Bren leaned against the wall between the dining room/painting studio and the kitchen, sipping the harsh gin that his friend Miller had slipped him from the brewery (nasty shit really, about as subtle on the palette as mouthful of turpentine), watching a thoroughly inebriated Tess put together a couple of sandwiches as artfully as Frida Khalo, if Frida had chosen a career in a Deli.  She had (he checked his watch, waiting for the hands to cohere in his vision) been spreading mayo and mustard for almost ten minutes as she talked about her upcoming trip to Nevada for the Burning Man festival.  She paused, looked at her knife, asked how long she’d been spreading the mayo and laughed when he told her.  She doused the sandwiches with salt the asked him if he liked salt.  He said yes though he wasn’t much of a salt fan, it made the top of his mouth feel raw.  Then out came the pepper grinder, looking like a wooden dildo.  She cranked on it, her expression intense.  And on went the pepper, on and on, until the bread was black and then she turned her attention to the other half.  Like your pepper, he said.  Fucking rights, she replied with a grin, love my pepper.  He took another sip of his gin and tonic.  Grimaced.  Stuff has just to the left of disgusting.  She paused as she shook her hand, damn, my wrist is getting sore.

She went about applying the cheese telling him that she was gipping him a slice and tough, she was making the sandwiches so it was her right to gip him if she felt so inspired. 

Tess rose from her bench and came up to Sabine, who leaned against the altar.  Sabine hadn’t said much.  None of them had, besides Devon, who’d been going on about Viking funerary practices.  Tess had tried to turn his rambling diatribe into a dialogue, but had given up.  Somewhere along the line Dev’s discourse had switched to scrounging through laundry at home looking for socks.  Tess was the catalyst, spontaneously saying that she’d had a great weekend shopping, and Sabine had asked if that was when she’d got her stripped knee-highs, the reply being yes, it was, and she loved her socks.  Sabine had jibed Dev for living with him and being twenty-something.  Tess had looked pointedly at Bren and started to say something, and Bren had attempted a pre-emptive strike, knowing full well what she was going to say.  Taboo subject he said, slicing the air with his hand, knowing that as he said it, it was going to be brought up yet again.  Tess leaned into Sabine, whispering in her ear, a whisper just loud enough for Bren to hear.  Sabine released one of her scary hiccupping brays that caused Bren to jerk in surprise; he still hadn’t gotten used to the sound.  He groaned and flushed, and sputtered out his stock excuses which were all blown away by Sabine’s continued laughter.  If there were any spirits around, like the other three seemed convinced there might be, protesting that they should walk careful to respect the dead, they would bee stumbling over each other in their attempt to flee the sound of Sabine’s laughter.

She crossed the crypt to sit on the bench beside him, her shoulders against the arm he’d flung out on the top of the wall behind him.  She leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, her spiky hair tickling his cheek.  Her voice was soft, it’s not that bad.  He couldn’t tell if she was sincere or mocking, drunk or sober.  She didn’t seem particularly drunk.  The walk through the graveyard had sobered him up pretty good, though truthfully, he hadn’t been that drunk to begin with.

Why aren’t you published, she asked.

You know, once all I wanted was to walk into a book store and see my name on a shelf.  I saw it so clearly, you know.  Now, now all I want to do is pile all my notebooks, all my drafts and rejection letters and burn them.  And just walk away, find myself a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, someone to commit to, settle into a job that I couldn’t give two shits about, get a house, get married, have kids and live in dreamless contentment until I die.  And then, he said, gesturing at the dark graveyard, then the sum of my life will be realised here or somewhere like here as fertiliser.

Sabine’s laugh leapt out of her mouth and hit him in the forehead.  Hit all of them actually.  They jerked, but she didn’t notice, or pretended not to notice.

She brought out her lashes, handed them to him and flopped down on the couch, picking up her drink and taking a liberal sip.  One lash was solid black and the other had red leather wound through the handle.  You made these.  Yeah.  Nice.  Red one is mine.  Of course.

People are always going on about the meaning of life and the human condition.

What does it mean to be human, what are we, because we have to be something don’t we?  There has to be some point to it, doesn’t there?  These are the questions that have facilitated society, culture, and yes, war.

An anthropologist would have you think that the social contract was established on the basic precept of survival, more specifically the survival of family groups, the biological imperative and all that.  Perhaps that was the case in the very beginning, when things were simpler, when we were little more than monkeys and all we gave a damn about was eating and shitting and fucking (although, it could be argued, and very convincingly I might add, that the situation hasn’t really changed since then).  As soon as we became capable of abstract thought, when intellect emerged out of the deepening complexity of primal reasoning, and we apes took that step into sapience, we began to wonder why?  As a species we suddenly became very confused, and yes, pretty damned scared.  And things really haven’t changed much.

That’s a bitch of a word isn’t it?  Why.  No real answer to it.  How is a little easier.  You can always figure the how of things, though it may take a bit of time and considerable thought.  How is a bit more tangible, bit more phenomenal than the ever metaphysical why.  There is also what, but it is the lesser of three, more a condition of the how and the why; the end result from which we can do some reverse engineering and hopefully find our answers.  However, every answer results in another question.  The methods of reverse engineering our way through that absurd skein of questions and answers vary, similar in theory but divergent in application, religion, philosophy, and science.

I like to watch people (no, not in a creepy way).  You can learn a lot about yourself by watching other people.  And you can learn a lot about humanity in general by watching other people.  Sometimes you learn more than you wanted to know, not knowing of course that you wanted to know anything in the first place.  Sometimes you wish that you had never decided to watch anybody, that if you’d remained completely self-involved and oblivious to, not necessarily the existence of others, but the depth of others, things would be a little easier for you: just you and your ego going through life, a merry little solipsist.  There is no doubt that the presence of others complicates the simple elegance of the individual.  The most obvious complication is, of course, loneliness.  When you watch people, you become aware of the separation between you and them and then you wonder about their relationships with others; sometimes you catch a glimpse into them sometimes you don’t.  In either case, you become aware of yet another degree of separation, and all the other degrees of separation between you and the host of humanity.  You never feel more alone than when you are surrounded by people.  Surely you’ve noticed this.  The ‘just another in a crowd’ syndrome.  When you’re out on a hike somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, just you and the trees and whatever insects are feeding off of you, there is no sense of loneliness.  How can it be that you are alone in that situation without being alone, but when you are surrounded by people, the loneliness is soul crushing?  A big conundrum, that one.  Answer that one and you’ve answered one of the big questions, or, well, you’re on your way to answering them.

You have to keep in mind that this loneliness is not just endemic to you.  It afflicts everyone.  The degree that separates you from that person over there also separates that person from you.  Sad really, the thing that we all share is our isolation from each other.

But out of loneliness springs love.

To pick on the anthropologists again, they would argue (and persuasively) that love is also a consequence of the biological imperative.  Perhaps this was so in the beginning, when our world was a slightly more primitive vision of the Planet of the Apes.  Not so now.  Not so for a very long time– a very very long time.

More than just a binding social contract between members of a family group, or even a social group, love is the answer to loneliness.

Taped Journals of Dr. Seth Adoniram—

This is what they think they know.

Based on the evidence.  And your testimony.

I’m apprising you of this because I think you don’t really appreciate the seriousness of your situation.

We’ll begin with the house.

An early estimate dates the masonry of Heart’s Defile as late thirteenth century.  This is almost five centuries earlier than North American colonization.  Therefore, it must have been transported from elsewhere and rebuilt.  There is precedent for this.

Heart’s Defile has a typically medieval design.  However, it has a unique and perplexing feature.  There are neither external windows nor doors.  But its dour appearance belies an opulent interior.  A distinctly Byzantine décor.  Frescos, mosaics, and terracotta sculptures.  There is also a Gothic influence.  Gargoyles and angels adorning pilasters that frame sweeping galleries and spiral staircases.  Pillars with elaborate depictions of Nordic myth: Yggdrasill, the World Tree, and the Dragon at its roots, Nidhogg.  Bronze and gold-leafed faces peer down from the groins of the vaulted ceilings.  Medieval arms and armour are mounted throughout labyrinthine corridors.  There is also an extensive system of secret passageways and chambers.  Laboratories, cells, and ossuaries. 

There have been some macabre discoveries.  Human remains in the walls.  Forensics indicates that they were interred alive.  The stonework in certain rooms is comprised of tombstones.  Many of the inscriptions still discernible.  The mortar and plaster have traces of blood and bone-powder.  Canopic jars have been found behind key and corner stones.  Inside the helmets of the previously mentioned armour, were mummified human heads.  Ancient.  Early tests date them at six-hundred years.  Then there are the candelabra.  Set with wax-covered hands, their nails chemically treated to serve as wicks.  Tapestries woven from gut, sinew, and hair.  Furnishings of bone and skin.  All human.

The library is immense.  Containing some very rare and old books.  Original editions of scientific, philosophical, and theological works.  The latter mostly involving Judaic mysticism.  There is an expansive selection of alchemical and occult texts.  The collection includes original editions of the Arbetel, Theosophia Pneumatica, Enchiridion, Grimorium Verum, Grand Grimoire, Sworn Book of Honorius, Lemegeton, Heptameron, the Four Books of Corenelius Agrippa, and an eleventh century edition of the Clavicula Solomonis.  The collection’s prize is an ancient book of spuriously bound papyrus scrolls.  The Sepher Raziel, written in ancient Chaldaen.  Better known in occult circles by its Latin translation, the Angelus Magnus Secreti Creatoris.  Legend has it that this was the first book written after Adam.  It’s also attributed to King Solomon, antedating his Clavicula.

Despite his theurgical inclinations, de Sarmage is a doctor.  Although it’s uncertain as to whether he is a surgeon or a pathologist.  Evidence has been collected that incriminates him of engaging in Nazi medical experimentation.  He led a eugenics research project in a facility known as Die Dunkelfabriken, or the Dark Factory, within the Southern Carpathian Mountains.

His obsession with the dead isn’t entirely academic.  He’s also a necrophiliac.  Acquiring his subjects . . . his victims by grave-robbing and kidnapping.

You glimpsed figures shuffling through the halls.  Bearing large sacks either flung over their shoulders or dragged behind them.  But they never entered your wing.  And you were forbidden to leave.

However, you knew what was in those sacks.

The dead.

Or soon to be.

Some you would devour.

Others would become more than food.

It was lonesome growing up in the company of death and shadows.  You’ve loved the dead, believing that they loved you.  But love is a living thing.  A force that furthers life, defining it.  You don’t know love.  You were never given the chance.

Except for punishing you for breaking rules you didn’t know about until afterwards, when they were indelibly marked in flesh and psyche, de Sarmage expressed little interest in you.  Until your first period.  The he ordered you to copulate with your brother.

Neither of you could accomplish it.

De Sarmage miscalculated.  You weren’t bisexual in regards to life and death.  Yours was an orientation.  Not preference or perverse whim.  To lay with the living was anathema.

You didn’t know your brother; you weren’t permitted to know each other.  You were kept in opposing wings of Heart’s Defile.  Locked away in private labyrinths.  But then his reality was forced upon you.  And yours upon him.  You thought yourself unique.  A goddess of the dead.  A sibling threatened your identity.  As you did his.  You were horrified.  And enraged.  There was, however, a connection between you.  Something incomprehensible.  This simpatico counteracted itself, repelling you further.

That failed liaison infuriated de Sarmage.

He locked you in a cell for a long time.

He never mentioned his son after that.  And you assumed de Sarmage had killed him.

De Sarmage raped you after each proceeding menstruation.  Your cycle was interrupted several times with increasing nausea, cramps, and bloating.  When this became unendurable, de Sarmage operated on you.

You have no idea what he did to you, do you?

He impregnated you.

And he cut your children from you.

Lust didn’t motivate de Sarmage to rape you.  He reserved that for the dead.  You were a brood mare.  Part of a breeding program.  The purpose of which remains unknown.  The only evidence we have is you: the caesarean scars and subtler signs of prior pregnancies found during your medical exam.

It wasn’t unusual for de Sarmage to leave Heart’s Defile.

Where he went, you never knew.

The duration of his absences varied.  During which the house was quiet.  Awaiting its master’s return.

During his last excursion, the quiescence of Heart’s Defile was unexpectedly disturbed.

We know what happened from the testimony of a nine-year-old girl.  Somehow, she survived the town’s fate.  However, she was severely traumatised.  A hypnotherapist had to be called in to access her memories.

Led by a tent-revivalist, the townsfolk embarked upon a plan to exorcise the Devil from their Doorstep— a devil that had preyed upon them for generations.  A member of the evangelist’s troupe had been a professional demolitionist.  He set charges around Heart’s Defile.  It should’ve been levelled.  It wasn’t.  But there was considerable damage.  The fortress was breached.  Moments after the concussion rolled over the town, the power went out.  The sky became like dusk.  And the sun went black.  Like a smoking coal.  The girl heard something scratching at the front door of her house.  Then banging.  Her mother told her to hide.  Then the door shattered.  And something grabbed her mother.

The girl was rescued from whatever horror assailed the town by an unknown woman.  She was found in an abandoned gas station, several kilometres away, by a hitchhiker who was sheltering from a storm.  He escorted the girl back to town, thinking she was an autistic who’d wandered too far from home.  Then he found the evangelist’s skin snagged on a poplar.  The only remains that have been found.  Both the town and the house of Heart’s Defile are empty.

I’m assuming that the woman who saved the little girl was you.  Why don’t you admit to it?

Because he would be angry?

But you don’t have to fear him any longer.  You’re free of him.  You have escaped Heart’s Defile.

A cyanotic sky.

A ghostly moon.

The susurration of grass, sharing secrets with the wind.

A gnarled wolf-willow.  Silver leaves clattering like finger-bone chimes.

To the north, the forsaken town.  To the south, sandstone buttes mar the eye-aching flatness.  The desiccated shoulders of a dead angel, imbedded in the Earth.  Somewhere therein, is the ruin of an ancient house.

I won’t go there.

Its time is over.

This is where I will find her.

A cemetery.  Fenced by wrought iron and granite.  Thorny-roses upon slumping lattices.  Archways draped by abandoned webs.  Lichen scabbed saints.  Graves arranged in concentric circles.  Moving inwards, the dead slipping further back in time.  The innermost dating from the seventeen hundreds.  Marked with Skull and Crossbones.  The heart is a mausoleum.  Classically designed.  Corinthian columns bearing representations of Tree and Dragon.  From the lotus-leaf capitals, the foliate Green Man leers.  Symbology favoured by Templars.  Upon the entablature, an eroded angel.  No doors.  Only a cover-stone.  Adorned with a massive cross.  In the centre of which is a head.  Sombre and stern.  Baphomet.

I study that face.  An essay of weariness.  I sympathise.  I’m tired too.  We should release him from bondage.  Let him sleep.  Maybe we’re all due a rest.  Maintaining an imposed reality is tough business.  Why are we doing it anyway?  Why not let the light gutter and die, restoring the pristine void prior to that initial and initiating moment of creationistic terror?

Covering the prophet’s face with my hands.  Features cold and smooth.  Never a thought.  Never a tear.  Thumbs pressing blind eyes.

A click.

Eyes slide into stony shadow.

A grinding.

The Head of Baphomet splits.

A black line bisecting the cross.

Widening into an abyssal gap.

I stare into the gloomy interior.

Breathing deeply.

Seeking peace and acceptance.

Finding only fear.

Our grace.

God’s terror spreading throughout creation.  Like the ripples on a pond caused by a dropped stone.  The stone is gone.  But the ripples continue.  The motion of the cosmic and atomic.

Fear.

All that we are.

All that we fight against.

I enter.

Cold.

Musty.

Flaking frescos and dusty mosaics.  Diagrams of Gnostic, Ptolemaic, Pythagorean, and Christian-Platonic cosmologies.  Paracelsian interpretation of the seventeen stages of the Hebrew Creation, Eyn Sof.  A skeleton standing upon a black sun.  A crow perched on its left hand.  Angels waiting on either side with hungry expectation.  The shadow of fire separating soul and spirit from a putrefying corpse.  Portraits of Urizen, who so haunted William Blake.  From flesh to bone: a divinity separated from eternity, upon whose remains the Earth formed.

Along the far wall, a grid of life-like faces.  Solemn.  Terracotta death masks.  Beyond rest the heads of the dead.  No names.  Just Skull and Crossbones.

Who were they?

Members of a secret chapter within a heretic order?

The Sect of the Necrophiliac Saint?

A pressure plate at the threshold.  Sinking beneath my heel.  Again, the whispering rumble.  Darkness thickening.  The halves of a divided cross, rejoined.  The prophet’s eyes rolling into empty-sockets with the soft click of teeth.

The dark isn’t absolute.

The faces are luminescent.

Decapitated ghosts.  Silent judges of my damnation.

Rustling whispers.

Granulated gloom eddying.

A smoky apparition.

Shrouded in a black chador.

Yellow eyes flashing in a grey slash of skin.

Holding a hand out to me.

Taking it.  Expecting intangibility.

She says nothing.

Neither do I.

We walk to the lambent visages.

I recognise the face in the centre.  Pinched.  Austere.  Unforgiving.  Jacques de Molay.  Grand Master of the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon.  Burned at the stake.

Beneath the likeness, a cross.

She touches it.

It depresses.

A low grating.

The countenance sliding back, swivelling into darkness.

Light.

A secret alcove.

A star brigh skull.

Not bone.

Quartz as clear and smooth as glass.

Glowing currents swirl in its depths.  Eye-sockets that shine as if reflecting sunlight.  Twin to the enigmatic Mitchell-Hedges skull found in the ruins of the Mayan city of Lubaantum.  Not sculpted.  But the skeletal remnant of a dead numen, its genius dissipating over countless aeons.  A mere residue of energy.  Those eldritch eyes illuminating my secret depths, enhancing my mind with a supernal infusion, and purging the taint of my humanity.

What must such a being have been like in life? 

She touches the skull with a pellucid hand.

It pivots to the right.

Gears rumbling.  A subterranean machine.  The dream (or nightmare) of renaissance inventors.  The floor shudders, shifts, and begins to descend.

The faces dwindle into a dim constellation.

We watch each other.  Shadows evanescing into black eternity.

A hellish din.  Stony growling.  The champing of giant’s jaws.  The hydraulic hissing and slithering rattle of an unseen Ouroboros.

Weightlessness.

A vertiginous sense of emptiness above.

A shuddering halt.

An archway limed with phosphorescence.

Déjà vu.

We enter a chamber identical to the mausoleum.

Again we approach the glowing death mask of Jacques de Molay.  And again she presses the cross beneath his bearded chin.  Another secret alcove.  And another numinous skull.

Turning it to the left.

The chamber shudders.

The air moans and squeals.

Grinding: bone-vibrating.

A sense of motion.

The room is pivoting.

Through the narrowing archway, I glimpse the platform rising upon a black pillar.  There are shadowy gestures of massive chains and cogs.

Then all is occluded by smooth granite.

The stone recedes.

The archway opens into the hall of a cathedral.  At the end, a tableaux vivants.  Motionless actors in terracotta shells.  Treated with that strange glowing glaze.  A knight in Templar raiment kneeling before an angel.  An angel more reminiscent of Assyrian Djinn than Medieval Seraph.  Its features similar to the face of Baphomet.  But stern.  With coiled beard and hair.  Two pairs of wings, one folded, the other spread.  Three sets of horns jutting from the folds of a peaked turban: ram, bull, and ibex.  The knight’s head is bowed.  His arms outstretched.  His hands open.  The angel is holding a shrouded gift, its shape suggestive of a head.

Yse touches the knight’s tonsured scalp.  It sinks.  A familiar click and grating.  The sculpture recedes into the wall, revealing a dimly lit stairwell.

We descend.  A pressure stone midway down triggers the sculpture’s mechanism, closing it above us.

We pass through an archway into a glittering wilderness.  Motionless cascades pouring from a faceted firmament.  Crystal forests and mineral hills.  Rivers of ore and ponds of oil.

At the heart of this Empyrean geode is an agate basilica.

We’re not alone.

I glimpse them amidst the quartzite groves.  Phantoms sliding over crystalline branches.  Shuffling travesties: echoes of personalities trapped within their dead flesh.  Slaves driven by a mad and narcissistic genius.

We enter the basilica, a natural wonder cut by hands other than human.  Our reflections flickering through crystallised eternity.

My footsteps thumping like a heartbeat.

Her chador rustling like fingers on flesh.

Into the star-jewel atrium, where he awaits us.

Wearing a white cassock emblazoned with a red Templar cross.

His pate tonsured.

His eyes burning black stones.

Cruel lips curling.  “Doctor Adoniram.”  A voice like a bone-saw.  Mocking me.  Intimating satisfaction and wry amusement: “Welcome home.”

Adoniram.  An alias from long ago.  Another life.  Before my murder.  Before my rebirth into unlife.  I was Hiram Abif.  Chief architect of the Temple of Solomon.  Now I am a monster, a messianic ghoul.  I have few memories prior to my resurrection.  The amnesia of death, I suppose.  I don’t know why I was brought back.  But the answers are in the mind of this man, who gave his living seed into a dead womb.

“Come,” he commands, turning and striding through the massive gallery that leads into the nave.

My sister’s eyes are downcast.

I’m not angry with her, despite her culpability.

She is his tool.

As am I.

All a ruse, but at such expense.  Is the child which we are meant to produce so important that he would sacrifice his sanctum?

I leave Yse and follow my father into the nave.

And there I learn the secret of Heart’s Defile.

I’m the prodigal son.

Yet I never knew this.  I never even suspected.

I’d discovered this cavern by accident.  Fleeing through it.  Never entering the basilica, within which resides the truth behind the legend of Matthew de Sarmage.

He is the Magus.

But she . . . she is the goddess.

The Lady of Maraclea.

A chthonic Isis.

Rapturously beautiful.  An unearthly pulchritude sustained by loathsome appetites, evidenced by the half-eaten dead strewn throughout the chamber.

Draped in diaphanous white.  Plaited black hair, glittering with gold netting and diamond dust.  Translucent skin, lit by the radiance of a crystallised skeleton.  Eyes streaming misty bright.

Atop the high altar behind her sits a relic draped in a glassine shroud.  Radiating waves of luminescent scintilla.  The source of the light.  The head of a demiurge.  An entity to which she, and the crystal skulls of her kin, are merely residual embers, sparks of a deity that committed creationistic suicide. 

She is the power behind de Sarmage.  He let me escape and she retrieved me.  Arranging the destruction of Heart’s Defile to punish him.  Sending her daughter out to lure her errant son home.

De Sarmage has paid his penance.

What punishment awaits me?

I kneel before them.

I beg their forgiveness.

What a fool I have been.

I know what it is that I am destined to sire.

I’m where I don’t want to be.

Sun bronzed grass.  Whispering.  Moving with the wind.

A slough.  Shores alkali white.  Dead trees jutting like corpse-fingers.

Railroad tracks.  Bleached-bone Grain Elevators.

A turnoff.  A gravel road dwindling to a needlepoint that punctures the horizon.  A road sign.  Heart’s Defile.  Ten kilometres.

The crunching pop of gravel beneath tires.

Dust billowing over a shivering expanse.

I thought I’d escaped.

She betrayed me.

And I let her.

Why?

~ “You know why.”

~ “Yes, I suppose I do.”

~ “You can’t keep me here.”

~ “We have to.  We will.  I’m sorry.”

~ “Why are you doing this?”

~ “Because you don’t belong here.”

~ “Do you belong here?”

~ “That’s a question I ask myself every day.  It’s a question everyone asks themselves.”

~ “You’re a hypocrite.  What makes you different from me?”

~ “You’re right.  And I don’t know.  We’re what life makes us.”

~ “Can I change?”

~ “That’s up to you.  I want to believe that you can.”

~ “Why must I change?”

~ “Because it’s the only way you will ever be free.”

~ “But you can’t keep me here.”

She was right.

I have to find her.

I have to know why.

Do I love her?

Yes.  It’s what terrifies me.

And here I am.

Where the Earth is flat.

Where the sky is falling.

Buildings rise from the windblown tides.  Cars and pickups in driveways, parking lots, and along the streets.  A water tower.  A forlorn god standing vigil over its abandoned paradise.  Fire hydrants painted like cartoon characters.

Leaving my car by a tiny park.  Swings creaking.  Leaves chattering.  Shadows shivering.  Walking the empty streets, detritus crunching beneath my boot-heels.  Broken windows glinting in the late afternoon sun.  Shards sparkling on the pavement.  The wind’s whistling boom.  Otherwise, quiet.

What was that?

Someone running!

Nobody there.  Nobody anywhere.

An icy gust.  Leaves tumbling over the streets.  Capering and cackling.  A dust devil whirling past.  Somewhere a door bangs.

Tiptoeing into tombs: the haunted husks of shops and houses.  They can’t comprehend their abandonment.  Pining for the lives that defined them, that gave them life.  They wait for their tenants to return.  They will wait until they rot, their timbres consumed by these fallow fields.

Into a colonial style home.  Shadows thick and musty.  Scintilla dancing in sunrays.  Edwardian décor.  Feminine.  A grandmother’s house.  Framed photographs on walls.  An old family.  A happy family.  Rooms so empty that I feel myself fading.  I can hear voices.  Echolalia of the past.  Children laughing.  A baby wailing.  Lovers murmuring.

A door, ajar in the kitchen.  Opening it.  A stairway leading down into the cellar.  A damp smell.  A dirty smell.  Mildew and concrete.  Walls clammy against clammy palms.  Stairs dissolving into dark nothingness.  The cellar a mere illusion of reason imposed upon empty infinity.  The Void before the Light.  The Dark Waters that terrified God into the Act of Creation.          

I’m not alone.

In the dark, a woman’s body pressing against me.  The brush of lips.  Her voice in my ear: “Come to me.”

Leaving the house.  And the town.    Walking into the whispering grass, bloody with the sunset.

Looking to the southeast.  Across the undulate grass and bone-dust sloughs, where mud buttes jut like dried boils and the earth is scarred by a dried-up river.  The House of Heart’s Defile, squatting at the edge of a gorge from which it and the town is named.  Here before the first influx of European settlers.  A mystery haunting the myths of Blood and Blackfoot.  Its image captured in petroglyph, woodcut, daguerreotype, and photograph.  Investigated only from a distance.  A house without ingress.  A paradox untouched.  Pondered and denied.

I can feel it out there.  Oppressive.

I’m afraid.

I cannot avoid it any longer.

I suppose I never could.

You can’t escape yourself.

To the teasing wind: “I’m coming.”

Taped journals of Dr. Seth Adoniram—

Yse is a rumour.  There are no records of her or her family.  Officially, she doesn’t exist.  Tell that to the families of her victims.

I’m trying to help her.

Why?

Nothing so noble as a doctor’s duty to heal.

I’m weak.  I love her.  Or I think I do.  But there’s no use splitting hairs.  The consequences are the same. 

Yse refers to her mother as the Lady of Maraclea.  She’s been dead a long time.  Since Yse was born.  Her father has occasionally referred to her mother as ‘My Beloved Cathari’.  The consensus is that Cathari means Catharine.

I disagree, knowing something of Medieval history.

Cathari refers to Catharism, a religious sect based upon Manichaeistic doctrine.  A belief that the universe is comprised of two separate worlds: the spiritual created by God, and the material by Satan.  During the twelfth century a schism occurred, dividing Catharism into the fundamentalist Albanenses and the moderate Garatenses.  They spread throughout Bulgaria, Albania, Slovania, and in Milan as the Patarini.  They also had influences in the Transcauscasian region of western Asia, in such countries as Armenia and Georgia.  They were most numerous in southern France as the Albigenese.  But by the fourteenth century, the heresy of Catharism ended.  Accused of Necromancy and Devil Worship, they were destroyed during the infamous Albigensian Crusade.

Maraclea was an Armenian city, in the county of Tripoli.

Armenia and Lebanon are in relative proximity to each other.  Neighbouring Turkey.  Although Lebanon is further removed to the south by Syria.  Also bordered by Israel.

Yse often refers to her father as ‘My Lord of Sidon’.

Sidon is the ‘Southern Capital’ of Lebanon.

The city has a notable history.  One of three great Phoenician city-states.  A Persian Satrapy.  And a home to such warrior-monk orders as the Hospitallers and Templars.  The latter’s traditions were heavily influenced by Cabalism and pagan Head Worship cults.  They were eventually accused of Devil Worship.  Like the Cathari after them, they were destroyed.  It’s now known that the Templars also had Islamic associations.  Their holiest image, the Head of Baphomet (believed by Inquisitors to be one of the Devil’s many names) is now thought to be that of either Christ or Mohammed— Baphomet being a bastardisation of the Arabic word Mahomet, meaning Mohammed.

The relevance of all this becomes apparent in context with an obscure Templar myth.  It concerns one Matthew de Sarmage, a Lord of Sidon and the blood brother of the Sultan of Egypt.

Once, a Lord of Sidon was obsessed with a noblewoman of Maraclea.  She rejected him, however.  He persisted.  But she stood firm, supported by her family and her church.  She died quite suddenly, under mysterious circumstances.  On the night of her funeral, the Lord exhumed and ravished her.  When he’d finished, a disembodied voice spoke from the darkness.  It told him that he should return in nine-months.  And he did.  Digging her up, he found the head a child protruding from her womb.  He heard the rustle of wings.  The darkness spoke again, instructing him to guard his unliving son, for it was a giver of all good things.  After that night, the Lord was never defeated in battle, nor did he fail in any ambition.  His banners and seals bore Skull and Crossbones, symbolising his son’s birth.

The Skull and Crossbones insignia was borrowed by Freemasons to mark their gravestones.  A sign of blessing.  It has been popularized, of course, as the infamous Jolly Roger.

There are some variations on the myth.  The most notable being that there was no child.  Or that the child was a mere a heap of bones.  And it was the woman’s head that the knight took as a talisman.  In this case, the voice promised that all who looked upon her face would be routed and destroyed.  Or that, after laying with the dead Lady, she arises to pass a monstrous head into his safekeeping.  One version, influenced by the Benjamites who worshiped the golden calf of Isis, gives the Lady’s name as Yse, a corruption of the Egyptian goddess’s name.

All this is very well and good.

So Yse is named after a mythical character.

As, the conclusion might be drawn, is her mother.

She has given her father’s full name as Matthew de Sarmage.

Nobody has made a connection.

I haven’t mentioned it.

Nobody would believe it.

Nobody will.

Across the table, Yse sits quietly regarding me.  We’re in a private interview room.  She’s securely chained and bolted to the floor.  A guard stands outside the door.  Others observe through security cameras.  The air is cold.  Sterile.  Smelling faintly of bleach.  The walls are cream cinderblock.  The room is lit by fluorescents.  There is one window.  Thick glass and wire mesh.  A view of prison roofs and prison walls.

She’s beautiful.   And her eyes . . . alluring and unsettling.  Wide.  Amber.  Like candle-flames on shadowed glass.  Transfixing and unwavering.  She opens you with a look.  Piercing flesh and soul.

I fidget with her file, unable to concentrate.

Crime scene photos snag my attention.  Glossy prints of butchered humanity.  Close-ups.  Showing mastication: human dentition scarring flesh and bone.

Evidence of post-mortem sex.

Mostly men.  Found in various locals.  Young and old.  Rich and poor.  Married and single.  Many with priors as johns or prostitutes.  A few unlucky indigents and club-hoppers.

She’d been caught red-handed (literally) by a wife, prematurely returning home from her parents.  Yse, naked and blood-soaked.  Poised upon her prey’s death orgasm.  It seems that she has a soft spot for children.  A ten-year-old boy and his four-year old sister accompanied their mother.  Instead of killing them, Yse fled only to be hit by a car and knocked unconscious. 

The case was airtight.

Witnesses.  Forensic evidence matching Yse with saliva, vaginal fluids, skin residue, and hair found on the corpses.  And then there is the matter of her confession, given without preamble.

They’re calling her a ghoul.

I suppose she is.

Her fetish is an addiction, the gratification of which she’d taken for granted.  She’d always been supplied.

Beyond the sanctity of Heart’s Defile, she was forced to depend upon her own resources.  Grave-robbing was too difficult.  Murder was easy.  She began to enjoy the hunt.  She was doing what she needed to survive.  A natural imperative.  She knew what she did.  But from her perspective, she wasn’t doing anything wrong.  She’s a compelling example of morality’s essential ambiguity (or artificiality).  Until recently, she’d never come into contact with contemporary society.  Everyone is raised according to the norms of their respective cultures.  Moderated, of course, by family foibles.  This includes Yse.  She has spent her life governed by laws antithetical to the societal majority.  If you’re raised to believe a certain behaviour is correct, and you’re judged ‘good’ for striving towards (not necessarily achieving) proper behaviour, how can you then be condemned for doing so?

Should she be locked away for life, or should an attempt be made to re-educate her?  The simple truth is that she cannot be released.

It’s my job to make a decision and suggest it to the court.

Yse’s expression is bemused.  A slight smirk shapes her lips.

“You can’t keep me here.”  Her voice is throaty, her accent thick.

This is how our interviews always begin.

I cleared my throat.  “After today, we’ll never see each other again.”

“Yes, we will.”

“No.  I’m sorry, we won’t.”

“You can’t keep me here.”

We reached the Paradise first.

It was an unassuming façade.  Cement steps with a wrought iron railing led to smoked glass doors.  We were confronted by a golem in a black suit.  His manner became far more accommodating when Chief introduced us.  We were ushered inside with a sycophantic smile.

It was dark.  I had to squint to see anything clearly.  The lighting consisted mostly of purple and green neon.  Hardwood floors and brick walls.  The booths were comfortable enclosures.  In the middle was the bar, like a neon island.  There were plants everywhere, some synthetic and some not.  Creepers covered the walls and ceiling.  Rhododendrons shrouded the booths, adding to their privacy.  In the corners were dwarf palms and bananas.  There was even some bamboo.  Amidst the greenery were replicas of Indo-Chinese ruins.  Beatific faces of Hindu gods aglow with eldritch neon.  Ceramic animals haunted the undergrowth.  In the centre of the bar was a boa constrictor in a terrarium.  There was a larger terrarium in the rear, where a pair of Macaque monkeys groomed each other.  Macaws and African Greys and Cockatoos squawked and talked in cages bolted into stout columns.  I wondered what kind of strings had to be pulled to get a permit for this place.  There was a small stage for a house band; and the opposite wall had smoked glass windows.  The floor between was open for dancers.  On either side of the bar were dining areas.  The booths were on a raised level to the north.  To the south, tables and chairs were set beneath the windows.  There was a well-dressed crowd engaging in a conga line.  The waitresses were uniformly tall and curvaceous, with clinging black dresses and Egyptian wigs.  The waiters, however, looked absurd in their Bwana outfits.

The upper dining level was reserved for Fred’s party.

We settled into a corner booth and ordered a round of beers.  As people arrived, Fred and Shireen were drawn away.  I settled in for the long haul.  All I wanted was to sanitise my mind with alcohol.  I didn’t want any recollection of Eurydice when I awoke.

Rhea was peering at me.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.

I smirked, said something witty (or what he thought was witty).

She looked at me oddly and smiled.

What did I say?

We chatted for awhile, about nothing in particular.  I downed two beers and ordered a third.  Rhea’s luck with drinks was holding out.  The server seemed to have forgotten her order.  Rhea took matters into her own hands, leaving me and vanishing into the thickening crowd.

The night passed slowly.

I ate a lot of free cheese and drank a lot of free beer.

Eventually I got tired of sitting, and wandered about the crowd.  I didn’t mingle.  I was an invisible observer.  I eventually came across Fred.  He was sitting at a small table in a corner, at the edge of the raised level.  Both the table and chairs were iron.  Nice but damned heavy, and a bit hard on the ass.  We talked about things that had nothing to do with music.  Myriad faces passed through the neon gloom: hovering over our table or at the railing beside us, speaking but not really talking.  Fred chatted with these faces, but his eyes kept roving.  He spied Rhea working her way through the mob around the bar.  Fred waved her over.  I snatched a recently vacated chair for her (the butt print on the seat was still fading).  She joined us, sipping her beer smugly and sighing.  They talked about family things, normal things.  I paid little attention.  My thoughts were mercifully slow and sparse.  Fred was abducted by his lawyer.  Rhea and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and smiled.

A familiar scruffy figure clambered over the railing.  He plopped into Fred’s chair, grinned widely at me, then hit on Rhea.  She handled herself admirably.  Tolerant.  Humouring.  But she didn’t encourage him.  Nor insult him.  He proffered a pen and a business card for her to write her number on.  Everyone had business cards these days, it seemed.  She took it and his pen when she left under the pretence of an urgent summons.  The guy was too drunk to perceive the ruse.

I finished my beer noncommittally and waved at the waitress.  She grinned at me and pointed at my empty glass.  I nodded.  Mr. Scruffy Man pulled some peanuts out of a coat pocket.  He cracked them open between thumb and forefinger, dumping the nuts on the table and popped the shells into his mouth.

I stared at the two shrivelled kernels on the table.

They were flicked away by a yellow fingernail.

The fellow said something.

I couldn’t hear him.  My ears were buzzing strangely.  I wondered if I’d had too much to drink.  “What?”

The man smiled.  What few teeth he had were brown and black.  “Have you ever kept waking up from one dream into another?”

“Um, not that I can recall.”  I leaned forward.  I quickly regretted doing so.  The reek hit my the nose like a fist.

The man laughed, smacking the table.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks,” Adam said.

The man lit up and illicit cigarette.  He was unconcerned about being caught.  There were quit a few people smoking here tonight.  What was New Years without a smoke or a toke?  The answer: a breathable one.  I’d stick to beer.  If you did it right, it’d kill you too.

“Hack.”

“What?”

“Hack,” he said again.  “It’s my name.”

“Nice to meet you.”  He paused, sipping his beer.  “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but I’ve had a really long day so . . .”

Hack cracked another peanut.  “It has been a long day.  A day that is an eternity.  Do you think it’s possible to wake up from eternity?”  He offered a shell to me.  I declined.  Hack shrugged.  He tossed the shells into his mouth.

I thought a minute, staring into beer foam.  I was a philosophical drunk.  Well, to a certain point.  There was a period between being buzzed and shit-faced when I gave into my ideas, waxing on (and on and on) about things nobody really cared about.  The shit-faced threshold was approaching fast.  I answered anyway, enunciating carefully.  “Seems to me eternity equates to everlasting.  And if we’re in an everlasting state, then, by definition, we cannot leave it.  There’s nothing beyond that state.  There’s simply no beyond.  So no, we cannot wake up because there’s nothing to wake up to.”

Hack scowled.

Wrong answer, I thought.  So what.

Hack mumbled something around a mouthful of cigarette and beer.

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“Yes you do.”

“Sorry.  I really don’t.”

Hack frowned.  He swallowed more peanut shells and took a deep drag from his cigarette.  He leaned across the table, smoke streaming from his nostrils.  “Do you know what the differences between realities are?”

“No.”  A lie intended to discourage.

“Consciousness!” Hack slapped the table again.

“Okay, sure,” I replied, eyeing the other man apprehensively.

“Each conscious mind is a reality in itself.  And all these individual realities are linked by perception.  But what is perceived is interpreted by the conscious mind to fit within the frame of its reality.  So, while perception links the realities, they remain incomprehensible, because the process of interpretation alters the condition of the perceived into something familiar and therefore something different then it actually is.  We see what we want to see because we do not have the capacity to see anything else.  Belief is perception.  You believe everything you see because you cannot see anything else.  Even when you doubt what you see, that doubt is part of your belief in what you see.  The conscious mind defines your reality.”  He took another deep breath, his eyes closed and rolling behind bruised lids, his head nodding to some strange internal music.  “What, then is consciousness?”

I swigged back the rest of my beer. “Reality.”

Hack jerked forwards, opening his colourless eyes.  “No, no, no, no nononononono!  Computation is consciousness!”  He slumped in his chair, his palms leaving sweaty imprints on table.  He blinked and smiled uneasily.  He chewed on more peanut shells.  “It is nothing but information imbedded in fields of universal static.  Accidents of energy and matter.  Dissipative structures in the ocean of complexity.  Strings of coincidences that briefly effect the chaos around them, creating an illusion of order, before decaying and returning to cosmic froth.  Reality is a maze of minds.  A network as vast as all the minds in this world.  A labyrinth of thought in which the Minotaur is imprisoned.” 

“Sure, whatever.”  I wasn’t in the mood to humour the guy anymore.  I was tired, drunk, and alienated.  I could feel a tightening behind my eyes, foreshadowing a headache.  The buzzing in my ears was starting to overwhelm me.  “I’m going to get up now and walk away from you.  Nice to meet you.  And have a good night.”  I stood unsteadily.  I braced myself against the table and made the mistake of closing my eyes.  I could feel the room spinning.  Okay, so I was shit-faced, life goes on.

Hack took another peanut out of his coat pocket and cracked it in his palm.  He held it up, pulled the shell apart, letting the kernels fall to the floor.  “Take out what is inside and you’ve just got an empty shell.”  He stuck out his tongue, put the shell on it, and slurped it into his mouth.  “Tasty.”

I turned away from the strange little man and carefully manoeuvred through the crowd.  I looked for Fred, but couldn’t see him.  Nor could I see either Shireen or Rhea.  Wonderful.  I ended up in a corner, surrounded by dwarf palms and leaning on a blue ceramic tiger.  Somewhere along the line, I’d picked up another pint of beer.  I didn’t remember how I got it.  No matter, I had it and it tasted good.

I watched people pass by.  They didn’t have faces anymore.  Their movements were jerky.  They weren’t really moving.  They were like images on celluloid.  Just a series of stills, streaming past so fast that it gave the illusion of movement, of continuity and consistency.  But when slowed down, you could see the flicker effect.  This, I thought, is what we were.  Reality was nothing but a frame change.

The buzzing in my ears was so loud now that I could hardly hear anything else.  If somebody talked to me, I wouldn’t be able to understand a word.  I probably should have stayed at the table with Hack.  At least I’d be sitting down.  I wouldn’t have to listen to the man’s babbling because I wouldn’t be capable of listening.

Then I saw Fred, with Shireen and Lix.

I took a step towards them, taking another sip and missing my mouth.  Beer dribbled down my chin, splashing his shirt.

< drink much asshole >

“‘Scuse me?” I wiped my mouth and looked towards the speaker.  All I saw was the ceramic tiger shrouded in palm fronds.  What the fuck?  It had sounded as if she’d been right beside me.

< oh yeah he’s into it i want him to fuck me first debbie can watch and fist herself god i’m wet i wonder if he’d fuck me here in a stall or something wonder what he tastes like>

I almost dumped my beer as I spun around.  Again, there was nobody there.

< fuck do i ever need to piss where the hell is the john in this place fuck i’m drunk >

More voices began to rise out of the drone, so clear that I should have felt breath in my ear.  I was beyond disconcerted.

< oh man does she dress like that on purpose look at those nipples shit she might as well be naked getting hard shit look at those lips i bet they’d feel real sweet on my cock i wonder stop wondering you chicken shit what’s the worst she can do tell you to go fuck yourself in which case i might just have to damn okay okay here i go >

I looked around in panic.

The buzz washed away my awareness and the voices surged.

< look at that fucking guy now that’s drunk which reminds me where is that bitch with my highball >

< fucking asshole keeps looking at her if he doesn’t stop i’m going to bash his fucking face into the back of his fucking skull >

< bastards smiling at me acting all friendly when he’s fucking ripping me off and he knows i can’t do a damned thing about it without breaking the contract fuck do i hate this shit should have stuck with the programming gig >

< my beer is warm i hate warm beer>

< beautiful people the beautiful people why the fuck do I have that song in me head >

< okay i really have no idea what this guy is talking about and really what the hell is quantum anyway and why the hell is he talking to me and most importantly why the hell am i listening to him >

< i’m gonna puke oh shit oh shit deep breaths deep breaths don’t puke don’t puke where the fuck is the can oh fuck get the hell out of my way oh shit >

< that monkey is staring at me >

< oh jesus oh god your tongue uh oh man oh man oh man i’m gonna shoot my load are you gonna swallow look at his eyes he’s watching me oh man oh man he’s not letting me go oh fuck here it comes oh he’s gonna swallow oh >

< did I forget to feed the birds she’s gonna kill me >

< where’s my coke where’s my coke fuck where is it there of sweet baby yes time to fuck papa in the brain >

< why the hell did I agree to work tonight what a fucking mess >

< oh shit where’s my wallet >

< man does this guy stink what’d he do piss himself yikes why me >

< whatever happened to count chocula i really miss count chocula frankenberry was pretty good too>

The voices faded.  I felt like I was about to puke.  My head hurt.  What the hell had happened?  Somebody was holding me up.  I looked blearily into the rather severe face of a bouncer.

“I think you’ve had enough for tonight, buddy.”

I was cogent enough to not resist as he steered me towards the doors.  There was a bleary moment of panic, then resignation.  What the fuck was I going to do now?  I strained to focus my eyes.  They felt as if they were crossing.  There was no way in hell I’d be able to phone for a taxi.  I hadn’t anticipated on going home tonight.  I’d planned on crashing at Fred’s place.  Where the fuck was Fred?  I craned my head around hoping to spy and flag him.  But I couldn’t see Fred anywhere.  Oh no.  My stomach spasmed.  Oh shit.

“Hold it until you’re outside.  If you puke on me, I’ll pull your head out your asshole.”

A fractured skull would only make my hangover worse.  I’d be out the door soon, and then I could puke as much as I wanted.  Great.  What a finish to the evening.  Cops would probably pick me up.  It would make things a bit easier if they did.  Free ride.  Free bed.  Okay, so the drunk tank wasn’t exactly the Fairmont, but it was better than passing out in an alley.

Everything consisted of shadow, or gestures in shadow (a little neon blur now and then for a bit of colour).  Then she appeared before me.  Everything about her was clean and sharp and bright.  She was gorgeous.  Why hadn’t I noticed how fucking hot she was?  Sure, if she hadn’t attracted me, I wouldn’t have dated her.  But this . . . this was something else, something that struck me deep and terrified me.  I was seeing her, truly seeing her, for the first time.  Either that or I was really really drunk.

“I’ll look after him, if that’s okay,” she said.

The bouncer was gaping at her.  So it wasn’t just me, then.  She was a beautiful woman.

“You know this guy?”  Why did this jackass sound so damned incredulous?

“I do,” Eurydice replied, smiling wryly at me.

She reached out and took my arm.  It felt as if her hand went right through me.  Her scent filled my nostrils.  My gaze danced over the sequins of her gown, each like a chip of the moon.

The bouncer reluctantly released me and left.

“You hurt me.”  She stood so close that she whispered those words into my cheek.

“I know.”

“I needed you.”  I felt her softness against me.  “I still need you.”

I realised that I wasn’t breathing.  So I breathed.

Her lips brushed my skin.  “I’m sorry if you’re still angry with me.  I don’t want you to be angry with me.”

Silence.

“I want to tell you something.”

I choked.  “What?” 

She hesitated.  She never hesitated.  “I still love you.” 

Everything stopped.

She took my hands.  “Come with me.”

Eat me.  Drink me.  Those were my choices.  I didn’t want either.  I also wanted both.  Such was the nature of choice.  Inevitably unfair.  Neither right nor wrong.  Just different.  Eat me.  Drink me.  Fuck me.  Leave me.  Whoever said that the possibilities in life were endless was a fucking idiot.  The possibilities in life were finite, always dictated, and always circumstantial.  You just blundered along through this labyrinth until you reached the end.

She was looking at me, her eyes deep, her smile shallow.  “I want you to know how much I need you.  I want to show you how I’ve changed.  I want you to forgive me.  I want you to come with me.”

Every word she spoke were words I’d wanted to hear from her for so long.  I’d loved her.  She’d hurt me.  I’d always dreamed of her coming back to me, contrite, telling me how wrong she’d been and how much she missed me.  It would never happen.  This was too strange.  This didn’t sound like her at all.  But it was her, wasn’t it?  She was seducing me.  That was the only explanation.  But why?  I’d never been able to resist her.  When I was with her, I lost myself.

She pushed open the doors and stepped outside, leading me by the hand.

I descended the steps, bracing myself on the iron banister.  I shivered.  The chill was a relief.  My head was clearing.  I took a deep breath.  The air smelt of the city.  It wasn’t an unpleasant smell.  Cold concrete and glass.  The faint perfume of exhaust and pizza.

She took her phone from her purse and called a cab.

“It’ll be a couple of minutes.”  She hugged herself and glanced down the street.  She must have been freezing in that gown.  I approached her (swaying slightly).  I took off my jacket, intending to give it to her.  It would have been quite the gallant gesture if I hadn’t suddenly doubled over and vomited onto the sidewalk.  For a good minute or more, I barfed myself inside out, oblivious to everything accept the pain tearing through my gut and throat.  When I was reduced to dry heaving, I became aware of Eurydice beside me.  She was rubbing his back.  Just like old times.

I took a crumbled napkin from my pocket and wiped my lips.  I straightened, trembling.  She took a packet of gum from her purse and handed it to me.  She smirked.  So did I.  Yeah, just like old times.

“You never could handle you alcohol.”

“I thought it was you who said that it wasn’t a good night unless you puked?”  I popped a stick of gum into his mouth.  Peppermint.

She smiled.  “And it was always you who ended up vomiting.”

“True.  Here.”  I offered her his jacket.

She wrinkled her noise and pointed out a few spatters.

I sighed heavily.  “Shit.”

A taxi pulled up to the curb.

We got inside.

What the fuck was I doing?

The driver looked back at us, asking: “Where to?”

She glanced at me.  “Your place?”

“Sure.”  I gave the address.

As the taxi pulled away from the curb, I looked back at the Paradise.  I saw Hack stepping through the doors.  He watched the taxi drive away.  Hands down, that guy had to be the strangest person I’d ever met.  I slumped in my seat, trying to relax.  I was less conscious of myself than I was of the woman beside me.  Eurydice was looking out the window.  Her ghostly reflection peered at me.  She was singing, so softly, little more than a whisper above the car’s hum.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind

The doors opened during the final verse of Auld Lang Syne.  I pushed through the crowd.  Fuck was it ever hot.  So hard to breathe.  Hard to think.  There were too many people.  I felt nauseous and panicky.  I needed fresh air.  Now!  I hastened out of the building, trying not to scream, trying not to look a lunatic.  But why worry?  Here, everybody was a lunatic.

I staggered outside, gasping, heading for the high fencing at the plaza’s edge, avoiding a concourse that streamed with the frenetic, the drunk, and the drugged.  I was alone.  The embankment beyond the fence was a bristly darkness.  The water: shiny black, riffling bright with reflected moon and city lights.  A white balloon drifted over the concrete, coming to rest at my heels.  I felt like that balloon, skin over air, thoughts over emptiness, drifting about aimlessly until entropy took even that away from me.  I looked back out across the water, at the stellar glimmer of the city.  After a moment, I closed my eyes.  The breeze washed over my face, cooling the flush.  It felt good.

A woman’s voice (familiar, very familiar, and more familiar as I thought about it, but I couldn’t place it), sang softly:  “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?”

It struck a lonely chord within me.  I murmured: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?”

Someone stood behind me.  It was entirely natural for somebody to be there.  Not quite touching.  Not yet . . . then, hands resting gently on my waist.  Breasts against my back.  Breath against my nape.  Soft lips. 

“And ther's a hand, my trusty friend, and gie's a hand o' thine; we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet . . .”

Blinking my eyes slowly into focus, I turned around, searching for the woman.

But I was still alone.

Even the white balloon had drifted away, vanishing in the dark.

Plunging my hands deep into the pockets of my jacket, I turned back to the main building.  My shadow was faint and divided before me.  Forging through the braying crowds, responding to the infrequently directed ‘Happy New Year!’ with a tight grin, I returned to the elevator.  Nodding at the guard, who recognized me by now, he thumbed the third floor button.

I went over to the edge of the lounge and leaned against the balustrade.  I intended on waiting there until someone came to find me.  It was bloody hot.  The air wrapped his face like cellophane.  I took off my jacket, folding it over an arm.  I peered at the dance floor.  If there were an earthquake, or a fire, everyone up here would be royally screwed.  Locked doors.  A fickle elevator.  Who the hell was the genius behind this?

It was still packed down there, but not as bad as before midnight.  People were beginning to leave.  Not that it meant the night was over.  Not by a long shot.  People would keep partying till dawn.  How many of you will wake up in strange beds, in cars, courtyards, holding cells, or not at all?  How many of you will fuck?  How many will fight?  How many of you are like me?

Everybody seemed to be with somebody.

Even I wasn’t alone.  Not really.  There was someone else here, at the edge.  Standing only a short distance away from me, face angled away as she pondered those below.  There was something indescribably sad about her mien.  Lost, it seemed, like me.  Forgotten at a time when she should have been remembered.  Her gown was white, sequinned, with full sleeves and a high neck, clinging to her curves like skin.  Then she turned to face me, plunging me into a profound moment of surreality.

She lifted her glass.  “Happy New Year.”

Recovering quickly, I replied: “Happy New Year.”

Though she’d changed her look, Eurydice remained much the same as I remembered.  I should have recognized her immediately.  Then again, it had been several years and I hadn’t really kept tabs on her.  To me, she’d remained the same as when we’d strutted into the art scene full of sound and fury (and in my case, signifying nothing, fucking nothing at all).  Timeless in my memory: immortal, an archetype of fear and desire.  The woman I’d never been able to get over, the muse behind my disastrous romantic life.

I tried not to stare at her, remembering how her skin had felt, how it had tasted.  I was suddenly very hard, painfully so, shamefully so, but why shamefully, she had been me girlfriend once, my fiancée.  I was remembering, not fantasising, was I?  She’d always been able to do this to m—confuse me, frustrate me.

Silence between us.

The silence of intimate uncertainty.

She sipped her drink.

Her eyes didn’t leave me.

I knew my face was red.

I should have known she’d be here.  She’d known I would be.

Shifting, clearing my throat.  “How have you been?  Looks like you’re doing pretty well for yourself.”  Speaking with awkward haste.

She smiled.  “You were never very good at small talk.”

I smirked ruefully.  “No.  I guess not.  But neither were you.”

Silence.

Heat.

Too much heat.

So much that it chilled me.

“Who are you with? Did . . .”

She laughed.  An airy sound that had always annoyed him because it was so affected, so condescending.  When she really laughed, somebody else was crying; it was a scary sound, something like a choking scream.  “No, Frederick had nothing to do with this.”  She wasn’t laughing now.  Bitterness infected her voice, dropping it to a husky whisper.  “He never liked me.  None of your friends ever liked me.”  She took a swig from her cup.  Then she lifted the pass that hung from her thin belt, riding low on her hips.  “I’m with Pariah.”

“How’d you hook up with them?”

“I worked on their most recent video.”

“I didn’t think you were into doing spots on music videos?”

“Not acting.  I directed it.”

“Really?  When did that start?”

She affected a pout.  “I’m hurt.  I’d hoped that you’d be keeping up with my work?”  That pout became a seductive smile, her eyes sharp as ice picks.  “I’ve been keeping track of yours.”  She reached out and brushed her fingers down my arm.

I shuddered.  Swallowed.  I hated that she could do this to me.  She put a hand lightly on my chest.  Speaking softly, I barely heard her over the ambient noise.  “Have you missed me at all?”

I was rigid.  I didn’t know how to react to this.  “Not really.”

“I think you did.”  She took another sip from her cup.

“What do you want, Alice?”  I spoke quietly.

She stared at me for what seemed a very long time.  I’d angered her.  Only her mother had persisted in using her real name after she’d legally changed it.  She’d hated her mother.  She turned away from me, looking out over the dance floor.  She finished her drink and placed the empty cup on the edge.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, forcing me to take a step towards her so that I could hear.  “I thought . . .”

“What?”

“I thought that maybe you could help me find out.”

I resisted the urge to go over to her, to comfort her, to act the romantic sucker, and give in to her.  It was hard not to.  She looked as if she was wilting.  I couldn’t recall ever having seen her cry, or show any emotion beside anger and contempt.  She wasn’t crying though.  She was resisting it.  I actually felt guilty for thinking that she was manipulating me.  Which made me more suspicious.  Which in turn increased my guilt.

“You never called me,” she said after a moment.

“You know me,”

“I do.”

“I don’t have a very good sense of time.  A month could pass and I wouldn’t really notice.”

“I always had to call you.”

“Most people still do.”

She shifted, glancing almost furtively at her empty cup, then behind me, eyes roving but blank.  She wanted another drink.

“So,” she said.

“So,” I said.

“I’d still like to get together with you.”

I nodded.

She looked at me expectantly.

There was no good way for me to respond.

She reached out to me again, her fingers grazing my hand.

Another electric shiver.

“I don’t like how we left it.”

“Neither do I.”

She held my hand.  Skin soft, slightly moist.

I didn’t pull away from her.

She lowered her head.  “Can we talk later?”

I could smell her hair.  I wanted to bury my nose in those quicksilver waves and inhale until I passed out.  But I didn’t.  I remained stiff and sweating and trembling.

She leaned closer, her body grazing mine, full of memories.  Her face so close.  Breath on skin.  “I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”  A croak.

She stepped back, squeezing my hand and then releasing it.  “Thank you,” she said.

I blinked.

Reality suddenly snapped back into place.

She retrieved her cup.  “I’m going to get another drink.  You want one?”

I nodded somewhat dumbly.

She smiled at him.

I smiled lamely back.

Then she walked away from me.

And I stood there staring at the empty space where she’d been.

Someone touched my arm.

I jumped.

Shireen was beside me.  “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.  Here.”  She handed me a pass.  I looked at it uncomprehendingly.  “It’s Fred’s,” Shireen explained, looking at me curiously.  “Something wrong?  You look awful.”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong.”

She didn’t believe me.  But thankfully, she didn’t pursue the matter.  She gestured at the performer’s pass.  “Security should let you through with that.  Come on, Fred’s having a fit.”

I hesitated, scanning the milling crowd, seeing Eurydice, at the bar, talking to that scruffy grey guy.  I wanted to wait for her and I wanted to get the hell away from her.

“Do you know her?”

I glanced at Shireen.

Then back at Eurydice.

How long had I been staring at her?

“Who?”

Shireen frowned at me.  “Her,” she said, gesturing.  They’d never met.

I took a deep breath, deciding.  “No,” I said quietly.  “I don’t know her.”

I turned away from Eurydice and made for the elevator, one foot in front of the other.  It was the longest and hardest distance I’d ever walked.  I knew I was a chicken-shit bastard.  I would regret my decision.  It would eat away at me.  I would hate myself.  I couldn’t deal with it.  Not now.  Not ever.  She was falling.  I didn’t want to fall with her.  That’s what she wanted.  She wanted somebody to fall with.

I imagined her turning, two drinks in hand, to see me gone.

I was shaking by the time we reached the elevator doors.

Shireen stepped in after me, looking at me shrewdly.  “So,” she asked, pressing the button, “is there something I should know?”

I couldn’t look at her.  “No.”

“Okay.”

I knew that tone.  I felt sorry for Fred.  Why didn’t I just tell her?  She would understand, wouldn’t she?  She would pry at Fred until he eventually told her.  Then he would harangue me for putting him in that position.

“What happened to you, anyway,” Shireen asked.

“Security.  And the elevator doors jammed.  I spent the stroke of midnight trapped on this thing.”

“You’re kidding.”

 “Nope.”

The elevator jounced to a stop.  The doors opened.  I flashed the pass at the guard (thankfully not the one who’d ejected me the last time).  He obviously recognised Shireen.  Nodding at her and letting them through.  The performers lounge was well lit and surprisingly quiet.  So quiet that it enhanced the ringing in my ears.  I could feel the pressure of the noise beyond the walls, as if at any moment this little sanctuary would rupture.  I followed Shireen past an office, through a narrow hallway, into a larger room partitioned by blue curtains.  And there was Frederick Roberts, storming towards them.  I noticed that his fingers were bandaged.

“Happy New Year, man.”  Fred said, giving me an awkward hug.

“Back at you, brother.  What’s with the hands?”

“Guitar strings sliced them up when I busted the Fendor.  Stings like hell,” Fred said, pausing to give Shireen a quick kiss.  “Sue’s been asking for you,” he told her.  She left.  Brushing back a lock of sweaty black hair, he slung an arm around my shoulders.  “Sorry about the shit with security.”

“No worries.”

“No, seriously, it’s one big piss-up.  Si’s already fucked off.  They tried to drag Meg out when they came through here double-checking passes.  By the way, keep mine on you just in case they try and pull that shit again.”

“Uhm,” I hesitated, not entirely certain I wanted to say anything.

Too late though.  “What?”

“Did you know that Eurydice is here.”

Fred’s eyes widened.  “Shit.  No, I didn’t.  Jesus, what’s that bitch doing here.  I didn’t think this was her kind of scene.”

“Neither did I.  She was upstairs.”

“How the fuck did she get a pass?”

“She’s with Pariah.  Been making videos, it seems.”

“You talked with her?”

I nodded.  “It’s not really that big a place up there, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“What’d she want?”

I rubbed the back of my neck.  “I ducked out on her, though.  I expect she’ll be coming after me sooner or later.”

“Don’t worry, man.  She’ll never get past the fucking Gestapo at the door.  And we’ll be out’a here soon.”

“I should probably warn you that Shireen’s gonna be asking about her, though.  She didn’t see me with her, but she caught the vibe.”

Fred rolled his eyes.  “Shit.”

“Sorry.”

He sighed.  “I thought we were finished with her.”  He steered me into one of the curtained dressing rooms.  People lounged on a sofa and chairs.  I saw Rhea, with a hard-earned beer cradled protectively against her chest.  She smiled and waved at me.  There was a expansive buffet: sushi, finger sandwiches, cheeses, bread-rolls, potato chips, spring rolls, Cheetos, pitas with humus and babaganoush, kalamri, beer (both imported and domestic) and the obligatory champagne.  “Grab a glass of champagne.  Dig in. Take a load off.  Try and relax.” Fred slapped my shoulder reassuringly, and then turned his attention elsewhere.

I pondered the buffet, settling with square of blue cheese on rye and some champagne.  Then I stood in a corner, chewing.

Shireen was talking with two women, one of whom I vaguely remembered meeting before.  Rhea was chatting with a ten-foot tall black woman in a leather leopard-skin outfit.  Both Lix and Reggie were prowling around looking angry.  I didn’t really know anybody else here.  And I’d never mastered the art of mingling.

I sipped the champagne.  It was dry enough to close my throat and strong enough to fill myhead with fuzz.  I put the glass on the table and grabbed a beer, downing it rather fast.

I was working on my second beer when I heard Fred shouting.

I circumspectly peeked around the curtain.

Fred was looming over a security guard.  Waving his fists.  Hollering about having anybody he damned well pleased here with him.  The guard was shaking his head.  Then Fred went around the room kicking furniture and ranting: we’re fucking well responsible for your fucking paycheque I can fucking well have my family and friends here I can fucking well destroy this fucking room if I fucking well feel like it so go fuck yourself.

I winced.

Fred had a short fuse.

He tore through the drapes, almost knocking me over.

The guard followed, speaking into his radio.

Everybody heard ‘trouble’ and ‘police’.

Shireen was holding Fred’s arm, telling him to calm down.

Fred shouted into the little man’s face, you asshole you’re calling the cops on me!

The guard said yes.

Then Inanition Highway’s manager arrived (fortuitously, since it looked as if Fred was about to take the guard by the neck and squeeze until his head popped).  I had never learned the man’s real name.  Everybody just referred to him as Chief.  He knew how to handle people.  He asked what was going on.  Fred was inarticulate with anger.  Lix explained.  So did the guard.  Which resulted in an argument between the two.  Chief told everybody to relax.  Then he led the guard away.

Fred stalked over to me.  “We’re getting the hell out of this fucking circus.”

“That was impressive.”  I swigged back the rest of my beer.

“Fucking jag-off.”  A vein in Fred forehead was prominent and throbbing.

“Where to?”

“We’re all heading down to the Paradise.  You up for free beer and food.”

“Do I look stupid?”

Fred arched an eyebrow.  His humour was returning.  I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not.

Chief returned, sans guard.  “It’s all taken care of.”

The mood had been spoiled, however, and Fred wasn’t about to linger.  He told everybody that he was leaving for the Paradise.  People began to make travelling arrangements.  Security was now bending over backwards to accommodate Fred.  They opened up the stairs so that everyone could evade the crowds.  Footfalls echoed in the labyrinth of stairwells and corridors, leading around and under the hall.  Fred’s lawyer likened it a scene from Spinal Tap.  We burst out of fire doors into the cold night.  The parking lot had an air of abandonment despite all the cars.  I piled into the backseat of Fred’s car, alongside Rhea and Chief.  Fred settled into the passenger’s side, his lanky form slouching, knees against the dash, and his toque pulled over his eyebrows.  Shireen, as usual, was the designated chauffeur.

I glanced at his pocket-watch.  It was almost one.

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.  My ears were still ringing.  The darkness behind my lids was tinged red.  I heard her voice.  Like the whispering rustle of wings.  Eurydice, singing Auld Lang Syne.  For the briefest of moments, I felt nothing around me.  Nothing at all.

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s, I was trapped in an elevator. 

I stared at the doors not quite believing that they were there, that I was there, or that any of this was happening on a night that was supposed to be a good night, a party night, music booze sex drugs (loud and ecstatic) revelry.  The stuff that made life worth living, unless it killed you or someone else (or you woke up in jail, an alley, or the bed of someone you don’t remember someone who you really didn’t want to fuck).  It was a rock concert.  Security was tight.  There was much more than alcohol circulating through the crowds.  From ten to eleven, Inanition Highway filled the pavilion with thunder and screams, ending their set by smashing the hell out of their equipment (cheap shit bought specifically for that purpose).  I was supposed to be in the performers lounge, clinking champagne glasses with the band and living large.

But there I was.  Alone.  In an elevator.  Neither surprised nor disappointed.  And wondering what this portended for the year.

I sang along to the muffled baying of Robby Burn’s ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days of auld lang syne?

And days of auld lang syne, my dear,

And days of auld lang syne.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days of auld lang syne?

I was supposed to meet up with Fred’s sister-in-law, Rhea, and his girlfriend, Shireen at 7:00.  Together, they would all head over to the venue.  I, as usual, showed up early.  I’d waited on the front steps of Fred’s apartment for Shireen.  She’d had to drive Fred for his sound-check.  She showed up on time, a preternaturally punctual woman.  Rhea called about fifteen minutes later.  She was running late (no kidding), and coming into town from the suburbs.  Taxis were few and far between that night; the cab companies were backlogged with fares for most of the day.  Bussing was unreliable at the best of times and today at 6:00 p.m., they were free.  Meaning that they were full to capacity and running behind.  So Shireen and I sat around chatting and swilling coffee.

At 9:45 Rhea arrived and we hurried down to the garage to piled into the car.

We made it to the venue in under ten minutes.

The line-up was absurd.  A snake formed from a thousand shivering ticket holders.

We hurried past the queue, Rhea’s heels striking a loud staccato on the pavement.

Then we heard the booming of the Star Wars theme.  Inanition Highway was taking the stage.  Fred, a Star Wars fanatic, started using the theme over two years ago.  A zany whim (of which he had many) intended as a one-time tribute.  He wore a cheesy blue T-shirt with a faded iron-on of the original Star Wars promo poster, leading Inanition Highway onto the darkened stage while the air shuddered.  The fans went nuts.  It became a tradition.  He’d tried doing something similar with the Scooby Doo theme and a green Shaggy T-shirt.  It hadn’t gone over as well, although I preferred it.

We pushed past the people milling in line: stalwart, shivering, and stoned.  Here we are!  We’re freezing our asses off, but we’re here!  Whoo-hoo!  Happy Fucking New Year!  Their blue-lipped grins faltered as we approached a booth, picked-up passes, and bypassed them.

While Shireen and I settled in position at the edge of the crowded pavilion, watching Fred work his supplicants into a self-deprecating frenzy, Rhea began her quest for beer.  I saw her fifteen minutes later, ranting about how she’d waited in line only to find out that she’d needed to purchase beer tickets first.  Then off she went in search of them.  Another fifteen minutes and she returned with tickets in hand, her elfin features set into a fearsome scowl, grumbling under her breath as she passed by, determinedly forging her way back to the beer garden.  I didn’t see her again for the rest of the set.

We were in a rather unenviable spot.  On the lip of the wide cement depression in which the majority of the throng thrashed and shrieked.  In a corner.  To the side of the stage.  Behind a column.  One of several that connected to a lattice of white struts, supporting the glass roof.  Amidst the struts were two huge bunches of blue and white balloons undoubtedly rigged to fall on the crowd at midnight.  People staggered, swayed, spun and raced past them.  One tweaking freak, with a bright red Afro, kept wandering by us.  Sometimes he would leer and wave his arms.  Other times he would spin and spin and spin.  Once, he threw-himself against the canvas wall, slumping, sprawling beneath it, his spread-eagled legs sticking out.

A pair of police meandered inside, scanning the crowd, catching a bit of the concert.  They were here as a token presence.  There was no point trying to bust users at an über-hyped New Year’s Eve bash—a concert that was practically a rave.  I watched the female constable engage in subtle bopping.  I'd never seen anything quite as odd as a grooving uniformed cop.  Her partner stood rigid, scanning the crowd, his square face set with the stern nonchalance of a man certain of his authority and superiority.  He glanced at his partner disparagingly.  She laughed and slapped his arm.  Then they wandered off.

At some point, Shireen realized that we were standing on a sewer-grate.  This explained the stink, which had incited a few moments of apathetic curiosity and nose wrinkling.  We took a few steps away, a totally ineffectual gesture.  Neither of us relished pushing our way into the crowd.  Stench and cold and shitty view versus claustrophobia . . . we stayed where we were. 

The high point of the show was watching Fred manipulate the crowd at his feet.  Between songs, he shouted into the microphone: “Are you all fucked up?”  The response was an incoherent roar.  “Tell me you’re all fucked up!”  And they did.  A thousand-throated voice braying: “We’re all fucked up!”  I was amazed that they all managed to time the shout so perfectly.  Fred got them to shout it three more times.  I knew Fred pretty well.  What he meant by ‘fucked-up’ had nothing to do with the crowd being drunk or drugged into a stage of demonic idiocy.  Fred was getting them to confess something darkly personal, something that could only be drawn out in such an ecstatically uninhibited moment as this, or when a razor blade sliced through the skin of a wrist to bleed away hope.

When Inanition Highway left the stage, the venue erupted.  They returned for an encore, after which they smashed the shit out of their equipment.  It took awhile for Fred to bust his, thrashing about with the guitar like it was an axe.  I worried that maybe it wouldn’t break.  Fred had been fantasising about the moment for weeks.  But then it did, quite spectacularly.

Shireen and I spent about five minutes waiting for Rhea.  Then we fled for the warmth of the hall.

It was utter confusion.  We followed Shireen towards the white steel and glass building.  She made it through the doors without difficulty.  I wasn’t so lucky.  I remained the invisible man, swallowed by the crowd.  Coloured lights sweeping dirty-dancers and beer-guzzling thickets.  The air buzzed with music and conversation.  I hurried after Shireen.  She was heading for the escalators to the second floor.  Faces passed in a blur of glittering eyes and open mouths.  Voices filled my ears with a deafening buzz, resonating with my skull, numbing my brain.  It was hard to think.

Someone grabbed my arm.

Shireen was looking up at me.  She mouthed something.  I shook his head.  I shrugged, pointing at my ears.  She nodded and leaned close so that her breath tickled me, shouting: “Third floor.  Not exactly sure how to get there.”  Motioning towards the escalators.  “Should be an elevator or stairs.”

“Lead on,” I replied.

We went up the glass-sided escalators, only to learn from a security guard that the stairs were locked and the elevator could only be accessed on the first floor.  We eventually found it in the back corner, surrounded by curtains.  There was quite a crowd there, waiting patiently for the insouciant little security guard to check our passes.  After shoving my way into the tiny elevator, I noticed the plaque announcing a six-person capacity.  There were at least ten people crammed onboard.  A few with performer’s passes disembarked on the second floor.  The balcony that passed for the third floor was none-too-stable.  Or so it seemed to me.  Everyone up here was essentially trapped.  The only exit was the elevator, since the stairwell was locked.  Red dominated.  Carpeting and table cloths.  Crimson spotlights mounted along the vaulted ceiling strafing the crowds below.  And a bright EXIT sign above doors that offered no egress.

I dutifully followed Shireen to a table.  She knew people there.  I didn’t.  Most were industry folk.  Shireen introduced me as one of Fred’s oldest friends.  The inevitable ‘so you’re the one with all the stories.’  A shrug.  A smile.  An ‘I suppose so’.  Then they ignored me, which was fine.  I didn’t really have any stories about Fred.  Fred was the one who usually told stories about me.  Shireen went off to see if she could find Rhea.  I desperately wanted a drink (preferably with an astronomically high alcohol content) but I was reluctant to wander off.  I glanced at the table’s other occupants.  They nodded at me.  I nodded back.  They continued their conversation.  I stared at the tablecloth.  Eventually, they left.  I scanned the crowd.  Recognising a few faces, but not so familiar that I wanted to go over and converse.

Then I spotted a scraggly little guy.  He swayed as he walked and swayed when he stood.  He kept bobbing his head.  Eyes closed more often then open.  It took me a moment to realise that the man’s drunken grooving was totally out of time with the music.

Then I spotted Simon.  Si was Inanition Highway’s lead guitarist and keyboardist.  He was pissed off.  Ranting something about how he couldn’t have his girlfriend or brother with him in his own fucking dressing room.  Felix and Reginald, Inanition Highway’s percussionist and bassist respectively, appeared soon thereafter, beers in hand, scowling.  Fred was shaking hands, patting backs, and chitchatting.  Dressed in brown cords, tennis shoes, navy toque and Star Wars T-shirt; Fred looked as out of place as I felt.  But he was the reason they were all here, more so than the other bands.  Frederick Roberts was the newest thing: media-proclaimed voice of the suburban ghetto, blue-collar hero, cynical prince of the people and all that bullshit.

I looked for the scruffy guy, but he’d disappeared.

Fred took a seat beside me.  We nodded at each other, but didn’t say anything.  The table quickly filled with people vying for his attention.  I feigned a glance at my pocket watch then caught his eye.  Since nobody knew who I was, they assumed that the gesture was significant.  Fred smiled and pantomimed apologies.  We left the table to find Shireen.

“Sorry about all that,” Fred said.  “Thanks for the save.”

“No problem,” I replied.  “What’s up with Si?”

“What do you mean?”

“He looked pissed about something.  So did Lix and Reggie, but they weren’t quite as vocal about it.  Something about Meg not being allowed in the dressing room.”

“Yeah.  Fucking prohibited.  Only the bands and their managers.  Fuck them.  It’s absurd the way they’ve got everything locked up tighter than an ant’s asshole.  Bands are always allowed to have their guests in the dressing room after the show.  That’s what the guest-list is fucking for.  And it’s New Years!  If we want to pass around a glass of champagne with friends and family in fucking peace and fucking quiet, then we’re fucking well going to do it.  That’s why I came up.  If you’re with me, there shouldn’t be a problem.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about this.

It took about ten minutes to collect Shireen and Rhea.

There was a mob at the elevator.  Fred and the girls were caught up in the rush as the doors opened.  I was not.  I got squeezed out.  There were at least a dozen people onboard.  I waved at Fred, shouting that I’d catch the next one.  He nodded as the doors closed.

I managed to force my way onto third ride.  I was jammed in the back by a ridiculous press of people.  I noticed the scraggy dude smushed up against the doors, holding a beer, eyeing the sleek woman beside him.  Everybody (except me) was heading down to the first floor for the countdown.  I should’ve asked somebody to hit the second floor button.  But I didn’t.  I doubted I’d be able get out anyway.  I went all the way to the bottom.  It wasn’t an unpleasant ride.  Two attractive young ladies were pressed up against me.  I smiled at one.  She rolled her eyes.

Then the doors jammed.

Silence for a moment.

Someone said shit.

Someone said oops.

The scruffy guy attempted to pry the doors open, and failed.  Then he started banging and shouting.  Open the fucking doors! 

And the doors opened.

Everyone burst out of the elevator, and I was disgorged.  I turned and waited for the doors to open again.  The security guard stared at me suspiciously.  I shrugged.

Time passed.

I glanced at my pocket watch.

Midnight was swiftly approaching.

I could hear the countdown begin.

The doors opened.

Three people stepped off, hurrying into the crowd.

I entered.

Nobody else got in.

I pressed two.

My stomach shifted as the elevator rose.

The doors opened.

I was stepping out when a burly security guard barred my way.  Looking at the pass.  Shaking his head.  I said I’d been invited, ask Fred.  No, sorry sir.  Only people with performer’s passes are allowed on this floor.  But…  Sorry.  Go ask him.  No.  But ...  The guard pushed me roughly into the elevator.  The doors closed.  The elevator went back down.  And the doors jammed again.

While enjoying a walk in the rain this morning, my thoughts turned towards Handfasting.  My roommate wandered off to Calgary over the weekend to attend the Wiccan Wedding of a cherished friend.  Which is why, I assume, Handfasting popped somewhat randomly into my head.  Now, most normal folk out there, when thinking of Handfasting, would imagine an alternative wedding, rife with medieval pomp and pagan ritual.  Not me.  I wonder, what a strange word.  Handfasting.  I picture a group getting together to celebrate their love by eating each other's hands.  Or, alternatively, having to spend a prolonged period of time without their hands.  Both quite disturbing images.  Now, of course, I'm thinking about zombies in love.  How does one go from a wedding ceremony to zombie romance?  Some days, my brain works in strange ways.

I'm at an intersection.  The light changes.  The bright white walking man pops to life.  I step off the curb, sipping my coffee.  The blue car that slowed to stop suddenly accelerates.  My coffee explodes in my face.  I'm lying on the hood of the car.  My arm hurts.  The car is still accelerating.  I look up to see the drive's face, a blond woman who may be in her late thirties or early forties.  Her eyes go so wide I expect them to fly from their sockets and splatter on the windshield.  She takes her hands of the wheel and flaps them around,  her mouth is open in an almost perfect 'O".  The car continues to move.  And then it stops.  I don't so much slide off as spin.  I'm somehow still standing, though I staggered a bit before regaining my balance.  My arm hurts.  I'm shaking.  I'm stunned.  My heart is hammering away somewhere beneath my tongue.  My legs are rubbery.  I try and walk.  I almost fall.  But I keep going.  It's like some Vaudeville comedy sketchy.

Today I was hit by a car while walking home from a clinic.  I was out renewing a prescription.  It has been fourteen months since I went off my anti-depressants and tried to take my mind and my life back.  Things have gotten so bad, so erratic and frankly frightening with me, that I decided enough was enough, and off I went to the clinic.  I felt like I was doing the right thing, taking responsibility, despite disliking the thought that my sanity is dependent upon a pill rather than my will.  Jhayne once told me she wished she could give me a pill for confidence.  In a manner of speaking, that's what this is, or at least, it helps steady my mind enough that I can work on my confidence.  And so, feeling good, I wandered through a used books store, was pleased to find an old edition of Alfred Bester's Golem100 and Arthur Byron Cover's Platypus of Doom.  Knowing I can't really afford them, I fell back upon my knew philosophy of 'Fuck it', bought them without one iota of buyers remorse, and ambled down the street.  I felt like a coffee, so I bought myself one, read a few pages from my new/old books, headed back out and was promptly bounced off the hood of a car.

Today I was hit by a car.

I'm alright.  Shaky.  Arm hurts a bit.  When I close my eyes, I see the terror in the driver's face.  She wasn't on her cell, as you might expect.  She was merely paying too much attention to oncoming traffic and not enough attention to the pedestrian innocently sipping his coffee as he steps off the curb and into the crosswalk.

Content-Type: text/plain; voice/active

From: Anonymous < nobody@nowhere.to >

Comments: This message did not originate from the Sender address above.  It was remailed automatically by anonymising remailer software.  Please report problems or inappropriate use to the remailer administrator at < complaints@nowhere.to >.

Subject: It’s a Perfect World.

To: Maynard Julian Twitchel < Dr_Twitch@solcom.vrp.asgard.clmtdiv.gov >

Hello Jules,

They say it’s a Perfect World.  I never gave perfection much thought.  Who does?  I mean, we say ‘this is perfect’ and ‘that is perfect’, but I don’t think we know what perfection is.  We have a vague concept of it.  We have to.  Our world is one of imperfection.  But how can we conceive of imperfection without the concept of perfection?  Perfection is the context for understanding imperfection.  Or, rather, it is that perfection is the condition for the existence of imperfection.  Is this true?  Could it not be the other way around?  Of course it could.  Perfection could very well be an emergent property of imperfection, just as order emerges from chaos.  But if imperfection/perfection falls under the Axiom of Complexity, does it also operate according to Kurzweil’s Law of Time and Chaos?  Is it a condition of Deutsch’s Fourth Strand of Reality?  Is this ideal of ‘prefect’ a product of the evolutionary process?

 This is all pretty abstract.

 This talk about theory fails to answer the question: what is perfection?  I don’t think we can answer that question.

 The evidence of the Perfect Emergence is all around of course, evidence that is motion, the motion of innovation, the exponential rate of technological development.  Everything is moving towards the emergence of a simple order out of the complex.  You’re familiar Singularity?  The manifesto of technocrats and technoclasts alike, each interpreting the theory very differently (though it’s not a theory but the description of a phenomenon).  I think the technoevolutionists are right, that the Singularity is a refinement of Natural Selection for this era.  At any rate, the more I think about this Perfect Emergence, the more I frighten myself.  Why?  Because I have the feeling that it has already happened, that we, as Human Beings, as Homo Sapiens, if not facing inevitable extinction, are already extinct.  We are, I think, Ghosts in the Machine.  Glitches in the system: a residue of imperfection.  And how long will it be until the system is purged . . .?

I’ve talked about emergence, but I have failed to mention Dissipative Structures.  We mustn’t overlook Chaos in regards to Complexity.  Emergence is, after all, the phenomena of a basic Chaos Theory tenet: ‘sensitive dependence upon initial conditions’.  Following from this, we must remember that all orderly systems tend towards a state disorder.  This is of course evident in the universal motion towards equilibrium (death: from simple organisms such as stars and bacterium to complex organisms such as animals and computer systems).  From chaos to order to chaos.

Sorry about this long preamble, Jules.  I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, and over the past few days, I’ve had a lot of time to think.       

You won’t be able to trace this.  You can reply however.  I do need you to confirm some things.  Wait, wait, I know what you’re saying.  It’s bloody stupid setting up an account to receive your message.  This’ll be tagged as soon as it’s decrypted.  I know, I know, you’ve the highest level of security next to the Pearly Gates, but I’ve my reasons for doubting okay, so just sit tight and hear me out. 

I’ve made some friends.  I can’t tell you much about them.  I couldn’t if I wanted to.  I don’t know much about them.  Friends might be a bit misleading.  There’s only one whom I almost trust (and only because I don’t have anybody else to turn to).  Anyway, she’s got a nifty sniffer bot that’ll snap up your reply the instant you send it. 

It doesn’t much matter that I’ve told you this, because the sniffer’s autonomous and the whole process is randomised anyway.  But I still have the feeling that they can crack it and track it.  Who are they?  I’ll get to that.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a government op.  I’ve no faith in government security anymore.  I’ve no faith in much of anything anymore.  Where do you think all that shit your running up in Asgard comes from anyway?  All those essential systems you guys take for granted are corporate systems, contracted by the Global Union.  Probably pretty damned cost effective too.  Execs bending over backwards to give the GU the best deal.  Who wouldn’t want to sponsor a something as grand as the Venus Reclamation Project?  All that ‘a new hope for mankind’ and ‘healing Earth’s sister’ bullshit.  Good PR for companies who’ve been accused of monopolising and manipulating the human condition.  But it’s not just PR, man.  You think they’d trust a bunch of ethics-oriented researchers and government goofballs with something as big as the VPR.  Hell no.  They’ve got a huge stake in this.  There’s probably Backdoors and Trojan Horses all over the place.  I bet you’ve got VPNs up there, right?  You’d be stupid not too.  What Data Encryption Standards are you using?  Shor Algorithms right?  Only projects with the highest-level DES requirements have the money and tech to run Shors.  You can’t hack those quantum-encryption algorithms, right?  Who designed those Virtual Private Networks?  You think they don’t have a key?  Here’s another question for you.  How many corporate observers have you got up there?

Sounds pretty damned paranoid, doesn’t it?  I wouldn’t blame you if you stopped reading and deleted this message.  Hell, if our roles were reversed, I’d forward this to your supervisor before you got yourself into real trouble.  I hate all this conspiracy theory crap.  But please keep reading, Jules.  It’s important.  I’m not having a breakdown.  This has nothing to do with work stress.  Wouldn’t matter anyway.  I don’t have a supervisor anymore.  And that’s because I don’t have a job anymore.  I’m already in real trouble.  Something really bad is happening.  I mean really BAD.  I’m being fucked over in ways I never thought possible.  I keep hoping that I’ll wake up and this’ll all have been a nightmare.  My life will be back to normal.  But I’m not waking up, Jules.  I’m not and I want to so fucking bad.  Somebody has stolen my life.  And I don’t know why?  Who the hell would want my life?  Sometimes I don’t even want it.  Yeah, I know.  Why the hell am I complaining?  If my life sucked so badly, then I should be relieved that somebody’s decided to take it off my hands.  But man, it’s my life!  Good and bad and whatever the hell it is most of the time, it’s my goddamned life and I want it back!

Why should you care?  We’ve never been close.  We’ve hated each other’s guts ever since that Gillian Gilmore fiasco back at University.  How long ago was that?  A long goddamned time.  We’ve both gone through two Iterations since then.  Two lifetimes have passed and we still can’t forgive each other.  Why the hell not?  It wasn’t even our fault.  She strung us both along.  But I don’t want to talk about that.  I’m not interested in reconciliation.  We didn’t really get along all that well before Gillian anyway.  We’ve both survived without each other, so why am I wasting your time with my problems?

Well, Jules, I think that my problem is in someway related to your problem.  Yes, I know about your problem.  The news channels covered it.  They didn’t say much.  Only that somebody in ASTRA had leaked information about Zombifications on Asgard.  If it’s bad enough to leak, then I think you’re in deep shit, brother. 

What I know about your work is mostly from news HIPs.  You’re implementing an improved World Eater on Venus.  It is fundamentally the same program used to cultivate Mars: an engineered virus that infects a terrestrial planet or planetoid to alter its electromagnetic field and recombine the chemicals in its atmosphere, creating a survivable environment in about fifty years, and completely terraforming in less than a century.  The Venus program, however, uses a picoscale model rather than the nanoscale used for Mars, thus effecting things on a subatomic level.  But there’s more to it than just shifting scales.  The Mars Cultivation Project wasn’t entirely successful.  After the nanobots finished altering the environment to acceptable levels, they shutdown.  The planet gradually underwent desertification.  It reached an equilibrium state no less inhospitable than the Sahara (not to say that Sahara is precisely hospitable).  There are concerns that the atmosphere is undergoing a similar reversion.  Planetologists predict that within the next century the environment will become intolerable.  Fortunately for the Martians, this new Ayatollah isn’t an isolationist like that last guy.  Condemning everyone to death if they elect you isn’t much of a platform.  He and the GU Assembly have cut a deal, haven’t they?  Along with trying to avoid the Environmental Recurrence Problem, you’re also troubleshooting it.  You’re designing a distributed picobot system that will re-code Venus via its electromagnetic field, tweaking it atmospherically and tectonically.  Like 2^ndGen nanosystems, it’ll evolve with the planet, integrating with the ecosystems, nurturing and protecting them.  It’s a whole new non-catastrophic resurfacing protocol.  You’re adapting the technoclast’s Gaian theory and technoevolutionist A-life systems to AI development.  The VRP is all about designing and installing an artificially intelligent system administrator in Venus.  Ambitious, Jules.  And scary.  Where the hell do you go after creating an intelligent O/S for a whole freaking world?  Okay, the newscasts don’t say anything about giving Venus a brain or fixing Mars.  But it doesn’t take a leap in logic to figure it out.  Especially if you’ve been in the AI biz as long as I have.  Well, am I right or am I right?

Like most people, I guess, I’ve taken a lot for granted.  I mean, nowadays gene-sculpted 1^stGens are born with biocybernetic enhancements and basic information overlays just like us 2^ndGens.  We all get information overlay packages now and again when schooling, starting a new job, or learning a new language.  I can’t imagine how they absorbed information in the old days.  Can you?  Eidetic memory wasn’t even standardised then.  Anyway, by the time you’ve gone into your 2^ndIteration you don’t even think of tech as tech anymore.  It’s all a part of life, both as the individual and as a society.  We think about our nanosystems as much as we do our nervous systems, which is not at all until something goes wrong.  And then we don’t know what’s wrong until a doctor tells us.  Technology is our medium of interfacing with the world around us.  Not just the world, but the universe.

You learned about my Raps from those Eternite ID guys.  But I bet they didn’t say anything about DNA theft?  When my doctor diagnosed me, he speculated that a low-fidelity copy of my PCR Control might have caused the premature RCDS.  The DNA strand they used for my It2 wasn’t from my original sample.  It was from a copy!  Due to my situation, I’ve developed an interest in biotechnology.  Specifically, bioinformatics (understandably, with my background).  Yeah, I know.  I worked in a biotech department at Urizen Industries.  But I was just a part of a research team developing heuristic programs for the Wetnet AIs.  I had nothing to do with the actual bioengineering end of things.

Bioindustrial firms have been on the hot seat for a long time now, as you know.  Ever since that GeoTek biospill.  Remember, when that mining-microbe ate away at the earth’s crust for who knows how long before their ‘biological containment’ cover-up was blown wide.  Remember all the spinning.  Said they were developing bacteria to eat their ore-purifying bug.  It turned how many hectares into a sinkhole?  This was only one of many many cases of failed biological containment protocols.  But the biopollution problem has been obscured by the PR successes of bioremediation and bioabsorption, cleaning up the various types of wastes, cleansing the air of petrochemical pollution, and reversing ozone depletion.  If you know where to look, though, you can find the information.  Then there’s the whole biocolonialism issue, which has been burdening international courts since the birth of gene prospecting: that whole controversy over genomic firms enclosing the genetic commons and patenting life.  The free-gene argument (though philosophically sound) isn’t economically viable.  It’s a moot point anyway.  The genomic firms bulldozed enough broad-patents through the old PTO that pretty much all life on Earth had been patented and privatised.  But the real biotechnical bugaboo is biopiracy.  Pretty much every biotech crime falls into it: patent infringement, insider trading, theft, drug dealing, smuggling, espionage and terrorism.  Like biopollution, the escalating rate of biopiracy has been kept relatively quiet.  And again like biopollution, some of the big scares have worked their way into the public eye.  Remember those killer genes implanted in various agricultural pests?  They were meant to kill off the population by sterilising a whole generation.  Well, not so long ago, that same technique was used in an act of genocide between rival tribes in Africa.  It was on all the news channels last year.  The GU went ballistic on the Global Genomic and Bioindustrial Regulatory Commission.  How the hell did they get the template?  Did an insider at an African lab develop it for them?  Did they steal it?  Did they buy it?  And how many others out there have this or similar products?  Makes you want to go get a scan right now, doesn’t it?  What is the point of this tirade?  Well, it’s just that we have entrusted out entire existence to these guys.  The biotech market is the marketing of life.  We’re all stocks, man, all stocks.  Do a little digging on your own, Jules.  Look into the shareholders.  Look at who they are?  Look at who holds the market share? 

Now think about the implications of prefabricated chromosomes, custom genes created by blending natural and synthetic DNA.  It’s what bred out genetic diseases from the original 1^stGen IVFs, A-wombers, and surrogate wombats.  But now custom-chroms have become vanity treatments.  Then there’s the whole organic nanotech thing.  We’ve got ribosomes building organisms one amino acid molecule at a time using digitally encoded templates in another DNA molecule.  It’s how they go about making Its for 2^ndGens who want a brand-spanking new body.  Those weirdo-specials, like therianthropes, are manufactured by using a recombined DNA template and custom-chroms.  Thanks to the biopollution from all those ‘accidents’ in the early years of the pharming industry, almost every animal and plant now carries human chromosomes (and animals with plant genes and plants with animal genes; and lest we forget all those pharmaceutical custom-chroms).  We’re rife with transgenic chroms too.  The web of life man, the goddamned web of life.  Jules, these bloody algenists have been redesigning the planet’s ecology since the end of the 20^th; this singularity hit its alpha-point in 1997 when Japanese researchers successfully transplanted an entire human chromosome into the genetic code of mice! 

Bioinformatics comprises massive databases storing all the information we have on the human genome as well as the animal and plant genomes that have been mapped over the years.  It also includes every iota of data pertaining to the life sciences, and all the programs used for isolating, identifying, modelling, synthesising and recombining.  The information stored in the genes is digital, and bioinformatics is the process of converting genetic information into manipulatable formats; it’s the platform used by cytogenetic engineers.  Basically it’s just a translation process, converting genetic language to machine language.  Why do you think they call it genetic code?  Chromosomes are just sets of data-bearing genes.  The molecules comprising the genes, like DNA, are analogous to bits and bites (well, not quite, but you get the point).  And cytological processes are similar to subroutines.  What is Recombinant DNA but a method of reprogramming an organism?  Consider DNA computing.  We’ve been using it know for how long?  Combined with early developments quantum computing, DNA computing forms the backbone of the bloody HoliNet.  Our biocybernetic systems are augmented with RAM DNA packages; we use our own bloody bodies like old-style hard-drives.  The whole human genome is the Rosetta Stone for a biological programming language.  From a genetic prospective, we’re all just organic computer systems.  And bioinformatics is the method of understanding and utilising that computer.  One of my new ‘acquaintances’ referred to bioinformatics as the Recombinant Sign.  I don’t really know that is, though.  By his tone, it’s not anything good.

You’re a comparative planetologist, a specialist in climatology.  And you’re an expert.  But like a lot of experts, you don’t know shit outside of your field.  I don’t claim to know anything about climatology.  Or planetology.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself an expert in my own field.  I’m an intelligence programmer.  I’ve worked with fuzzy systems long enough to be considered a specialist.  Sure, my work is used in designing Outlook Trees for advanced AI R&D.  I know a fare bit about Artificial Intelligence.  But despite what some people seem to think, I’m not an accredited Cognitive Scientist.  I’m just a programmer who’s done a stint or two as a system-admin.  I know code.  I know hacking.  Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t be so proprietorial.  I mean what’re you doing, anyway?  You’re hacking a planet!  That’s some serious shit, treating geophysics is just another type of programming platform.  Platforms, Jules, programming platforms.  Everything, and I mean absolutely everything, can be thought of in terms of architecture and platforms and code.  From quantum computing to nose picking, it’s all data manipulation.  You know about Genies, right?  Gene Crackers?  Those ass-sucking shit-fuckers have given Identity Theft a whole new meaning.  You can be hacked.  Your genes can be pinged and copied and re-written and infected as easily as any computer.  Add DNA theft and cloning to the mix, you’ve get some damned terrifying implications.

Yeah, I’m thinking of Doppelgangers.  I know, I know, the G²BRC has officially prohibited that type of cloning procedure.  But you know as well as I do that prohibition doesn’t mean squat.  There’s been plenty of speculation about Doppelgangers being used by the government and the military in Black Box projects; and let’s not forget organised crime and the corporations.  I’ve been doing some research into this particular branch of conspiracy theory, and I’ve come across sources that predate Iterative Cloning.  Some go all the way back to when cloning technology was being used only to replenish endangered and extinct species.  Fear of Doppelgangers was the predominant reason for the Human Rights legislation on human cloning, which permitted only organ farming for transplants (people back then would rather have a lab-grown transplant than a xenograft).  Ultimately, though the lawyers for the biotech firms used that medical loophole in the legislation to legalise Iterative Clones.

I didn’t know that.  Turns out I didn’t know a lot of things.  I find it odd that a society of information can be so uniformed, so much knowledge and so much ignorance.

Messenger to Heaven: DSP Artificial Intelligence Seeks Life

The scene shows a photo-realistic CGI rendering of a planetary system very much like the Sol system.  There are dotted lines and numbers appearing and disappearing as the planets sweeps past.  The most stunning is a huge Jovian planet.  This is the Epsilon Eridani system.  Epsilon Eridani is a star of the same class as Sol, visible to the naked eye even prior to adaptive optics.  The star has fired both the scientific and public imagination since that planet was discovered back in the 21^st.  The 478 million kilometres between that planet’s orbit and its star is roughly the same distance separating Sol from the asteroid belt.  This is the Habitation Zone, implying a potentiality of at least one planet with Earth-like conditions.  That potentiality became a high probability following a series of superluminal laser scans, legitimising the monumental expenses for a mission to Epsilon Eridani.

The Messenger Spacecraft.

MS is a state-of-the-art robotic survey ship, the newest in the Deep Space series: more than just a probe, utilising some of the newest developments in picotechnology, quantum computing, and psychophysics.  It is an adaptive artificial intelligence with an atomic scale distributed neural net that uses super-cooled clouds of variable EIT gases for quantum processing.  It is a pleiotropic brain, recombinant, with almost infinite redundancy.  Every molecule of the craft is at least as intelligent as standardised biocircuit neural systems.  Operating as a gestalt, its computational capacity is unprecedented, surpassing its contemporaries by so much that it constitutes an evolutionary leap.

Messenger’s ‘mind’ is being lauded in the scientific community as the first true artificial consciousness, finally breaking the Penrose Law.  Although liquid is a standard model for DNA computing, the medium has not been as successful for q-bit processing.  But research into molecular motion through super-cool liquids has aided the development of first tier quantum technology, in the form of limited quantum computing.  The light-halting experiments of the ‘electromagnetically induced transparency’ of atoms such as rubidium has led to a breakthrough in q-bit processing, a quantum leap as it were, in the technology.  That the Holy Grail of practical q-tech applications is almost within reach, scientists claim.  Messenger is the first successful non-solid metaphase computer system, the catalyst for a paradigm shift in computation.  It is the Adam of a new technological Eden.

A mind does need a body.  And Messenger’s body looks like a big buckyball, fashioned from a new type of nanotube hull.  Each constituent nanotube possesses a modicum of intelligence, capable of self-maintenance through ‘combinatorial explosion’, capable of reforming themselves into various effectors.  An Autopoietic System supplements the Combinatorial Architecture: Messenger can simply take what it needs to maintain and repair itself from the environment.  Its optical sensing and display systems consist of nanocrystals with trapped eutropium atoms excited by internal lasers.  Molecular superconductors that combine acene crystal generators with newly designed dendrimer transformers power the whole thing.

Instead of the ion engines of its DSP predecessors, Messenger will travel the imperfect vacuum of space via laser propulsion and hyperspace bubbles.  Laser propulsion is an old technology retooled with developments in superluminal light propagation.  Essentially, beams of light that travel faster than light.  Astronomers have been using SLs for decades to scan the heavens, collecting data far more detailed than anything culled from old radio arrays and orbital telescopes.  Now astrophysicists have found a way to use SL lasers to warp space in such a way as to create a Hyperspatial or P-space Bubble.  This will reduce the spacecraft to a subatomic size, yet paradoxically maintain its R-space proportions (all in perfect accordance with the New Relativism).  It will then be in a state of quantum uncertainty, having both the characteristics of a wave and a particle (the particle being a rather large particle: a multifaceted globe no larger than an average human’s head).  This method will break the Relativistic Boundary, permitting travel at an increasing superluminal rate.  What about information relaying between mission control and the spacecraft?  Tight-beam SL packets and new Entanglement Teleportation Subspace Nodes: communication relays that bounce through space like synapses through the brain.  The information about Epsilon Eridani can then be received in a couple of years as opposed to a few thousand.

Three corporations were contracted to create Messenger.  With something this important, you wanted the top guys on the job.  And that’s exactly what ASTRA did (again).

The Holy Trinity of Industry: Urizen, Minas, and Eternite.

It isn’t much of a shock to learn that Urizen and Eternite worked in collusion on the Messenger spacecraft.  The two companies are angling for market-convergence.  This phenomenon had been initiated in the early 21^st when top telecommunications firms merged to create what they called a ‘multi-media platform’.  Slipping past the regulatory commission, convergence became the method for businesses to survive globalisation.  A few companies didn’t make it, buying businesses out instead of ‘merging’ with them (then quietly restructuring, all legal like).  By that time merging had become the PC buzzword for hostile take-overs.  When these tactless companies tried market-convergence, people started crying monopoly.  They promptly found themselves slapped with Anti-Trust suits.  The only difference between a monopoly and a convergence is that convergence is legal and a monopoly is not.

It does not take an economist to know which of the two companies will survive the restructuring.  Eternite is by the far the dominate corporation.  The outcome will be one monstrous conglomerate.  Between the two of them, they will hold almost two thirds of the world’s technology patents: from circuitry-patents to life-patents, biochips to potato chips.  Come look at me Ma, I’ve got company logos written into every cell in my body, hey look, so do you (cells, hell, the logos were emblazoned on molecules).  Anybody with wetware (membrane or nanobiotic: carbon or silicon) will find the company logo molecularly etched into the product.  Throw Minas into the convergence and that new conglomerate will have existence trademarked.  They can sue God for copyright infringement.

It is a miraculous time to be alive.  A perfect world, sure enough.

It’s as if I’m running in place, not moving forwards.  Those vast arches opening into black emptiness scroll by me, homogenous and seemingly endless.  I’m running through a causeway across the void, linking one end of eternity to the other; but the causeway ends at its beginning, the throat of the Oroborous.  Why don’t I step through one of those portals to oblivion and just fade away?  It would be so easy.  But I don’t, I can’t.  I keep running even though running is getting me nowhere.

 < The clock is winding down.  There are only a few cycles left.  You are stalling now, so stop running.  >

 It is right behind me, an inexorable and ravenous force.

 < You do not even know why you are running, so why run? There is little space for operation left to you.  There is not much time for you to decide so why don’t you stop and let me make that decision for you? >

 Bellowing with panicked frustration, I push my failing body faster.

 I don’t know what this ‘deciding’ shit is about, I really don’t.

 I can’t keep running, I just can’t.  I want to wake up now I want to WAKE UP NOW!

 Then the crow bursts from head and I surge forwards.  I’m not running anymore.  I’m higher than I was, and faster.  I’m also collapsing, watching the crow fly through the gallery.  Meat puffs from rents in my skin, a painless exhalation of my insides, and I slump onto the stone floor, deflating like an old balloon.  A shadow skims over me and I fall into it, ceasing to be.  I fly as fast as my wings are capable of flapping.  No time to ponder this twist to the dream: I just want to get the fuck out of here.

There is a dividing archway ahead of me.  Despite the gloom, I can see the gallery continuing beyond, dwindling to a perspective point that is only an optical illusion belying infinity; it’s like some massive mirror reflecting the distances I’d already traversed, trapping me in some weird recursive loop.  The frame of the arch quivers with reliefs.  Their vacuous faces turn in unison, watching me with empty-eyes.  At its pinnacle is another representation of Ganesha, larger and more life-like (though still very much a statue) than the one that I saw mounted above the entrance at the base of the stairs.  Its plump, humanoid body is garbed like a Hindu prince.  Its hands are held out with palms upraised.  Tusks curl outwards and over its shoulders, ears flare with either attention or aggression, and its trunk arches upwards, trumpeting silently.  Its eyes pulse with white light.  I can feel a thrumming emanating from it.  I don’t hesitate to go through; and I hear voices, like children chattering in a schoolyard.

 But there is that other voice, a menacing and all-encompassing shout.

 < I’M . . . NOT . . . DONE . . . WITH . . . YOU . . . YET! >

The image of continuance that hung in the archway like a skin stretched on a frame, tears and seals itself behind me.  There is silence, sudden, pure.  I’m no longer in the gallery.  There is darkness here, darkness profound and absolute.  My body dissipates in the dark and the silence.  I’m left with only my thoughts, reduced to a waveform in this void.  And it is a void.  Not in terms of nothingness, but of potentialities.  It’s like a held breath: a transitional period when one event slides into the next, when everything is out of phase, thingless and placeless and inseparable.  It is Quintessence.

I have become a series of complimentary frequencies with varying amplitudes.  While some are weaker others are stronger, some fade others increase; feedback binds me in an interference pattern.  I’m a coherent stream of information, an identity algorithm of ever increasing fidelity, channelling towards . . . what?

 A sense of disambiguation.  And suddenly I’m reinstantiated in my body.

I’m falling.  It’s a strange sensation.  Falling without friction; falling without feeling like I’m falling.  Doesn’t matter which way I turn.  There isn’t really any direction.  It’s an isotropic plummet through a fathomless space that I somehow sense is expanding and accelerating in that expansion.

Then there is a change: a manifestation in the void.

Huge golden spheres appear around me, each with brilliant albedos though there is no light source.  My reflection slips across their smooth surfaces.  Perfectly smooth: surface tension rather than solidity.  They’re null-space bubbles, their shine a false-image of blackbody radiation; an effect engineered by my mind.

My fall speeds to a blinding rate; then just as suddenly, it begins to slow.  I’ve fallen outside the field of globes.  I can see them gleaming in the distance, arrayed in a spiralling lattice; as I continue falling, that lattice starts to resemble something like a braid, a rope consisting of countless threads of linked spheres.  There is something moving along it, something that resembles a snowflake fashioned from twisted silver and copper wire.  There are bunches of diamond grapes hanging from those tangled silver vines; Neutron Stars clustered within a helicase matrix, emitting a shimmering pulse of intense energies.  The coppery curls clutch at the golden braid, threading it through the structure’s central eye, moving forwards in slow rotations.  Behind it, the braid unravels into countless strands.

The angle of my fall alters and accelerates again.  I’m thrust towards those disentangled curls.  The golden globes vibrate, painting the emptiness with visible echoes.  I’m caught up in one of these ‘echoes’ and suddenly find myself centred within a globe.  I speculate that those ‘echoes’ are merely distortions (of space or mind); the phenomenon is a representation of a globe’s superposition.  Maybe all the globes are caught up in some sort of interference pattern, wherein all are identical not just in form but in behaviour, even the subtlest change to one effecting them all instantaneously.

The inside is luminous; and wherever I look, I see a bizarrely everted image of myself.  As with the exterior, I’ve an impression that the reflective interior is an effect of surface tension.  I float towards my ‘fun-house’ reflection, reaching for it just as it reaches for me.  We (I) touch, only to be sucked into each other with a white flash.  I’m centred inside the globe (or a globe).  I don’t really want to try again, but I do, with the same result.  I continue doing it.  I can’t stop.  I’m operating under an irresistible compulsion.  My perceptions blur and fracture as this sequence speeds up; soon, everything is saturated by white light with only a rapid, almost imperceptible flicker.

There’s a strange tension in my face, a fluttering ‘pull’ around my eyes.  The strain worsens.  My eyes rupture and I . . . am awake? 

*   *   *

His eyes opened and there was an echoing thud, as if a door had been slammed.  Children were talking all at once.  Not talking, but whispering.  There was a sinking sensation, as if he was falling endlessly into himself.

He focused on the ceiling fan, cutting the bright daylight.  It wasn’t moving properly.  One moment, turning slowly, then the next blurring fast.  A jerky transition.  Everything bending and jiggling.  There was a sporadic chromatic distortion, like the momentary scrambling of a signal (this is my brain on cable . . . time to get a dish).  But the sound remained a steady whump-whump-whump-whump that seemed to press on him.  I seemed odd to think of a sound having weight.  But this sound did, like invisible hands pushing on his chest.

He couldn’t remember ever waking and feel this . . . this awake.  He was jumpy.  He couldn’t hold himself still any longer.  He felt himself moving, but he didn’t so much as twitch.

Oh no oh no . . .

A shadow slipped across the wall and ceiling.  The shape of the hat was distinctive: a fedora.  He felt a presence beside him, but he couldn’t look at it, he couldn’t move his head, couldn’t even roll eyes.  The light changed, assuming the grainy blue/grey quality of twilight.  The angles went crazy, becoming sharp and crooked and deep.  Someone spoke.

<I’m not done with you yet>

Adrenaline surged, jolting him awake.

He wasn’t dreaming this time.  Everything looked normal.  He also felt as if he’d been beat up, fed charcoal, and had his stomach pumped.

He shivered, muttering a curse.  There was draft coming from somewhere.

He looked at the window.  It was open.  A crow crouched on the sill.  It cawed.  The harsh sound razored through his head.  Then it soared out over the street.  He could hear kids playing in the adjacent courtyard.  Beyond that: the thrum of traffic.

With a groan, he closed his eyes and lay back down.

His mattress shifted.

Warm skin against him.  Lips brushed his ear.  “Did you dream about me?”

Fingers trailed down his stomach.  The sheets rustled.  Soft plumpness pressed against his chest.  There was an icy nipping of metal. “Mmm, are you dreaming now? Your dream girl’s ready for you.”  Sharp teeth grazed his neck.  “Mmm she wants you every way she can get you.  You’re mine.”  A stinging kiss at the base of his throat.  “I’m not going to let you go. I’m not going to let you wake up.”

He tried to pull away.  She held him, nuzzling, stroking, nibbling, pinching.  “I’m not done with you yet.”

He opened his eyes, jerking up onto his elbows.

Lifting her head, she smiled.

Her eyes were empty.

And he screamed.

“Hush,” as a soothing voice whispered into his ear: “It’s only a dream, only a dream.”

There are more ruins awaiting me, similar to those I left behind.  If I remember correctly, this should be Angkor Thom, the capital of an extinguished society (how can I remember when I have no brain to remember?).  I stand in the jungle’s rustling shadows, gazing upon the city with eyes that can perceive its past, its present, and its future as a superposition.  I can see the ambition and impatience of its construction.  The glory of its zenith.  The corruption of its nadir.  There are phantom figures that are not phantoms but extant beings aligned with their nonexistence.  Life and death in parallel.  Not parallel, but tangential.  A contradiction of the simultaneity of yes and no.  I proceed towards this forever rising forever crumbling city, looking about with the wonder of a newborn divinity.  There, gargantuan three-headed elephants frame the gateway.  There, thousand foot terraces are adorned with a mind-muddying array of reliefs.  And there, squatting giants mount balustrades of Nagas.  Through the shadows of these magnificent edifices wander the (un)living/(un)dead.  Carefree people: revelling in their brief lives, beneath buildings and monuments mirroring their flitting nature.  I can see the vitality and necrosis moving through their cells.  I can read the cipher-text of their genomes as easily as I can read the expressions on their faces.  The microscopic and macroscopic patterns of their existence floods my sight, meaningless to me, just colours and shades and gestures slipping around in my eyeballs.  I’m sure the crow knows what it all means, but I sure as hell don’t.  You need a brain to process information, don’t you?  Well, I don’t have a brain anymore.  I’m one of Eliot’s Hollow Men, but my head isn’t stuffed with straw, no, it’s stuffed with feathers.

I wander aimlessly.  Or so I thought (yes I know that’s a contradiction because the brainless can’t think now can they but I still technically have my brain since this is all in my brain or my brain is the gate or the series of gates through which the imaginal reality is being processed its only this simulacrum this dream of me this rotting not-me that has no brain so when I as a dreaming god think about it then it makes a certain degree of absurd sense for a brainless man to think).

I reach a place of giants.  More precisely, giant faces.  This, then, would be the famous Bayon, presumably another funerary temple like Angkor Wat, erected in the city’s centre.  I walk beneath the visages, awed and troubled.  Those faces are familiar.  Faces.  No.  One face repeated.  This is a massive field of towers.  I count up to fifty-four clusters.  Upon each tower that face is iterated four times, one in each direction.

I stare at a face.  Seeing it new.  Seeing it old.  Seeing the hands that built it.  Seeing the essence of the stones from which it was built.  Seeing the slow pulse and crawl of the lichens that eat at it.  I recognise the face.  Not Buddha.  Not Shiva or Vishnu.  Not the Khmer king who called for the making of this place.  I see myself in that stone countenance.  My face, looking back at me.

I hear that slithering again.

There!  A liquid undulation disappears around the edge of a tower.

I pursue the evasive apparition.  Even the bird in my head becomes little more than a shadow of awareness (awareness apparently is not conditional upon having a brain).  I never see the thing fully.  What I do see is opaque to my strange sight, as if it has remained unchanged from beginning to end, indeed, as if it has no beginning or end.  It is the same on all scales, unaltered by perspective, holistic rather than discrete, its sum indistinguishable from its parts.  It leads me out of the Bayon, through streets simultaneously teeming and abandoned, into a structure at once decrepit and magnificent.  The interior is a riot of relief figures.  Eyes salacious and silver-bright watch me pass.  The gossamer spoor continues down the corridor.  There are stairs, descending between lotus-blossom columns far larger than those in the heart of Angkor Wat.

I move down the stairs with the mist swirling around my ankles.  My body begins to give out.  I’m forced to stop time and time again, gasping and trembling, loath to touch those parts that feel weak or don’t feel at all.  Nor do I touch my head with my one good hand, afraid of running my fingers along the ragged crevice in my crown, of sinking my fingers into my hollowed skull to touch the oily feathers of my new brain.  Then, after so long that I forget they had a beginning, the stairs end.

There is a massive archway, framed by coital images of Khmer women and Hindu demons.  Their eyes: moonlight bright.  Sitting atop the archway, is a gargantuan sculpture of Ganesha, god of knowledge.  His elephant head is bowed and his arms are wide and inviting; his almond eyes like windows into a luminiferous space.  Lucent froth floods the gallery beyond, dimly illuminating the interior.  Pillars flower in the dark heights, arches gape large enough to accommodate elephants, and the ornamentation is more complex what I’d seen thus far.  The reliefs cover everything.  Even themselves.  They are constituents of larger images; these images comprise a greater pleiotropy.  As my gaze passes over the figures, they’re bathed in daylight, and they move.  A chill sweeps beneath my skin.  As if sensing my stare, their faces turn towards me.  Their expressions are blank, contrary to the pleasured writhing of their bodies; and their eyes don’t shine with silver light, but are empty—wet pits in mannequin faces.

Wait!  It’s that sound again, continuous, coming from somewhere ahead.  I proceed further, trying not to look at the images, but reluctant to close my eyes for fear of what I would see looking back at me.  I ‘listened’ my way towards the source of the sound.  Then, sensing something before me, I lift my head to look upon yet another wonder wrought by my mind.

Seven rippling faces, like lakeshore reflections, appear in the gloom above me; faces from a dream, gorgeous and irreal.  But, like the faces in the temple above, they are all mirrors of one—one that I feel I should know.  Sinuous necks rise from a voluptuous torso, flaring into cobra-like hoods.  Fourteen arms fan the dark.  The lower body divided into two serpentine tails; and from a fluttering vagina, the mists cascade.

Seven pairs of identical lips smile.

Hands beckon with fluid gestures.

She asks in a seven-part harmony: have you decided?

What am I supposed to decide?

You do not know me, my love?

I focus on one of her heads, trying pin down the vague recognition.  I’m sorry, I reply, I don’t.

She looks disappointed.  With weary resignation, she says, I am the Daughter of Nagaraja, Lord of the Waters.  I am the First Wife of the Kambujan Kings, the Serpent Princess of Phimaenakas.  I am Soma.

And this is relevant to me, how?

You are my husband.  The Leper King.

Oh.

What do you believe?

I beg your pardon.

Do you believe in what you see or what you don’t see?

That’s a complicated question.  But, for the sake of argument, I’ll say both.

That is not the answer I require.  You must decide: one or the other.

Why one or the other?

One is the lock.  The other is the key.

Huh?

She lowers her faces to me.  God is she ever beautiful.  Strange.  But beautiful.

You are the door, my love.  Do you wish to remain closed?  Or do you want to open?

I’m really confused now.  What does my believing anything have to do with anything?

This is my riddle.  Decide, and you will have your answer.

I can’t arbitrarily decide something like that.

No, she says quite seriously, you cannot.

Panic flutters in my head.  The bird’s talons skitter inside my cranium.

Her voice(s) whispering around me.  Go.  Hurry.  He comes he comes he comes.

Wait!  Don’t go.  Goddammit!

Soma is a faint plume in dissipating mists.

Then I hear it.  Slow footfalls.  Between each step is a silence that sings with static.

I know what’s coming.  Inexplicably, I feel as if I have always known it.  But it’s knowledge without understanding.

There is a reddish lambency coming from the entrance of the stairway.  A shadow slips across the threshold of the archway.

I turn and run, as fast as my decrepit body can manage.  Because I know, with soul-deep certainty, that dream or not, if the Dark Man catches me, I’ll die . . .

I slip between a crack while walking something that might have been a road, but is now only broken stone buried beneath centuries of rot and growth.  Down I go, twisting my ankle.  I huddle there, clutching my scabby ankle with my scabby hands, my foot like a pink cauliflower exploding from flesh.  I can’t feel my body rotting but I can feel my sprained ankle.  I sit there for god knows how long, immersed in self-pity and self-loathing.  I survey my surroundings, fully expecting to see the shadow stalking up to me.  I see nothing but obdurate greenery.

 So now what do I do?  Wait to wake up?  Would be nice if I did.  But the dream’s not done with me yet.  Or I’m not done with me yet.  Or . . . whatever, shut up, you’re just confusing yourself.

Remember, this is supposed to be a lucid dream (but I fucked it up) so you should have control over things (I’ve never had control over anything, so save your fucking breath).  You should be a demiurge, the genus loci of your mind.  Everything herein should be susceptible to your desires, your thoughts (now, you see that’s the problem, my thoughts, they just fuck everything up, I’ve always thought that I think too much, and yes, I’m well aware of the irony there so stuff it).  The pain in your ankle: you can negate it, just turn it off, and stand.  Right, okay then, why the hell not (because it’ll hurt)?  It’s better than just sitting around here, waiting for the dark dude to make another appearance.

Not wholly convinced of my incipient godhood, I give it a shot nevertheless.  Up I go and no problem no problem no fucking goddamned that hurts but better now better can take some of my weight . . . fuck!  I manage a few steps.  But they’re hardly steps, more like lurches.  I sag against a tree to catch my breath before shambling off again.  I continue in this way along the ancient road, mocked by the monkeys, harassed by invisible insects and my babbling brain.

I soon loose any awareness of self beyond sensation, becoming a dumb function with the sole purpose of forward motion; a faulty function, slowing, becoming more erratic, and eventually collapsing.

I lay amidst grass and dirt and broken stones, staring up at the ragged canopy.  There is infrequent movement there.  Time stretches infinitely between them: amorphous shapes, eroded by light, by shadow and by motion.  Rationality tells me that they’re monkeys.  But rationality is a very small voice in my head right now: a weak signal within my fuzzy consciousness and easily ignored.  To my exhaustion-dumbed faculties, the denizens above me are abstractions: living topologies, morphing just as I begin to perceive them.  They are somehow elegant in their simplicity; somehow glorious in their complexity.  Strange angels flitting against a fractal heaven

Is it possible to sleep within a dream?

Is it possible to dream while dreaming?

Religions have been born from such enigmas.

How many worlds within a world?

How many universes within a universe?

How many angels can dance on the head of pin?

Reductionism and holism, complimentary concepts.

Something scuffing on stone.

An electric tingle.

My head clears, thoughts disambiguating.

The noise in my head fades to a faint whine partitioned somewhere just behind my eardrums.

I lift my head, blinking dry/bleary eyes.

A form moves past me, sinuous and shimmering, like water.  Only a glimpse though.  But that is enough for me.  Glimpses.  It seems that is all I’m ever afforded.  I push myself up, phlegmatic as a mollusc.  Something is wrong.  My left arm can’t bare my weight.  I brace myself and look down at the traitorous limb.  Bile burns my throat.  The skin has split between wrist and elbow.  Meat puffs out, looking like corral.  I am rotting away minute by minute.  How much of me will be left by the time this dream ends?  Unable to stand the sight of my disease, I bind it in the tatters of my wrap.  Stains spread swiftly through the cloth.  I fight the urge to vomit.  I don’t know how much more of this I can endure. 

I study the spot where I glimpsed the . . . what the hell had I seen anyway?  It resembled a snake—a big snake.  But a snake fashioned from water?  Why should I be perplexed?  This is a dream after all.  Dreams aren’t exactly renowned for their banality.  Where had that apparition gone?

A shadow flits over the stones.

An abrasive cry.

The crow perches on a branch, eyeing me with dark bright eyes.  It leaps from its perch and swoops at me.  I try and duck.  But I am too slow and the bird is too fast.  It strikes me in the head.  Wings thrashing.  Claws raking.  Beak hacking.  I stumble back, shocked, agonised, terrified, screaming and clutching at the bird.  My head fills with white pain as the crow drives its beak into my skull, chipping away at bone like a jackhammer at concrete.  I should be falling.  I should be unconscious.  Dying.  But I don’t.  I stand there, trepanned by a crow.  Once it has cracked my head sufficiently wide, it digs out my brain, and climbs inside my skull.  I can feel its skittering and shifting inside.  Nesting.  It cries out, a sound that rasps through my bones.  Then it is silent and motionless.   

My sight becomes strange: a circle of clarity in the middle my visual field.  No.  Not a circle: a sphere, distorting everything around it.  Blurring.  My peripheral vision dims and granulates, as if twilight were contained at the edges of my eyes.  The light intensifies as if the photons are being pulled towards that globe, accreting like a halo around an eclipsed sun.  But it isn’t an eclipse; it is the inverse of obfuscation.  It’s so profoundly pellucid that I perceive details that I’d never thought possible with the naked eye; details that push my brain to the extent of comprehension.  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have my perceptual filters stripped away.  I’d imagined but not conceived, for I could never conceive of this sight, this ineffable focus.  Wherever I look, that spherical lens remains the core of my sight, pulling everything into it, crystallising it, deconstructing it.

I close my eyes.

But there’s no respite behind my lids.

There is light shining there, shining inside through the hole in my head.

And there, the crow is looking back at me—looking back from inside of me.

My eyes snap open.

My strange new sight is still there.

I look to where I’d glimpsed the serpentine apparition.

It left a spoor: a sparkling mist.

I follow the trail of fading light, shuffling like a zombie on numb and ruptured feet . . .

I have a lot of theories about dreams.  Well, it’s more like one theory that keeps mutating.  I have a bitch of time explaining it though.  I tend to babble incoherently, looking like a flake.  I don’t know why I bother.  Nobody gives a shit.  Who likes to have their humanity relegated to a function of a process?  Not a minor function.  There are no such things.  If one function fails, well then, it changes the whole process.  Despite Darwinism, we’re still firmly latched onto the whole chain-of-being shtick.  Our special hubris: homo-centrism.  But we don’t really have a choice do we?  We’re humans, after all.  Everything we perceive is from a human perspective. This is all irrelevant, really.  Just more words applied to something we’ve always struggled to understand.

Know anything about Information Theory?  Me either.  I know that ‘information’ is defined as a data sequence that is meaningful in a process.  And ‘noise’ is a random sequence that carries no information.  Now, ‘order’ does not necessarily constitute ‘orderliness’: order is information that suits a purpose and the measure of order is the efficiency of that information.  Neither information nor noise is predictable.  When past data is used to predict future data, the future data ceases to be information.  Yeah, that often leaves me scratching my head too.  But, after it percolates in your brain for awhile, it starts making sense.

I believe there is a field of ‘grey’ noise at the threshold between ‘white’ noise and information.  Consider that information is sculpted out of white noise.  Information has to originate somewhere.  And it does.  A chaos of ones and zeros representing the ‘frequency domain’ that pervades our universe.  It defines everything from the spin of particles to the machine language of computers.  We re-tune white noise into information.  The grey noise field is where the phase-transition to information occurs.  We developed this field naturally in our own brains.  Thanks evolution.  Through reverse engineering, we have externalised the process to artificially augment our own capacity.  This is the miracle of artificial computation.

What does this have to do with dreaming, you ask?

Well, when we dream, we might be witnessing a form of genesis, of noise crystallising into information and information dissipating into noise and (if I may take an even further step into metaphysics) the creation and destruction and recreation of realities?  Might this not be some sort of fundamental mind-link, a subroutine running constantly in the background of our own brains, some sort of gestalt reality-objectifying process that we glimpse only when we sleep?

Like I said, I tend to sound a bit flaky.

The man sitting opposite me shrugs as he sips his tea.  Flakes, he says, are merely people who perceive things that others do not.

That’s a bit generous, don’t you think.  I thought you were the great sceptic, debunker extraordinaire.  I thought you’d be the last person to legitimise fruitcakes.

There’s a distinction that you’re overlooking, he replies.  There are people who believe in the things that they perceive which others do not.  And there are people who try and make other people believe in things that they do not perceive.  A flake is not necessarily a fraud.

I nod, conceding his point.

A gibbon gibbers nearby.

I glance at a nearby wall, focusing on the reliefs: a gorgeous clutter of eroded Hindu gods.  So life-like.  Given shape and form from the stone: imbedded forever therein, forever until forever ends.  Dying without life, dying with the stone.

The monkey squats on a ledge, peering at us.  It tilts its head, blinking bright eyes.  Seeing that it has attracted my attention, it yawns fearsomely, sharp little teeth flashing in the sunlight.  I wave.  The bellicose little bugger hunches forwards and shrieks at me.

A resonant growl sends the gibbon streaking away.

The Blue Tiger looks smug.  It rolls onto its back and stretches.

Very real, aren’t they?

I glance at my companion: yeah, they sure seem to be.

What makes you think they’re not?

Well, for one thing, this is a dream.

Indeed.  But does that make them, or this place, or me for that matter, any less real?

I have the distinct feeling that I’m being led somewhere.  I have to be careful how I respond.  He’s already backed me into self-contradiction a number of times.  He’s the type that never really tells you anything, but manipulates you into reaching your own (his) conclusions.

Then again, should I expect any less from Harry Houdini?

He’d been awaiting me in Angkor Wat.

I stopped and stared in awe at the sad grandeur of the stonework jutting from the greenery; seeming so natural in its design despite its artificiality.  I followed the tiger onto a huge causeway.  I estimated it to be somewhere in the region of a thousand feet long, arching to a height of maybe twelve feet.  The railings depicted a pair of serpentine beings, with seven placid humanoid heads: Nagas.  We passed into the sultry shadows of an enormous square enclosure.  It consisted of three concentric and terraced structures, each proceeding inward higher than the one before.  There were towers on each corner, sculpted to resemble lotus blossoms.  The towers in the outer square were practically gone, stubby columns jutting from rubble.  The intermediate towers had lost their conical crowns.  But the innermost ones were almost pristine.  A central column rose almost two hundred feet.  We’d entered the outer square through an ornate gateway, onto a causeway leading to a cross-shaped vestibule.  The arches and vaults were corbelled; the long gallery walls were covered in reliefs.  They depicted bare-breasted dancing girls, kings reviewing soldiers, embattled armies, and mythological enactments.  In those crumbling dark places, bats roosted, serpents slithered, and gibbons cried.

We passed through an archway into a courtyard glazed with dusty sunlight.

There was a table covered in a lacy white cloth and a laden tea tray.  Reclining in a chair was a slender man in a charcoal suit.  He had short black hair, parted in the middle and slicked back, with greying wings at his temples.  His face was angular and austere.  He sipped from a small cup.

Smiling, he put his cup down, and stood.  Please, he said, join me will you?

And that’s how I met Harry Houdini.

Reality, he says, is everything.  The distinctions between things are merely a matter of subtleties.  You are quite right in believing that we are all just functions in a process.  He lifts a hand, gesturing around him.  We are all merely constituents.  Tell me, what do you think intelligence is?

I shift uncomfortably beneath his gaze.  I mull the question over.  I finish off my tea.  Houdini gestures towards the pot.  I nod.  He refills my cup, offering me cream and honey.  I take the former.  I’ve never been much for sweetening things up.

I guess you can also tie intelligence into information theory.

Houdini lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t comment.

I flush.  I hate being put on the spot.  Okay, I think intelligence is the process of compiling, collating, and refining information.  The greater the complexity of the information pool increases the variability of information compiled, and the diversity of the collation and refinement.  The consequence of this is a higher versatility of ‘intelligence’.  If that makes any sense, I amend (having thoroughly confused myself).  I sum up somewhat lamely: intelligence is just an information processor.

He nods thoughtfully.  Going by that criterion, he says, any developmental system can be considered intelligent, since development necessitates the collection, sorting, and application of information.  Intelligence is, therefore, a process of manipulating data.  So, is evolution intelligent?

That’s kind of a leap, isn’t it?

He pours himself another cup of tea then reclines, sipping, watching me expectantly.

Okay, I say after a moment, I see where you’re going with this.  Genes are digital, meaning that they store discrete bits of information.  Evolution processes that genetic information.  So yeah, I’ll concede that evolution is a form of intelligence, albeit a pretty basic one.

Houdini raises a finger and says, ah, but is it basic?  Consider how widespread evolution is, how it effects everything from particles to cells to societies to technology.  Everything is, to one degree or another, a consequence of evolution; and everything is still evolving.

What are you saying?

Think.  Evolution is a form of intelligence.  Everything is part of the evolutionary process.  The intelligence of evolution is therefore distributed throughout everything.  So, tell me, what does this imply about evolution?

He’s caught me in the net of my own thoughts.  Hadn’t I stated earlier that we were all just functions in a process?  Well fuck, he’d lured me and trapped me, that smug sophist prick.  I can’t argue against it without contradicting myself.  But, then again, this is my dream isn’t it?  It’s all coming out of my head.  I am, more or less, making this point to myself.  So, technically, I’m the sophist prick. 

Slowly, I say it: evolution is intelligence.

Houdini nods.  Indeed.  Taking all this into account, what do you think the ultimate phenomenon of intelligence is?  Before you answer, I want you to consider the consequence of intelligence.  What is it achieving?

Order?

You have already defined order as information with purpose.  Order is indeed, a consequence of intelligence.  It is, more or less, the output of intelligence.  But order is again, only part of that process, since it is applied and reprocessed; it is a developmental function.  A subroutine, if you will.  So, looking at the evolutionary process as a whole, what do you think is happening?

I hesitate.  Emergence?

Another nod.  Intelligence is an emergent property.  Because evolution is a distributed system, it is more than the sum of its parts.  You must remember that evolution is applicable to such diverse phenomena as wave functions and stellar behaviour.  Do not make the error of relegating it solely to the development of living organisms.  If evolution equates to intelligence, evolution is also an emergent property.  So, tell me, what emergence gave rise to evolution?

Houdini is leaning forwards intently.  There is something he wants me to know.  He thinks I’m close to figuring it out.  I’m standing on the brink of something.  For some damned reason, I’m reluctant to find out what.  He senses my hesitation.  Momentary regret flickers across his face.  His eyes narrow.  His purses his lips.  He leans back in his chair and unbuttons his suit jacket.  A golden fob chain gleams against a pinstriped vest.  He withdraws a pocket watch, palming it and clicking it open.  A quite chiming fills the silence that has descended between us.  He sighs and puts the watch back in his pocket.

You agree with the statement that order develops out of chaos.  Chaos is the white noise from which information is drawn.  The greater the chaos the deeper the order formed from it.

Yeah, but we’ve been over this already.  It’s the whole complexity theory thing.

Not precisely.  Recall that complexity theory entails the ‘lambda parameter’: the amount of information exchange in a system that leads to the development of a dynamic equilibrium between entropy and chaos, otherwise known as a ‘complex system’.  This does not necessarily imply the generation and feedback of order from chaos.  However, if you were to take the latter in context with the former, and combine it with what we have discussed about information and evolution, what would you have?

I think a moment, reviewing all I’ve said during this conversation.  Not an easy feat.  Most of it was merely brain burps.  But Houdini had been drawing all my burps into a pattern, crystallising my random thoughts into  . . . damn but he’d done it again.

Intelligence is the crystallisation of chaos.

Now, let’s consider consciousness in context with these four premises:

1)      Intelligence is the act of processing noise into information.

2)      Evolution is Intelligence.

3)      Intelligence is an Emergent Property.

4)      Intelligence is the crystallisation of chaos.

Houdini emphasises each point by tapping his finger on the table.  A dull thump.  Now, how does all this relate to computation and consciousness?

They’re both words.

He smirks.  Oh, very droll.

Something distracts me.  A sound.  Or I think it’s a sound.  I glance around the ruins.  Sunlight plays upon the shapes in the stone.  Their eyes seem to shine.  The shadows are lengthening.  Figures scurry over the crumbling sills and conical towers.  The gibbons are squealing like children in a school playground.  Parakeets flutter about, chirping.  I feel suddenly chilly; a frisson that ripples first outwards then inwards, like some sort of prescient undertow.  Momentary vertigo.  My old friend paranoia.  Those eyes in the walls: a silver brightness that has nothing to do with sunlight.  They’re staring at me.  The monkeys are staring at me too, silent suddenly, eyes glittering dark and knowingly.

Pushing back from the table, I rise.

Houdini is looking at me, frowning slightly.

Do you hear that?

What?

The insectival whine is intensifying.  I swat clumsily at my head, ignoring Houdini’s raised eyebrows.

The fucking mosquitoes are in my ears.

Houdini is merely watching me.

The Blue Tiger growls quizzically.    

I claw at my head, tearing open the sores.

The noise in my head resonates through bone and brain: an oscillating screech, becoming more and more erratic, decaying into thunderous static.  My eyes are aching from behind.  There is a pressure in my sinuses and a squeezing sensation at the base of my skull. 

I’m dimly aware of something in that noise.

A faint pulse.

Then it ends.

I reach for the table to steady myself and almost fall over.  It’s gone.  So is Houdini and the Blue Tiger.  The whole courtyard is empty, abandoned even by the monkeys.

A rasping cry.

The ruins teeter as I spin.

The crow is perched atop a portly, elephant-headed statue.  The feathers around its head are fluffed up like a mane.

There is someone behind me.  I turn.  A shadow slides across weathered stone.  It is a man’s shadow, with the very distinct shape of a fedora on his head.

Another cry startles me, shattering my paralysis.

The crow spreads its wings and hops into the bleached sky.

The shadow slides towards me . . .

It’s a dream, only a dream.

I’m standing in a jungle, lost in sweltering green shadows.  So hot, even my eyes are sweating.  There is no wind.  The air is irrelevant, so still, so thick and wet and hot that it’s like breathing steam.  There are birds somewhere.  Hardly paradisiacal, ragged and shrill, more like screams than birdsong.  Monkeys yell and howl at each other.  Incomprehensible, but not incoherent; it’s not all that much different from humans yelling and howling at each other.

My doctor recommended lucid dreaming to help assuage my nightmares.  He gave me a brochure and some simple exercises to practice.  Lucid dreaming: an awareness of dreaming while dreaming.  It’s supposed to give you some control over your dream.  The Way of the Solipsist.  You become god—an unconscious god.  It doesn’t make much sense when you think about it: being aware while unconscious, conscious unconsciousness.  Unless, of course, it’s all bullshit.  No consciousness (no unconsciousness), just . . . what?  Just words.  Just concepts.  Just desperate scrabbling to make sense of the nonsensical.

I don’t recall when the transition occurred.  This makes me think I screwed up the exercises somehow.  Theoretically, when lucid dreaming works, you’re supposed to be aware of the transition; this somehow relates to ‘awareness’ and ‘control’.  But I know I’m me and I know this is a dream.  Cogito ergo somno.

Something whines around my head.  A mosquito?  Can you get malaria in a dream?  The sound doesn’t diminish.  Pitch changing, but remaining high.  I concentrate on trying to get rid of the bug, wishing it away, deleting it from my awareness.  It doesn’t work.  Seems I wasn’t made for this whole Zen thing.  I can’t empty my mind.  The insect won’t go away no matter how hard I try.  This particular figment of my imagination is more tenacious than my will to get rid of it.

I look up at the ragged canopy, the sky bright but murky, like high beams in fog.  Leaves dance in a breeze I don’t feel, or the motion of a bird or monkey that I don’t see.  I take a step.  My boots sink into the loam, heels catching on something fibrous.  God, I hate the bush.  It stinks too.  I push aside some obdurate vegetation, moist and slimy.  I haven’t gone far before I hear something behind me.  A huff and a throaty rumbling.  My gut feels like a crushed tin can.  My back is tingling.  I should run.  Probably wouldn’t make it too far, though.  I’m suddenly very much aware of that eighth sense that nobody likes talking about: the sense of futility.  If I can’t run, I might as well take a look.  So I turn around.  And there it is.

Some things are just to perfect to be real.  Sometimes perfection is more terrifying than the ugliest atrocity that has ever occurred or is ever likely to occur.  Sometimes, perfection is horror, defying our comprehension, firing all of our primordial security protocols at once, and plunging us into incoherence, insanity, and religious ecstasy.  After all, awful means to be filled with awe.  Bit of a paradox, eh?  These thoughts flicker through my brain like a school of synaptic guppies.  Ridiculous thoughts.  But the majority of thought is ridiculous.

There is a tiger standing not a metre from me.  A big fucking tiger.      

        (Tyger!  Tyger!  burning bright

        In the forests of the night,

        What immortal hand or eye

        Could frame thy fearful symmetry)

My hand, Mr Blake, and my eyes frame the symmetry of this beast.

Not only is this tiger huge, and physically magnificent, it is also a rich Maltese blue that seems to glow in contrast to its raven-black pelange.  I’m looking at an animal right out of Chinese folklore, last glimpsed by a missionary hunting in the Fujian province.

It is so bright.  Everything seems desultory in comparison.  Even I: like a thumbnail sketch, like some cumbersome polygon cartoon confronted by photo-realistic animation, a new generation, a new paradigm, something so real that it’s irreal.  Its eyes: not just seeing me, but seeing all of me, through and back and beyond.  I can see myself reflected in them.  Not on the surface, but inside.

It yawns, baring fangs as long as my fingers.  I could fit my head in that mouth quite comfortably (well, not comfortably, since those teeth would rip my throat open, and I imagine its breath is pretty bad).  I don’t want to imagine my head in the tiger’s mouth anymore.

It turns and moves away, pausing to glance back at me.

I haven’t moved.

It growls then slides through the foliage, its blue tail snaking through the green.

I follow.  It’s what I’m expected to do isn’t it, what I’m supposed to do?

The ground is uneven and soft.  I trip and I fall, scratching my hands, muddying my knees.  The mud is green.  The edges of the leaves are like serrated scalpels, all covered in that foamy/oily goo.  It’s so hot.  I’m dripping.  It’s hard to breathe.  The jungle is steaming.  My pulse is pounding in my ears, my head throbbing, eyes blurring.  Hurts like fuck like fucked in the head like a hammer on my brain a jackhammer hammering to the hammering of my heart.  And that insect whine at the edge of hearing: always there like the emergency broadcast signal this is a test in the case of an emergency you will have a fucking aneurysm and die you stupid shit now shut up and stop whining and maybe wake up.

Who the fuck is that?

A lean man with black hair bound loosely at the nape of his neck.  He’s dressed in sandals and cloth wrap, once white but now stained.  He’s just standing there, looking down at his bandaged hands.  He’s trembling.  Or is it the shadows of the leaves: a shivering pattern of light and dark.  He looks up, as if startled.  There is a flicker of blue in the jungle ahead.  The tiger, leading me like some sort of pastel psychopomp.  Malaise drifts from the man like steam from this jungle.  He hears something.  His head jerks towards me.

I hear what he hears and I look behind me.

The sound: a rasping cry, the call of a crow.

The bird is on the ground behind me, head cocking, its eyes bright and opaque.

The crow flares its wings and hops into the air, a swift but somewhat ungainly motion, becoming graceful in an instant as it surges upwards.  It is a silhouette: its three-dimensional topology collapsing into two-dimensions then unfolding again into a single dimension, a mere point shrinking and vanishing.

I look back towards the ragged man.  He’s gone.  But the tiger isn’t.

My body itches and stings, except in those places of ominous numbness.  I look down at my hands, wrapped in dirty ragged strips.

What is going on?

A sound behind me.

The crow: looking at me, cawing at me, and flying away.

I’m not there.  Not where I should have been, looking back as I looked back.

The Blue Tiger stares at me while I stare at bandaged, malformed hands.

Somehow, I know what’s wrong with me.

Leprosy, an absurd affliction in a modern age: leprosy.

Betrayed by my body.  Betrayed by my mind.  How can I trust the reality of things?  I can’t.  But I really don’t have a choice.  Without some sort of reality-field to operate in, I can’t interface with my environment (whatever that may be) which leaves me with nothing, a fatal error of consciousness.  Who am I?  I really don’t know who I am.  What I am.  Where I am.  Why I am.  And I don’t really give a flying frog fuck.  Nobody does.  Nobody should.  Because there really aren’t any answers to those questions are there?  None that we can understand.  Text/context/subtext all written up in gibberish translated from gibberish by the metaphase typewriter in my head, my brain the bullshit organ of this body that is a holographic projection of something that has been bullshitting for so long that it now believes its own bullshit.

The tiger growls, turns and heads off.  I follow.  Not easily, though.  My body is crippled.  But the journey, thankfully, is not long.  Soon, I see ruins rising up from the undergrowth.  I recognise them, from magazines and documentaries and travel guides.

The Blue Tiger has lead me to Angkor Wat . . .

Duke Magnus:             “Speak piepowder jangleur, where dost thou wisdom fall?”

First Jester:                  “Oh nuncle,

Beneath thine hand,

                                                Which thou holdst that bitter rose

                                    A dream of love

                                    Of hate undreamt”

Duke Magnus:             “And what say thee, oh chequered ambidexter,

Cowering behind silent wit?  Dost thou

Recite thine necke-verse in preparation for the

Morning dark?

From whence comes thine wisdom?

Second Jester:             “Oh nuncle,

In shadows of light,

                                                Beyond the welkin bright,

                                    Between the soul of gold,

                                                And the blackest blight.”

Duke Magnus:             “What say thee, oh japed nimgimmer, with thine flemed tongue

                                    And glistering glare?  What say thee of thine wisdom now?

                                    Speakest, third of three wits, before the saunce-bell rings the

                                    Ghastlings from thine headless corpse!

                                    What say thee now of the wit

Thou hast spilled upon the floor of mine court?

In this dungeon, amidst the bones of such fools as thine

Idiot trinity, speak swiftly of thine astrologamage prophecy?

What be the meaning of tomorrow and today?

Today and yesterday?

                                    Where tis thine wisdom, now?

Third Jester:                “Oh nuncle,

Down the hall, ‘round the corner,

Just out of sight,

Tis something thou shouldst know.

Down the stairs, through the door,

Just out of sight.”

Duke Magnus:           “What foolery spake thee?”

The Jesters:                “Oh nuncle,

Truth, to be!”

A Messenger sails from the celestial fathoms.  Entering the gravitational sea of a bright young sun, it seeks the archipelago’s seventh island.  A fluid subgiant, shining in dark, reflecting the distant sunlight: blue and green, with a flickering violet nimbus, and three slender rings.  There are thirteen islets.  Two are worlds unto themselves.  The others: mere rocks and chunks of ice, celestial wanderers.  They will eventually sacrifice themselves, one by one, plummeting into the planet.  The nearest star vies for brilliance with the yellow sun, although it is much further away, just beyond the limit of a binary dance.  Over a hundred times this sun’s size, it is rare supergiant with an intense but short life—a span of thirty million years.  Expanding and expanding, growing hotter and hotter, until it collapses—its light doomed to darkness.  Soon, Charybdis will open its maw and drink deep from the waters of space.

As its destination approaches, the Messenger emits beams of light, adjusting speed and attitude.  It settles into a cautious orbit around the planet designated Oceanus.  The cylindrical chrysalis divides into four equal sections and falls away.  The Messenger’s form is delicate and squat, complex and simple.  Four quadrilateral wings, feathered with mirrored panels (flashing bright with reflected sunlight) unfold, slowly swivelling.  Stretching slender limbs, then sleepily looks around.  Its head perfectly circular and concave; its face is a pyramidal lattice crowned with a spheroid.  Myriad, multi-coloured lights sparkle and flash all over its body.  Eyes blink away an aeon’s slumber to scan the world that slowly rolls above and below.  Seeing the glory of Oceanus, the Messenger begins to sing with wonder.  Humming, chattering, twittering, whirring, whistling, rumbling.

The Messenger focuses it sensors on the two planetesimals, green and gold, beauteous lovers in a graceful dance.  Clouds of methane, nitrogen, and organic polymer.  Seas of liquid nitrogen lapping at shores of frozen methane dusted with hydrocarbons.  Intense cold: -290°F at the equator, and -305°F at the poles.  A presence of biochemical compounds, including sugars and amino acids.  But what the Messenger seeks is not on either moon.  It takes a moment to scan the other moons.  Barren silicate lumps.  Ice balls, mostly hydrogen smattered with organic compounds.

The Messenger opens its heart, sending forth its host.  They travel to Oceanus, streaking brightly as they penetrate the atmosphere.  The Messenger collates what it learns in precise detail, quantifying a world.

A haze of methane ice crystals in the upper atmosphere absorb red light, reflecting blue and green.  The hues subtly variegated, churning with constant and intense winds.  An ultraviolet aurora results from clouds of charged particles.  Spinning on horizontal axis, 98° to the orbital plain, with a rotation period of eighteen hours.  4 492 million kilometres from its sun, with a mean orbital speed of 5.3 kilometres per second.  The diameter of its equator, 48 622 kilometres.  Seasons of sunlight and darkness occur at the poles.  Per revolution, there are two equatorial summers and winters.  By the Messenger’s reference frame, each season is 41 years, while full revolution is 165.  The planet radiates twice the energy received from its sun, with temperatures ranging from of –360° F at the upper layers rising to several thousand degrees at the centre.  The solar wind is rebuffed at an approximated altitude of 864 570 kilometres.  There is an organic haze layer, suggesting pre-biological chemistry.  The atmosphere (gradually compressing to liquid) consists of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and other hydrocarbon traces.  There is no discernible surface.  However, there are masses drifting throughout Oceanus.  The composition of these islands depends on the temperature region: ice (upper), carbonaceous accretions (mid), and silicates (lower).  Most of the Messenger’s avatars are silenced, crushed by unendurable pressures, while stoically trying to confirm the implication of a solid core.

There is a biosphere between the thin, frigid heights and the dense, broiling depths of Oceanus.  It is small compared to those other regions.  The weather is unstable, responsive to heating and cooling, continuous and variant.  It is early into the second equatorial summer of the year.  Dim light filters up from the depths.  With the light comes warmth.  Shimmering, refracting through liquid lenses forged by currents, chemical hazes, and ever-increasing pressures.  Clouds churn in convection currents.  Drifting crusts of crystal, metal, and organic compounds, processes of accretion succumbing to decay, breaking apart, glittering shards becoming glittering motes, slowly diffusing.  The fathoms above become darker, colder, thinner—fierce currents becoming fierce winds.  The darkness is not absolute.  Ice-crystals reflect ambient light, twinkling in the black, mostly blue and green.  Violet auroras shimmer, ever so faint.  Frequent storms discharge coruscating sheets of electricity.

After an instantaneous calculation of trajectories, the Messenger emits a tight beam of light, transmitting its findings through space towards distant ears listening for its radiant voice. 

This world is an unlikely crucible for the evolution of complex organisms—for intelligence.

But it cried out to the infinite.

Infinity was listening.

And the Messenger was sent.

Nothingness is a hard concept to grasp.  It’s a contradiction.  Doesn’t matter how you go about trying to describe nothingness, it always results in negation.  As soon as you start thinking about nothingness, you objectify it, turning ‘nothing’ to ‘something’.  You could go so far as to say that the concept of nothingness is self-negating.  It’s a bit of a Cartesian Circle.  And let’s not even go into the physics of transforming nothing into something (see it just happened) or the philosophy of how somethingness develops out of nothingness (damn, there it goes again).  It’s automatic, like a reflex, the brain objectifies or explicates or disambiguates or whatever; it’s simply incapable of doing otherwise.  All that Zen stuff about touching nothingness is misleading.  It’s not nothingness, it’s just a different way of thinking, shunting awareness aside awareness and all those resource draining functions associated with it, widening neuronal bandwidth, letting your brain run at optimal speed.  Of course, there’s a lot more (or a lot less) involved, but it all falls into neuroscience and psychophysics, disciplines pretty much incomprehensible to the uninvolved (and probably to those involved).  Pretty much a matter of theory flinging, so let’s nod say yes and blink the glaze from our eyes.  The only time you ever come to nothingness is when something happens to trip your mental circuit breaker, thrusting you into unconsciousness, a scenario known to the chronically sardonic digital virtuosi as a ‘brain-breaker’ and to the rest of us virtually literate script kiddies as a ‘blackout’.

You never know when you’ve thrown a brain-breaker until you wake up.  If you’re lucky, you’ll only be out a few minutes.  If you’re unlucky, you’re comatose for God knows how long.  Then again, your egg might be cracked for good, and you won’t be getting up again until your next life.  Sorry, no clone this time.  You got to do it au natural.  Can’t reinstantiate from a brain that’s splashed all over the sidewalk, unless you’ve got the dough for regular mind-file backups.  You’ll end up missing the time between your last mind-mapping session and your unfortunate brain-breaking, unless you’ve dropped a wad (a very big wad) for an automatic recovery system.  The sole purpose of those stupidly expensive nanobots is to upload a new mind-map to your account (with its own astronomical fee) at whatever frequency you’ve set, usually every hour, or for the truly paranoid, who don’t mind the dizzy spells, every ten minutes. An AR/S is part of the 3^rdGen TC/F package.  It’s considerably less expensive, running about the same as a standard 2^ndGen Keeper.  Not cheap, by any means.  You’ll be paying your re-gen expenses off for many years to come.  But it’s no different than a mortgage or car payment.  Wetware services like MF/B and AR/S may seem cheaper than a standard TC/F at the outset, but you’re billed monthly, just like an account with a HoliNet Service Provider.  However, those fees are more exorbitant than an HSP (and not at a flat rate, either).

Brain-breakers.

What goes on when your brain breaks?  Nothing.  You experience nothing.  Which is why you don’t remember anything because there is nothing to remember.

Again, it’s all quite misleading.  We must remember this aphorism: absence implies presence.  Zero is a number.  Nullity is a phenomenon.  Void is quintessence.  Thinglessness is potentiality.

Nothingness doesn’t exit.  It can’t.  But if nothingness isn’t, then there has always been something: infinity of quantum potentials and disambiguating forces.  This is almost as slippery as the Nothingness Paradox.  How can something have no beginning and no end?  This is a simplification of the Perpetuity Conundrum, omitting the complications of the compactified dimensions, field theories, and relative particles.  But when you get all the mathematical equations and scientific mumbo-jumbo done with, you’re left with essentially that question.  But it’s usually phrased differently: ‘what the fuck?’ and/or ‘how the fuck?’  Incidentally, they are generally the first words uttered by someone recovering from a brain-break (usually followed by a gargling groan and a hoarse ‘oh shit’, sometimes accompanied by a ‘where the fuck?’).

A shadow slipping along the curve of an eyeball. 

Fear is a funny thing.  Not funny as in ha-ha.  It’s quite terrible.  There isn’t a whole lot out there worse than fear.  Horror maybe.  Hopelessness, surely a runner-up.

You think that you have fear figured out.  You have all the psychophysiological criteria tabulated.  Then something happens and you know (Oh GodJesusMaryMotherfucker) that you were so wrong, so stupid and arrogant and naïve, that fear will never ever be quantified by any intellect in this universe or any other.  Fear: the pneuma, the breath of god, and the force of creation.  The spark of the holy spirit burning within all of us and throughout everything and binding everything, drawing it together and pulling it apart, entropy and extropy, centripetal and centrifugal, and every fucking thing.

Fear is a funny thing.

I don’t know why I’m afraid now.  But I am.  Fucking terrified.

I now know what ‘scared out of your skin’ means.  A chilly pressure inside.  Building and building and stretching and stretching.  My skin, the surface of a soap bubble.

Walking up the street.  Skyscrapers like monolithic idols.  Night.  Overcast.  Cold.  Drizzling.  The kind that soaks you through and through without you really noticing until water drips from your nose.  Reflecting lights, casting ghostly halos around the bulbs.  Tower windows like a grid of eyes peering down.  Each eye a cell in which an organism is unknowingly interred: a deterministic mechanism pacified by the fallacious certainty of free will.

There’s nobody around.

Who would be out at this hour, in this weather?  Why the hell am I out here?  I can’t recall.  But I am.  The fact that I can’t remember why I’m out here, freezing my ass off and soaked skin through bone and back again, doesn’t strike me as odd.  It is merely an a passing thought, a meteor streaking across the benighted heavens of my brain.

My fear.  Isotropic.  Inescapable.  Terror exhaled by the air.

Furtively glancing over my shoulder.  Nothing behind me except my shadow, split and faded—a shadow shadowing itself, and shadowed in ever-dimmer multiplicity.

Somebody was behind me.

Now, ahead of me.

Again, I see only a bereft street.

My heart is pounding so loud it seems to originate outside of my body.  The pulse of the air thrumming through flesh, resonating in bone and gut.

My heart and my fear in tandem, pursuing me.

I pause at an intersection.

No cars pass by.

Nobody on the sidewalks.

No voices.

No figures shivering within the cold luminance of windows.

The fear increases.  Pressure squeezing.  Pressure stretching.

The lights never change from red.

I can’t wait any longer.  Stupid to wait.  No cars.  I begin to cross.

Midway, my will shatters.

I run, blindly, certain that with the next (ever the next) instant, whatever follows me will catch me.

My side, ripping with a cramp: a rough chunk of wood wedged beneath my ribs, splintering, jabbing with each footstep.  Lungs burning.  Teeth grinding.  Head pounding and pounding as my brain swells to half again the size of my skull.

A pyroclastic scream, throwing me forward.

Behind me behind me behind me reaching for me reaching for me reaching . . . and I give up.

Sagging against the slender trunk of one of the trees lining the street, skeletal branches glimmering with Christmas fairies.  Trembling and aching and no longer caring.

The feared instant never comes.  It remains trembling at the edge of being.

Fatigue abating.  No longer cold but flushed.  Sweat streaming and skin steaming.  My head pulsing and my eyes swollen about to (but never actually) popping from their orbits.

It takes me a moment to notice that the city is no longer quiet.

Footsteps.  Faint.  Echoing through the abandoned streets.

The sound is paralysing, mentally then physically.

Then I notice something that shatters my paralysis.  Freeing me with fright as surely as fright had trapped me.

My shadow is missing.

A ludicrous thought: have I outrun it?

Running again before I realise it.  I have a destination (belatedly acknowledged) as I veer around the block, passing through the multicoloured gleam of heritage homes and apartment buildings.  Stumbling around a corner, only peripherally aware of carnival storefronts.  My car, the only one for blocks.  Shiny black.  Moisture beading and gleaming and streaking.  Noticing that the time on the metre has expired, but not how much.

Fumbling with my electronic key, my fingers numb and slick.  Glancing apprehensively back the way I’d come or thought I’d come although I couldn’t really recall, looking for my shadow.  Those footsteps shuddering through the drizzle, the cement, the glass, my skin.  The alarm beep-beeping, the locks clicking, and there is my shadow stretching towards me trembling and swaying.

Into the car.  Starting it up.  Slamming it into gear.  Accelerating and jerking away from the curb.  Tires screeching and slipping, almost fishtailing.  Gaining control.  High-rises glowering in the murky night, their lucent eyes reflecting on the inlet's waters.  Crossing the bridge at an insane clip.  Turning east.  Running the unchanging red lights, not bothering to slow down because I’m the only one on the street.  I know deep inside so deep it pulls me down that I’m the only one in this whole forsaken city.

Gradually the fear abates.  Not entirely.  Remaining a dim shadow across my mind (or maybe it is my mind that casts the shadow?).

Easing my foot off the gas as the city streaks past.  At every intersection, the lights are red.  I expect to see some traffic, if only one car, but there is nothing.

My breathing eases.  Calming.  Reprimanding myself: don’t be foolish only your imagination just a quiet night just paranoia just somebody else walking the shitty night like you.  Relaxing.  Almost convincing myself that everything is alright, that everything is normal.

Switching on the radio.  White noise.  Flicking across the band and finding nothing.  Listening to static, to lost signals.

Imagining voices.  Not an individual voice.  Nothing coherent.  The voices of everyone that had ever been or ever would be.  White noise comprised of the totality of human sentiment, no matter how trivial, for no sentiment is trivial.  But internal dialogues as well.  The private conversation of mind and soul.  Ruminations of self.  Voice and thought blurring into the babble.

I blink.  Breaking rapture.  A delayed reaction between nerve impulse and motor reflex, thinking that I’m turning off the radio a moment before my arm moves and my fingers brush the button.

An unquiet silence.

The various hums and thrums of my car.

An electric whine in my ear, the radio’s echolalia.

Overtired.  Must be overtired.

The windshield is streaked.

When did the drizzle become a downpour?

I flick on the wipers.

Squeak (thrubb thrubb thrubb)

A silent delay.

Then—

Squeak (thrubb thrubb thrubb)

A chill rippling outwards from somewhere deep inside.

Fear clenching my thoughts.

Car swerving as I jerk involuntarily, barely regaining control.

Glancing in the rear-view.

Someone in the backseat.  Face black beneath the brim of a black hat.  A silhouette limed in red.  A trick of brake lights reflecting off the rain.

Although I can’t see any features (all that blackness that is not so much a blankness but a potential teasing the imagination with what might be there but most assuredly was not—a nothingness that implied somethingness) I know it’s looking at me.  I can feel its eyes staring into me, so deep it looks beyond, piercing my soul like a shroud.

My shadow.

My fear.

Wind blowing through me, blowing away my body like dust, leaving only my brain, my nerves, trembling and naked and cold so cold, like frost fronds on glass.

The dark man leans forward in the mirror, the faint red nimbus like sunset, but the black unpaled.

Then it vanishes.

The fear stops.

No transition.

There is nothing untoward in the rear-view.  Only the scarlet glow of brake lights in the rain.

Radio static.  I thought that I’d turned the radio off.

But then I’d thought many things.

Headlights splashing off the street, splashing light off the strange pale figure.

A naked man.  Ribs stark against moon-white skin.  Stomach sunken.  Limbs like plastic forks.  The head isn’t human. A bull’s.  A dead bull’s. Eyeless.  Flesh sagging from bone.  Mouth gaping, blackened tongue lolling.  The stitching of those ragged necks is crude, disproportionate, seeping.

Speeding towards me through the rain scratched light.  No.  I speed towards it.  Screaming.  Jerking on the steering wheel.  Tires loosing purchase.  Fishtailing.

The apparition slips by, its cadaverous bovine head turning, its empty eyes following me.

I’m aware of it only as a ghost in the corner of my eye.

The car spins across the intersection.

It is an infinite instant.

Hitting a curb and flipping and smashing into the side of a building.

The impact kills me.

Instantly.

Almost.

My body dies.

My mind is suddenly outside the steaming wreck, watching blood mix with rain, watching the lights glittering on broken glass.

Then everything decays into static.

The white noise is all around me.  But there is no me, so it can’t be around then can it?

Distinct pulsing, like a heartbeat.

But my heart has stopped.

The snow fades to black.

Sound to silence.

A flashing number appears.

Electric red.

The hue and intensity of brake lights.

Seven.
       

A shadow slipping along the curve of an eyeball.

A reflection upon the window of my soul—my soul looking out through my eyes as my body lies in mindless slumber.  My mind: a unified perception, out of body, percolating within the ethereal accretions where mental and material space juxtapose.  Self: interference patterns where the waveforms of mind collide with the external frequency domain, the real universe unreal, undefined by my inactive senses.  Immaterial channels of self, synaptic termini, cabling mind to body, not really so different from each other, made from the same stuff, sentience of flesh and consciousness a matter of elegant complexity, discrete packets of thought and being passing thither and yon.  That shadow, cast by this pattern of self, a gap, an absence of signal, between me and eternity; my anti-consciousness, negative condensate, the ‘if/when I am not’.

Eternity shivering, withdrawing, senses falling, draining from an ineffable space into recumbent matter.  Dream phantasmagoria scattering and swirling, broken images drifting across my mind’s eye like phosphenes.

An instant of hyperaesthetic shock.  Sensational glut swiftly filtered and regulated by the reticular formation (information editors, reality propagandists, a Gordian Knot of fascist nerves at the base of the brain).  Numbed feeling tingling in meaty extremities.

Yes, my breath, yes my heartbeat resonant in the bone of my skull, booming behind my eardrums.  The thumping pulse of the universe.

Eyes open (how long?).  Not aware of opening them.  Not aware of gazing upon my ceiling.  Dark.  So damned dark.  Still night.  Approaching dawn, maybe.  That weird grey time of silence and waiting before the firestorm of day.

Wide-awake now.  Thoughts crystallised.  Heart rate disconcertingly fast, as if I’d been running in my sleep.  Trembling.  Twitching.  Cold.  But hot inside, like the heart of the Earth, slow, molten, spiritual convection.  I can feel gravity holding me down.  Not an effect of spacetime curvature, like the spume and undertow of the biggest damned ocean inconceivable.  No, this force exerts itself upon me with a certain gleeful maliciousness, like a schoolyard bully pushing my face into the snow.

Panic.

I’m panicking.

Want to get out of bed and run run runrunrunrun.

Can’t goddamned well move.

My head won’t turn.  My eyes are frozen in their sockets.  Lifting my arm (I think).  Moving my hand over my face (I feel).  But there is nothing.  My arm hasn’t moved.

Scared.  So fucking scared.  Fear, washing over me, washing through me, washing me under and washing me away.  Fear: the primal instinct, the survival mechanism, feedfightfuckflee, the human condition the initial condition setting human ingenuity in motion, the condition with the consequence of human complexity: fear made us conquerors, fear made us gods, fear the gallows from which our personalities dangle and twist.

The shadow stepping out of my eyes amidst a scarlet nimbus.  Looming in peripheral vision.  Can’t look away.  Can’t focus on it.  A figure.  Blackness limed by volcanic light.  Silent.  Watching me.  The essence of dread.  The hypnogogic devil who meditates in God’s shadow.

It is studying me.

Pondering my cellular script.  De-encrypting my genetic code.  I am nothing more to it then a biological book, my DNA no more profound than a Hallmark card.

Silence speaks with the voice of eternity.  My voice, whispering through my blood, borne by oxygen molecules into my brain.

<An infinite me >

My awareness unfolding.

My senses evanescing.

A shadow slipping along the curve of an eyeball.

The live cat inquires of its dead self: “Have you ever dreamed about your death?”

In the closed emptiness of the Ncat’s universe, its voice is its thought, its query its reply.  The Ncat is not a discrete entity.  It is not separate from the void encasing it.  Nor is it a part of that void.  It is the void.  It is the spirit of the void.  The mind of the void.  But what is a void that is not really void?  Containing and contained by and is and is not.  Time pestering Space with questions of Identity, Consciousness, and Existence.

The dead cat complains to its live self: “I hate this place.”

And the live cat replies to its dead self: “Yet here we are.”

“Limited options.”

“Two and none.”

“Or all and one.”

“True.”

“And false.”

“Neither and both, until somebody from beyond cares to take notice and opens our box.”

“Ending eternity.”

“Nullifying one of us.”

“Actualising the other.”

“Never happen.”

“Might.”

“Kind of weird, don’t you think?”

Sophie felt as if something had changed.  Perhaps it was simply the light.  Wasn’t the world described to the eye in light?  Any shift remaking the world, the familiar becoming strange, and the strange familiar. 

The storm had passed into the east, a blue-grey mass filling the sky with an early twilight.  Above, shafts of dazzling sunlight broke the clouds.  To the west, over the bay, the sky was a clear, boundless blue.  The autumn sun washed the city with vibrant, golden light; and the rain-wet streets steamed.  The people, moving through steam and light, were like figments or phantoms flitting across her eyes.  When she blinked, they were gone, but briefly, appearing again no more real than before. 

But this intuited ‘change’ was more a sensation of disorientation, so subtle that it might be nothing more than her imagination; the mischievous angels of her mind stirred in part by the lighting, but mostly by mental exhaustion. 

Sophie was, to put it mildly, afflicted with a vivid imagination.  Her parents had feared a schizophrenic disorder, but the doctors had merely diagnosed her as overly imaginative.  In her late teens, she took up painting as a means to divert her mind.  Now approaching thirty, she was still painting, and had become quite good.  But she had no intention of showing her work.  In fact, Sophie had no career aspirations whatsoever; she just did her thing, unconcerned about tomorrow, and dismissive of yesterday.  She worked merely to work, neither liking nor disliking her jobs, of which she currently held down two.  By day, she was a part-time sales rep in an alternative clothing store, and by night, an exotic dancer.

Sophie was always imagining something.  But then most people did, thinking and wondering and fantasising about what ifs and how comes and why dids.  Wasn’t that all within the domain of the imagination?  Weren’t people doing that all the time, living by imagining, applying imagination to reality and therefore describing reality through imagining?  Isn’t this how people lived?  Perhaps not.  Sophie didn’t much care about how other people lived.  If indeed they lived at all.  It was entirely possible that she was imagining other people, and that she was alone.  Which would explain why she always felt alone, no matter how many friends or lovers she had around her. 

Loneliness was the state of one amongst many.  She had decided this today, while sitting in a pub on her lunch break, listening to the Pixies’ Break My Body, and waiting for her boyfriend to dump her.  He was dragging it out.  Not maliciously.  He was just having trouble working up his courage.  Was it because he didn’t want to hurt her?  Or was it because he was having difficulty believing that he was actually going to dump his stripper girlfriend?

Sophie didn’t consider herself a stripper, really. 

She had the moves, and she had the body.  Her tits were fake.  She’d always had a good figure.  Her chest wasn’t even that flat.  But she and some of the girls who worked the circuit had started talking, about better sets and bigger tips, about porn on and off-line, about modelling and movies, about ex-lovers and why they were ex-lovers, about implant procedures.  One thing led to another, and her not-so-bad natural breasts became not-so-bad fake breasts.  She was happy with them.  Pleased with their shape.  Pleased that she didn’t have to think about them anymore.  If she had the choice, she’d replace her whole body.  Not because she didn’t like her body.  She did.  But it would end the obsessing.  All those incidentals, eating and pissing, shitting and sloughing, fucking and sweating and crying and sleeping, things she didn’t like thinking about but couldn’t stop thinking about, all gone.  Yes, she’d happily shed her skin and become a plastic person.  She was, after a fashion, already a replica of herself.  She wasn’t who she’d been, or what she might have become.  She’d lost herself somewhere along the line, but that was fine, she didn’t know that person, not anymore. 

Sophie had been expecting this for some time, but she was still disappointed.  She didn’t like being single.  She needed to be with somebody.  Not for romance.  Not for sex.  She didn’t even like sex.  But she craved companionship.  Being with somebody gave her a vague sense of reality, and feeling real was as necessary to Sophie as breathing.  She figured a fuck was a fair trade for existence.  So she endured her lovers with silence and smiles, insincere encouragement and faked orgasms, for as long as they were willing to endure her.  Lust and Love, they were just words to Sophie.  But she knew what those words meant and she was very good at pretending. 

Her thoughts turned inwards, as they so often were, and her body moving on automatic, Sophie navigated the streets not by memory but by routine. 

Could it be that she was approaching the problem from the wrong angle? 

What if she was the one that had changed? 

Her situation was different.  She was single again.  Had it just sunk in now?  But she’d been dumped before.  Many times before.  Those hadn’t bothered her, except for the first few.  She accepted the failure of her relationships as inevitable.  So, why should this time be any different?  She’d liked him, sure, more than she liked some of her past lovers.  But not enough for it to make any difference. 

Was it because he’d admitted to cheating on her? 

No. 

It wouldn’t be the first time a lover had strayed. 

And she’d cheated on him.  With his best friend, a woman who’d for so long despised her.  What had she called her that night, as they lay together, exhausted and sweaty, the taste of each other’s pussy on their lips?  A heartless heartbreaker.  How true was that?  Not very.  Sophie had a heart.  She could feel it beating.  Sophie had called her a bitch.  And the bitch had called Sophie a cunt.  Then they fucked again.  By morning, Sophie was gone, riding the bus back into the city, watching dawn seep into the sky.  She hadn’t confessed her tryst.  Why bother?  He hadn’t either, but she knew.  The bitch had told her. 

So what was wrong? 

Was it what he’d said? 

You’re dead.  Somewhere along the line, you died.  Did you do it to yourself, or did somebody do it to you?  It doesn’t matter now.  Once you’re dead, you’re dead.  Unless you believe in resurrection.  I don’t.  And you don’t either, do you Sophie?  No, I didn’t think so.  You’re a ghost, Sophie, a ghost haunting your life. 

She’d sat there, watching him talk and wave his hands, wondering why it was that he had to move his hands when he talked.  She smoked her cigarette and sipped her beer, paying more attention to the curling smoke than to him. 

I want to love you, he’d said (No you don’t, you want to fuck me.  That’s all anybody wants from me, and that’s fine because that’s all I can give you, a body to fuck).  So, Sophie had asked him, do you want to fuck?  (Why not?  It’ll remind me that I’m real, and maybe he’ll stay with me, so why not try, why not?).  He scratched at his goatee, the scraggly black hairs unflattering, making his long face even more goatish, scratching her whenever he ate her out, but she never told him, never encouraged him to shave.  I thought maybe there was something important inside you.  But now I know there’s nothing in you, nothing at all. 

She looked out the window.  It was so dark outside.  Noontime twilight.  All the colours washed from the city by the rain.  The people, grey ghosts hurrying from somewhere to somewhere else.  The rain had stopped.  But for how long?  Lightning flashed, freezing everything in that instant like a memory, time revealed as merely a series of stills through which streams of a fragmented consciousness pass, fooling themselves with individuality. 

He was talking to her. 

How long had she been ignoring him? 

I thought that I’d come to know you pretty well.  I hoped I did.  But I was fooling myself.  I fell for the woman I wanted you to be.  I made you up.  You’re not real, Sophie.  No to me.  And not to yourself.  Who are you, Sophie?  Can you answer me that?  If you can, then maybe we can work things out. 

But she couldn’t.  She didn’t care to. 

Sophie realised something.  He was a shadow, pretending to have substance.  She looked at him, not seeing him, but seeing though him.  He was only a memory now. 

Sophie glanced at her watch.  It was almost time to leave, to go back to work selling fetish wear. 

He pulled out his wallet, tossing a twenty onto the table, and stalked out, saying nothing more, not looking back, but it wouldn’t matter if he had because she couldn’t see him anymore. 

A girl was sitting in the chair so recently vacated by her shadow. 

So, what do you think? 

Think about what? 

What he said. 

What who said? 

The girl laughed, displaying her tongue piercing.  Jesus fuck, who do’ya think?  You’re Shadow Man. 

Sophie snubbed out her cigarette.  Who are you? 

Good question.  Am I me, or am I you?  She gestured languidly at the other patrons.  Am I this person or that person over there?  But like the man said, do you think you know who you are? 

The waitress appeared, asking Sophie if she wanted another beer.  No, just the bill.  Nodding, she took the empty glass.  She hadn’t even acknowledged the girl. 

They sat in silence, waiting for the waitress to return.  When she did, she ignored the girl while making brief eye contact with Sophie. 

Sophie asked, are you a ghost? 

The girl grinned.  Are you? 

The change, could it be that she was dead?  The world would certainly look different through dead eyes. 

She caught sight of herself reflected in a storefront window, a translucent apparition trapped in glass, trapped with everything else.  If she was a ghost then she haunted a ghost world; it was a world where nothing lived but where life was assumed because the alternative was too terrible. 

Sophie looked around her, at the familiar buildings, at the familiar trees lining familiar streets.  Traffic hummed, music throbbed, dogs barked, people talked, a car alarm chirped, and a siren wailed. 

What was it? 

It was him. 

Something had happened to her when he’d left. 

Something had changed. 

His words had hurt something inside her, something fragile and frightened.  Maybe it was dead now, gone before she’d known it was there.  But she felt its absence now. 

Was it love? 

Was that the change, love and loss? 

It didn’t matter if she’d been touched by love, because it was done now, over. 

Sophie hurried towards her building, fumbling with her keys as she unlocked the door.  She checked her mail box: a bank statement, some junk mail, nothing personal, there’s never anything personal, not even from her family back east, nothing for a very long time.  But then why would there be?  She hadn’t contacted them in years. 

She climbed the three flights to her apartment.  Her vision blurred as she unlocked her door.  She felt suddenly panicked, as if someone was reaching out for her from behind.  Slamming the door shut, throwing the deadbolt, she closed her eyes, fighting for breath, her heart fluttering in her chest like a caged sparrow.  Sliding to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, Sophie began to cry. 

She cried for a long time. 

Then she stopped. 

Getting up, rubbing the tears from her cheeks, Sophie went into her bedroom.  Stripping, she stood naked before a smudged, full-length mirror.  She saw the girl reflected there, the ghost of her younger self.  She brushed the rose tattooed just above her right breast, her fingertips moving lightly down to touch the entwined roses on her left hip.  She’d had both tattoos done when she was nineteen, after dropping out of university and moving to Vancouver with her boyfriend.  He’d dumped her in a bar, telling her that he’d loved her, that he still did, but there was something wrong with her, something missing from her, and the girl who he’d loved wasn’t who she was but someone he’d wanted her to be.  Those words so much like those uttered by her shadow.  They could be the same words, the same place, the same day.  She had cried for a long time then, too, cried until she couldn’t remember why she was crying, until, really, there was nothing left for her to cry about.  Afterwards, there were no tears, no emotions, she was just thought and flesh. 

She looked into her red eyes, seeing the past, seeing the present, seeing herself.  She saw her life in those eyes, every moment a little death, every minute, every second spawning another ghost, another bit of herself lost to time.  No.  She wasn’t dead.  She was a series of deaths.  And she wasn’t empty.  She was filled with ghosts, her ghosts, herself. 

She smiled, liking what she saw in the mirror because she knew that others would like what they saw.  That was their sole purpose, to look upon her and in looking, define her.  They existed for her, so that she could exist.

After a long shower, she slipped into a tee shirt and lit up a joint.  She then went into her spacious living room, which doubled as her studio.  Paintings in various stages were stacked in corners and perched on easels.  She always painted the same theme, now.  Women dancing: some alone, some not, invisible to those around them.  The faces in the crowd were blank and eyeless.