple fusion of a giant superconducting positron emission tomography scanner wired up to a supercomputer and the proprietary soul of the device, an array of GyBMaLLEs. Concealed behind the room's white walls, these Gyro-Balanced Magnetic Laser Lithographic Engravers targeted the patient's optic and auditory cortices with extraordinary accuracy and precision. According to the user's manual, which Mason had downloaded and assiduously scrutinized, holographic analysis allowed the patient to conjure up a profoundly vivid mental reconstruction of a person with whom he had a history of inter-social dysfunction. These realistic reconstructions evolved and improved over time, and were subject to exquisite control: stop, rewind, freeze-frame, replay, and so forth. Under the careful supervision of a mental health professional, remarkable revelations involving a patient's heretofore mental sparring partner could be achieved. Understanding followed. The insights gained could be applied directly in actual human-to-human interaction or, if the vexing relationship under analysis had been terminated, then the patient could at least resolve outstanding trauma and move forward down his own life-path ‑‑ or so the manual averred.
The phenomenon of face recognition was illustrative. It was unnecessary to dredge up a perfect image of a person from the vaults of memory as though it were a frozen icon in one's mind. Memories were not solid objects like photographs but manipulated, representative symbols. The Lancebourg Device did not function in discrete terms because the human mind did not deal in static chunks of information, but instead juggled relationships between scattered memory fragments. You recalled certain general features, and then the mind built upon this base-memory, adding details, refining, rejecting what was inadequate, enhancing smaller details, increasing resolution, all without you knowing what your brain was doing. The Lancebourg Device piggybacked onto that natural process and brought it into sharper, conscious focus.
Holographic analysis was about feedback: PET scan to GyBMaLLEs to PET scan to GyBMaLLEs. Read/write/read/write, with memory amplification. Mason had grasped this immediately.
"Well, you know the drill. Have a seat on the couch, Mr. Palmer, and in a few minutes we'll begin." His Shrink nodded and turned, pulled the door closed behind him. A soft thump pulsed through the room with a slight feeling of pressure on his eardrums, and the outline of the door disappeared into the ubiquitous white on white.
Mason sat down. He leaned his head back.
He hadn't needed his pretentious, prissy Shrink to try to impress him with theories of phenomenology. He'd learned all he needed to know about that from James Joyce. It occurred to him then that maybe that was all Ulysses was about. Space, and movement through space in time. Motion. Changing velocities. ds/dt. Multiple points of view of external phenomena. A mild version of relativity, even. Parallax. Perception and memory. Even Leopold Bloom's cat, he thought. Was that the significance of that scene, with old Bloom wondering how a cat perceives the world? Was clever Joyce signaling in that scene the whole point of his massive dismantling of perceived objects and their relationships during a single day? Networks of sparking neurons negotiating the lightless interior of a cat. . . .
"Okay, Mr. Palmer," came his Shrink's disembodied voice from the surrounding white globe, "we'll begin in a few moments. Try to calm your mind. Clear away all thoughts, and focus on the pattern before you."
The room dimmed around him, and presently a ruby-red design appeared floating in the air a few feet before his eyes, a thin geometrical drawing like the petals of a daisy. He focused his attention on it. It served as a mandala to draw his awareness to a point and forestall other random thoughts and visions.
"Very good, Mr. Palmer," his Shrink's voice said. "Stay focused."
He began to sense the familiar field accruing around him. It was not a tingling sensation, but a boosting of consciousness and a clarification of the thinking process, as if gadfly trivia was being subtracted away, filtered out. It was a singular sensation, like being high and powerful.
"Okay. We've been working through your relationship with your girlfriend--"
"Ex-girlfriend."
"Yes, of course. Sylvia. Do you think you can. . . ."
It was routine now, requiring little effort on his part. He thought of her, and the image immediately began to manifest, life-size, in the air before him, replacing the mandala daisy. At first she was a hazy, milky ghost floating in the air, but his mind had learned how to surrender itself to the feedback process, and quickly the vague, fuzzy edges began to attain sharper focus. The noise started, too, the incessant whining, accusatory tone, although as yet he could not hear what she was complaining about; still, the intonations and inflections were immediately recognizable to him. The processes continued to its endpoint, and in no more than fifteen seconds a ghostly-white Sylvia-specter stood before him, semi-transparent, obviously wildly furious as ever, shaking her finger in his face, and he softly said the magic word: "Freeze," and she froze to stillness, her eyes glaring at him and her mouth wide open in mid-harangue. He marveled at the accuracy of the ghost-image, and as he always did, he brushed his hand through the apparition, testing it. His hand passed through it, feeling nothing, sensing no ectoplasmic chill. But the frozen image remained.
"That's fine, Mr. Palmer," his Shrink's voice said.
"I still can't believe I can freeze her like that," he said. "If I'd been able to do this in real life, it would have made everything a lot easier."
"Real life isn't subject to holographic control. The idea is to take what you learn here in the discontinuously-controlled environment and apply those lessons in continuously unfolding reality."
"Yes, yes. . . ."
But he didn't care about the psychobabble theory that his Shrink was trying to sell. He'd never cared about trying to better understand the relationship he'd had with Sylvia ‑‑ he'd understood it all too well. What he'd always wanted was only to do this: to freeze her in situ, not to have a deeper understanding with her, not to engage in meaningful conversation or give and take. All he had really wanted was to just make her finally shut up. And although she was only a ghost, a second-rate approximation of Sylvia-in-the-flesh, it was satisfying to see her at last frozen this way, locked inside her own madness, which was not raining down on him.
It was too bad she was a raging lunatic, he thought, because she did have certain appealing qualities; it was just that the madness and selfishness had overcome and obviated them all. He wished that it had been possible to cut away her uncontrollable fury and release the sane human he had known early in their relationship, who must still be cowering in there somewhere deep in her neurotic mind. But it was too late for that now, even had it been possible. Even restored to her earlier sanity, he would not want her now. He thought of a number of women he had known over many years, and he wished it were possible to take various appealing qualities from each of them, and to discard what was less desirable, and to reassemble all these best components into a brand new individual, one balanced, and bright, and lovely, and with a mind truly complementary to his own.
"I'm going to activate the new elements of the program," his Shrink said, and suddenly everything commenced to change.
It began with color. Sylvia's white ghost slowly began to take on color. The change, hesitant at first, was most apparent in her clothing. As the feedback-driven process advanced it picked up speed, the colors growing brighter and more fully saturated. The effect spread to her flesh, the finger in his face, and her eyes and face and hair beyond. As the intensity and subtlety of the shading became more perfect he realized that the transparent quality of the figure was falling away. He was astonished. She now looked like her own true, three-dimensional self, and at first he felt a sense of shock and trepidation, because it seemed that somehow the real Sylvia had been teleported inside the room. But she did not move; she remained fixed, motionless, exactly as he had frozen her moments before. The startling process of transformation came to an end. Somewhat fearfully, he reached his hand up to try to touch her finger in his face. He jerked his hand away.
It was real; at least, it felt real. Authentic Sylvia-flesh.
"Holy crap!" his Shrink's voice said.
Mason remembered the man had mumbled something earlier about improved tactility binding. Well, he thought, the upgrade had definitely achieved that. The GyBMaLLEs must have acquired substantially improved access to the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex. He wondered what other enhancements came with this update.
"Unfreeze," he said, and immediately Sylvia's tirade resumed where it had left off, only now she was more intimidating with a new physical dimension. He reached up toward her mouth and ran his fingers back and forth over her rampaging lips, feeling her stiffen in surprise. But to his surprise he saw that her lips had smeared. It was as if she had become a three-dimensional finger-painting, and now her mouth was smudged in a blur, and she was physically unable to talk. "Freeze," he said, and again she froze, and he considered what he had done.
"What have you done?" his Shrink howled.
He could control the feedback loop in a way he had not suspected before. He did not have to rely exclusively on memory. It could be a more creative process. He considered it for only a brief moment before setting to work.
He focused on the women he had been remembering earlier. Read/write/read/write, he thought. Feedback. Using the frozen-Sylvia as the starting template, like a blob of clay on a potter's wheel, he began imagining parts and pieces here and there removed, reformed, remade. And as he did so, the image before him began to change.
"What are you doing, Mason?" his now frantic Shrink demanded.
"Be quiet," he whispered, continuing with the sculpting process.
"I'm coming in there," his Shrink said.
"No," Mason said, "you're gone." And he imagined his Shrink out of the building and miles away, standing alone in the middle of a bleak desert in Utah. . . .
Now he could take his time.
He spent the rest of the day perfecting this new woman, this amalgam containing elements he had found attractive and charming in dozens of other women, adding other elements he had known only in his own imagination. Height: half an inch shorter than he; hair: long black ringlets; eyes: emerald green; measurements: 35"-23"-34"; legs: long, like so-and-so's; lips: thin, but well-defined, like so-and-so's; earrings: short silver semi-circles; skirt: white, an inch below the knee; blouse: black and white checks. . . .and so on. The woman who emerged resembled them all in certain ways, but none of them completely.
Her psychological composition was the most difficult part of the task. The last thing he wanted was a man's mind in a woman's body, but what could he possibly know about a woman's mind? So he started with Sylvia's mind, but now he was able to cut away her uncontrollable hostility. He stripped away her memories and gave her a brand new history, boosted her intelligence and wisdom, made her a happier creature less threatened by a world she barely understood, again incorporating insights and beguiling effects he had gained from other women over the years. Of course she required a new vocal register, and brand new speech mannerisms. . . .
When he was finished he leaned back on the sofa admiring his handiwork. She had everything but a name. Eve being too obvious, he decided she should be. . . .hmm. . . .Isabelle. And Isabelle she was.
Then he looked around the room. It wouldn't do to lose access to the Lancebourg Device. It could come in handy in the future. So he decided that Isabelle was his new Shrink. And that they had fallen in love. And that they need not live in the New York rat race any longer.
"Unfreeze," he said.
She came to life and smiled at him. Her eyes were twinkling.
"Your therapy has been successful, Mr. Palmer," she said. "You're cured."
He smiled back as he stood up.
"Call me Mason. And if I'm cured, then we need no longer worry about rigorously adhering to an ethical doctor-patient relationship, right?"
"I suppose you're right. . . .Mason."
"In that case, let's get dinner and drinks. I'm buying."
"That sounds just fine," she said.
She opened the door and the usual thump of pressure equalization followed. They moved out onto the iron-railed walk behind the building. The lush green trees of Savannah's Emmet Park were spread all around them in the late afternoon twilight. He put his hand in hers and they walked down to the smooth cobblestones at street-level, making for the riverfront. He inhaled the clean air deeply and felt the soft quiet settling in as she leaned into him.
For the first time in months, he felt completely relaxed.
Arabella the wonder hog
Clad in stockings and swilling grog
Chats all day with chickens and geese, then
Spills the beans to
Redneck policemen
Arabella the wonder pig
In gold lamé and platinum wig
Consorts with forces from the underworld
Then joins the beauty parlor gossips, freshly
Washed and curled
Arabella the wonder swine
In her Easter bonnet she's looking fine
Blocks the exit in the church foyer, then
You find the butcher's dispatched your
Second cousin
Arabella, how she squeaked and squealed
Them as knows keeps their thoughts concealed
Justice delayed may strike with a fortuitous slam
Rendering the blackest apostate a luscious
Christmas ham
Generations of men and women with
Best intentions in their hearts accomplished
Extraordinary evil throughout these lands, but
Spanish moss shags down thick from overhanging,
Hoary live oaks whose gossipy roots
Interdigitate and synapse below the underbelly of
America's gently dreaming mind.
This is the cluttered basement housing
All of our best dreams. This is the wellspring out of which
All embryonic, great notions trace their germinal headwaters.
This is magic's voodoo beauty that can't be denied, that
Can't be conjured into any physical form without the
Breaking of hearts and
Concordant disturbance of our cherished
Genealogical ghosts from their white marble mausoleum temples,
Their ageless voices whispering to us,
Sometimes trumpeting, in
Unintelligible murmurings.
This is the primeval collective unconsciousness of the slumbering
American mind.
We've ventured far into that foreign land
That lies beyond the perimeter of words, where
The dazzle and sizzle and razzamatazz of neurotransmitters
Prompts wondrous strange flowers to bloom, where
Time's unpeeled and rivers enter oceans, violent
In their meniscal conflicts. Madness' abyss
Opens up unexpectedly at our feet, and we must say
(As all artists must say when eternity
Yawns its bejeweled maw at them):
Alleluia! The
Beginning times are near.
Another star shatters, isosceles points
Rain down, dangerous as glass knives.
Looking up in startled reaction, the
Slender neck's exposed.
Jugular.
Re-dreaming another's dream,
Falling between the spaces
Between words, as if the script
Slipped. Promethean, bound
On New York stage in chromed
Steel bands, seeking out the
Subtle variations in motivations,
Error shifting, multiplying,
Interfering reflections, all faces
Bleed into two: Adam, and Eve.
For twenty years Erasmus Woodruff was a spectral disbeliever.
This doubt, among others, was a conviction inextricably linked to his technical, scientific inclinations, no doubt. Logic and science, while ultimately anchored to fundamentally unprovable assumptions, at least led to consistent explanations and expectations. Faith and mysticism, on the other hand, substituting for rational thought, could support any constellation of propositions, no matter how mutually inconsistent they might be.
But his reflexive rebuffing of legendary hobgoblins and gremlins and all things that go bump in the night began to depreciate ‑‑ slightly ‑‑ when Jo, a former friend of his, a reliable witness, conceded to him how she'd encountered ghosts a few times in her own life, now and then, over the years.
There was, for example, the strange report of a visitation transpiring one sunny afternoon when Jo, alone at home, thinking she'd heard a noise in the family room, emerged from the kitchen to discover her incorporeal mother fussily tidying up the den, feather duster fluttering diligently as the elderly woman hummed happily to herself some tune or other popular in the late 40s. The unexpected intruder's amazed daughter froze in her tracks and watched this spectacle for several moments before the apparition, with carefree insouciance, faded back into the nothingness from which she'd recently emerged.
Less than an hour later Jo received a telephone call from her agitated father, eight hundred miles westward in California, who reported that the elderly woman had passed away earlier in the day.
Jo told her story without boasting or grandstanding, and indeed she seemed just as surprised by the event as anyone would be to hear it related.
Of course this hearsay assertion did not unequivocally settle the matter for Erasmus; on the other hand, Jo was a reliable source. At a minimum the incident suggested to him that certain ummm parameters by which he assumed reality was circumscribed might profitably be reconsidered and, possibly, extended. He could not reject the basic postulates of cause and effect that governed the physical world, but the nature of time itself seemed less concrete to him.
Take positrons, for example. He knew positrons could be explained quite accurately as electrons retrograding the time stream.
If electrons could do it, why not more complex objects?
Souls (for want of a better word) in heightened states of emotional extremity making psychic connections across vast distances between reciprocal, attuned brains? Human minds broadcasting and receiving like hypothalamic radios?
Maybe something like that. Maybe. Like those stories of lost dogs doddering along for years across vast stretches of desert wastelands (heavily calloused footpads and matted yellow fur) only to show up against all statistical explanation at their long-lost masters' doors ‑‑ where they'd never been before.
Magic? Ghostly, psychic tendrils?
Humbug.
Erasmus never dwelt on this sort of metaphysical conundrum. In fact, on this particular April morning (the cruelest month, he dredged up from some deep place in memory) that dawned twenty-eight years after Jo had told him her fairy tale ‑‑ years and years since he'd thought about Jo herself at all ‑‑ nothing could have been further from his thoughts than tabloid fables of mental telepathy and kindly guardian spirits. All Erasmus was really contemplating was great mounds of human refuse, the broken and useless fragments of abandoned dreams that tended to accrue over failed lifetimes, and the secret little treasures they might, just might, every now and then, conceal.
The usual crowd was collecting in the early hours of dawn: frumpish, middle-aged gray people mostly in their decades out-of-fashion garments with a colorless neckerchief here and there or a shapeless dun-brown hat to keep the morning chill off. Approximately equal numbers of men and women mulling along the paved alley close between the low brick rows, vaults of catastrophe, desperation and pain, most of them at least a little pudgy, many of them a good deal more than a little, red-eyed and groggy, several sipping from cardboard cups of steaming bad coffee. By and large going to seed, or already gone. He hung back, slumping against a dirty wall, watching them stirring a few feet away, milling about and gazing at the ground. A few mumbled grunts of recognition at each other, but talk was token, authentic conversation nonexistent. They all knew each other or, rather, recognized each other. They worked the circuit, and they were competitors. No real opportunity for friendship. Or desire.
They were treasure hunters. Unrealistic optimists.
Dreamers.
Remembering abruptly and unaccountably Werner Meschgat from three spaces down, that lunatic would-be UFO videographer, that kabbalistic numerologist and dull pedagogic Northumberlandian medieval bestiary lexicologist and notorious paint huffer, the formula from Hermes Trismegistus' infamous Emerald Tablet crossed his mind then.
As above, so below.
The mystical realm co-mapping onto a local system of material coordinates, like a hardwired, direct landline link to God in His Heaven: that was the lunatic, esoteric, phantasmal eigenstate-crowded world that Werner Meschgat longed to inhabit.X.X.X.
All this around them then paradise in disguise? Hmmm.X.X.X.All systems of dynamic equilibrium are bound by unsuspected encumbering, enclosing schema? Exotic machinations of biochemical logic, for example, to lock in barbaric fringe-oriented outliers, keep them from bolting for the hills of sanity, drawing in the constraints narrow and tight with all the authority of gravity? Too little insulin and your plasma runs sweeter than Mum's apple pie; too much and the cells suck the hollowed out dendritic anastomoses dry dry dry.X.X.X.Meschgat's insular mind dwelt in a desert wilderness located well outside the main sequence burn of stellar intersocial lifestyles. Not like these lumbering, bumbling gray bidders on the corpses of dreams. Not like them at all.
The auctioneer, a tall, stiff, rail-thin, bald Methuselain they knew as Bill, arrived with the proprietor of Famous Jerry's Self Storage. Jerry was dumpy and beet-faced, waddling along in flip-flops, shorts, an untucked Hawaiian shirt, and already with a nasty green stogie wedged between his thick yellow ivories. Jerry also carried an enormous set of bolt cutters. Antediluvian Bill consulted the clipboard he carried and then looked over the ragtag group, which began to move in closer together, calm and orderly like a small herd of cattle anticipating the morning feeding.
"Looks like no newbies here today," Bill muttered without enthusiasm, "so I'll dispense with the rules. You folks know how this works. We'll be auctioning off the contents of seven abandoned lockers this morning. You pay the settled price plus the twenty percent fee." He turned to Jerry. "Shall we begin?"
Fat, Famous Jerry waddled up to the first electrifying horde. Deftly wielding his calamitous and invasive red-handled instrument like a medieval knight of old, he courageously clipped off the padlock that had kept these secrets from mortal eyes for the contractually requisite twelve months of unpaid rent. Then, inclining destiny's low-carbon steel splitter against the side of the palatial cinderblock ramparts, with one heaving exertion Sir Gerald rolled up the louvered metal door along its ceiling track, and from outside these long-questing gadabouts beheld the storm wracked dross of yet another forsaken chapter of human history stuffed inside: two much-stained and sagging mattresses (the customary thin blue stripes on time-yellowed white), some battered end tables, a half dozen lampshades inexplicably divorced from their lamps, a dusty stand-up vacuum cleaner, a few large, cheap, murky framed prints, a colossal keypad telephone like no one had used in three decades, various bulging and splitting cardboard boxes of assorted dimensions and denominations, four very large bags of cat litter, at least one of which was also split open and bleeding its gray contents in a fetching alluvial fan across the concrete floor, dozens and dozens of pregnant plastic grocery bags great with dozens and dozens of more crumpled plastic grocery bags, a smattering of girly magazines, four or five dead, inverted cockroaches in plain sight, limbs folded in silent and forgotten supplication to an unknown insect deity (who, nevertheless, had neglected to intervene and deliver them from their untimely demises), a wooden reindeer/magazine caddy, one unsightly antler irredeemably damaged, a green and turquoise world globe, a stainless steel banana tree, a collapsing stack of another era's board games, and dozens of cheap plastic toys scattered willy-nilly. Of course what was most intriguing was whatever might be concealed from view behind the mattresses, but rules is rules: the locker could only be entered by the winning bidder.
"Shall we start the auction at thirty-five dollars?" Bill proposed tiredly. Thus they commenced.
Afterwards, the day proceeded along its predictable, ordained tracks. Like the other prospective buyers here, Erasmus was far removed from the guts of the operation that so efficiently generated this kind of waste along society's dilapidated fringes. But unlike them, he definitely saw his role here in ecological terms. You're soaking in it, he thought. (His car had jumped the rails and plunged from the crazy roller coaster chute-the-chute a long time ago, somewhere between splitting, irreconcilable universes.) These auctions were a necessary spinoff of the kind of savage beetle-logic-society that had metastasized and bloated to fill out the swollen shell of this incipient twenty-first century. He saw the same things that everyone else saw but could not decipher, their decoder rings mass produced in the cereal mills that had cornered the profitable prophecy markets decades before. Too much fluoridation, probably. Brylcreem and Palmolive. None of this was supposed to have happened. Clearly.
Every small town's local stereo equipment assembly factory or insurance firm used to accrue institutional wisdom over the years as errors were resolved and learning took place, followed by implementation of policies that embodied that wisdom. But now, Erasmus thought, all that's been superseded by the institutionalization of least-common-denominatorism, the corporate headquarters located a thousand miles to the northeast forbidding any policy change, and all minds being periodically descaled through mandatory attendance at customer service indoctrination sessions in which we learn to embrace with joy our officialized mediocrity. They would enclose the world in an airtight dome, no beginning and no end. Every direction the same as any other. In a way, garbage abandoned in storage lockers is the real end product of the American manufacturing dream.
As a matter of fact, all modern history, he'd often reflected, is only the still unstaunched wounds the world suffered in the 40s.
The world's still badly bruised and mangled, blood still flowing from hundreds of unstaunched lacerations. Bones still broken, unknit, organ systems crashing, not in sync.X.X.X.Eyes bandaged and skin and flesh deeply burned and grape juice-stinky with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. It's just that the battering occurred so long ago that the poor, gaga patient's come to view his invalidity as normal. The status quo is violence-made-perpetual, authorized, notarized, licensed, stamped with bleary contusion-blue ink, formalized, state-sanctioned, approved, mandated under the law. Proscribed.X.X.X.Reconsider it from the perspective of a thousand years.X.X.X.Two thousand.X.X.X.Those first few post-War centuries clearly poisoned by impossible, untenable philosophies and political structures.X.X.X.
It reminded him (again! ‑‑ grrr.X.X.X.) of Meschgat, this time ranting about those beatitude-happy hippy monks in the time of Charlemagne, so obsessed with building up their massive libraries, only to have them all finally looted by barbarians so that all that remained was a tally of how many volumes had once been amassed together in one particular place or another that had never done anyone any good. Not even their titles or author names were preserved. And yet it had not all been for naught. Damned cold, those whiteout harte eingefroren Teiche winters. Many calories domiciled in inky vellum, just waiting to leap out in friendly licking orange flames.X.X.X.Or like Leopold relishing his cockcrow ritual-taking of Titbits. Up the chimney or down the loo, either way. Made him think of Arizona Western College. They used to call it A Wash Closet. Provincials never got the best jokes. Throw in a flat-headed blonde and a beer can and that changed everything though, har har har.
In the end it proved no more a lackluster auction day than any other ‑‑ and no less. It was the dream of a Great Discovery that kept them coming back, of course, the Royal Take, the Big Haul, but instead at the end of the day they'd all finally lug their dubious booty home and shuffle through their fairly-won rubbish, deciding where a minor profit might be attempted in another market, like the swap meet or eBay. Plenty of suckers out there: the only challenge was finding them. On this particular day Erasmus had not been inspired to post even a single bid until they'd come to the very last locker, by which time several of the regulars had already evaporated away. Only three bids were placed for this treasure trove, which he won for seventeen dollars, plus the service fee. Now, in late afternoon's dim light, Erasmus sat at the cramped lemon yellow melamine table in his trailer with his long fingers wrapped around a lukewarm can of beer, scratching his scraggly chin and gazing with apathy at the contents of the two shabby cardboard boxes he'd brought home. He was reflecting remorsefully how he'd blown another twenty bucks, and he was wondering vaguely what he'd ever done to have his life reduced to this level of animal-like existence.
But.X.X.X.
But there had been something strange about that last locker: something the others hadn't picked up on. A vibe, maybe. An aura. Not mystical, but.X.X.X.A mystery. Not to overstate it, but.X.X.X.Someone had been paying fifty dollars a month for a pair of cardboard boxes and a lava lamp?
Of course, there had probably been more junk crammed in there once upon a time, but it had all been carted away before the owner decided to skip out on his rent. Still.X.X.X.If you were going to take everything else, why leave just these few items behind?
Probably a meth freak, he thought. Druggies do crazy things.
He sipped his beer and cast his thoughts backwards. He'd paid his money and entered the locker. Closer inspection revealed the lava lamp wasn't exactly a lava lamp, but more of a lava globe: some kind of thick, clear plastic sphere filled with a translucent, slightly amber-colored oily fluid, mounted on a brushed bronze base with a long electric cord trailing out. It put him in mind of kitschy objets d'art from the early 70s that featured early, crude forays into fiber optic technology, although for some reason he thought this device seemed older than that. Reaching down, he'd opened the first box, which proved to be stuffed full of old issues of Science.
Now, back at home, he frowned, considering how the Science magazines were odd, out of place. Not exactly the sort of thing you might expect even a freaked out meth hotrailer to keep in storage. And what was in the other box? He hadn't bothered to check back at Famous Jerry's, but it was heavy and the contents moved around like books. He reached over and unfolded the flaps. Books, sure enough, looked like text books, and on top of them, some kind of typed manuscript. He reached in and removed the loose pages, about thirty or forty, he guessed. And actually typed, not spooled out by an inkjet printer. What was it? Some sort of technical article? He studied the title.
DISTRIBUTED MINDS: A GENERALIZED HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM FOR THE METEMPSYCHOSIS PROBLEM. Robert C. Eppel, Ph. D.
Gibberish.
He set the manuscript aside on the junk-cluttered table and began pawing through the box. Textbooks, as he'd guessed. They were technical, college-level, primarily concerned with physics and optics. None of them looked less than twenty years old.
A not too surprising discovery. His investment was a complete bust.
He picked up the manuscript again and flipped back to the references at the end. None later than 1962.
What is this crap?
Once again he turned to the front of the article. He started picking through it, here and there. He found a good deal of talk about wave interference patterns and discrete neurological quantum vectors and sensory wave frequency tuning and Fourier transformations of cognitive matrices. From here the paper progressed to consideration of quantum mechanics and the great divide between the Copenhagen Interpretation and Hugh Everett's relative state proposals, but these matters were mentioned only briefly before Robert C. Eppel, Ph. D., began to spell out, with only marginal citations or experimental support, a notion of something he called "a universal witness with self-conscious nodes" which, he seemed to suggest, operated with quasi-independence within individual sentient minds.
Erasmus put the beer can down and dropped the manuscript on the table, a few of the top sheets falling free to feather-flutter down to the floor.
It was all just junk. An unpublishable personal cosmological freakout. Robert C. Eppel was a complete crank.
Over the next few hours Erasmus drank several more beers and looked at a double feature of lousy 50s monster movies on TV. The jumbled plots precluded anyone from actually watching the shows. They went far beyond laughable.
It occurred to him that many, many years had passed since he had last laughed a sincere and wholesome belly-rocker laugh at anything absent an undercurrent of bitterness and regret. An odd, sooty blackness had infected his soul ‑‑ no doubt about it: an infiltration of tiny, strangulating black carbonized flecks. Blinds closed early against any divulging rays of prying, gossipy sunlight. He was the dark sheep standing at some little distance removed from the flock. Blind, barely aware bleaters stupidly grazing. But probably not so unlike many of his own age, he thought. Meanings and significance broke down under the accrual of minor treasons and betrayals through the years. It was a slowly erosive process that gradually exposed soft purposelessness lying drooping and wilted beneath. So easy to mock and dismiss these irresponsible ones, cast them to the wolves, or just to the bloody dogs, abandoned on the bleak access roads with their hand-printed bits of cardboard, whispers for slightest crumbs of aid, for connection.
Can't recall that all those people once were happy, hopeful children too, faces shining, same age as we were, clean-scrubbed with mother's too cold sink water, just like the stressed out family man coming home from his hated job in his long, sleek, spotless dark car, eyes fixed straight ahead, feigning blindness like all the other sheep.
He did not much like himself. Aging had made a slob of him as ineffectual as the shabby, slouching monster-blobs on TV.
Sunday morning blues. The TV set was still belching white noise when he awoke on the tiny sofa surrounded by six beer cans, one of them still half full. His mouth felt stuffed with cotton balls. His thoughts could not connect up.
Deep purple light still hugging the world outside the curtains, he saw. Grunting and grumbling he stirred, scratching conducted out of the public eye. His spine was compressed and curled and stiff. Make a cup of tea and eat a bowl of microwaved cream of wheat, like a fresh bowl of steamy hot wallpaper paste. Like Paul said: just another day. No need to rush things. The pieces would reassemble themselves.X.X.X.eventually.
In a little while he caught himself envisioning, or recalling ‑‑ vaguely ‑‑ little scenelets from yesterday's auction. It got him reflecting on the use of words as a lubricant to move actions along. Action/auction. Advancing. Like the stylized jargon of the auctioneer that's required to facilitate the exchange of cash for worthless relics. Which particular words are used are seldom, if ever, of more import than their cadence. Mumble-chanting in a religious ceremony. Funerals. Interment. Blah blah. Weddings and births. All that same old same old.
He thought how words never define but only adorn objects or situations, Yule tinsel hanging there suspended between people ‑‑ all of them strangers, really, every last one Other-infected interlopers down to the bone, the marrow core. Word-jewels like nacreous haloes mistily reflecting certain physical aspects of perceptions weighed and assessed to the nth degree and deemed worthy of mentioning, or perhaps only vocalizing in a clipped, noncommittal grunt. Is all talking, he wondered, all writing ‑‑ cheap, seamy romances, musty-dusty archaic literature ‑‑ is it all mental embroidery, Broca's nucleus (or whatever the hell it's called) madly pounding away at the ivories, mad to keep up with the deluge of sensory data instreaming? The climatology of the mind, neural nets awash in raging hurricanes of ‑‑ not data, exactly, but ‑‑ well, noise shot through with tar baby clusters of chance coherence?
It's not orderly information but chaotic tides of interwoven phenomena and static electricity-bound epiphenomena, galaxies beset by swarming bee-hordes of saucy zany atomic orbital whizzing globular star clusters, the subtle shadings of color for relief, the powdery spectacle of pastels sliced together side by side by side by side, and the nuanced scents tuned to evolution's deftly calibrated olfactive palette, like the mélange of smoldering sage or faint breaths of pine on a rapidly cooling, paling sky mountain night well above citymen brainfog and lung polluting jungle smog. It all cascades, continuous, breaking, seeping in, and jazzy-mouthed people, rattle-a-tattling, throwing words out like nets at it all, more holes by far than threads.X.X.X.
He ended up back at the midget, lurid, saffron-banana-colored table again with its creepy hints of predatory bird heads (or nightmare pterodactyls?) peeking out through the late 60s reiterative mandala pattern of tiny circles and cones barely visible here and there through all the rubble he'd deposited and forgotten over the years ‑‑ piles of papers, receipts, a pocketknife, a hammer, six or seven yellowing paperbacks with splitting covers (the whole trailer was absolutely stuffed with books in no order whatsoever; he relied on a system of absolute knowing to find any object he might seek or need or desire: a system which worked better for some classes of objects, like books, than for others, like bills), several entropy-drained batteries, double- and triple-As (few of them ever used.X.X.X.metaphor, metaphor.X.X.X.), a reminder card for a doctor's appointment missed long ago, a spindle of about fifteen CDs he'd burned once containing something or other (music? pictures? tax information? no knowing), a broken piece of white-transparent quartz crystal about the size of his palm, unopened bills, unopened letters, handfuls of pens that wouldn't write anymore and crummy pencil stubs, a small stack of three by five index cards (blank), a roll of clear strapping tape in its bright red sharp-edged dispenser, and of course the fortune he'd won at Famous Jerry's the day before ‑‑ and he fired up the ol' pc, hulking on the other side near the closet-sized kitchen. Hmmm.X.X.X.During the night he'd received an email from Todd, a friend he'd never met. Todd lived in North Carolina. Their virtual paths had crossed a few years earlier when Erasmus had been out of work and, on a whim, he'd begun killing time exploring genealogy online. To his surprise, it had turned into a compelling obsession for him, tracking down the stories of unknown ancestors. Often enough it was like rediscovering lives that had been sadly cast overboard and abandoned to history.
Todd said:
"Hi Erasmus.
"It's been a while. I seem to pursue this hobby in fits and bursts and last year was more of a fit. There are times with little effort, I am deluged with information that for years have eluded me. Then there are other times that I hit a cold trail such as the case with both the Anthonys and Woodruffs.
"We'll probably never lay to rest the identity of Tom Woodruff's father. You are probably correct in that he was buried somewhere on the family farm with a wooden marker, long decayed, in MO or on a trail between TN and MO. But my immediate question is: are we satisfied that Mrs. Davis really was Mrs. Woodruff before? Can we safely conclude that the widow Woodruff married old man John Davis and that the mixed family was enumerated by a census taker too lazy to properly separate the Woodruffs from the Davises in Nebraska?
"I'm not diving full into this again by any means, just trying to engage my living relatives for any information including family lore. Although lore is at best a version of the truth, it is all we have and adds a bit of color and life to ancestors. They will be gone soon and so will the lore.
"ttyl."
Erasmus didn't want to dive full back into the matter either. All the leads had dried up. But the email did get him thinking about the problem again as he puttered around the trailer that morning. In a little while he settled back down in front of the old computer, whose thick black devilfish cables were an ensnarled tangle looping and furcating over much of the top of the table, its side loosely tacked to the wall with rattling machine screws, the power cords plastic-tied down along reinforced spindly trestle legs. He inserted a disk and reviewed his records, struggling to concentrate and get it all in his head again. Todd and he had successfully traced the lines back as far as Thomas Woodruff's birth in northwestern Missouri: 13 January 1846; his mother had remarried a man named Davis a few years later, and over the next fifteen-odd years the combined family had lived at various times in southern Iowa, Nebraska Territory, and in the vicinity of Kansas City, where confederate sympathizers were being lynched in their own front yards and their household goods plundered by Jayhawker raiders by the early years of the war. Erasmus and Todd had learned all about Tom's war service (enlistment: 8 November, 1862; mustered into 2nd Nebraska Cavalry, Company E: 8 December 1862; enlistment: 3 August 1864; mustered into Missouri Volunteer 43rd Regiment Infantry: 22 September 1864; saw action at Booneville: 9, 12 October 1864, Brunswick: 11 October 1864, Glasgow: 15 October 1864; 43rd Regiment Infantry attached to District of Central Missouri operating against guerrillas in the District of Central Missouri: April-June 1865; saw action at the Affair of the Little Blue River: 11 March 1865; skirmish at the Star House near Lexington: 4 May 1865; mustered out at Benton Barracks: 30 June 1865). They knew all about the family Tom sired in Kansas after the war, and whom he later abandoned, walking out on them one lonely Wichita night. Later they'd located poor old Tom's place of death at the National Military Home in Leavenworth, Kansas (died: 3 February 1919). He was buried in the Leavenworth National Cemetery.
His mother's first name was Nancy, maiden name unknown. His father's first name they never learned. Tom's parents and grandparents were born in Tennessee.X.X.X.
Erasmus was sitting at the table, staring at the big fat computer monitor staring at him, lightly tapping his thumbs on the edge of the table. Tom Woodruff was like a vagabond Tom Sawyer, Erasmus thought. They could never push back to Tom's father to reach the earlier generations. Tom was the wall: the big Dead End. Do not pass Go.
Barricade across the past.
He felt his senses returning to his body from wherever they'd just been, faintly vibrating solitudinarians in deep space. He looked around the cluttered, messy trailer, seeing it for just one second with new eyes.
Junk everywhere. Dirty clothes. Clean clothes draped here and there, needing folding and put away. Dirty dishes. Clean dishes still out by the tiny sink. How could he explain to anyone these things he could never explain to himself? Lies and compromises. Rationalizations. Life inside one's head.X.X.X.
Tom's broken life wasn't the only big Dead End.
Sometimes, now and then, he wondered whether it was possible they could be right ‑‑ whether they just might, all of them, be right. Strength in numbers.X.X.X.If it were better finally to surrender to the socioeconomic snares and pitfalls, loosen one's heroic grip, let go of scruples, let go, slip and float away down the bubbly stream. Let one's meddling family members and friends so-called and a myriad of other shady strangers determine all one's choices. Embrace the popular roboticism. Hello. How are you? Nice day, isn't it? The weather we've been having. Did you hear.X.X.X? Did you see.X.X.X? Worship a God who demanded sacrifices one could never make, folding hands solemnly, bowing heads, wry, secret smile. Acknowledge the moral superiority of the government, all the time mocking it. Be a chip before history's guttling flood. Is this how Noah felt? Easy, that life? He couldn't possibly see how. But more respectable. Oh yes. And that had value: no denying the obvious. Happy happy moocows. Why tyranny in familiarity?
Too sensitive. Think too much. But.X.X.X.That was the most perplexing part of it. Easy? He noticed he was staring at the lava lamp that was not a lava lamp. Sphere. Dome. Globe. Optics. Where? Yesterday's auction. The junky techno-freak, or whatever he was. A fellow, fraternal head-liver, or society's detainee? Either? Both? Who? What? Science geek.
He thought: Ah, we're all on drugs: they're called neurotransmitters and hormones and micronutrients and electricity, burning, burning, like an angelic, luciferin-fulgent B-52 bomber made all of magnesium self-immolating in sacrifice brighter than the sun, streaking down its shallow arc in slow motion toward the blue green earth below. Buzz, buzz. Nicotine. Ephedrine. Acetaminophen. Ibuprofen. Barbiturates. Antidepressants. Coca-Cola. TiVo. YouTube. Blitzed far out of whatever minds they once had. Those freakish, Frankish Benedictine monks: if they were transported forward through time, their minds would be absolutely blown. He got down on hands and knees under the dingy table and traced the cable for the printer that had been shoved away down there ‑‑ hadn't used it in months ‑‑ and pulled it out of the overloaded power strip, replacing it with the ungrounded prongs of the lava globe. Then he scrambled back up in front of the pc and sunk back into the unsteady office chair to stare at the device behind and to the right of the monitor. It sat there, silent and unchanging.
A minute passed. Two.
Doing nothing. Broken, no doubt.
His mind wandered.
Bleeding Kansas.
He thought about David Atchison's Border Ruffians. John Brown. The Jayhawkers. Jesse James. Woodruffs and Davises in antebellum Missouri in the thick of it, or close enough. Tom Sawyer, yeah; Thomas Woodruff was a version of that emblematic American boy, gone wrong a little bit somewhere along the way, stung by shrapnel maybe, a piece of red hot shell casing giving him a little peck ‑‑ kiss! ‑‑ striking him with a taste of combat neurosis generalized afterwards to the public-at-large, and why not? Who knew what dance the girl next door might one day decide to do on your head? What year was Tom Sawyer.X.X.X? A decade or so after the war, if memory served. A hundred and fifty years ago now it all went down. All that time, the machinery of the expanding American Empire running on and on, those great big pile drivers cranking on steady, hammering, slamming endlessly, pumping, humping it, bottomlessly fueled, megagallons of crude super-octane fuel oil, boundless, a kind of eternal, ethereal, Jacksonian explosion, the dreaming culture carpeting the contested rolling grassy buffalo plains, torn by warring visions and fever-dreams, stretching, reaching out toward the edge of the salt, salt sea, peering hungrily, unpacified, beyond: further.X.X.X.The ontogenetic colossus metamorphosing, tentacles slipping in unseen when you least expected, before anyone began to harbor the slightest suspicion even, the rest of the world still dozing in backwards European incestuous family feuding, the media much easier to control back then, yeah, palimpsest history, erase and repaint, voilá! the invisible man was here ‑‑ or.X.X.X.was.X.X.X.he? ‑‑ claws catching, creeping up from sandy bottom continental shelves. Island gigantism. Pituitary madness.X.X.X.Mutating all the way across the beaches of France and Okinawa. Atolls, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't, and bombing runs over animal-crowded barges, sheep, pigs, goats, bleating, oinking, mooing, crowing, stinking.X.X.X.Get your goggles on, boys, check your masks and don't forget to breathe.X.X.X.
Kilroy.X.X.X.It was Aristotle ‑‑ no, Archimedes ‑‑ who had that to say about levers. Give me a long enough lever and I'll move the world. Close enough. Lever action. Ball and socket joints. That was the real.X.X.X.element of history. Protoplasm. Buoyant, resilient-springy happy bobby-bouncy roly-poly pneumatic collision cushions. Meat muscle tense tense strength springing bounding rebounding tensing taut tight squeezing touching back of knee stroking feeling soft slight fuzz on cheek breathing decompressing doubling up hup hup hup huffing puffing echoey all down the ages no matter what nonsense myth opinion bombast whisper rumor fell in and out of fashion. Comes and goes. All those juices flowing, merging, tiny little half-universes of possibility fusing into uncountable galaxies of zodiacal (when you wish upon a star) zygotes (fly me to the moon) under the tin roofs of every shabby tenement and hut and barnlike pigsty horse-hop manger hayloft ménage under the tornadoy, gentle blue Bible-thumpy black frockcoaty vacant-eyed skies of Great Gawd Amighty America.X.X.X.Humble, God-fearing servants down on their knees under the all-seeing golden sun, meeting and greeting and eagerly exchanging hot potluck lunches and later seed, tiny trickles, streams, rivers, tributaries and feeders of that wild forking branching ramifying complexifying central neuron dendritic master river Mississippi carving out the muddy-bottomed crevasses and canyons, the jigsaw gyri and sulci, of all their quaint and homey, thick honey-flavored sub-cerebral impulses and dark, infernal dreams, now spinning like a deadly low pressure prairie weathervane, now pointed dead-on between his eyes and backed up by a sure-fire lowball William Tell, always-precise-but-never-accurate, coming inescapable straight at him (Was romanticism a kind of psychological trick invented in the Dark Ages for piercing through the unutterable, primal foulness of the deed itself? But surely the psychic imprinting, the firework flashes of dopamine associated with one single individual.X.X.X.Ah, but he'd run circles over this same ground time and time again.X.X.X.), a flashflood sweeping all hesitation and mistrust away, and all the yelling, shrieking, laughing, fearing, crying, birthing, stillborning, paining, suffering, humiliating, loathing and dying that necessarily went along with it all, all the vain efforts to make sense of it, of any of it, from Thomas to Roy to Jack to Leroy to James to.X.X.X.What was it like for Thomas Woodruff to be a kid in those days, he wondered. He could almost feel him out there, buried under the sediments of long and blistering days. If only. If only. Iff: if and only if.X.X.X.
Ozone, faint whiff, and the lava globe commenced to emit a grumbly, low-pitched, ancient electronic equipment hum. What was.X.X.X? He stood up so he could reach it, there beyond the monitor, reached out with both hands to place them on the surface of the sphere, and‑‑
The lights came rushing at him so fast he flinched inwardly, rushed on past him like twisting, broken cyclones of impossibly brilliant rainbows wrapped all around. Then: there he was, cool morning breeze on his skin in front of the white courthouse in the sun-mottled shade of old white oaks, their waxy terpsichorean leaves all insanely happy and glissading. Children all around the white bench where he sat, playing hide-and-seek, running, racing, laughing wild and free, boys and girls somewhat oddly dressed, he thought, some kind of costumes. Performing a play? Maybe. Period clothing. Impressively authentic, though. Much of the cloth appeared worn thin, torn and patched. And what kind of shoes.X.X.X? Birds sang strangely melodiously in the high tree branches. The grass seemed remarkably green to him. The white puffy clouds were stunningly whiffed up against the crystalline blue sky. Not a contrail to be seen. It was like seeing clouds for the first time. Background so quiet. And the smell of the air ‑‑ so fresh! Everything would have been perfect except for the sign hanging next to the courthouse door. From where he sat he could only read the bits in the boldest font size; to wit: "$200 Reward," and "FIVE NEGRO SLAVES."
This surprised him so much that Erasmus rose from the bench to investigate. Inspecting the notice more closely proved no less appalling. He skimmed through it: "Ran away from the subscriber on the night of the 30th of April, one Negro man, his wife, and three children.X.X.X.Mary, his wife, is about thirty years of age, a bright mulatto woman.X.X.X.a boy, of the name of Fielding, a dark mulatto.X.X.X.Matilda, a girl, rather a dark mulatto.X.X.X.Malcolm, four years old, a lighter mulatto.X.X.X.supposed that they are making their way to Chicago, and that a White man accompanies them.X.X.X.reward of $150 will be paid for their apprehension, if taken within one hundred miles of Kansas City, and $200 if taken beyond that.X.X.X." Etc.
Kansas City? he thought.
At the bottom of the notice: "KANSAS CITY, May 3, 1855."
He turned, slowly, to look around, paying closer attention to his surroundings. The neat little houses so widely spaced along the wide dirt roads. The trees. The wide, verdant band of vegetation tracking all along both sides of the snaking river. The men on horses, others working the fields, wide-brimmed hats on their heads in the far distance, a few large mules pulling wagons.X.X.X.
"Hey mister. Hey, mister!"
He looked down.
A boy of about eight or nine stood next to him. He was short and thin with fly-away sandy sunburnt red-brown hair, dark green eyes and freckles across the nose. His smile revealed missing teeth. His shirt of white flannel with red zaggy stripes was tucked into pants too large for him that were held up by a piece of rope. The boy was barefoot.
"What is it?" Erasmus asked. He realized then the boy must have chased after him from where the others were playing. He looked their way. Now the children had stopped their game. They appeared to be watching the two of them across the courthouse lawn.
"Your clothes.X.X.X."
"My clothes?"
"Yes. Where'd you get them? They look funny."
He looked down at what he was wearing. Funny? They were normal enough, if rather sloppy. An old pair of jeans and a faded and torn beige tee-shirt. Great big belly. Black canvass tennis shoes without socks. He ran his hand over his shaggy gray-white hair, uncombed since sometime the day before. Probably Einsteinian, in a freak show kind of way, he thought. A five or six day old beard over puffy jowls, considerably more salt than pepper. A little bit scary. It was a wonder the kid had approached him at all.
"Did they dare you to ask me that?" he said.
The kid was smiling, but his eyes frowned. He pointed at the tee-shirt. "What's that?"
He looked down. It was a Led Zeppelin tee featuring an image modeled on Rimmer's "Evening, or the Fall of Day." He looked back up at the boy.
"You like that?"
"It looks like an angel. Or.X.X.X.Something."
"It's Icarus," Erasmus said. "Greek mythology. His father made wings for him out of wax and feathers. But--"
"Hey, Tommy!" one of the other boys cried out from over by the park bench. "Come on!"
The boy hesitated, looking back over his shoulder at his friends. Now they were all making giant windmill motions with their arms, calling to him: Come back, Tommy! Come back!
"Tommy?" Erasmus said.
The boy looked back. "Yeah?"
"That's your name?"
"Yeah. What of it?"
"But.X.X.X.What's your last name?"
"Tommy, come on!"
The boy laughed as he turned and started to run back to his friends.
"Davis!" he called out.
Tommy Davis.
He didn't even watch him as he ran. He knew then what it meant to feel a chill pass through one's body, like a ghost had passed through you. It was, he understood abruptly, like running an internet browser with multiple tabs open: he saw this clearly with his mind's eye. He located the other tab and spread open his hands, breaking the contact and--
was back standing somewhat slouched over the table and monitor, feeling the warmth in his hands. The amber-colored oil was heating up.
Momentarily he got back under the table and unplugged the device.
He spent the next four and a half hours online, reading everything he could track down or link to the ascending conjecture of the holographic mind. Clearly conceptions of spacetime, supremely ensconced on their hoary-old unchallenged theorem-bejeweled thrones for centuries, for millennia, were slipping ‑‑ according to some, already had been consigned to a back seat. Solids transforming into abstraction that necessarily must rise out of the newly perceived, deeper order.
Relationships truer objects than things.
The death knell of reductionism begun in the 20s as light was revealed to be less particle or wave than um wavicle.X.X.X.Shut up and calculate! .X.X.Data storage in parallel, not serial.X.X.X.Parallax.X.X.X.Leopold.X.X.X.Nonrepresentational coding schematics. Information seen from multiple angles, each with its accompanying level of error; the runaway proliferation of δs.X.X.X.Every observer beholds a different universe.X.X.X.Let there be Self.X.X.X.The whole universe is the true item; its contents are not aggregations of parts but broken fragments that must come up short when all the scattered ergs are tallied up.X.X.X.Cognitive interference patterns.X.X.X.Schopenhauerian noumenalism, yes, yes.X.X.X.The spacetime continuum itself nested potted integrated in thoughtspace.X.X.X.Beingspace.X.X.X.It moves. It moves: Eureka! .X.X.
Robert C. Eppel, Ph. D., it seemed, had been decades ahead of his time.
He took a shower, standing huddled afterwards in the claustrophobic stall wrapped in a large beach towel shaking with cold and something else, trying to recover body heat. He finished drying off and put on clean clothes and brushed his teeth and hair. Hurry. Hurry. Not enough time to shave, he decided.
Dozens of questions occurred to him. His mind was burgeoning and burping and bumping and thumping along in overdrive as he closed and locked the trailer door behind him. Coming down the steps of the tiny redwood deck, he ventured outside to walk the three blocks to a Mexican fast food place he frequented. It was a few hours after noon, he guessed inattentively. The sky was hazy pale blue, burnt up in exhaust clouds, all light diffuse and weak and sliced through by dizzying power lines running in every direction overhead. The same old mean dogs raced about barking madly and snarling at him through flat gray chain length just as they always did when he passed by. He could smell the murky, oily water smell coming up from the street grates. Serrated-edged weeds, deep green, thrust themselves up from the cracked concrete sidewalk, its smashed edges tumbling down into the street. Abandoned houses pushed well back from the street, shot-out windows covered with rain-stained plywood sheets. Twenty year old cars with ten year old primer paint jobs and bad mufflers went bump-and-grinding past, beat-heavy rap pounding through his lungs, Dopplering mercifully away, reminding him remotely of the feel of the snare drums of a passing marching band in a parade when he was a child.X.X.X.Erasmus, frowning, brow curled inward, fists stuffed in pockets of the nylon windbreaker he'd pulled on, thinking all the while, thinking.X.X.X.
Was that really him?
Of course it was him. You know it as well as I do ‑‑ you are me.
Well then, why didn't you question him? Afraid?
Afraid! You know I didn't recognize who he must be until it was too late, and anyway I wouldn't want to do a number on him like that. You saw him. What do you really think he knew? Never thought about that before. Just a kid. He said his last name is Davis. All he knows is that his stepbrothers and sisters are his brothers and sisters. Never knew his father, or not very long. May not even have any memories of the man. Before the war. No pictures of his father. No daguerreotype. Maybe his mother hadn't even told him yet, and if she did, it couldn’t mean much to him, could it?
But you're convinced it really was him.
Of course, and so are you.
Then how--
Then how. Yes. That's the question. How does it work? What are the parameters? Does it have to be someone who's dead? Are all human memories, or minds, burned into and preserved in the substance of reality that way? Or the other way: first the minds, then the reality. Complex. I was thinking about him before I. At a specific age? Think back. Remember. I think so. About his childhood. Then.X.X.X.What does it do? Harvest your thoughts at t = 0 and locate ghostly minds in holographic spacetime? What kind of cockeyed machine does such a thing?
And yet it worked.
It worked once ‑‑ if it can be said to have worked at all. What does it really do? What is its purpose? Someone left it in a storage locker, for Chrissakes! Maybe it generates an illusion. Wish fulfillment--
You saw it! That was real!
You want it to be real. You know why.
But.X.X.X.Just think of what you could do. Even if it's just like a hyper-tuned up Ouija board. What if it is exposing real pasts. Think about that? What if you can see true history as it happens. Think a minute. Maybe it doesn't have to even be your relatives, or ancestors. Maybe anyone.
Like who?
I don't know. If that was, if that.X.X.X.scene, that episode, really was in 1855, the run up to the Civil War, then Lincoln himself was there somewhere in that world.
You want to meet Abraham Lincoln?
Well.X.X.X.Why not? Lincoln, or anyone! That's the point. What if you can use the device to go anywhere, see anyone who's ever lived. I mean, potentially--
You're crazy! Do you know how dangerous that is?
No, and neither do you. We know almost nothing about this device. We only know it works--
We don't even know that. One episode--
One episode, right. That's why the experiment must be repeated. All experiments must be repeated, to confirm. Verify.
It's dangerous.
It may be dangerous. We must proceed carefully. We must think this through.
In the dirty restaurant crowded with ugly, human body-smelling customers being served by ugly, remote, emotionless cashiers. This is to go. I want three tacos and a small soda. Three tacos and a small soda. That's right. Is that for here or to go? Waiting for order 143. Filling up his cup at the sticky stained soda dispenser. People pushing in slow collision like emotionless herd animals. Tiny ones wailing. Smell of dirty diaper. Get the order and flee.
Back on the street.
Compile a list. Meet whom, back in time? Abraham Lincoln, that's one idea. Push it backwards? Um, hum, Daniel Boone? Benjamin Franklin? George Washington? The bit about the wooden teeth. The cherry tree. Clear up some of these mysteries once and for all. Imagine watching from the floor of Ford's Theatre when Booth entered the box and before he pulled the trigger, hesitating, perhaps, raising the weapon.X.X.X.In that infinitesimal instant when one past shifted forever into an extremely divergent future.X.X.X.
Hiding in the book depository, watching for the look on Oswald's face.
Have to limit it to politicians? Of course not. Don't even have to know what the person looked like. He'd found Thomas Woodruff as a child, hadn't he? Require a certain amount of knowledge about setting and conditions though, apparently. Hmmm.X.X.X.Genghis Khan? Marco Polo? Read up, study up, and go.X.X.X.How about.X.X.X.Jesus Christ? Holy smokes, the possibilities.X.X.X.
Birth. Life.
Death.
If you could go back in time and meet anyone you wanted.X.X.X.
Joyce. Hemingway. Beethoven. Dalí. Or.X.X.X.Janis Joplin. John Lennon. Or.X.X.X.Billy the Kid. Wyatt Earp. Or.X.X.X.Charles Darwin. Adolf Hitler.X.X.X.
Or the friends he'd lost over the years. Accidents. Diseases. Suicide.X.X.X.Or.X.X.X.
Or.
Is it.X.X.X?
He didn't go inside immediately when he got back home. It was impossible to pace inside the trailer, so he set the cup and bag down on the porch and did his pacing on the gravel path outside. Back and forth. Back and forth. At one point he heard Werner Meschgat calling to him from a short distance away. He ignored the call, and eventually Meschgat went away again.
Is it possible?
If any of it was possible ‑‑ if any of it was truly possible ‑‑ then, yes, that was possible, too. It should be. Why not?
I have to think!
But it was so hard to think clearly.
Later that night he was ready to try.X.X.X.
He plugged in the device, the lava globe. He waited for it to warm up.
He'd been struggling to clear his mind for some time. It was important to focus, to get this right. After a great deal of searching he'd located some old family snapshots. That helped. He'd spent hours staring at a few of them taken in the right timeframe. He didn't want to arrive at the wrong time. That could be.X.X.X.unpleasant. He was trying to focus, more or less, on about the year 1969. Not because of the social upheaval. Not because of the hippies or dope or rock'n'roll or anything like that. None of that was significant at all to what he was attempting. He tried to hold the images in his mind as he reached out beyond the computer monitor to the sphere and--
Once again the twisted arcs and curves of rainbows whipped violently around him, corkscrewing over his involuting awareness, but this lasted only for a second or two, and then there was this man, this emaciated man with waxen features lying in a bed, but no, no, it was the wrong man, the wrong time and place. Close already to panic, Erasmus refocused his energies and his will, and the walls of the room which had been emerging from the silvery light wavered and receded a little back into it.
It was shocking-brutal, but Erasmus struggled to keep his attention on the man in the bed, and directly he saw that the skeleton-being's features began to fill out, slowly, the closed, sunken eyes began to rise up out of their pits, slowly. The room, if there was a room, was turning around them, slowly, slowly, and through the closed curtains it seemed that the light outside was cycling, pulsating, now bright, now dark, and every gradation passing in between. What was.X.X.X.What.X.X.X.
Backwards, back, back in time, so slow, like shoving against air that had turned viscous like molasses, a definite pressure he was striving against, an actual physical pressure, or weight.X.X.X.The walls of the sickroom pushing back, back.X.X.X.But they were going back, and he began to hear the sounds, the voices, voices out of a past, voices whose nuances he'd long since forgotten. Voices of.X.X.X.children. He knew those voices. He knew them! Forgotten voices. The children who lived on the block, their mothers calling them home for lunch, for dinner.X.X.X.
As the process continued it began to accelerate and grow easier; indeed, it seemed to him to take on a life of its own; he was along for the ride now, but time itself seemed to know where it was going; hundreds of rose blossoms folding back up into their buds, stems growing down, down into the bush, retreating back to a bundle of green sticks stuck in the ground.X.X.X.Years and years of disappointments and horrors and deceits running away backwards, running back into the ground, undreamed, unknown.X.X.X.Models of sleek, aerodynamic cars bulking up, growing more powerful, alive, unsafe and inefficient.X.X.X.Soulful.X.X.X.The fogs of cynicism and sophistication were steadily burning away.X.X.X.Beautiful, supercilious women he'd known reverting back, gratefully, into lanky, friendly tomboys so easy to know.X.X.X.The rich brown soil smells of his youth, digging in the dirt, the blue skies, hot summer days, climbing in the mulberry tree in the front yard, and the kids with their bikes up on kickstands along the low brick retaining wall.X.X.X.Yes.X.X.X.Yes.X.X.X.He was.X.X.X.He.X.X.X.No.X.X.X.This couldn't be.X.X.X.He was still himself! He was still too old, and he couldn't, no, he.X.X.X.So he turned his attention on himself, pushing this too old body back toward the silvery, mercurial, peripheral light, concentrating with all his might, concentrating, focusing, back, back, concentrating very hard on the clothing he'd been wearing in one of the pictures ‑‑ he remembered the small russet-brown shirt with its patterns of crossing bars so distinctly ‑‑ his favorite shirt ‑‑ how easily the memory was returning now! ‑‑ go back, go back! ‑‑ until, after several horrifying moments, he saw, yes, it was, it was beginning to happen.X.X.X.He was changing, his body was changing back, reverting, losing weight, losing beard, hair growing shorter, darker, back, back.X.X.X.And he was growing shorter, too, the very short boy he'd been, growing shorter, pulling back inward, withdrawing back. His clothing changing to what he'd worn as a child, back. Back.X.X.X.
It was a wonderfully hot summer evening and the sun had been down for over an hour so that the rust-stained sunset clouds resembled faintly rose-orange spackling of crenated sherbet against the deepening blue-violet sky. Bats were beginning to emerge high above the street in twilight's clear, lambent glow. If he listened very carefully, he could just barely hear their soft chirrups as they flittered around the very high streetlight, small, soft brown bats eagerly hunting insects. The other kids had all been called home and he was still on the sidewalk with his bike ‑‑ remember this wonderful yellow-green Huffy with its banana seat, strictly coaster breaks, hit it just right and slide the back tire for three yards! ‑‑ and he'd already heard his mother call from inside the house, a little angry with him, but he didn't care, he didn't care at all. Because he was waiting, he was watching down the street, because he knew that in a minute.X.X.X.Yes! Here came the familiar pickup truck now that he'd long ago forgotten ‑‑ he knew those engine sounds; he knew them! ‑‑ around the corner, and he dropped the bicycle and it slipped down off the curve of the curb and into the street a little bit, so that when his father parked the truck in the garage he was a little mad, too, but Erasmus didn't care, he ran straight up to him crying tears of joy and threw his arms around his dad, pulling him close as though he hadn't hugged him in years and years, and when his mother came outside to see what it was all about he threw his arms around her too and cried and cried, leaving them both perplexed. After a while, he was sure, he was absolutely sure, that everything was finally all right again.
* * *
It was six days before Werner Meschgat called the cops.
Two of them showed up after about an hour and a half. Meschgat knew what they'd find before they entered the trailer. So did the cops. The odor was distinctive.
"What a pigsty," one of the officers grumbled.
"There he is," the other one said. His voice sounded stuffy; he was only breathing through his mouth. "A pig alright."
Past the two big men Meschgat saw his old friend sprawled dead on the floor by the tiny cramped table. Somehow when he'd fallen he'd managed to pull the computer monitor down on top of him. It lay smashed on the linoleum of the tiny kitchen floor. The computer cables had also pulled down some other contraption. Broken pieces of a glass sphere, like a fishbowl, maybe, lay near Erasmus' head.
"His torso's soaked in some kind of oil," the first cop noticed, and then: "What's this? The palms of his hands look all blistered and burned.X.X.X."
The other cop stepped past Meschgat toward the trailer door.
"This place stinks. I'll call the wagon."
The circles of the world are closed, but the siren call of Western dreams still resounds in our ears. We need frontiers -- outer space, inner space -- lest we become cannibals, devouring our own brothers, our mothers, our fathers, our children. Vagabonds adrift in dreams, floating free on invisible myth, we glide along in the quiet and alarm, rudderless on the unsteady jostling of days.
The End.
